MR. BODLEY'S ESSAYS.* OF the three essays in this volume,
the second, on "The Decay of Idealism in France," is the most striking from its subject. Mr. Bodley tells us in his preface, with some quite irrelevant sarcasms at the rapid revision usual with popular
divines, that he has spent more than a year in expanding it from its original form as a lecture before the Royal Institution. We cannot think that the time has been profitably spent. His thesis was just such a one as could be treated effectively in a popular lecture ; which means that it could be sketched and illustrated and then left to put its hearers on their guard against the danger of certain tendencies. But expanded in this fashion it takes on the air of a sociological treatise ; and read in a scientific spirit it arouses, not sympathetic interest, but the disposition to find weak places in the argument. Certainly in this case it finds them. Rarely have we read an
essay put together with so little attention to logical coher- ence. Mr. Bodley has drawn too freely upon his dossiers, and too little upon his judgment. The general scope of his thesis may be gathered from the following passage:—
" The French at the Revolution abandoned tradition for ideas, and during the nineteenth century a basis of idealism has usually been found in their acts. Twenty years hence idealism in a FrenChman will be as rare as . .. in a citizen of the -United States. The psychological change which is operating in the French character seems to have taken its decided course from the artificial starting-point of the beginning of a new century. The Dreyfus affair, which filled the latter years of the nineteenth century, was the last explosion of idealism in France."
The reader of this paragraph will probably rub his eyes when he arrives at its last sentence. In what fruitful sense can the Dreyfus affair be called an explosion of idealism ? Mr. Bodley's explanation is that if an outbreak of anti-Semitism were to occur in England, it would be owing to economic causes;
whereas in France it had no such practical basis. Later, how- ever, he tells us that Jews were unpopular in Paris because of the Jewish bankers and journalists who were thought, rightly or wrongly, to exercise too much influence on politics. If that is so, and anti-Semitism must have some cause, why is a political antipathy to be classed as idealistic, and an economic
antipathy to be refused the name? Mr. Bodley seems to think that the economic competition of Jews is real, and their political competition a good deal imaginary. But to have imaginary fears is not to be an idealist.
The notion of what Mr. Bodley means by an idealist is not rendered any clearer by the long discourse upon which he next enters about French writers such as Taine, who have been termed " idealist ". because they were in the habit of pursuing their researches into history by way of verifying preconceived notions. All this part of the essay is interest- ing in itself, but what has it to do with Mr. Bodley's thesis ? If French historians are less "idealist" in this sense than they used to be, and let their theories arise more inductively from their facts, it must be to the advantage of their studies. We cannot speak of the "decay" of such idealism. Again, we are presented with examples, from the Revolution onward, of politicians who were the advocates of some more or less abstract idea, Universal Brotherhood, or the British Consti- tution, or a Liberal Empire, or a Republic. But the decay of this sort of idealism Mr. Bodley himself would hardly regret, and he recognizes that it never has touched the large majority of the people, whose only ideal has been good government and moderate taxation. Possibly even here the change is really less than be thinks. If there were any form of government not already discredited in French eyes, it might have its idealists: but is there? The absence of idealist considerations which he noticed in the debates on the separation of Church and State in 1905, and the concentration of interest upon details, may probably be explained by the circumstances of the particular subject in debate. Infidelity bad largely increased since the subject was last discussed, and on the other hand the Clericals were bound.hand and foot by the Papal policy. A debate on Socialism would have produced ideas in far greater profusion. Mr. Bodley, however, rules out
• Cardinal Manning ; The Decay of Idealism in Franco; The Institute of F7611.06. Three Essays. By J. E. C. Bodley. London: Longmans and Co.
Los. net.3 Socialism from consideration, on the ground that it is not French but cosmopolitan. But is the idea of a republic peculiarly French, or the idea of the British Constitution ?
The greater part of Mr. Bodley's material is thus foreign to the scope of his thesis. To that he returns in occasional intervals, and the arguments by which he supports it are shortly these : that a mechanical age must destroy idealism because it eliminates national characteristics; that newspapers present their readers no longer with ideas, but only with information ; that booksellers' shops are fast disappearing-; that conversation is a lost art ; that schools have renounced the classics and teach only practical subjects; and that the nation is devoted to sport. Clearly an essay devoted to the study of these symptoms would have been most interesting and valuable. But Mr. Bodley does no more than catalogue them. Looking at them in their bare enumeration we should be inclined to deny the first altogether, and to question any strong ground for pessimism in the rest. Mr. Bodley seems to have fallen a victim to his own picturesque language; he calls the age "mechanical," and as such condemns it. But it would have been truer to characterize it as "scientific," and then he would have recollected that the age is not entirely devoted to improving means of locomotion and fabricating engines of war. Such a name as Pasteur reminds us of other ideals. Beyond medicine, again, there is the whole field of social amelioration, which is not mechanical. Every nation that is alive must busy itself with the ideas of its own genera- tion, and the present age is scientific and, to a certain extent, mechanical. But there is a limit to possible improvements even in aviation. It is only the novelty of the thing that for the time makes it attract so much attention.
The remaining essays in the book are better pieces of work. That on the "Institute of France" is a valuable historical study, which will clear up the vague ideas of the run of Englishmen on the subject of the French academies. The sketch of Cardinal Manning is an interesting pendant to other and larger portraits, because it shows how the Cardinal posed to the young man whom be had selected as his biographer. How- ever, Mr. Bodley's excursions into theology do not make us regret that this Life was never written. On a point of casuistry, for example, he prefers Manning's conduct to Newman's in these circumstances. Newman, before he left the Church of England, showed the course Ms thought was taking in successive writings. Manning, on the other hand, a year or two before he went over to Rome, delivered a charge as Archdeacon in defence of his own Church, which, when his Bishop congratulated him on it, be explained did not express his own view, but was "the case for the Church of England." In an elaborately sarcastic passage about Manning's relations with Newman, Mr. Bodley spoils his point by confusing Barnabas with Mark.
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