MR. BRYCE'S CONTEMPORARIES.*

Wis expect nothing but pleasure and dignified entertainment in a new book from the distinguished pen of Mr. Bryce, and in his latest work there is no disappointment. He has set himself to praise famous men, to explain to the world the excellences and personal charm of a score of eminent contem- poraries who have passed away before him. A clear-sighted intelligence, long trained in looking beneath the surface of things and discerning the fundamental principles that underlie appearances, joined to a delightfully lucid style and a pene- trating sense of the moral essence of life, qualify him to give us a work that will be set in all well-regulated libraries beside Bagehot's Biographical Essays and Sir Leslie Stephen's; Studies of a Biographer. The book has a personal note, how- ever, which differentiates it from most others of the kind. Mr. Bryce disclaims the praise of the biographer, "even in miniature." His aim, he tells us, "has rather been to analyse' the character a,nd powers of each of the persons described, and, as far as possible, to convey the impression which each made in the daily converse of life Having been privileged to erijny their friendship, I have felt it a duty to do what 'a friend can to present a faithful record of their excellence which may help to keep their memory fresh and green." The record covers a wide 'field; It is headed by the names of great statesmen,—Gladstone and Beaconsfield, Lord Iddesleigh and Parnell and Robert Lowe ; distinguished ecclesiastical figures—, Manning and Stanley and Tait—move through the pages with trappings of purple and the flourish of croziers ; historians, like Green and Freeman and Lord Acton are themselves sub- mitted to the dissection which it was their task in life to apply, to the great figures of the past; lawyers like Lord' Cairns and Sir George Jessel, Trollope the novelist and Green the philosopher, Robertson Smith of the Encyelopaedia' Britannica, Godkin the famous editor, instructors of youth like Henry Sidgwick and Edward Bowen, make up the varied list. All of them, with the exception of Lord Beaconsfield, were personally, and most of them intimately, known to Mr. Bryce ; and as the reader lays the book aside he feels that to him also they have become something more than mere great names of the nineteenth century,—men finely touched to fine issues, but struggling also with the same problems and vital conditions that affect each one of us.

To review such a book within our limits is no easy task. We had marked about a hundred passages for quotation,— which is the only method by which the charm and insight of such a volume can be conveyed to the reader. But it is simpler to recommend him to read the book for himself. We must be content with expressing our appreciation of Mr. Bryce's admirable work. The two essays on which one may concentrate attention, as both the longest and the most interesting, where all are interesting, are the first and the last, dealing with the two great Prime Ministers whose names stand out in the last third of the nineteenth century. There are not many writers of to-day who could be trusted, like Mr. Bryce, to deal impartially and appreciatively alike with Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone. The one he knew both as a leader and as a colleague, and we may read between the lines a modern version of Ben Jonson's fine saying about Shake. speare,—" for I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any." The other represented most of the ideas and political methods which are anathema to Mr. Bryce, and was no doubt, in his view, lacking in that high moral earnestness, that application of the deepest ethical principles to our party system, which he holds the equipment of the true statesman. Yet he has given us a very fair, and even admiring, account of a man whom he nevertheless thinks • Studios in Contemporary Biography. By James Bryce. London ; Macmillan

• and Co. [les. net.] to have rather lowered than raised the tone of our public life.

Without agreeing with 41 Mr. Bryce's opinions, we may yield no reluctant meed of admiration to his analysis of the qualities that contributed to Lord Beaconsfield's wonderful career. The following passage, in which he endeavours to solve that "great Asiatic mystery," is worth quoting as a good example of Mr. Bryce's way of thought:—

" Imagine a man," he says, "of strong will and brilliant intellectual powers, belonging to an ancient and persecuted race, who finds himself born in a foreign country, amid a 'people /fir whose ideas and habits he has no sympathy and scant respect. Suppose him proud, ambitious, self-confident—too ambitious te rest content in a private station, so self-confident as to believe that he can win whatever he aspires to. To achieve success, he must bend his pride, must use the language and humour the prejudices of those he has to deal with; while his pride avenges itself by silent scorn or thinly disguised irony. Acces- tomed to observe things from without, he discerns the weak points of all political parties, the hollowness of institutions and watch- words, the instability of popular passion. If his imagination be more susceptible than his emotions, his intellect more active than his conscience, the isolation in which he stands and the superior hi- sight it affords him may render him cold, calculating, self- centred. The sentiment of personal honour may remain, because his pride will support it ; and he will be tenacious of the ideas which he has struck out, because they are his own. But for ordinary principles of conduct he may have small regard, because he has not grown up under the conventional morality of the time and nation, but has looked on it merely as a phenomenon to be recognised and reckoned with, because he has noted how much there is in it of unreality or phaaisaism—how far it sometimes is from representing or expressing either the higher judgments Of philosophy or the higher precepts of religion. Realising and per- haps exaggerating the power of his own intelligence, he. will secretly revolve schemes of ambition wherein genius, uncontrolled by fears or by conscience, makes 811 things bend to its purposes, till the scruples and hesitations of common humanity seem to him only parts of men's cowardice or stupidity. What success he will win when he comes to carry out such .schemes in practice will largely depend on the circumstances in which he finds himself, as well as on his gift for judging them. He may become a Napoleon. He may fall in a premature collision with forces which want of sympathy has prevented him from estimating."

That is an able and illuminating, though not in all respects a fair' or correct, picture. For example, Disraeli had in his curious, ironic way a great deal of true sympathy, as well as

admiration, for the English character, and had an intense feeling of pride in the British race as well as in his own. . . Mr. Bryce has applied this striking theory to an examina- tion. of Disraeli's career—in which the light drawn from his very remarkablenovels is freely utilised—which strikes one as the most plausible explanation yet offered of what is surely one of the most remarkable careers in political history. It is in his final summary that the value of a broad historical outlook as a guarantee of toleration becomes most apparent. He can

recognise greatness with which he is far from sympathising :— "When all possible explanations of his success have been given," Mr. Bryce says of Lord Beaconsfield, "what a wonderful career ! An adventurer foreign in race, in ideas, in temper, with- out money or family connections, climbs, by patient and unaided efforts, to lead a great party, master a powerful aristocracy, sway a great empire, and make himself one of the four or five greatest personal forces in the world. His head is not turned by his elevation. He never becomes a demagogue ; he never stoops to beguile the multitude by appealing to sordid instincts. He retains through life a certain amplitude of view, a due sense of the dignity of his position, a due regard for the traditions of the ancient assembly, which he lea*, and when at last the destinies of England fall into his hands, he feels the grandeur of the charge, and seeks to secure what he believes to be her imperial place in the world. Whatever judgment history may ultimately pass upon him, she will find in the long annals of the English Parliament no more striking figure."

One may feel, with Romola, that there is something peculiarly

noble in the power of appreciating ambitions and views which one does not share, and it is safe to say that few things more illuminative have been written about Beaconsfield than this essay by Mr. Bryce.

In spite of all that has been written about, Mr. Gladstone, as much may be said of the eighty pages in which Mr. Bryce endeavours to sum up that versatile and many-sided character. With all his admiration for Gladstone, Mr. Bryce is quite able to realise the singularly

violent opposition, amounting in many cases to a semi-personal dislike, which his variegated policy often aroused. He is not blind to the spots on the' sun : yet his picture only increases our sense of the meridian splendour of the hunimiry. Perhapa the moit quotable passage- in this remarkable eesay_is.that.,in.

which Mr. Bryce illustrates the extraordinary multiplicity of Gladstone's mind :—

"His was a singularly complex nature, whose threads it was hard to unraveL His individuality was extremely strong. All that he said or did bore its impress. Yet it was an individuality 59 far from being self-consistent as sometime.; to seem a bundle of opposite qualities capriciously united in a single person. He Might -with equal truth have been called, and he was in fact a conservative and a revolutionary. He was dangerously iMpulsive, and had frequently to suffer for his impulsiveness ; yet he was also not merely prudent and cautious, but so astute as to have been accused of craft and dissimulation. So great was his respect for tradition that he clung to views regarding the author- ship of the Homeric poems and the date of the books of the Old Testament which nearly all competent specialists have now rejected. So bold was ho in practical matters that he carried through sweeping changes in the British constitution, changed the course of English policy in the nearer East, over- threw an established church in one part of the United Kingdom, and Committed himself in principle to the overthrow of two other established churches in other parts. He came near to being a Roman Catholic in his religious opinions, yet was for the last twenty years of his life the trusted leader of tho English

Protestant Nonconformists and the Scottish Presbyterians 'Though he loved general principles, and often soared out of the sight of Lis audience when discussing them, he generally ended by deciding upon points of detail the question at issue. He was at different times of his life the defender and the assailant of the same institutions, yet scarcely seemed inconsistent in doing opposite things, because his methods and his arguments preserved

the same type and colour throughout It was the persistent heat and vehemence of his character, the sustained passion which he threw into the pursuit of the object on which he was for the moment bent, that fused these dissimilar qualities and made them appear to contribute to and increase the total force which lie exerted."

We should be glad to quote further from Mr. Bryce's excellent essays—notably from those on Freeman, Parnell, and the late Mr. Godkin—but we have slid enough, we hope, to send our readers to his book for themselves. They will be grateful.