BOOKS.

MR. HARE'S LAST HEROINE.*

M.R. HARE heads his first chapter with Longfellow's lines

" Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime."

We must, however, own that, after careful perusal of these. volumes, we entirely fail to see anything " great " in Madame Bunsen, or " sublime " in her life. Mr. Hare, we believe, is a scholar. Does he remember the prayer of Hector ?— Ali ptiy ciaroW ye zeti ciroJto4u.nw, feiyee goeg 71 nal i000fteotat TryBecrAcci.

The idea of greatness contained in these magnificent verses has ever seemed to us the true one. Mere grandeur of character is not enough to constitute greatness. There must be "some mighty deed," the fruit and outcome of this character, wrought by him who would have his name go down "even to the after- born." We do not mean that the (Avg Tr must be done in the face of all the world ; but we do mean that it must be some- thing the mere story of which will move the great heart of the world, when it comes to hear. Jeanie Deans in her simple love and truth, Henry Esmond abandoning his birthright, Igna- tius Loyola in his lonely retreat at Manresa, John Bunyan, the tinker, wrestling with all the powers of evil at Bedford, are, to us, among the types of real greatness. Thousands of such heroes there are daily around us, of whose deeds it would be

good to hear. We cannot agree with Mr. Hare that Madame 0 Bunsen was one of them. But the lives of even the greatest are best written when they have rested long in their graves ; when the love and hatred of contemporaries have passed away with those who bore them, and a younger generation looks with cooler eye on the deeds and the motives of the dead. It is not yet three years since Madame Bunsen died, and Mr. Hare. must have begun his task before she had been many months in. her coffin. How can we expect impartiality in such a biography, or how can we expect fulness? "Thousands of letters," says Mr. Hare, "have been necessarily omitted, which, nevertheless, had a charm of their own." Deference to the feelings of friends who survive, deference to the opinions and prejudices of the day, must make the editor of such a correspondence as Madame Bunsen's shrink from publishing much which' it is needful to know, for those who would form to them- selves a definite idea of the intellect and character of the writer. We have fancied in reading this collection that we could here and there see traces of such editorial omissions. We do not, of course, for a moment suggest that the letters printed- are not each in themselves complete, but it seems difficult to believe that Madame Bunsen's reflections on certain great pro- blems went as far as they did without going farther, or that one who chronicled her every feeling so minutely should have re- frained from committing them to paper. And yet we are very- possibly mistaken, for though Madame Bunsen's mind was marked by great decision and a certain kind of strength, it entirely lacked breadth and comprehension. It is, in- deed, as an illustration of the fact that where early pre- judices are strong. and the character is marked rather by force and tenacity than by depth and broad sympathies, high culture, much reading, and a wide and varied experience of men and cities, are quite compatible with real narrowness of view, that we have found a certain interest in these letters.

In the winter of 1816 the Palazzo Gavotti was the centre of English society in Rome. There was settled a lady who, to vigorous powers of mind, and beauty of person still remarkable at forty-five, added that charming grace of manner which is the rarest and most precious of social gifts. Mrs. Waddington was the darling niece of the well-known Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany. To this connection we owe an interesting introductory- chapter by Mr. Hare, a chapter which we must own to have found by far the best reading in the book. Since her marriage at eighteen years of age, Mrs. Waddington had resided, with little interruption, in her quiet home of Llanover, devoting all her energies to the education of her family. Eldest of that family was the subject of this book, Frances Waddington, now five-and-twenty, and enjoying her first visit to the Conti- nent. Miss Waddington had been carefully brought up. If her mother owed her manners to the society of Mrs. Delany's friends about the Court of George Ill., she was no less indebted • The Life and Letters of Frances, Baroness Bunsen. By Augustus J. C. Hate- London : Daldy, lebtster, and Co. 1879. to the long years of solitude at Llanover for the rich store g of thought and knowledge which made her company prized by some of the first thinkers in Europe. And- in these thoughts and studies her daughter had from infancy had part. The little Frances was taught literally at her mother's knee, "with- out any regular lesson-hours, yet, when in the house, expected to be always busy with one thing or other." A few short visits to London and Windsor, and six months spent in Edinburgh, was all of the world that this young lady had so far seen. In one of another temperament, such an education would very likely have resulted in shyness, but Miss Waddington was ever strong, self-confident, and self-possessed. Her praise of Waverley, in a letter of this date to one of her Scotch friends (Professor Monk), is a very characteristic bit of writing, stiff, correct, and decided in every line.

Among all the Roman lions who visited Mrs. Waddington's salon, the greatest was the great Niebuhr, then Envoy of His Prussian Majesty at the Court of Pius VII. With Niebuhr of an evening sometimes came a young countryman of his, an enthusiastic and all-devouring student, ranging over the world in quest of knowledge. Mrs. Waddington thought it well that her daughter should take lessons in German, and innocently selected this dangerous young Bunsen to give them. Intimacy soon ripened into friendship, friend- ship into love. Mrs. Waddington's eyes were not opened till Bunsen declared himself ; it was then too late to interfere, and on the 1st of July, 1817, Frances Waddington married the German student. In the autumn, the influence of Niebuhr pro- cured her husband a post in the Prussian Embassy. The Bunsens fixed their home in the Palazzo Caffarelli, on the Capitol, and lived there till their return to England, in 1838. The following year found them at Berne, and from 1841 till 1854 Bunsen represented Prussia at the Court of St. James. After his resignation he passed six happy years at Heidelberg, removing to Bonn just before his end, in 1860. From this date till her death, at Carlsruhe, in 1876, Madame Bunsen lived almost entirely abroad. We do not propose to touch upon the political transactions of Bunsen's busy life ; their history has been amply told else- where ; here we shall entirely confine ourselves to a study of the opinions contained in the correspondence before us. There are three main lights in which a man's character may be viewed. We may consider him in his public career, in his family life, and in what Montaigne somewhere calls the little arrThre-boutique of his soul. To penetrate this last recess is, perhaps, impossible ; all that we can hope for is to get a glimpse or two of the interior, from which we may form some rude and uncertain notion as to what it is like. Even where we have the fullest knowledge, even in our own case, there is always a good deal of guess-work ; and yet every biographer who is an artist will make the attempt, though he feels foredoomed to fail. If he cannot grasp the master-key, he will, at least, be able to open the outer chambers of the labyrinth in their natural order, and thus hazard a shrewd opinion as to what is buried within. lathe present case, we have unusually full information as to the state of mind of the patient. Madame Bunsen's habit of self-examination appears at times quite morbid, making some of the letters before us read like the written confessions of a Jan- senist nun. These are curious but not pleasant reading. They bear the impress of a very ordinary English mind, choked with all the ordinary English prejudices, and with rather more than the average English training. A thin coating of superficial Liberal- ism only serves to bring out the original graining in stronger relief. Madame Bunsen, like other women, shows best at home. The family gossip from Rome is far the healthiest part of the book, and must have been very interesting and amusing to those for whom it was intended. The children, almost as inexhaustible a subject as horses to connoisseurs, form, of course, the staple of these letters. We would instance as among the best, that on the birth of little Mary (August 10th, 1820), brimful of love and gratitude ; and that cruel one of the following summer (July, 1821), in which the sorrow-stricken woman tells her mother how her darling was taken from her, and how good her Italian servants were to her in her great grief. She found it but natural that they should be ; they had children of their own,— the explanation was quite simple. Half a century later this wound was still fresh, and gave rise to the touching letter on the death of her little grandson, Arnold. "Hand ignara mali,"—but we beg Madame Bunsen's pardon, she is of quite another mind. Men, she writes, "are less able to look upon others with compassion

when they are compassiouating themselves." If by this Madame Bunsen merely means that grief, like all true passion, is absorbing, and to that degree selfish, we agree with her ; but if she would say that suffering is not the best training for pity, why, here we are at one with Virgil, and with the millions who have felt the truth of the great line in all the ages since the singer died.

From the children we pass easily to the artists, lovers of children by profession. Three of them lodged in the Palazzo Caffarelli, and imagined glorious birthday presents and Christ- mas-boxes for their little countrymen below. Madame Bunsen was acquainted with all the greatest painters and sculptors of her day, and sometimes gives us little bits of gossip from the studios. She was herself gifted with many of the qualities which go to make a great artist. A keen eye for all things beautiful around her, a true touch, and an enthusiastic delight in beauty as she knew it, were her's. But her tastes and sym- pathies were too small and narrow to afford her a true concep- tion of art. Talking of Bishop Thirlwall as a young man,

she says :—" I doubt the possibility of his understanding any- thing that is to be felt* rather than explained, and that cannot be reduced to a system.' Strange to say, we entertain pre- cisely the same doubt about Madame Bunsen herself. She revels in Dante, for Dante, of all poets, paints most vividly and distinctly. But Wordsworth is to her "contemptible stuff," and Turner's effects she considers "spongy and ex- aggerated." In this last opinion, however, she does not perhaps stand alone. She speaks highly of Carlyle's Past and Present, though we should question whether she more than half understood it ; and of Webster's Vittoria Coro mbona, which, by the way, she mis-spells. TVaverley, too, she praises (in ex- ceedingly awkward fashion, it is true), but Madame de Stael was

her great favourite, as a girl "I have thought and said," she writes, "that I could never like the person who did not feel

like myself about Corinne and Delphine." This

was written at three-and-twenty, but the character re- vealed in the unwitting confession changed little in the course of a long life. Madame Bunsen "could never like" those who differed from her. She was liberal ; but, like a good many other Liberals of the Continental school, she had an entirely orthodox eagerness to persecute all who were sc. narrow-minded as not to be liberal too. She thanks Macaulay

"for giving her ten reasons where she had one before, for holding opinions which she had. long held," and like Croaker in the play, she always listens to reason when she is determined, "because it can then do no harm." She is so very bitter against the pretenders, who cannot dis- tinguish the "real flesh and light draperies of the marbles of the Parthenon" from "the outline produced by whalebone and buckram," that we must give an instance of her own discrimina- tion in this kind, before we turn to her theology and politics. At five-and-thirty,—an age when the judgment should be already matured, Madame Bunsen read another of the " Waverleys :"— " Reading it," she writes to her mother, "has done good, just by taking of the edge of a curiosity to read the many later and unknown works [we wonder which these may be !] of Sir Walter Scott, based on the merits of the few earlier ones known to me. I now know him as a bookmaker, as which I never knew him before. It is a proof to me of the present idle taste of the multitude, that so many people have told me this was the very best of the novels! To my feelings, it is the very worst I have ever read It is rempliss- age from first to last, mostly or entirely unreadable, but from curiosity, and I am sure the public only like it because they want goat's flesh and asaftetida sauce, to stimulate their pallid appetite."

Deluded multitude, with your " pallid " appetite, with what sublime dogmatism this great critic teaches you! Can any reader guess which of the mighty " Waverleys " is "goat's flesh and asaketida sauce" to the refined taste of this elegant lady, whose feelings must not be rashly "harrowed up ?" It is the Heart of Midlothian! We cannot beat this. There is Madame Bunsen, painted by her own hand. She is quite sure of herself and of her own views. " Orbis terrarum may judge otherwise ; she is sorry for them ; they are an idle multitude. There are remarks on music quite as "rich," to use a vulgar expression, as this astounding piece of criti- cism, to be found elsewhere in these pages. And this is the woman whom Mr. Hare proposes to the world as a model of greatness ! But probably he would say that her greatness was moral greatness merely.

There is a very interesting bit of writing in one of Mr.. Ruskin's books, where he traces at some length a close con-

* The italics are in no case ours; tke writer, it must be remembered, is a lady.

nection between the moral character of a painter and his sense of colour. There is, no doubt, some exaggeration in the passage, but it illustrates a great truth,—that inti- mate relation which exists between the intellect and the moral character, and which in such questions as the nature .of wisdom and justice, and the true explanation of how a man can "see the better things and follow the worse," gives rise to some of the profoundest puzzles in ethics. If Mr. Hare agrees with us that the intellect is a clue to the character, or rather, that intellect and character are interwoven in such complex fashion, that it is altogether unphilo- sophical to aim at unravelling the intricacies of the one without, at the same time, examining the bias of the other, he ought to have seen that such trash as this could not be the growth of a great mind. If, on the other hand, it is his opinion that character can be advantageously studied without reference to the intellect, and his sole desire is to edify his readers, why did he not omit this, with the other "thousands of letters" which had a charm of their own " ? The publication

• of such views will scarcely add either to Madame Bunsen's reputation, or to her editor's. We think, then, that Madame Bunsen's character was of like texture with her intellect, ex- ceedingly common-place. She appears to us never to have grasped the terrible nature of the problems she so constantly touches on. She has a most uncomfortable way of raising "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," giving us her views upon them, and then passing on to the newest story about the children, or the last dinner-party at Windsor. The awful mystery of evil in this world and the next, that tremendous Sphinx-riddle before which the keenest and most profound of human intellects have bowed down in agony and confessed themselves baffled, presented itself to Madame Bunsen,—and just ruffled her. There is no more convincing proof of feebleness. Thousands of strong minds there are to whom this question never comes home, but we know of none whom it has once fastened on that it has not torn and rent, as the poisoned robe tore Hercules. From St. Paul and St. Augustine to Pascal, there is the same terrific straggle, the same after-peace, the same awe-stricken cry, "0 altitudo !" But we can always see the scars. Though the flowers bloom never so sweetly, we still mark the burnt-out crater below. Can Madame Bunsen's editor have been so ill-advised as to keep back the history of the struggle ? Can Madame Bunsen have locked this one secret in her own heart ? We know not ; we can only judge by the evidence before us, and that evidence shows Madame Bunsen talking of these mysteries, with rever- ence indeed, but without consistency, and without that know- ledge which comes through suffering, of their immensity and their importance. She has not the air of the veterans. Madame Bun- sen, as indeed is inevitable, where narrow sympathies and powers of keen but superficial observation are united with a Calvinistic creed, had a mean and most false opinion of human nature. She writes to her son of "the native powers of hatred and selfish- ness which lead the natural man to delight in giving pain rather than pleasure." She "wonders that the Germans are such good people with but a grain here and there of vital Christianity to keep the mass from corruption." So deep, in fact, was her detestation of the natural man, that in one most extra- ordinary letter (April 27th, 1865), she deliberately sets to work to exonerate the Devil at his expense ! Like a good many other pious persons, since the days of Moliere and before, Madame Bunsen has no scruple about criticising the religion of her neighbours, and as might be guessed from the specimen given above, she has a vocabulary sufficiently ample and vigorous at her command. At the end of a ferocious attack on Madame d'Arblay (Johnson's "little Burney," and a friend of her own youth), she has the following characteristic sentence :—" But I wish I could talk instead of write, my mother would help me to construe her, which I am very anxious to do." How many ladies, in like case, hourly wish the same ! Scandal is so much more piquant vied, voce than on paper ! She talks elsewhere of her sister-in-law as "an intolerable household burden," and "a spike,"—epithets which, however well deserved, are some- what forcible. Creeds fare no better at her hand than persons. She dislikes the Lutherans, and her frantic hatred of Catholicism, in her double capacity of Englifsh Calvinist and German Liberal, utterly blinds her to the common- est principles of justice. She thinks the executions of the Jesuits under Elizabeth were "mere legal acts of self-

defence," for which the poor Queen's character is "blackened" by " Puseyite and Romanising writers " ; she regrets the repeal of the penal code in England, and " delights " in the Falk laws, but she thinks the persecution of the Protestants in France very wicked. Had Madame Bunsen never heard of the Camisardsl Both Jesuits and Pastors were rebels in the end, but both were driven into rebellion. The cases are exactly parallel. Catholic devotion to the child Jesus is "heathenism," wayside images a scandal, even the Due de Broglie's attempt to deduce his own creed from the Gospel is "loving and believing a lie." Finally, in the Franco-Prussian war, this charitable old lady is filled with the spirit of prophecy, and interprets the defeat of the French as a "tremendous judgment of God," fallen upon them for their "prevailing atheism," though forty pages later, we learn that the victors themselves were but "whited sepulchres."

Mr. Hare, in his preface, expresses a hope that the reader may "for a time" be lifted "into the pure and lofty atmosphere" of Madame Bunsen's heart and mind. Of that heart and mind, as reflected in these letters, we have endeavoured to make a slight but faithful study. We do not greatly fear that many persons will feel tempted, "even for a time," to emulate the ideal of excellence Mr. Hare has set before them.