BOOKS.

CASTELAR.*

WE in England know more of the public men of foreign countries than the inhabitants of any foreign country know

of ours. Yet we know exceedingly little, and no honest attempt to enlighten us should come amiss. Such an attempt is being made in the series of which this little book is the last issued volume. And it is itself quite an honest attempt to enlighten us, though in some respects not a very successful one. Considered as a very brief sketch of Spanish history during the present century, it has a good deal of merit; but as an account of Don Emilio Castelar it leaves a great deal to be desired. The author's judgments of most of the men who have played a part in the troubled life of the Peninsula in our own times—Espartero, Narvaez, O'Donnell, Prim, and others—seem to us pretty correct; but in treating of Castelar he has made the mistake of writing about a man whom he did not mach like or much admire. "On ne doit jamais eerire," says Renan, "que de ce qu'on aime."

The rabies Boswelliana is bad enough, but the rabies Purcelliana—shall we call it?—is a good deal worse. Mr. Hannay is not so terribly candid a friend to his hero as Mr. Purcell is to the great ecclesiastic over whose ashes he has poured such turbid streams ; but he ought to have loved him

better if he was to do him justice as a biographer. His imperfect sympathy with his subject has led him into a fatal error. Castelar rose from nothing to be the Dictator of Spain at the age of forty-one without any outside help. He had neither rank, nor wealth, nor protection, nor unscrupulous daring, nor any one of the things which take a man to the front in dangerous times, with one single exception, — a marvellous gift of eloquence. If it is to be made clear to the reader how this man was different from other men, it is absolutely necessary to show what his oratory was like.

This can be done in two ways. The most effective is the

one which was followed by the first Lord Lytton when he wrote his wonderful and all-too-little-known description of O'Connell:—

" Once to my sight the giant thus was given,

Wall'd by wide air, and roof'd by boundless heaven ; Beneath his feet the human ocean lay, And wave cn wave flow'd into space away.

Methought no clarion could have sent its sound Even to the centre of the hosts around ; And, as I thought, rose the sonorous swell, As from some church-tower swings the silvery bell.

Aloft and clear, from airy tide to tide

It glided, easy as a bird may glide; To the last verge of that vast audience sent, It play'd with each wild passion as it went ; Now stirr'd the uproar, now the murmur still'd, And sobs or laughter answeed as it will'd.

Then did I know what spells of infinite choice,

To rou,e or lull, has the sweet human voice;

Then did I seem to seize the sudden clue To the grand troublous Life Antique—to view Under the rock-stand of Demosthenes, Mutable Athens heave her noisy seas."

No one who reads that can fail to understand how it was that

the great tribune of Catholic emancipation obtained his ascendency over his countrymen. Few, however, have the gifts of the first Lord Lytton, who wrote the beet criticism of the great English orators which our language possesses, and to whom even a strong political opponent could not deny, as he listened to his speeches against reform in 1859 and 1860, the praise of being a great orator himself. That he assuredly was, although he failed quite ludicrously in one of the highest graces of an orator, for his gestures were those of a goat in delirium.

If you cannot describe an orator as Lord Lytton has done, the next best thing is to quote numerous passages from his speeches. The author of this little work does not tell us that he ever heard Castelar make one of his orations, while he quotes only three fragments from them, and that for the

purpose of commenting, not very happily, on their faults.

The result of this strange method is that the reader is left with the impression that for once an effect has taken place without a cause. Since Parliamentary government began in Spain, she has been fortunate (or shall we say unfortneate P)

• Don Emilio Costeiar, By David Hannay. "Public Men of To day." London : Bliss, tisnde, and Foster. 196.

in possessing a long line of most admirable Parliamentary speakers of very different views. Lopez, Alcala Galiano, Olozaga, and Donoso Cortes were all very great in their different ways. Oratory was accordingly no new power in Spain. How, then, was it that an utterly unknown and unbefriended youth was hailed at two-and-twenty as a sort of magician, and kept up the reputation he had acquired for nineteen years. until he became one of the great names of contemporary Europe ? Mr. Hannay dislikes—a sober-minded Briton instinctively does—the redundant, excessively orna- mented style of Castelar. Bat the question which the reader wants to have answered is not what Mr. Hannay rightly or wrongly thinks, but what it was which so bewitched many millions of men. When we have read all that he is pleased to say, Castelar still remains a hopeless puzzle. The life of that eminent personage divides itself into two halves. During the first half he was mainly an orator ; during the second he was, and is, an orator and a statesman.

First, then, as to his oratory. It would be idle to attempt in our space to give many examples of it. Mr. Hannay takes all his examples from a couple of papers published some seventeen years ago in a book called Miscellanies : Political and Literary, by Sir M. Grant Duff, to which we have referred, and which appear to contain a sufficient number of extracts from Castelar to enable the reader to form his own opinion. We have counted ninety - nine. To us it seems that the great Spaniard often lets words and ideas manage themselves in a very wild way. He is excessive, gorgeous, does not stop to ask himself how all this will look to plain men in their counting-houses or shops. What is that, however, but to say that he is essentially and above all things an orator ? Even in his books he writes as if he had an audience before him,—an audience from which he receives almost as much as he gives. It may not be a wise plan to turn men who are born to be orators into rulers of the State ; but is it a Spanish weakness only ? We think we have heard of it in some other lands. Tried by the only two tests worth applying to oratory, Castelar, from the first moment when as a boy he sprang to his feet in the Teatro del Oriente, and became famous in an hour, has produced enormous effects at the moment of speaking, and has uttered more phrases which, once read, stick to the memory than any orator who has lived in our times. Eloquence is always apt to run into exaggera- tion ; but are we to prefer to the pulpit-orator who throws the neighbourhood into a frenzy of admiring enthusiasm the dull, though no doubt excellent person, who, sent to take his place, soon preaches to empty benches, and says very complacently : " Je remis toutes choses dans l'ordre "? Castelar is un- doubtedly far too much in the habit of paying his pound sterling in coppers, though often the coppers are gilded to look like doubloons ; but to say, as Mr. Hannay does, after luotang two passages, one of which is really eloquent, that "Many men, many women, many children could surely write passages like these by the hour, if they had the good fortune to possess Meander's Treasury, and were endowed by Nature with indifference to the discredit of redundancy and impro- priety in the use of images," is to indulge in that kind of criticism which makes the reader throw down the book, saying " Cela dispense de la parodie !"

As to his statesmanship Castelar came to it by a very strange road. If he had been an Englishman and had got into the House of Commons at two-and-twenty, he would, in the natural order of things, have become an tinder-Secretary in about ten years, and would, when brought into contact with the hard realities of business, have been gradually weaned from some of his illusions, and cheated of many of his hopes. By a strange combination of accidents what happened to him was very different. He was transferred at a bound from the Professor's chair, from the tribune and the platform, to the foremost places of the State, and very soon to the highest place of all. The first thing he tried was honestly to carry into effect the principles which he advocated ; but he soon found that some of those principles would not work in practice. We English find it difficult to understand that any sane European should be a Republican other than a Re- publican of despair,—a Republican who says :—" Well, bad as a Republic may be, it is the least of several evils amongst which I must choose." But then in England the monarchy has not for a number of generations devoted itself, as if of set purpose, to make monarchy ridiculous ; and we Englishmen,

thank Heaven, had not to wait for the French Revolution to get our first ideas of liberty. That was the unhappy lot of Spain. It was very difficult for a Spaniard born in 1832, who cared for public affairs at all, to be anything but a clerical or a military absolutist on the one hand, or a strong Liberal on the other. And if he was a strong Liberal, it depended more upon chance than anything else whether he was to be a I'rogresista or a Republican. The chances which made Castelar a Republican were, first. being born in the revolutionary atmosphere of Cadiz, and secondly, a too exclusive reading of French books. When, however, he found that some of his ideas would not work, what did he do ? He frankly said so, knowing well that by saying so he was absolutely ruining his own career. We know something in England about great statesmen throwing over their most cherished opinions when a personal or party advantage was to be gained, but we are less familiar with the kind of man who says, as Castelar did say :—" I am quite indifferent to what people may think about my consistency. My duty is not to prove that I was right, but to save Spain." He had but to hold up his finger to remain at the head of the State. General Pavia would have backed him to the uttermost if he had sent the idiot Cortes about its business, and remained to govern supported by the military, who would have kept down the mob of the large towns ; while the immense majority of Spaniards would have said he did quite right, and have acquiesced in his indefinitely continued Dictatorship. He preferred, however, the tranquillity of his own conscience, and retired from the political game. For more than twenty years he has occupied the position of a sort of amicus curie. The attitude which he now takes is this. He says in substance to all who will listen to his advice :-

I

myself believe that a Republic is the best form of Govern- ment; but during a long life of straggle, we Spaniards have got everything that a Republic could give us, save the name only. The Government under which we live is a crowned democracy. Looking back at the things which I asked for when I began my political career, I see that almost everything I then wished for has been attained. We have an excellent Government. The Queen-Regent rules with about as light s hand as we could wish any one to rule with. I can't serve her as a Minister. My doing so would be misunderstood. I have my past behind me. But you, who are younger and are not bound by your past, you, my friends, can't do better.' Here is the advice which years ago, but after his Dictatorial experi- ences, he gave to the Italian Radicals at a great banquet organised in his honour at Rome:—

" If a principle, however progressive it may appear, can com- promise all that you have acquired, do not propose it and do not set it forth. Content yourselves with preparing it for the future. You, who are by nature inclined to synthesis, do not fall into the error of errors—the error of looking only to liberty, and caring nothing for authority ; the error of looking only to progress, and caring nothing for stability ; the error of looking only at the future, when every movement has in it the past, the future, and the present. The ideal should be formulated, sustained, diffused every day with unequalled constancy, because it is the promise of the renovations necessary in human societies. But in order to give it a fair trial never forget that every idea contains a logical series of ideas, and that every great work grows with the same slowness with which grow those natural objects which last the longest."

When a man with such a past behind him talks to such a company in such a tone we need not ask whether his theo- retical preference is for a Republic or a monarchy. His language is that of the best and wisest kind of Liberal.

In conclusion we would say that the time has happily not yet come for writing Castelar's life. His enemies, if urged to purchase his latest speeches, may still say what Lord Beacons- field did say to his bookseller when it was suggested that he should purchase those of Mr. Bright : " Thank you. No. I would buy them if they were complete." He has still, we trust, many a wise word to say before he passes from this world ; and when his Life is seriously undertaken we hope that his biographer will make it clear how many evil things there were in the Spain of 1854, in the doing away of which he had a right to say "Pars magna fui ;" and how well he has combated the twin demons of militarism and Socialism,— the two gravest evils which now menace the civilisation of Europe.