THE FUTURE OF THE QUARTERLIES.
THE death on Monday of Mr. H. Reeve, who at the age of eighty-two was still the editor-in-chief of the Edinburgh Review, and on the whole, with certain reserves, the very competent editor, induces literary men to discuss once more the value and probable fate of the two oldest quarterly re- views. It is more than ninety years since the Edinburgh
and Quarterly were started, and the chance of either of them reaching the century of life is generally declared to be remote. Their more unfriendly observers assert, indeed, as they have asserted this week, that they are already dead, and that nothing but the reluctance of their proprietors to part with objects which during their lives have been so conspicuous, prevents their being decently buried. They are, it has also been often asserted, too dull to be read, except by old fogeys who do not in truth read them, but in pretending to do so hope to conceal the fact that they and the world of literature have long since parted company. No person of the day will willingly open periodicals published at such long intervals of time, or study articles so lengthy and sure to be so belated. They have been superseded, it is alleged, for all purposes of controversy or criticism by a swarm of monthly reviews, and even these latter, it is continued, are becoming too slow for the taste of an age which likes its criticism, like its muffins, to be brought up hot and hot. A book should be reviewed on the day on which it appears, if not the day before, while the discussion of an event should end within twenty-four hours of its occurrence. Even an evening newspaper is apt at 5 o'clock to seem a Little stale, and instruction to be fresh should be full and exhaustive within twelve hours of the receipt of the news which it is intended to explain. The new generation, it is affirmed by these reasoners, has no use for quarter. lies, which only litter and cumber the tables, where, for some few hours, or it may be minutes, at a time, mental food is allowed in country houses to remain on view, not so much to tempt the appetite as to fulfil one of the require- ments of hospitality.
The world belongs to the young in all matters that are not of faith, but we venture nevertheless, as old fogeys ourselves, to put in a word in deprecation of an unreasonably severe judgment. It is quite true that the quarterlies have ceased to be periodicals in any controversial sense. They cannot argue with each other, or answer each other, or exercise the smallest influence on each other's opinions. The world will not wait till April for the answer to a proposition stated in January, or take the trouble to recollect in September what were the opinions which it wished in July that some one would controvert. To refute in one quarter the ideas prevalent in another is, nowadays, labour lost, the very phraseology employed having in so long an interval grown obscure, while the information as to facts, on which all ideas must at least pretend to rest, has become out of date, if not, in many cases, radically false. The men in front, it is true, may be, indeed usually are, unchanged, Nature not serving up fresh generations of able men as cooks serve up fresh dishes, but their views and their situations are often too much changed to admit of discussion upon the old bases. There is as little use in treating Liberals be- fore and after the introduction of Home-rule as if they were the same people, as there would be in drawing a word-picture of Lord Rosebery before and after he had been Premier for a month. The world moves too fast for disquisitions so out of keeping with the pace of the time, and the quarterlies considered as journals may, of a verity, be pronounced dead and buried. They have, however, uses which may keep them alive for many years yet, and in per- forming which they are unlikely to be superseded. They are the best depositaries for instructive essays as yet extant, and the world has not lost its value for instructive essays. On the contrary, the success of the new " Encyclopsedia Britannica," which is simply a shopful of essays, has been phenomenal, and the demand for such productions, when they are called "series," apparently knows no limit. Six shillings is not an outrageous price for ten of the best of them, and the readiness to produce the best is, we should say, in- creasing. The best-informed and the best-placed men in the world have quite a new readiness to keep the world instructed, if only their names may still be nnsmirched by hasty criti- cism; and Messrs. Longmans or Mr. Murray could, if they liked, and if they selected editors equal to that new function, keep their quarterly volumes supplied with exhaustive papers by Kings and Cabinet Ministers, explorers and physicists, and historians, men giving new information at first.hand in its most condensed yet interesting form. There are few secrets kept nowadays ; the wish to be undcrbtood or defended is nearly universal, and there is quite a new impression, partly well-founded, if in part too sanguine, that the truth, if only plainly stated, will in a very short time filter down into the popular mind. At the same time, the old feeling that there are some vehicles of truth which are dignified and some which are not, has not entirely disappeared. It is disappearing, perhaps, though we rather doubt the fact, but it has not vanished, and hundreds of men all over the world will defend themselves or expound themselves in the Times who would not for the world suffer their thoughts, or what they wish to be considered their thoughts, to appear in the columns of any other paper. Ask M. de Blowitz, that recognised " doyen " of all interviewers, on any day of the year, if that is not true. The old quarterlies precisely meet this want, and we do not doubt that Messrs. Longmans or Mr. Murray could, if they tried, issue a number with one paper by the King of the Belgians on his "Object in Buying the Congo," a second by Sir William Harcourt on " The Overthrow of the Rosebery Government," a third. by Mr. Rhodes on "The Secret History of the Conquest of Matabele- land," a fourth by M. Hanotaux on "French Plana for the Future," a fifth by M. Lobanoff on "Russia in the Far East," a sixth by Lord Kelvin on "The Hopes of Science," a seventh by one of the Tanderbilts on "American Millionaires : their Joys and Sorrows," an eighth by Count Ito on "The Aspirations of Japan, Real and Imaginary," a ninth by Car- dinal Gibbons on "The Expansibility of the Papacy," and perhaps a tenth by Lord Dufferin on "My Political Acquaintances," though the time for the last-named, to be sure, is hardly yet. The instructed, we may be certain, will read such discourses with avidity ; and the quarterlies which are read by ten men and gutted by a hundred for one who buys them, do not need enormous popular circulations. All that is required is the right editors for them, men who will not regard themselves as postmasters, and will do very little with the red pencil, but will hunt the world for the right kind of papers, and will be trusted by the personages — we use the word advisedly—who could produce them. They must be men of discrimination, yet omnivorous ; of the time, yet looking down on it ; and above all be regarded by all they address not as journalists but as historians. Years ago, if they will pardon such personalities, the ideal editor for the Quarterly would have been the Duke of Argyll, the per- fect editor for the Edinburgh Sir Monntstuart Grant Duff. They would at all events have given us more nutritive esti- mates of the trend of politics than those to which for some years past we have been accustomed.
Should the anonymous be given up, as it has already been by all the monthly magazines ? Certainly not. There are still many men, though the world will scarcely believe it, who are so placed that they cannot avow their literary work, or who feel as if they derogated from their dignity in avowing it, or who are unable to hear a criticism on themselves by name, which they do not feel unpleasantly when applied to their work. They know much, and they are the natural patrons of the quarterlies. There is much to be said even in the historical and scientific departments of thought, which the writers do not care to say over their own signatures, and which it is to the world's interest should be said. And finally in our day work is apt to be deteriorated by being signed. The writer is anxious about himself, his own repute, his own consistency, his own standing in foreign eyes, rather than about the quality of his work. There are cases, of course, in which the name of the author adds a sincere value to his work ; and cases also in which a prose-writer will no more do his best while hidden behind the wax-mask of anonymity, than a poet will if he is never to receive a meed of praise ; but the means are not lacking to provide against that difficulty. The Atheneum, or for that matter any other journal, is only too glad to be enabled to say, with something of authority, that "the recent remarkable article" in a
quarterly on "The Campaign in Formosa, and the Prospects of the Island," is from the flowing pen of his Majesty the Mikado himself.
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