MISS WEDGWOOD'S APOPHTHEGMS.
MHERE is so much to think about in Miss Wedgwood's
striking essays on "The Moral Ideal "10 by which large sections of the human race have been profoundly influenced, that a great many readers will almost lose sight of the force and brilliance of many of the detached thoughts in the mass of the reflections. And this may be all the easier because Miss Wedgwood does not get into her various subjects easily. Nor till she has a good deal of " way " on, is an earnest reader
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aware that he is studying the writings not only of a pro- foundly reflective mind, but of one of great imaginative grasp. Her openings are apt to be cumbrous, and it is only when she gets into the full swing of her subject that we recognise how great her power is. Indeed, those parts of her book which delineate "the moral ideal" of man in its various forms are certainly not superior to those which present us with comprehensive intellectual criticisms on that moral ideal. You feel the depth of her sagacity almost more keenly than the warmth of her ethical convictions, and not seldom wonder even more at the massive shrewdness of the statesman than even at the subtle insight of the woman. She delineates the ideal of the unmoral Greek, even more brilliantly than that of the Persian dualists who believed in the conflicting powers of Evil and Good, and is most impressive of all when she passes into the criticism of the Roman imperialism, and the vacuum which its desolation left. Scattered through her pages are apophthegms that deserve to be separated from them, not only for their mas- culine breadth and truth, but frequently also for their vivid imaginative expression. Here 18 one, for instance, of the former, —not the imaginative class,—which might serve as the motto for her essay on the Indian belief in a "primal unity" in its relation to the principle of caste :—" The religion which con- fuses God and man, sets up lines of ineffaceable distinction between man and man." And here is another apophthegm, equally true and pithy, on the relation of the same belief in "primal unity" to the deficiency in historic accuracy, or rather to the unhistoric inaccuracy, of the Indian genius :—
" Fable and myth are marvellously busy in the East Here we see the indifference to fact which is a result, indirect, indeed, but not remote, of the belief that the One is the AIL What matters accuracy in relation to the world of illusion? All event is unreal, myth has a deeper truth than fact." But it is when Miss Wedgwood comes to the Greek and Roman world that her imagination is really roused. In contrasting the Persian religion, which turns wholly on the conflict between good and evil, with the impartial Greek vision of life, she finely says :—" As compared with the Persian ideal, we find that we have exchanged a moral contrast of light and darkness for an artistic balance of light and shade." Still more impressive is the sentence in which she comments on the easy transition by which Athene, for instance, passes from the inspirer of pure desires into the tempter who prompts to evil :—" When the Greek spirit most approaches the contemplation of an Ahriman or a Satan, then also it comes nearest to the sense of a Redeemer They seem to have passed over by the merest hair's-breadth of change from the sense of evil which is characteristic of the spirit which strives with evil, to evil itself. Like some eagle hovering on 'poised wing above the summit of the Andes, they exchanged as it were, with a stroke of the wing, the slope that sends its waters to the east for that which sends its waters to the west, and confused in their lofty gaze the springs of mighty rivers which increase their remoteness with every foot of progress, and find their issue in oceans that are thousands of miles apart." That seems to us a singularly fine illustration of a singularly true criticism of the visionary approximation between evil and good in Greek thought; and yet when Miss Wedgwood comes to criticise the sources of the fascination which the strong Roman organisa- tion exerted over the various races of the world, she touches a yet higher point of imaginative truth:—" The desire for unity is so deep in the human heart, that even in what is arduous and trying, the sense of a plan, a meaning, brings with it a wonderful
alleviation There is a wonderful influence in the con- templation of a large, enduring reality, the sense of a link with the past and the future, the neighbourhood of which is impressive and permanent. It may exist where there is no love, no justice, no moral nobility, and yet it has its own steady, persistent claim; it overcomes weak resistance, and there is more weak than strong resistance in the world." In that last sentence there spoke the statesman rather than the woman, and we only wish that all statesmen would study Miss Wedg- wood's essays on "Rome and the Reign of Law," and "The Age of Death," for they would find in both much to profit those politicians of to-day who think that all political move- ment should be a glissade along the line of least resistance. The sense of "a plan, a meaning," in political advance, is the very mortar of great States, without which even "love, justice, moral nobility," will find nothing strong and main-
fain nothing permanent. And how finely the sense of Roman greatness is condensed in the following comment on the strange ascendency which the worst of the Emperors seemed to exert over some of the greatest of their subjects
" The Emperor had no true strength, but there was no other strength than his. While his victims were mere individuals, in him was incarnate the ideal of the past; he represented the' dead Commonwealth; and noble spirits, like the faithful hound, keep a long watch beside a corpse." Again, what could be finer than this comment on that sudden enlargement of the idea of "living according to Nature" which was first born into the great cosmopolitan Empire of Rome, and on the loss of concrete reality by which it was accompanied?—" To inhabit the city of Zeus instead of the city of Cecrops seemed a wonderful expansion given to all possibilities on which the heart of man could dwell ; and in their recoil from what was narrow, the men of that day failed to discern that in removing the limitations of their ideal home they deprived it of all form. They escaped from the river to the ocean, and forgot that the change would leave them without guidance till they learned to guide themselves by the stars."
What strikes us in these apophthegms,—and there are plenty more of them in the book,—is the largeness of their grasp, looked at from the intellectual rather even than the moral point of view. With a people who, so far as they have a philosophy at all, have one which declares everything which experience teaches us to be illusion,—the belief of the slayer that he has slain his victim an illusion, the belief of the slain that he has been slain, equally an illusion,—what matters one illusion the more ? Yet does not such a philosophy directly promote the suggestion that there is nothing true enough to render any philosophy possible? The philosophy of illusion makes philosophy itself an illusion, and if it makes any impression at all, makes the very desire for truth a despair. Again, the artistic-minded race who are so open to the good side of evil and the evil side of good, though they may have plenty of resource and show great delicacy of dis- crimination, cannot weld together even the various branches of their own stock, still less a great variety of stocks. That is the work of a race comparatively dull, absolutely uninteresting, but stamped with an enduring stamp of largeness and indomitableness, which gives a sense at once of power and uniformity of treatment to the races it sub- dues and with which it inlays the rich fabric of the Empire. And so it turns out that a steady and durable framework of policy and a masculine tolerance is of more significance for the proper fusion and control of the various elements of humanity, than mystic vision, or ethical in- tensity, or flexibility and originality of intellect and taste. All these last are rich ingredients of human society, but that which determines its general character and the lines and principles of its structure, is that which presents a fixed though comprehensive and elastic uniformity of aim, admit- ting into its range a great variety of types, but exerting over all of them the fascination which subdues them into co- operation and submission. And this it is which so impresses men, that even when the old framework is in decay, the nominal head of the system still retains to the imagination of men his majestic significance, and seems a kind of divinity at whose sign the best and worst should accept death or exile as the Mahommedan accepts it at the hands of God. The essence of conceptions of this kind is a vision that is more than ethical, a vision that while it contains the ethical insight, can yet discern the wider conditions for the proper evolution of moral ideas. Miss Wedgwood's subject is much more than "the Moral Ideal," and she treats it in a masculine fashion which shows us the large intellectual background without which moral ideals could never have grown to any fullness of maturity.
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