THE MAGAZINES.
THE Magazines are good this month, and the Fortnightly is especially BD. It has not a poor article, and has four which will be read by men who care for clear information and brisk ideas with cordial interest and appreciation. We think the most readable is Mr. Gifford Palgrave's second chapter on Dutch Guiana, but that is because we care for intelligent accounts of little-observed places, and have an interest in seeing how the lower races, like the emigrants from Central India, and Chinese coolies, and negroes away from Africa, lead their lives and con- tribute to the world's store of force ; but men with other interests clay be charmed with Mr. Bagehot's "Postulates of Political Economy," the commencement evidently of a larger work, and marked in full measure with its author's specialty,—intellectual suggestiveness; or Mr. Brodrick's "What are Liberal Principles?" or Sir George Campbell's account of our position in Egypt. The latter is thi very first utterance of Sir George Campbell since his return from Bengal fitted to make Englishmen understand why Anglo-Indians think him a considerable man. The late Lieutenant-Governor naturally looks at things from an Indian point of view, and so looking, he perceives that events may by degrees force on us the policy which used to be called "annexation," and he considers gravely whether Egypt would or would not be a disadvantageous possession. He decides, though with obvious reluctance, that it would. He finds, indeed, that a population singularly quiet, obedient, and industrious, without national pride, and free from religious fanaticism, yields to its rulers a revenue of quite nine millions sterling, a sum much more than sufficient for its good government even by an alien people,—more, in fact, than the sum we should have if we governed Bengal alone, a task we should not hesitate to under- take. He sees, too, that behind Egypt lies Africa, which can be entered with effect only through the Nile, which ought to be civilised, and which can be civilised only through the dominance of a first-class Power. His remarks upon this point are as true as they are striking :— "We know enough to be assured that a strong and civilised Power commanding Egypt may open up easy communication with, and navigation of, the great Lake region which occupies the centre of the African continent—a rich country of great capabilities, elevated several thousand feet above the sea, and the possessors of which, if sufficiently strong and organised, would dominate the bulk of the continent. Seeing how admirably fitted for labour the African race have shown themselves to be, how wretched and miserable is their condition in their own country under a barbarous anarchy and bloody slave-dealing customs, and bow tractable, amiable, and good-tempered they are under civilised control, one cannot doubt that any great Power which could and would perform for Africa the functions which we have performed in India, would immensely benefit the human race. And profitable ashas been the labour of Africans in other continents under all the disadvan- tages of limited numbers, slavery, and a degraded position, it must be that the great native population of Africa would add prodigiously to the resources of the world in their own fertile continent, if, political order being maintained, personal freedom and security wore guaranteed to them, and European energy and capital were introduced to direct free labour. The high Lake country in particular appears to be eminently fitted for such a settlement,—healthy, fruitful, and fitted for native and Enropern residence. At the present time, some of the most profitable productions in the world are those, only produced in the peculiar climate afforded by the combination of a tropical latitude with an elevation which secures against great heat and malaria. Such a climate is insufficiently available elsewhere ; in Africa there is a vast extent of it. Already the best coffee comes from High Africa, and pepper, quinine, and many other things would be abundantly produced there. Following the course of the many rivers which radiate from this elevated region, tropical countries of great richness and large populations would be reached as they cannot be reached from the pest- ridden coast. No doubt to any Power which can undertake such a work, Africa offers a field greater than India, and one where inter- vention would be still more justifiable in the interests of humanity. Africa might become a gigantic Java or Ceylon. . . . . . . It would only be with a view to Africa that we could think of under- taking Egypt. No doubt for the gigantic task of governing and civilising Africa we have some special facilities which no other country possesses. We have the capital, the energies, and the habitudes, by means of which we have been accustomed to occupy and improve new countries. We have learned in India the art of governing great sub- ject populations. We have in India the materials for a native army which we might raise almost to any numbers, which, with our present experience of the Northern races, we may make almost as efficient as European troops (for African purposes, probably more so), and which we might employ abroad without those dangers which are inevitable to a too large and efficient native army serving in India. If we shouli conclude that it is right to promote emigration on a large scale from the densely populated parts of India, and should succeed in doing so, probably no field would be better than Africa, where anarchy and bloodshed have left room for much new population, and where Indian intelligence and Indian arts might do much to supplement the honest, hard work of the Negro."
Nevertheless, he would not accept Egypt even at the bidding of all Europe. He considers that the command of a rapid approach to India is useless while India cannot be attacked from the Asiatic side, that England is already heavily loaded with dominions, and that we could not suppress the Khedive, who, though a foreigner in Egypt, has become so identified with the country as to take the position of a native ruler. It will be evident to any one who reads this paper carefully that Sir George Campbell, though de- ciding against annexation, has at heart a hankering after that policy, and is not satisfied with his own advice to leave it alone. Mr. Brodrick's essay is full of a breezy, healthful Liberalism, which makes it pleasant to read, more especially at a time when political apathy is so prevalent, but we fear he takes somewhat too sanguine a view of the ease with which his principles can be applied. He thinks if the wise agree, men are agreed, which is unfortunately not true. He defines "Liberal Principles" as (1) the unreserved recognition of Progress as the appointed law of all human institutions ; (2) an imperishable love of Freedom ; (3) the belief in civil equality as a right ; (4) immutable re- spect for man as such, and therefore, a dislike for cruelty, tor- ture, and oppression ; (5) a respect for political justice ; (6) the deliberate preference of national interests to minor interests ; and he believes that with these principles the problems which now most divide the Liberal party can be solved. Agreement among Liberals is, for instance, possible on County Reform, on the Land Laws, on Education, and the existence of an Established Church. On the latter subject, he asks whether the wisest Churchmen are not prepared to popularise and reform the Church to any extent necessary to harmonise it with the development of the nation, and whether the wisest Nonconformists would not accept local control of the Church and its property as a suffi- cient compromise. Supposing that granted, Mr. Brodrick should remember that the wisest do not bear rule, but we are totally unable to concede it. The wise Nonconformists reject the Erastianism which Mr. Brodrick thinks so excellent as morally wrong, and are no more content with secular authority over a Church when in the hands of parish councils, than they are with it when in the hands of Parliament. They could not influence the local authority more directly than they now influence the central one. The only common ground of the Liberal Churchman and the Nonconformist seems to us to be the common dislike of Church ascendancy, which enables them to join together upon a matter like the Burials Bill.
The Contemporary Review offers no exception to the general rule of the excellence of the February magazines. It is full of interesting and instructive articles, though, as a rule, somewhat more orthodox than usual. We have referred elsewhere to Mr. Martineau's closely-reasoned and powerfully-illustrated answer to Professor Tyndall. The paper which will, perhaps, excite an in- terest hardly second to it in degree, is Mr. Matthew Arnold's on "Bishop Butler and the Zeit-geist.' " His sketch of Bishop Butler as a man is very graphic, though, we think, he over- emphasises what he calls the saw indignatio of Butler's polemic against the thoughtless and idle levity of the fashionable scep- ticism of his day, and hardly allows enough for the characteristics of a solitary temperament, a reflective intellect, and an exacting conscience. Did Mr. Arnold, when he wrote his paper, recall Butler's remarkable sermon on the love of God, and the high passion of its conclusion ? No doubt there was a burning fire in Butler, but it was not a burning fire which glowed primarily against the sins of others, but against the shortcomings of his own nature. We are curious to see the concluding part of the article. Apparently, as far as we can judge, Mr. Arnold is about to fall foul of the very element in Butler's philosophy which the advances of modern science have most triumphantly justified and confirmed. But perhaps we are on a wrong track. As yet, we have heard a great deal of Bishop Butler and a very little of the Zeit-geist We fear that in the next number we shall have a good deal of the Zeist-geist and very little of Bishop Butler. We confess we pre- fer Bishop Butler, of the two. The Zeit-geist seems to us to be "a stream of tendency, not ourselves," which makes for nothing of any great importance, least of all for righteousness. There are, oddly enough, two papers in this number of the Con- temporary, which in one way or another go rather to justify the belief in demoniacal possession. One of them is the article on "Demonolatry, Devil-dancing, and Demoniacal Possession," chiefly in relation to the demonology of India, by Mi. Robert C. Caldwell; and the other is the paper on "Science, Testimony, and Miracles," by Mr. James Gairdner. Both writers insist that many of the phenomena of madness are still quite unexplained, and that the physical theories of modern medical science, though they may St the phenomena which we usually see amongst our- selves, do not seem to fit at all many of the forms of Oriental madness. It is a very curious sign of the times, that just as the old superstitions, as we thought them, were beginning to vanish amongst cultivated people, our increased knowledge of the very different religious and moral superstitions of the East, and the new forms of so-called 'spiritualism' which are rising up in the West and amongst ourselves, tend to disturb the confidence of the rationalists' conclusions in the very first spring-time of their popularity. Mr. Caldwell's description of Indian superstitions, though written with a certain tumidity of language which does not succeed in being as graphic and vivid as the writer intends, is an interesting and instructive contribution to the natural history of Oriental fanaticism, by one who has evidently very large experi- ence to guide him in describing it. Mr. Oxenham continues his essay on "Eternal Perdition and Universalism," without as yet having reached the exposition of the passages of Scripture unfavourable to the theory of eternal perdition,—which he reserves for another paper. We are anxious to see how he will deal with the double chain of passages on the subject. That there is much in Scrip- ture which looks towards a state of severe and indefinitely pro- longed punishment, no one can doubt ; that there is also much which implies a hopeful view of the deliverance of the whole uni- verse from the burden of sin, seems to us equally certain. And we should have supposed that the natural inference would be to say that we are taught by reverence for Scripture not to dog- matise on the subject, but to expect, on the one hand, the gravest consequence for unrepented sins, and yet to hope, on the other, in the infinite resources of Him with whom nothing is impossible. But Mr. Oxenham evidently makes light of this double thread of anticipations, and identifies Revelation completely with the gloomier strand. Professor Lightfoot, in the new portion of his very learned and candid examination of 'Supernatural Religion,' deals with what he calls the School of St. John,' and seems to us to adduce arguments of great weight to prove,—(l) that St, John's Gospel was really recognised as apostolic by a series of Fathers dating from the period of his own life in Ephesus ; and (2) that the Pauline teaching was recognised as apostolic by the very same
Fathers ; so that there is no real justification for the modern view that St. Paul and St. John were the leaders of hostile sections of the early Church, St. Paul being deemed by St. John as no true apostle, and St. John being condemned by St. Paul as belonging to the carnal school of Judaic Christianity. Pro- fessor Lightfoot's essays, when completed, will make the most important defence of the authenticity of the New Testament Canon which any English divine has yet produced.
Fraser opens with a very singular article by F. W. Newman, in- tended to prove that Government has a perfect right to prevent a "famine of capital" at home, and therefore a right to prohibit loans to foreign States made without its own consent. It has the same tight, he argues, as to prohibit the export of munitions of war, or coal, or anything else the loss of which tends to aggrandise the foreigner or injure the home population. We should not deny the right, or even the duty in certain eases, as, for example, in that of the Confederate Loan, when England lent money in order to enable a nation to perpetuate slavery, but we should question or deny both the expediency and the possibility of such prohibition. It is not possible, because investments can be made in any capital of Europe just as easily as in Lon- don, and prohibition would only harass without diminishing the business ; and it is not expedient, because the prosperity of foreign countries, which, in some cases, may depend on their political strength, is the very source of profitable trade with them. All Mr. Newman's arguments against lending money-to foreign States really weigh as heavily against employing capital in foreign businesses. A "famine of capital," for instance, for home mining may be produced as easily by speculations in Spanish mines as by loans to a Spanish Government. There is a curious paper about the "Royal Bengal tiger," the writer of which decides, amongst other things, that a tiger is rarely or never more than ten feet long, the larger sizes having been estimated from the skin after death, which stretches very much ; and that the tiger's claws are not poisonous, and appears to agree with Captain Forsyth that tigers have been known to ascend trees. We do not see why they should not, as they are only big cats, but it is curious, considering the immense help such a practice would give them, that it should not have become more common. Their weight is not the obstacle, as they are much stronger, weight for weight, than the grizzly bear,, which will ascend at once after honey. The taste of the tiger for man is certain—man being the easiest animal to kill— but we do not remember to have heard before of the man-eater in the Seoul district which killed nearly a hundred men, but ate none of them, only lapping the blood. It is to be observed that a man is poor provender for a family of tigers, a tigress and her cubs wanting an ox a night. They rarely in the wild state eat in the day, but sleep, hunt in the gloaming, and lie gorging all the night. There is a curious paper, too, on Byron, which reads as if it had been written by some Evangelical critic, just after his death, a bit of good, hard, Philistine slanging, just enough on points, but written by a man who does not consider Byron even a man of genius, and would gladly see him forgotten, not only on moral, but on artistic grounds.
The Cornhill, besides its two serials, has a story which would be very good, if its subject were not so hackneyed; a curious paper on Shakespeare's Greek names, which, though perhaps a little too subtle, is very suggestive ; and an analysis of the quality of self- esteem, which the essayist believes to be rather an emotion than an exertion of the intellect, and to be one of the weapons which man accretes to himself in his struggle for existence. He fancies that man, in his self-defence, is compelled to recognise his ega as important to himself, and then commences to consider it positively important, though in a majority of cases he does not settle, or try to settle, why it is important. He is probably right in principle, self-esteem being undoubtedly a quality observable in the non-reasoning animals, for instanc..., the cow, but he has failed to explain one great apparent obi..ction to his theory, the liability of many men—cynics say, of all men, but that is not true—to develop high or even transcendent self-esteem in regard to some quality or faculty which they do not possess, to the neglect of others which they do. Self-esteem in such cases is surely the result not of an instinct, but of a mental operation, beginning with a strong appreciation of the quality, continuing with an intense wish to possess it, and ending with the firm delusion that it is possessed. The remarkable form taken by Robespierres self-esteem, his belief that he was a singularly grace- ful gentleman, must have arisen in this way, as must the somewhat
similar illusion recorded of Sir W. Jones, the Orientalist. There is no defensive strength, no additional power of combat conferred by a mistake like this, and yet how very common it seems to be.
The ablest paper in Macmillan is, we think, Mr. Mahaffy's, on 44 The Humanity of the Greeks," full of suggestions which are striking, even when questionable ; and the most valuable by far is Professor Huxley's on "The Borderland between the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms,"—an effort to show that the difference between an animal and a plant may be one of degree rather than kind, and that the problem whether, in a given case, an organism is an animal or a plant may be essentially insoluble ; but the most readable is the long string of anecdotes about musical com- posers, men who, of all others, have displayed the eccentricity supposed sometimes to be the attribute of genius, and who have felt the effects of association on the imagination :—" Gluck, again, —of whom Handel said that he knew no more counterpoint as mein cook,'—' in order to warm his imagination,' says Carpani, 'and to transport himself to Aulis or Sparta, was accus- tomed to place himself in the middle of a beautiful meadow. In this situation, with his piano before him, and a bottle of cham- pagne on each side, he wrote in the open air his two Iphigenias, and Orpheus, and his other works.'" Sarti composed in large, dimly-lighted rooms, and at night ; Paisiello in bed ; Haydn alone and in deep retirement ; Beethoven apart from mankind, of whom he was jealous ; Auber on horseback ; and Mozart when travelling alone in a carriage, or walking immediately after dinner, intellect and imagination working best when free from the distraction caused by the presence of other human beings.
There is a very curious account in Temple Bar, embedded in its mass of tales, of an adventure among the Navajoes, by C. G-. Leland, intended to illustrate the proposition that a Red Indian has not precisely the same kind of mind as a European. The story, that of the ascendancy exercised by an officer over some Navajoes by his possession of a dancing-doll, is extremely interesting, but we do not see the metaphysical de- duction apparently perceptible to Mr. Leland. He says the Indians were not the least undeceived by their discovery of the mechanism which moved the dancing-doll. It was still a "great medicine," which he imagines a European would not have thought. But he himself says the Navajoes were impressed not so much by the doll as by the coincidence of its arrival with a prophecy that it should come, which prophecy was realised, mechanism or none; and he hints throughout that the medicine-man of the tribe understood the whole business, and rather admired the English officer for being so clever a cheat in his own line, surely a state of mind as precisely identical with that of many European sceptics as could well be imagined.
Barring the stories, there is nothing in Blackwood that we can find to read—for " Bates's Personally-Conducted Tour," though in a style in which Blackwood, and Blackwood alone, frequently succeeds, is as tedious as the tour itself would have been. "An Unimportant Person" is a very pretty, but very slight little story, with a good deal of observation in it, and some fun. The entertaining story called "The Dilemma" has, in the last two numbers, passed away from Indian ground and entered the world of English society. We can hardly say that we enjoy the clever and perhaps somewhat cynical sketches which we are given of that society as keenly as we did the realistic and yet also romantic scenes of the great Indian Mutiny ; but no one can deny the skill of the new pictures, though they do not rival the old in brilliancy. The sketch of the Cathedral-town society of " Wiltonbury," in the January number, was indeed a little too cynical. The clerical coteries of Cathedral towns are apt to be petty enough, but they are hardly so vulgar in tone, so wholly destitute of refinement of feeling, as that into which Colonel Yorke's mother and sister had had the misfortune to fall. But the picture of the society of Hamwell in the January number is drawn with more moderation, and certainly with sufficient vivacity. Though we cannot help regretting the descent of the tale from the high level of tragic incident to the lower one of social finesse, and could wish that the order of the development of the story had been inverted,—that the genteel comedy had conic first and the tragic action later,—still, the execution of both alike is suffi- ciently telling. Blackwood, however, this month wants more "go," more articles in it which one can read for the sake of reading them, and not for the sake of doing a reader's duty to his magazine,— which is, we take it, to taste, at least, anything of promise. The papers on Lamartine and Thackeray are both good and apprecia- tive, but we have read all they say half-a-dozen times before, and long, as we read, for words with a little more freshness in them.
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