BOOKS.
MR. McCARTHY'S "HISTORY OF OUR OWN TIMES."* IN these splendidly printed and dexterously bound volumes we have the first half of what promises to be a deservedly success- ful work. Mr. Justin McCarthy is a very clever man, and writes history very cleverly. Applied to Thucydides or Tacitus, such praise as this would seem ridiculous. We might as well call Shakespeare a clever dramatist. Applied to lesser men, to a Macaulay, a Carlyle, a Ranke, or a Michelet, it would sound somewhat grudging and invidious. But we see no reason why Mr. McCarthy should take it otherwise than as a compliment, and as a compliment we sincerely mean it. Mr. McCarthy is a man of indubitable talent, but a great historian must have something more than talent. He must have genius, if it be only the genius which has been defined as a "transcendent capacity for taking trouble." Genius glows with a subdued but steady
• A History of Our Own Times, from the Accession of Queen Victoria to the Bolin Congress. By Justin McCarthy. Vols. I. and II. London: Chatto and Windas. lustre in the massive narratives of Grote and Gibbon, and genius sparkles with bright but intermittent flashes in the- "drum and trumpet" histories of Napier and Kinglake. But in Mr. McCarthy's history, although it teems with passages which are smartly and even brilliantly written, we detect neither the glow nor the sparkle of genius, and we are driven to say of him what Littr4 says of Petrarch, as com- pared with Dante,—" Il montre un vrai talent, mais ii n'y a que du talent ; et quelle est la mesure entre le talent et le ggnie P" At the same time, it must be admitted that
we are trying Mr. McCarthy by a very high standard in- deed. We have no space to compare him with inferior writers, but we may briefly say that we rank his work much higher, for instance, than Lord Stanhope's History of the _Reign of Queen Anne. His easy sprightliness and terse vivacity remind us of Voltaire's way of writing history. But between the latter'w graceful airiness, and the " illustris brevitas " which Cicero praised in Cassar, as the crowning charm of history, " quelle eat la mesnre P" So far, however, as immediate popularity is concerned, Mr. McCarthy's most sanguine hopes are likely to be gratified. We should not describe his book ourselves as a shot between wind and. water, but probably- enough it will, in Dogberry's phrase, "go near to be thoug,lit so." It supplies a want that was distinctly felt. Its very de- fects will secure the attention of ',readers who find Miss Mar- tineau. and Mr. Molesworth too tough for digestion. Its undeniable merits will secure the attention of a worthier
audience. If Horace is right in fact, about the man who carries every vote, Mr. McCarthy's success is assured. He has mixed the utile with the dace very deftly, and his work is not more instructive than it is amusing. To say that it is unequally written', is to say nothing of importance against it. The all but perfect Thucydides nods at times, though he never snores,
like Alison and Smollett; and the pencil of Tacitus is not always dipt "in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse." It seems to us that Mr. McCarthy is least happy and least at home in dealing with matters that are purely military. His account of our disasters in Cabul is not a success, and his descriptions of tho Crimean battles are failures. Inkermann, although in one sense a "soldiers' battle," was won, and: won only, by the two siege guns which Lord Raglan's prescience and perseverance brought into the field ; and if Mr. McCarthy's description of the Alma does not clear the proverbial step which separates the sublime from something else, we are mistaken. But the reader may judge for himself :—
"It would be superfluous to say that the French fought splendidly, when they had any real chance of fighting. But the luck of the day was not with them. On all aides, the battle was fought without generalship. On all sides, the bravery of the officers and men was worthy of any general. Our men were the luckiest. They saw the heights ; they saw the enemy ; they made for him ; they got at him; they would not go back ; and so he had to give way. The big scramble was all over in a few hours. The first field was fought, and we had won."
Having quoted from Mr. McCarthy at his worst—and it is only fair to him to say that he seldom writes at his worst—we hasten to quote from him at his best. We do not, however, venture to suppose that we have selected anything like the best out of the many brilliant passages which presented themselves. We have been guided in our choice by the fact that the chapter from which we quote strikes us as one of the best in the book :— "The defect of Mr. Cobden's style of mind and temper is fitly illus- trated in the deficiency of his mode of argument. His sort of education, his modes of observation, his way of turning travel te account, all went together to make him the man he was. The apostle of common-sense and fair-dealing, he had no sympathies with the passions of men ; he did not understand them ; they passed for nothing in his calculations. His judgment of men and of nations was based far too much on his knowledge of his own motives anti character. He knew that in any given case, he could always trust himself to act the part of a just and prudent man ; and he assumed that all the world would be governed by the rules of prudence and equity. History had little interest for him, except as it testified to man's advancement and steady progress, and furnished. argu- ments to show that men prospered by liberty, peace and just dealings with their neighbours. He cared little or nothing for mere sentiments. Even when these had their root in some human tendency that was noble in itself, he did not reverence them if they seemed to stand in the way of men's acting peacefully and prudently. He did not see why the mere idea of nationality, for example, should induce people to disturb themselves by insurrections and wars, so long as they were tolerably well governed, and allowed to exist in peace and to make an honest living. Thus he never repre.• sented more than half the English character. He was always out of sympathy with his countrymen on some great political question."
The chapter from which we have taken this passage is carelk
"Free Trade and the League," Among other chapters which strike us as particularly good, we would instance those which are severally headed, "Canada and Lord Durham," "Chartism," "The Opium War," and "Palmerston." Among those which strike us as not so good are, "The Exhibition in Hyde Park," - and "Mr. Disraeli," both of which are much too long.
Of the spirit in which Mr. McCarthy writes, it is hard to speak with severity. "Time is a gentle god," said Sophocles, and to time's sweet influences Mr. McCarthy shows himself most amenable. Of lost causes, and of the dead, he speaks, as a rule, with almost superstitious generosity, and his good- natured fluency leaves us in no mood to inquire whether history should not be made of sterner stuff. We live in an age of re- habilitations, and poor Louis Philippe is, perhaps, the only his- torical character for whom Mr. McCarthy might, but will not, spare a little whitewash. We do not, however, mean to imply by this that Mr. DI cCarthy's book is tainted. by mawkish or eccentric sentimentality. It is singularly free from all such nonsense. It deserves to be read, and we hope will be read very widely, by young men and maidens whose weary souls find little nourishment in the arid wilderness of those "handbooks," "primers," and "epochs," which gentle pedantry is at present so fond of making. It is a healthy book, emphatically, as well as an amusing one, and we know of none other from which our younger readers could so profitably or so pleasantly gain infor- mation about the events of which it treats,—events, be it said, of which no decently educated Englishman over the age of twenty ought without shame to be ignorant.
We began by saying that Mr. McCarthy reminds us of Voltaire in his way of writing history. Our remark, we must observe, has no reference to the celebrated Frenchman's in- imitable style. Mr. McCarthy has a fairly clear and straight- forward style of his own, but it lacks the grace of correct and polished scholarship. It also lacks the racy strength of really idiomatic English. It hovers sometimes on the edge of preten- tious slipslop, as when Lord Durham, for instance, is described as "a strenuous figure ;" the scraps of French with which it is garnished are not always correctly used, and the present Lord Chief Justice's quotation from Cicero's well-known speech, "Pro Lege Manilla," appears in the form of undiluted nonsense. These blemishes, however, may be dismissed as trifles ; but Mr. McCarthy has a pet failing which we cannot so easily excuse. We do not know how to describe it better than by calling it a weakness for delusive allusions. But a specimen or two of these will-o'-the-wisps will be more to the purpose than any de- scription :—" He [the Emperor Nicholas] reminded people sometimes of an Alexander the Great ; sometimes of the Arabian Nights version of Haroun Alraschid." Well, the Emperor Nicholas certainly put all his eggs into one basket (the Crimea), and got them smashed. He may, therefore, remind some people of Swift's ridiculous pun upon the name of " Macedonia's madman." But no further re- semblance occurs to us. Again, Mr. McCarthy says of Lord Ellenborough that" he would have met the peril of an empire as poor Narcissa met death, with an overmastering desire to show to the best personal advantage." At the risk of arguing ourselves unknowing, we must confess to an entire ignorance of "poor Narcissa." She was surely not that creature, very mild, who "to make a wash would hardly stew a child." But who was she, then ? Who, too, was the "famous tenor singer of our day who once had some quarrel with his, manager?" Mr. McCarthy tells the result of that quarrel at great length, but we cannot assent to his statement that the attitude of Lord Palmerston at the Home Office could hardly be illustrated more effectively. Neither can we conceive how he could pen such a page (Vol. II., p. 265) so soon after complaining that Mr. Kinglake's "brilliant history of the in- vasion of the Crimea is disfigured by passages of solemn and pompous monotony."
This last remark reminds us that we have said nothing about the last chapter of the second volume, which is headed, "The Literature of the Reign, First Survey." On the whole, we think it very good. It was not easy to treat such hack- neyed themes as Macaulay and Carlyle, Tennyson and Brown- ing, Thackeray and Dickens, with freshness ; but Mr. McCarthy has managed to do so with considerable dexterity. We have one more bone, and only one, to pick with him. Palmer- ston declared that he should like to "put down beershops, and let shopkeepers sell beer, like oil and vinegar and treacle, to be carried home and drunk with wives and children." It will come to that some day, we fervently hope and firmly believe, but our author pooh-poohs Lord Palmerston's idea, because, forsooth ! "treacle is not beer." He repeats this form of argu- ment in the last sentence of his second volume. "It must," he says, "be said that Punch has always succeeded in maintaining a good, open, convenient, neutral ground, where young men and maidens, girls and boys, elderly politicians and staid matrons, law, trade, science, all sects and creeds, may safely and pleas- antly mingle. It is not so, to be sure, that great satire is wrought. A Swift or a Juvenal is not thus brought out. But a votary of the present would have his answer simple and con- elusive: We live in the age of Punch ; we do not live in the age of Juvenal and Swift." We feel half-inclined to parody this passage, and to substitute " history " for "satire," " Thucydides and Tacitus " for "Swift and Juvenal," and the name of Mr "Justin McCarthy" for that of Mr. "Punch." We should meau no offence to Mr. McCarthy by so doing, for as we close these volumes, our only feeling is one of regret that we cannot imme- diately proceed to their successors.
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