BOOKS.

MISS WEDGWOOD'S ESSAYS.*

Miss WEDGWOOD takes as a motto for these masterly essays

which she has collected under the somewhat inadequate title of The Moral Ideal, the passage from Plato's Laws, in which he says that God would be much more truly the measure of all things for us than any man could be ; and her whole drift is intended to be to show that only so far as man can distrust himself and open his mind to that which is not himself, is he really a fit measure even of his own drift and tendencies.

Miss Wedgwood has given her own account of her main line of thought in the concluding sentences of this book, and in many respects a better account than she has given in her interesting preface :-

" These pages have been occupied with an effort to illustrate from the history of moral thought the belief that Man can strive towards no virtue in which he does not feel the sympathy of God. He must feel himself in some sense a fragment, if ever he is to -discover his true oneness. Virtue must be a refracted ray from something above Virtue; duty must be the aspect, visible in our 'dense atmosphere, of a higher excellence extended far beyond it. And they who would deny this, they who feel that Nature exhausts God, that the summits of human virtue are the summits of moral excellence, that reverence is the provision for inferiority, and fades away before Man reaches those heights towards which he is always striving—they can find in the moral thought of the Past little but a collection of errors. Man, if we judge him by history, knows himself only so far as he turns towards the eternal Other of the human spirit ; he finds his true Unity only as he finds a larger Unity which makes him one with himself and with his brother man."

We should, however, ourselves describe her book in rather different language from that either of her preface or of her -concluding sentences. It seems to us hardly so much a pic- ture of the chief types of human aspiration,—which is what she seems to say in her preface,—as of the types of character which have aided and obstructed the•chief races of the world in their attempts to grasp the divine purpose. And though we quite agree that in every chapter one of her main con- tentions is that man fails most completely to know himself when he fails to turn towards what is above him, yet she shows that he has often betrayed better knowledge of himself and of what is above him in his actions than in his thoughts,— both the admirable chapters on Rome, for instance, explain- ing rather the historic conditions which enabled Roman character and legislation to aid enormously the develop- ment of the divine purpose for man, than any more direct results of the Roman's study of either himself or God. And again, even when dealing with thought as thought, it is as much by her criticism of what great writers miss as of what they say, that Miss Wedgwood helps us. Thus, it would be difficult to find a subtler or more impressive criticism of the leading thoughts of Lucretius and Virgil than Miss Wedg- wood gives us in these essays. But it can hardly be said that either the one or the other contributed otherwise

• The Moral Ideal : a Historic Study. By Julia Wedgwood. London: Trkbner.

than unconsciously,—as much certainly by what he ignored as by what he grasped,—to illustrate the development of our religion. We have seldom read anything more impressive than this criticism on the leading idea of Lucretius :-

"What Lucretius felt in nature was the spirit of law, of which Rome was the embodiment. He did not, indeed, consciously recognise what we could call law in nature ; what he did recog- nise there was, if we look at it from our point of view, a mere privation of law. But to him Chance was (almost the contrary of what it is to us) the negation of the arbitrary element, of which all Will was the expression. To an Englishman the type of orderly action is Will, and Chance is a mere negation of Will ; but to the Roman, Will was the disorderly interrupting agency, Chance was that general tendency of things which makes for order, if only it be not interfered with by the irregular impulse of human passions. Just as Fortune had brought out of the atomic life of separate oities the vast structure of the Roman dominion, so Chance had from the rain of atoms evolved the stately fabric of the Universe and the elaborate life of civil society. The process of evolution between this beginning and the Roman Empire was imperilled only by the desultory impulses of individual desire and aversion ; and Lucretius lived in the days when this individual agency was assuming large and turbulent proportions, when the passions of a Marius and a Sulla seemed to threaten the very existence of the one State of the world. His early life was passed amid the terrors of sedition and the horrors of civil bloodshed. In childhood he may have trembled at the days of slaughter which followed the return of Marius ; in boy- hood he must have shuddered at the months of assassination which followed the return of Sulla ; the conspiracy of Catiline renewed these memories in his ripe manhood ; and his life closed amid the turmoil which associated itself with the name of Clodius and tige tremors of the coming civil war. He lived when the dread of individuality, which animated so much of ancient life, was justified by terrible hatred, deadly revenge, reckless ambition, when it would seem as if the first necessity of a State was to get rid of great men. To him Will was the destructive, not the con- structive, agency. He saw in nature an escape from its dominion, and when he eagerly explained away all purpose in the Universe, he was, little as we can sympathise with the feeling, making room for that orderly impulse of law so deeply rooted in his mind that, like the atmosphere, it rushed in to fill every vacancy, and seemed present, wherever the agency of man was withdrawn. The object of his poem is well marked in a few lines where he describes the effect of watching a review from a distance, and after painting the tumult, the glitter, and the movement of the mighty legions, ends with the touch of quiet:— 'Yet sees the traveller from the mountain's height

The hurrying crowds as some still speak of light.'

It was his object to contemplate the hurrying crowds of life from that remote height where their distracted movement was reduced to rest and their vehement tumult was still. Hence the tone of delight in which the poet set forth a scheme of life which, though it must be accepted if it be certain, could never, we should have thought, be an object of any higher feeling than despairing resignation. No divine hope could be too great for the burst of apocalyptic joy with which Lucretius brings this scheme forward. The new Jerusalem descending out of Heaven is hardly hymned with more mystic rapture."

And the criticism on Virgil, though it would not do to muti- late it by taking any passage in it from its context, is even finer and more impressive. Miss Wedgwood characterises Virgil's tone as one of sorrowful and unsatisfied resignation to a divine plan which seemed full of injustice and cruelty and oppression to individuals, though it was justified, so far as such a plan could be justified, by the successful march of Roman conquest and reconciliation, in spite of the fact that that march passed over countries and peoples with whose sad fate Virgil deeply sympathised. Virgil felt that the colossal scale of Roman conquest must mean something far above his power to perceive; but his own personal attitude towards it was one of awestruck acquiescence rather than of either grati- tude or trust. Also, Miss Wedgwood's criticism on the place which woman takes in Virgil is one of the finest in a volume which is shot through and through with fine criticisms. Again, Miss Wedgwood's picture of the Gnostics and their adulteration of Christianity to suit it to the needs of the world,

is a very able one, showing how they regarded the only possible solution of the problem of evil as one which accounted for it

by the fall of a God rather than by the fall of man ; and her criticism of St. Augustine's doctrine of the fall as tracing evil chiefly to women, and of his way of compensating for that doctrine by raising all the virtues of women above the virtues of men, is both true and originaL Indeed, we think that in general Miss Wedgwood is more effective when she shows how men missed the right path of theological development, than when she shows how they found it. How happy, for instance, is this comment on the positive contradiction between Rousseau's teaching and that of Augustine !- " The ideal of Democracy, started by the American, and made emphatic by the French Revolution—what is it but the doctrine

of Original Sin inverted 9 Man's nature is corrupt, said Augus- tine, education should be the victory over Nature. Man's nature is holy, said Rousseau, education should be the victory over all that is artificial. The strange hankering after savage life which distinguished the eighteenth century and found its interpreter in Rousseau, was the reversal of the doctrine of the Fall. Those who most dwelt on it may never have heard of the doctrine of the Fall ; none the less the whole meaning of the second doctrine depends on the meaning of the first. The Rights of Man, the Goddess of Reason, the worship of Humanity—all are the sonorous, the emphatic, the passionate unsaying of the doctrine of Original Sin, the Fall of Man, the evil of Nature ; and, lastly, in our own day, the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest and the origin of humanity by natural selection, has come to bind the scientific and the moral members of this new development into a complete whole. Nature had been the invading, disturbing influence in Creation ; she is now enthroned as the Creator."

Now and then we think that Miss Wedgwood, in the energy of her impartiality, does scant justice to the view with which, so far as we can judge, she herself has the most real sympathy.

For instance, in stating the Christian view of the problem of moral evil,—namely, that evil is due to the abuse of human freedom, she says :—

" It is possible to imagine a world in which no sin and no wretchedness should exist beyond what should be justified by the virtue and the joy visible by its side, but to say that this world is one which we can thus explain is merely to invite attention to its failures. If the world were arranged in order that men might see evil and choose good, it has to be explained why men do, on the whole, see good and choose evil. He who arranges any scheme of probation or education in the hope that those subject to ,his in- fluence will do one thing when in fact they do another, has made a blunder; and if it is only reverence for infinite wisdom which is to check this criticism on a plan supposed Divine, that reverence had better check the speculation at its origin."

But the Christian theologian would not say that the world is

arranged that men may see evil and choose good, but that men who see evil may have the power to choose good, if they

care to exert it; and it is obvious that a world in which it was predetermined that they should see evil and choose good, would not be a world for the discipline of free-will at all. We do not say, and do not think, that the suffering or " wretchedness " in the world is explained, or that one-tenth of it is explained, by free-will,—there is some totally different purpose for suffering from any which can be called in any sense penal,—but, so far as we can judge, the moral evil in the world is adequately explained by free-will, and Miss Wedgwood's criticism that God might have given us freedom and then taken care that we should use it only in one way, seems to us only another way of saying that he might have excluded freedom altogether. It is not a blunder to confer a great power which may be abused, if such power is a far greater gift, even though it be abused, than any which is not liable to abuse.

Miss Wedgwood, as we have said, is happier in showing us the shortcomings of the various ideal standards with which she deals, than even in delineating their highest aspects; and this is the only exception we have to take to a very remarkable and powerful book. We feel, especially in the later chapters, where she is dealing with the Jewish, Pelagian, and Augus- tinian view of original sin, that she owes us some delineation of the truth of which these various views are corruptions ; and as she does not give this, the close of her admirable volume is less satisfactory than its opening. The criticisms are all

fine. But in the earlier part of her volume her criticisms show what she thinks true as clearly as what she thinks false, while in the later part she seems to us often silent where we most wish that she should speak. What, for instance, is the real strength of the modern superstition which she delineates thus powerfully ?—

" The divine right of kings has been succeeded by the divine right of multitudes. There is a virtue, it is thought, in multi- plication. If each individual wants something wrong, they cannot all together want something wrong. Human nature is elevated into a sort of Divine rule, regulating the disorders of individual will. The worship of the exceptional is changed into the worship of the universal, even at times into the worship of the average. The worship of humanity' by a small but influential sect among us is but the caricature of what is felt by all who exercise an obvious and lively influence on our own generation."

We should say that not only do individuals often want and too often get something wrong, but that masses of men often want and too often get something wrong, and yet that large sympathies have the art of at all events transfiguring the object of popular desire, where that desire is not a noble one, into something which looks much nobler than it is, and that without this art those large sympathies would dry up. They live only in a generous atmosphere; but then, unfortunately, they often have the tact to make much of the more generous aspect of desires which have another and degenerate aspect of their own. Yet this last is often the real moving force behind. the generous motive on which they enlarge.