SOME MAGAZINES.

THE Contemporary, which sometimes forgets that even the classes to which it appeals may have a surfeit of metaphysics and theology,

is full this month of readable papers ;—one in particular, on "Old Violins," by the Rev. H. R. Haweis, being a charming bit of writing, so good that it will attract readers who know nothing of music, and could not distinguish between a viola and a violin. It has just that note in it of half-humorous, half-enthusiastic exag- geration which, when, as in this instance, well kept down, gives to such writing its strongest attraction, at least for the outside world. Mr. Haweis writes about fiddles as Mr. Ruskin writes about art, if not with the same power, still with his whole brain and heart filled with a love of his task, which, so to speak, fuses his knowledge into an harmonious whole. Take, as an extreme instance of his manner, the loving way in which he has described Cremona varnish, the secret of which has been lost, and to which and to time is probably due some of that specialty of merit which makes the true Cremona the despair of the modern maker. Mr. Haweis, indeed, seems to think the secret lay in the art of Stradivarius, art closely akin to that of the sculptor, and therefore incom- municable; but admitting the art to the full, what pre-

serves that art in an age like this from imitation ? Can there be any curve in an fent in wood which the sculptor's skill can- not imitate, or any combination of bits of wood which musical mechanists cannot recombine ? Will some owner of Cremonas, with a genius for enterprise and for expense, let a Japanese carver try, the object being first explained to him every day for a month. Time must be, as one fancies, the great element,—time, or this varnish :- "In the spring, when the air at Cremona got clear and bright and the storms were past, the subtle gams and oils were mixed slowly and deliberately : hours to stand, hours to settle, hours for perfect fusing and amalgamation of parts ; clear white light gleaming from roads strewn with the dazzling marble dust of Lombardy ; clear blue sky, warm dry air, and the skill of an alchemist, these were the conditions for mixing the incomparable Cremona varnish. So deliberately was it prepared and laid on, just when the wood was fit to receive it—laid on in three coats in such a manner as to sink into the desaicated pores, and become a part of the wood, as the aromatic herbs and juices become a part of the flesh that is embalmed for a thousand years. All through the summer did that matchless varnish, which some say contained ground amber, and which at any rate was charged with subtle secrets, sink and soak into the sycamore and deal plates, until now, when age

has rubbed away its clear and agate crust in many places, the violin is found no longer to need that protection, for the wood itself seems to have become petrified into clear agate, and is capable throughout its myriad pores and fibres of resisting the worm, and even damp and the other ravaging influences of ordinary decay."

And yet one would almost be sorry that Mr. Haweis should be wrong, and that money, art, and patience should be able to reproduce the result of " the inspiration of a matchless workman, and a subtle soul infused into elements which seem beggarly, but have become priceless; the concentrated experience of not one life, but many, put into a curve or a fluting—a few thin plates of wood fixed together with an instinct that is dead, but that ere it died made those slips of wood almost a living organism—in some respects more than a living organism, because immortal." Mr. Maurice's sketch of M. Nadaud's book on the working-classes of England will interest many who scarcely know that M. Nadand, a working mason, narrowly missed being President of the French Republic, and is, perhaps, the one " Socialist " in whom Englishmen would put confidence ; but it is deficient in detail and in extract, and the reader who has not seen the book turns away dissatisfied, to study Mr. Capes' very curious sketch of the position of " the Jesuits in England." Mr. Capes has seen the inside of the Catholic communion, and believes that under certain circumstances it might be needful for secular Governments, not, indeed, to persecute Jesuits, in the ordinary sense of the word, but to lay them under special disabilities, to refuse protection, for instance, to their property as property devoted to immoral uses.

As, however, he holds that this contingency could only arise when civil and religious liberty were endangered through the multiplies- cation of Jesuits,—that is, when they had become too powerful to be persecuted—and as he holds that Prince Bismarck has made a grave mistake, and, as he avers, that any blow at Jesuitism kindles Catholic loyalty to the Church into active life, we presume him to say this only with the intention of exhausting his argument. His real belief evidently is, that the special theory of the Jesuits, their exaggeration of the virtue of self-suppression, entails a loss of individuality which must always limit their power, just as it would limit the power of an invading army :—

" Hence it is that the Jesuits are rarely men of much ability or force of personal character. Men of strongly marked temperament cannot submit to that crashing out of their personality which is the very essence of the training of the Jesuit noviciate. Unless they are allowed a full and free development of the nature with which God has endowed them, they must perish. Never was popular belief more erroneous than that which attributes a marvellous intellectual power and penetrating sagacity to the Jesuits as a class. Their force lies in their organisation, and in their thoroughly knowing their own mind, and in pursuing the objects of the Society with unfaltering steadiness. But as for attribut- ing to them a full measure of Satanic genius, it is just as absurd as to impute to them a Satanic duplicity. If we wish to draw up a list of the ablest men in the Roman Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus is one of the last places in which we ought to search for them. The practical efficiency of the Jesuits is dependent upon their corporate action. When acting singly, few men would be so powerless to influence human life and action."

That seems to us a final argument, unless the Society could place itself in a position in which its own average would be higher than the highest point obtainable by its pupils. That actually occurred in

Paraguay, and it may occur in the Southern States of the Union, where Jesuits hope to convert and organise the entire negro population ; and it might conceivably occur in a vast empire like India, where, however, the Society has not specially succeeded, being hampered by some ingrained peculiarities in the Hindoo

character ; but it is nearly impossible in modern societies, among which Jesuitism has never achieved any very striking or permanent success. It has approached one in Belgium, but only appproached it, and has even there achieved what it has achieved at a frightful cost, that of driving whole masses of indifferent persons into an attitude towards their own Church much more bitter and savage

than that of Protestants. Liberalism in Belgium would shed blood to be rid of its incubus, which is scarcely true of Protestantism even in Ireland or Lower Canada.

The Fortnightly has rather fewer good papers than usual. Mr.

Booth concludes his sketch of Fourier and his schemes rather hurriedly, leaving upon our minds an impression of dissatisfaction.

He has told his story so well as to leave on every English reader an impression, quite accurate, in our opinion, that Fourier was a dreamer of little practical value to the world—and as he pro- bably intended this, he has so far succeeded—but he has in no way explained the sort of grip that Fourierism got of many men ; of the St.Simonians, for instance, who were able dreamers and made

fortunes, of many Englishmen, and of a good many Americans. Why, for instance, was Horace Greeley a New Hampshire com- positor, who succeeded in so many things, affected through all his life and in all his views by Fourierism, rather than by any other form of combination? He did not want to live in a big workhouse, and go forth to labour to the sound of music, or do anything else to suppress his own individuality and the spon- taneity of other people, and amid all that rubbish what was it that took such hold of him and of so many men that were greater than he, Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example? Mr. Booth gives us no reply, and it is only to find a reply that it is worth while to write any more about Fourier. Mr. Fawcett, in a paper on "The Nationalisation of the Land," states the argument against that project with unanswerable economic force, but he does not allow for the possibility of a "conscription of emigration," which is, of course, though the workmen do not see it, the first condition of any agrarian scheme, as otherwise the increase of population would knock any scheme on the head, and he presses the vulgar argu- ment against State interference to a preposterous length :— " It is well to direct attention to the fact that mismanagement, extra- vagance, and jobbery are almost invariably associated with the trading and commercial undertakings of governments. When the English tele- graphs were recently bought for the nation, it is well known that an extravagant price was paid for them. It is scarcely too much to say a kind of extortion was practised on our Government, and the result was that more than a million pounds was virtually taken out of the pockets of the taxpayers to be distributed amongst the fortunate holders of telegraph shares. It mast also be borne in mind that all governments try to strengthen their position by the exercise of patronage ; and the more patronage a government has to bestow, the more will pecuniary and political corruption flourish.

We deny that proposition absolutely. Taken all for all, the State manages the post office, the telegraph department, and the Edu- cation department with less blundering, less extravagance, and less jobbery than the Railway Companies manage their affairs. The Ministers of State elected by the much-despised electors are distinctly purer men than the Directors of great companies, and the members of the three Services are abler, better educated, less corrupt, and worse paid than the officials of London companies representing an equal annual amount of cash. How anybody who knows anything of England can doubt that, we cannot imagine, any more than we can imagine how they doubt that the munici- pality of Huddersfield would be a better landlord for Huddersfield than Sir John Ramsden. Mr. Fawcett seems hardly to acknow- ledge the value of content in a State, and to doubt altogether the effect of ownership, of the sense of property, in bringing out energy. We do not want to see England owned by its electorate, because we do not want to see England devoted to the pursuit of comfort ; but to doubt that—the conscription of emigration granted—England would be more comfortable seems to us un- reasonable, except upon arguments which would be fatal to repre- sentative government altogether. We need not add that Mr. Fawcett is favourable to the enfranchisement of the land, would, in fact, go the whole length of the sober reformers by setting up an Encumbered Estates' Court, simplifying convey- ance, abolishing primogeniture, and prohibiting settlement upon any lives not already in being and visible to the donor. All we quarrel with him for is his constant depreciation of the rights and qualities of the State, which seems to us the only corporation entitled in theory or in fact to loyalty. He says, for instance, in this very article :—" General gratuitous education would transfer a portion of the expense of maintaining children from those who are responsible for bringing them into the world to the general public." Well, and why not? We are utterly hostile to gratuit- ous education, as a most inexpedient method of securing a great end; but supposing it desirable, what has individual liability to do with the matter? It is for the good of all that all should be taught, as it is that all should be policed, and the schoolmasters may as well be paid at the expense of all as the policemen. John Smith is no more responsible for bringing into the world ignorant children than he is for bringing children who may be thieves. Nevertheless, in the second case he pays only his share of cost, and in the first case he is to pay all of it. There is no moral question in the matter, but only one of expediency, which the State has a clear right to settle for itself. There is a fine and thoughtful paper in this number on " The New Helmsa," by the Editor, in which Mr. Morley, accidentally as it were, gives us his general estimate of Rousseau, which is worth quoting :—

" Rousseau had what Diderot lacked, sustained ecstatic moods and fervid trances ; his literary gesture was so commanding, his apparel so glistening, his voice so rich in long-drawn notes of plangent vibration. His words are the words of a prophet ; a prophet, it is understood, who bad lived in Paris, and belonged to the eighteenth century, and wrote in French instead of Hebrew. The mischief of his work lay in this, that he raised feeling, now passionate, now quietist, into the supreme place, which it was to occupy alone, and not on equal throne and in equal alliance with understanding. Instead of supplementing reason, he made emotion its substitute. And he made this evil doctrine come from the lips of a fictitious character, who stimulated fancy and fasei- nated imagination. Voltaire laughed at the bailers dam of Madame de Wolmar, and declared that a criticism of the Marquis of Ximdnes had crushed the wretched romance. But Madame de Wolmar was so far from crushed, that she turned the flood of feeling which her own charms, passion, remorse, and conversion had raised, in a direction that Voltaire abhorred, and abhorred in vain."

Add that with Rousseau "emotion" is not healthy instinct sub- ject to subsequent regulation, but sensibility depraved by long want of regulation, and we do not know that we should seek a more accurate description of Rousseau's place in the teaching of his time. It was not understanding alone that he suppressed or repressed, as Mr. Morley seems to believe, but the Will, without which the understanding is of little use as a regulating agent.

Blackwood continues "A True Reformer,"—the clever attack on our military administration,—but the paper of the month is the one on Goethe. The subject is somewhat worn, but the treat- ment is fresh and the criticism keen. This explanation, for instance, of the repugnance which many minds feel for Goethe as a man ready to devastate other's lives for the more thorough culture of his own capacities, is at once true and finely expressed : We are not so daring as to say a word against that mystery of self- culture which many philosophers hold out to us as the only thing worth living for, and in which many great minds have spent all their powers. It may have a generous, as it certainly has a noble side. The idea of a man who consecrates this fleeting human existence to the improvement of the faculties God has given him, scorning all meaner kinds of advan- tage, is without doubt a fine one ; and it is finer still when his aim in self-improvement is to serve and help his fellow-men. Yet there is something in human nature which cries out against this pursuit with the vehemence of instinct, and is, secretly or openly, revolted by it. We applaud the man who pursues Art to perfection, who pursues Science even in her least attractive forma, or who devotes himself with enthusiasm even to the lower branches of human knowledge. The spectator figures to himself something abstract, something apart from and loftier than the student, which he follows through all difficulties, and labours, and struggles, even though at the coat of his life. But at the name of self-culture our enthusiasm flags. We do not explain the change of sentiment, we merely state the fact. No doubt, of all the waste lands that are given us to cultivate, this one of the mind is the most valuable, and probably the most improvable ; and we are bound do our best with it, to produce the beet that is practicable from it; and in the best way. Most true ; yet our prejudice remains unaffected. And there is reason in it., as in all universal prejudices. There is something in the theory of self-culture which transgresses all the modesties of human nature, and strikes that hidden consciousness of in- significance which lies deep down in our hearts, as with a jar of discord and ridicule. What ! use all this great universe, so majestic, so stead- fast, and so sublime, for the cultivation of one speck upon its surface ; make vassals of all the powers of earth, and all the sights of nature, and all the emotions and passions of man—not for some big purpose, like the glory of God or the advancement of the race, but for the polishing and improvement of one intellect, for the sharpening of one man's wits, and the enlarging of his experience and the improvement of his utter- ance! The intellectualist may say, how splendid the organisation which can thus show its supremacy over all things created! but the common man feels a certain sharp revulsion, a mixture of acorn and indignation, humiliation and shame. There is even a bitter mockery to him in this devotion of himself as well, his anguish and his errors, to the cultiva- tion of the arrogant intellect, which regards him as a bundle of natural phenomena. This gives the special sting to that repugnance which we feel involuntary towards the human creature whose life is professedly spent in the culture of himself."

His years " are marked by so many sucked oranges in the shape of loves and friendships from which he had taken all the sweetness," that Englishmen, while fully recognising his genius, are repelled by his morale in a way his countrymen are not. Goethe was, this critic believes, far nearer to them than to us :—" And we do not doubt that, had we space to pursue the inquiry, he would be proved to be such an embodiment of the genius of his country, in all its height and breadth, its remorselessness and kindness, its cold determination and mystical hot enthusiasm, its steady pur- suance of an end through whatsoever means were necessary, shrink- ing from nothing—as to afford reason sufficient for the worship given him by MS countrymen." And it is in the Germane, too, though the world usually says it only about Berliners, to be for a time utter mockers, to sympathise with that deepest mockery of all, the mocking of the mocker :—" We do not know of anything that can be put beside this extraordinary creation of genius, Mephis- tophiles. Shakespeare was at once too human and too divine—too profoundly moral in his nature—to have been capable of it. He never could have brought himself to sneer at the Sneerer, and to hold up to everlasting mockery only, the worst and strangest and most pitiful impersonation of evil which ever occurred to genius. Other:poets have elevated the Devil into a splendid embodiment of despair—they have hated him, contemned, even in a tender turn of the great poet's nature have pitied, the hopeless One ; but only Goethe has made him at once powerful and ridiculous, victorious and paltry,—the grotesque slave of an angle, as well as the remorseless master of the perishing soul."

The paper in Fraser which will attract most general attention

is the continuation of General Cluseret's account of the Commune, but we do not see that he this month adds much to the previously existing stock of information. There is force usually in what he says, force and sometimes insight, but there is very rarely any novelty. Its general effect is that the group of men who governed Paris daring the period of that great revolt were honest incapables, workmen timid from their very certainty that only skilled hands could lead properly, and the " dried-up fruit of the so-called liberal professions," men with brains and audacity, but no judg- ment, and especially no judgment about military affairs. They were all besotted with the idea of 1793, the idea that revolution could do anything ; and all except one, Tridon, who was "a man of superior mind, but dying," succeeded in inspiring Cluseret with strong personal animosity, more especially by their regard for forms which, if his statements can be trusted, rose occasionally to the sublime. Audrieux, for instance, the civil head of the Military Commission, would keep his colleagues at work for half an hour to settle an account of 3f. 50c., which he might have settled by his own authority in five seconds. Cluseret's

sketches of his accomplices, bitter as they are, strike us as sub- stantially vraisemblant, and his own character comes out in the confessions to our thinking very clearly. He is clearly very able, that is on the face of every page of his writing ; very self-confident,

probably with reason ; utterly unscrupulous within certain limits which we have not yet ascertained, but which exist ; and a fanatic, for some cause which he does not choose clearly to bring forward.

It may be that cause, as most men believe, is merely his own advancement, or even his own enrichment, and we cannot prove the contrary, but that is not the impression his own writing leaves upon our mind. This impression is rather that of a sensible, able, energetic man with a tendency to cynical gasconade, who does not fear, who does not betray, and who has either a crack in his head or is dominated by some thought which is not easily traceable, but which may be a burning pity for the fate of the dim millions down below. Fie aspired to the dictatorship as a military necessity, but he rejected it as a form of government ; clearly had a profound contempt, not hatred, for cruelty of any kind ; and clearly did not share in the anti-religious feeling of the Commune :—

" A priest whom I did not know came to me at the office one day, at the time Cournet was Delegate of Public Safety. He wished to see the Archbishop.—'What for ?' I asked.—' To confess him,' he replied, frankly, and added, 'It is a great consolation to us priests.'—' Very well,' I said ; ' come again to-morrow, when I shall have seen the Pre- fect of Police ;' and at the sitting of the Council I spoke to Cournet about it. His first words were—' Do you think it can be done ?'—' Certainly, I replied ; ' what does it matter to us whether those people confess or do not confess—what has that to do with the Commune ?'—' You are right,' he said, after a few minutes' thought, and he signed the pass. The intel- lectual dwarfs of the school of Rigault and Co. could have set up a great cackle, and have imagined they would save the capital by refusing to let one priest confess another. What did it matter to ns? Let them con- fess, but don't let them teach, don't pay them, and above all don't per- secute them, and then they will no longer be dangerous. The Govern- ment which did them most harm was that of Taly—it did not meddle with them at all, it ignored them."

On the whole, Cluseret reveals himself to us in these papers as a man whom a Sovereign who knew his role would shoot at sight, and whom a "regular government" of any Continental kind would send to England as the only place where he could do no

serious harm, and would learn a good deal about the Liberty which he thinks a panacea for all proletariat evils. Cluseret's paper, with its personal sketches, its accounts of the ideas laid before the Commune, and its incidental revelations of the way in

which small Committeesdisposed,:with perfect freedom from opposi- tion, of the huge masses of a great capital, is well worth the price of Fraser ; but there is a curious paper also, on " the pos-

sibilities of free religious thought in Scotland," ending in the conclusion that the spirit of David Hume is once more abroad, and will not be quelled again ; and an interesting, but too short account of the " Irish Brigade in France," containing one hint of which we should like to hear a little more. Is there any- thing like sure proof that Lally, himself no doubt an Irishman by descent, was accompanied to India by any considerable Irish con- tingent; that, in fact, our danger there during the struggle with him arose mainly from our own alienated subjects ? The fact is very curious, if correct, but we never remember to have seen in any Indian history anything like evidence of it, though it would account in no slight measure for the extraordinary want of sym- pathy in France for Lally's military achievements. France has always considered her Foreign Legions penal corps, sometimes with reason, and has expended them without the smallest scruple a subsequent gratitude.

Macmillan we must pass this month, merely remarking that

the author of a " Slip in the Fens " knows the Cambridgeshire fens as very few people know them—this writer knows his scene better than he knows the Strand, and can pronounce it a

photograph—and pass on to the Cornhill, which has this month several unusually readable papers, the " Chinese Arsenals and

Armaments," " Dogs Whom I Have Met," by Miss Cobbe, and "Some Peculiarities of Society in America." The first gives an alarming account of the progress recently made by the Chinese in military science, and especially in the preparation of military material, an advance which is important from this point of view. Europe can always beat China, owing to the superiority of her men, but to beat her conveniently it is needful to be able to do it with small armies. Shipping 250,000 soldiers for Shanghai would be an endless business, even if Britain, France, and Germany were combined, yet good Chinese artillery would soon make invasion by a small army practically imposible. We should be killed off, and arrive in Pekin as victors with a Colonel and two drummer-boys fit for active service. It is not pleasant, therefore, to hear that the Chinese are building vessels on European plans, eight of them being ready on the rivers, and that the well-known Taku forts at the mouth of the Peiho have been rearmed after this fashion :—

" The armament of the forts, which, since their evacuation in 1865 by the British and French garrisons left in possession up to that period, had been completely renewed, the guns placed in position being princi- pally heavy American pieces of the Dahlgren pattern, has now been rendered most formidable by the addition of twelve Krupp guns, im- ported specially from Germany for this purpose ; and in further support of these defences, a quantity of torpedoes have been obtained from England in readiness for submergence at the river approaches. The manufacture of torpedoes is being at the same time actively prosecuted in the Arsenal of Nanking ; and according to the latest intelligence from China, a body of 10,000 soldiers has been set to work to construct a military road connecting the Taku forts with the city of Tientsing. Preparations such as these, pushed on with the utmost rapidity and earnestness, while at the same time all endeavours directed towards the introduction of peaceful forms of European enterprise are steadfastly rejected, form an unfavourable augury of continued relations of amity between China and the Western Powers."

Miss Cobbe is full, as usual, of personal experiences of dog history, but the paper which interests us most is that on the American system of allowing marriage by free choice. The Americans accept our principle, but unlike us, they try to make it real, and allow youths and maidens to see something of each other before they are engaged. They can walk together, drive together, and give evening parties together, and no harm is found to result. A man in fair society may take a respectable girl to a dance, flirt with her the whole evening, and give her a supper at Delmonico's afterwards, and nobody is surprised, or suspects anything more than a liking between the two for each other's society :—

" Of all American devices for enjoying the delicious autumn, the very pleasantest, and to a European at least the most romantic, is a party in the woods. A group of friends arrange to go together into some moun- tain and forest region, usually into the great Adirondack wilderness to the west of Lake Champlain, carrying with them guns and fishing-rods, tents, blankets, and an ample store of groceries, and engaging three or four guides. They embark with all their equipments, and pass in their boats up the rivers and across the lakes of this great wild country through sixty or eighty miles of trackless forest, glowing with a brilliance of scarlet and yellow that no woods can render, to their chosen camping ground at the foot of some tall rock that rises from the still crystal of the lake. Here they build their bark but and spread their beds of the elastic and fragrant hemlock boughs ; the men roam about during the day tracking the deer, or now and then, if such luck befal, the wary painter (panther), the ladies read and work and bake the corn cakes ; at night there is a merry gathering and a row in the soft moon- light. On these expeditions brothers will take sisters and cousins, their sisters and cousins bringing, perhaps, lady friends with them ; the brother's friends will come too, and all will live together in a fraternal way for weeks or months, though no elderly relative or married lady be of the party."

The writer attributes this freedom to the association of the sexes in school, or after school, but the explanation explains nothing. The sexes are educated together in Scotland without this resulting freedom, and the real point to be explained is why in America it should be found to be so "safe." We fully admit that it is, and as fully believe that the system is beneficial ; but our puzzle is to understand how it goes on without scandal and without annoy- ances, such as reckless marriages, which in England would be considered as bad as scandals. Is it simply that in America rash marriages are not feared, no marrying being rash ; or that there is something behind, some restriction of which the essayist knows nothing but which is very effective—an inexorable habit of duel, for example—or that there really is on many points a difference of nature between Americans and Englishmen. That marriages under such a system are more happy, goes without talking, for the couple know each other ; but we in England, even to secure happy marriages, are scarcely prepared to risk such freedom.