ARCHBISHOP WHATELY'S MISCELLANEOMJS ESSAYS.*
THERE is something manly and nervous in all Archbishop Whately's writings, which renders it impossible for us to meet any of them without a hearty welcome. The Whatelian canons of thought and action are not very deep and not very wide in their range ; but they • Miscellaneous Lectures and ReViallt. By Richard Whately, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin. Parker, Son, and Bourn. are strong, they are sensible, they are clearly defined, and when they are narrow and one-sided, which they often are, they carry with them their own remedy in the inevitable protest which their frank and energetic one-sidedness arouses in the reader's mind. The main defect of Dr. Whately's books is, that whatever their title may be, they are apt to turn out pretty much the same in substance, and often even in form. Accepting, apparently, Dr. Chalmer's apophthegm, that the only figure of speech worthy of constant and. practical respect is iteration, Dr. Whately appears to think that he cannot quote his favourite authors—of whom he himself is chief— and his favourite passages too often. The result is that Dr. Whately's later books are so full of direct quotations and variations from his earlier, that we have the same kind of feeling in perusing each of them which is produced by looking at the manifold images of any person or thing in the different drops of a chandelier. Every other book of the Archbishop's is reflected with more or less accuracy in each, and they have all such a strong family likeness that it is all but impossible to recal where the characteristic convictions of the writer are most originally and successfully and graphically enforced. For example, even in this collection of miscellaneous essays, where we are prepared for the writer's conclusions on various points of
interest nterest that do not strictly belong to any of his sys- tematic works, we find all our olsimt friends among the Whate- lien articles of belief turning up in rapid succession, often in the same words, always in the same general dress, and not unfre- quently several times even within the limits of this volume. This
is soothing but monotonous. We should be startled and pained by any fundamental change in the Archbishop, but we confess we should prefer those little varieties of manner, occasion, and illustra- tion which alone render even the welcome monotones of personal character tolerable in society. We agree with Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Carlyle that nothing is more effective, and nothing more agree- able in its way, than iteration ; but then it should be fresh iteration, and not self-quotation; there should be that amount of freshness in colour and proportion which the growth of character and the change of situation suggest. When a man has changed so little that he can bear to repeat what he said twenty years previous in the very same words, there is a mechanical effect which is jarring and unpleasant. We feel as if the conviction were a disinterred fossil which had not ripened with ripening character, and softened or strengthened with the wisdom of age. Dr. Whately asserts, by no means for the second time, in this work, his questionable metaphysical doctrine, that identity is nothing but the highest degree of " similarity ;" but he should know, as a man of the world, that less perfect degrees of similarity are often far more telling than the more perfect—that we are better pleased with a man when .he is like himself or consistent with himself, than when he summons up his old unchanged self from the past to ventriloquize with sepulchral voice through his present personality to the generation.of to-day. When we have said thus much we have exhausted our quarrel with the Archbishop's collected lectures and essays. It is rather too like a museum of his well-known opinions; but it has several fresh ele- ments in it which give it life and. variety, and add a few welcome touches to the features of the Archbishop's strongly defined intel- lectual character. He is didactic, he is rational, he is moral as ever; he is as great on evidences, as satisfied that all lucid Christian con- viction rests on considerations of historical probability,—as clear that Providence intended to try the " candour" of the Jews by giving them rather less than overwhelming intellectual evidence of the new revelation—as indignant against an obscure style, and as enthusiastic- in the cause of active benevolence versus passive sentiment as ever ; but in the paper on Miss Austen we have one of the few glimpses into the Archbishop's literary taste and insight which his writings give us. The following criticism on Miss Edgwortles ultra-moral tales is skilful, and has a dash of the caustic humour in which Dr. Whately occasionally indulges : "Miss Edgworth also is somewhat too avowedly didactic. That seems to be true of her, which the French critics, in the extravagance of their conceits, attributed to Homer and Virgil; viz. that they first thought of a moral, and then framed a fable to illustrate it. She would, we think, instruct more successfully, and she would, we are sure, please more frequently, if she kept the design of teaching more out of sight, and did not so glaringly press every circumstance of her story, principal or subordinate, into the service of a principle to be inculcated, or information to be given. A. certain portion of moral instruction must accom- pany every well-invented narrative. Virtue must be represented as producing,. at the long run, happiness ; and vice, misery ; as the accidental events, that m real life interrupt this tendency, are anomalies which, though true individually, are as false generally as the accidental deformities which vary the average out line of the human here. They would be as much out of place in a fictitious narrative, as a wen in an academic model. But any direct attempt at moral teaching, and any attempt whatever to give scientific information will, we fear, unless managed with the utmost discretion, interfere with what, after all, is the. immediate and peculiar object of the novelist, as of the poet, to please. It instruction do not join as a volunteer, she will do no good service. Miss Edg- worth's novels put us in mind of those clocks and watches which are condemned ' a double or a treble debt to pay;' which, besides their legitimate object to show the hour, tell you the day of the month or the week, give you a landscape fora dial-plate, with the second band forming the sails of a windmill, or have a barrel to play a tune, or an alarum to remind you of an engagement—all very good things in their way ; but so it is that these watches never tell the time as well as those in which that is the exclusive object of the maker. Every additional movement is an obstacle to the original design.' A passage showing still more of the same human, as distinguished from merely moral, interest in literature, showing insight into its real origin and conditions, as contrasted with its "edification," is the following acute remark on one of Miss Austen's peculiar merits as a novelist : "To say the truth, we suspect one of Miss Ansten's great merits in our eyes to be, the insight she gives us into the peculiarities of female character. Autho- resses can scarcely ever forget the esprit de corps—eau scarcely ever forget that they saw authoresses. They seem to feel a sympathetic shudder at exposing naked a female mind. Eltee .se peignent en baste, and leave the mysteries of womanhood to be described by some interloping male, like Richardson or Marivaux, who is turned out before he has seen half the rites, and is forced to spin from his own-conjectures the rest. Now, from this fault, Miss Austen is free. Her heroines are what one knows women must be, though one can never get them to acknowledge it ; as liable to fall in love first,' as anxious to attract the attention of agreeable men, as much taken with a striking manner, or a hand- some face, as unequally gifted with constancy and firmness, as liable to have their affections biased by convenience or fashion, as we on our part will admit men to be." The principal Essays, however, here reprinted are not in any sense literary. They are many of them theoretic, in that modified sense in which alone the Archbishop patronizes theory. If the word theory be used in its strict sense to mean a complete view or vision of a given subject, Dr. Whately can scarcely be called a theorist. What he does is to extort from any subject he takes up the par- ticular doctrine which he has learned to hold in regard to it, and to press it with a persistent force of intellect that consists in never varying his line or relaxing his urgency for a moment on the reader. Two of the most characteristic essays, as well as in some sense the most profound, are those on the Origin of Civilization, and on Instinct. They are closely connected together in their teaching, and exhibit very characteristically both the strength and the limitations of Dr. Whately's intellectual character. The lecture on the Origin of Civilization teaches very truly and with much force that the civilizing influences never accumulate in a savage people without teaching from above, either through the agency of some higher race, or, as in the case of the Jews, through the direct spiritual teaching and discipline of God. In the paper on Instinct, in complete accordance with this principle, the Archbishop shows that docility is the true test of reason as dis- tinguished from instinct, and that those animals which are teachable or capable of receiving a modifying influence from above, must be held to have in them the germs of reason as distinguished from instinct, though only in that degree which fits them for very limited progress, instead of having, like man, an indefinite capacity for ac- cumulating and combining the results of teaching. Now, this is, no doubt, a complete view of the subject of the origin of human civiliza- tion viewed only from one side—that of the understanding. But
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how was it that in discussing so great a subject it never even oc- curred to the Archbishop to ask why the teachableness of the human race has been apparently so lavishly squandered, why so large a proportion of races have had no teachers, so that they have spent the ages of human existence on this earth in barbarisms of the lowest kind. Surely this fact leads either to conclusions which the Archbishop would reject as heartily as ourselves, or indicates that in neglecting the moral conditions of the origin of civilization, the deepest part of the subject has been wholly neglected. The truth is, that in drawing the distinction between the lower animals and man, Dr. Whately has characteristically dwelt only on the distinction between instinct and reason, and has omitted that great distinction between the capacity for partial instruction and the capacity for in- definite progress which consists in a will to recognize and to appro- priate the nobler, characteristics of superior natures. That it is this power to recognize and seek after a moral revelation which is the root of all permanent civilization, history shows quite as clearly as it proves that docility is the true germ of civilizing capacity. In the neglect of this germinal moral life alone can we find any satisfying explanation of the number of races which have never, during their career on this earth, even begun to emerge from barbarism.
We give this simply as a specimen of the Archbishop's favourite class of subjects, and of his mode of treating them. Of his other lectures, one of the best is that on the present state of Egypt, and one of the cleverest, but we think least sound, that on transportation. The volume, as a whole, is sensible, wholesome reading.
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