BOOKS.
A HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND.* Mn. HERBERT PAUL has many qualifications for the task, to which he has addressed himself, of writing a history of modern England. His experience as a journalist has made him familiar with the art of criticising modern politics. He has had the great advantage of watching the working of the House of Commons from within. He is equipped with a knowledge of his subject which, if not always profound, is at any rate comprehensive ; and lie commands a style which never ceases to attract, and which constantly sparkles with epigram. In these circumstances, it is not smprising that he should have given us a book which is certain to obtain a large circulation. For, if he has not quite succeeded in writing a history of modern England, he has produced an excellent criticism of modern history.
We shall not, therefore, be thought guilty of desiring to dis- parage a book, for which we have little but praise, if we avail ourselves of a reviewer's license to point out one or two defects which in later volumes Mr. Paul might either amend or supply. And, in the first place, we cannot but think that Mr. Paul is too much occupied with literature and politics, and too apt to overlook the material progress of the people. Yet the chief facts in the history of England from 1846 to 1865 are not to be found either in the annals of Parliament or even in the records of the Foreign Office ; they are to be traced in the energy of her people, which was increasing her population, and rapidly augmenting her trade. We believe
• A History of Modern England. By Herbert Paul. 5 vols. Vol.. I. and II. London : Macmillan and Co. [8S. GI net each.]
that we are right in saying that during the six years of Lord Palmerston's Administration the people of this country con- structed three thousand miles of railway and doubled the tonnage of their steam fleet. In the same period talk in Parliament added some twenty-seven volumes of Hansard to our bookshelves. Yet we doubt if Mr. Paul could produce two statutes, as the outcome of these debates, which have had so much influence on the England that we know to-day as the extension of our railway system and the additions to our mercantile marine. To ignore, as Mr. Paul ignores, both these achievements, and the energy which produced them, is to ignore some of the chief causes which have maintained the pre-eminence of this country among the nations of the world. Mr. Paul, indeed, tells us in his introduction that the historian, "above all, must not lose himself in the satisfied contem- plation of material progress. For the things which are seen are temporal, the things which are not seen are eternal." We are not sure that we understand—but, so far as we understand, we certainly cannot accept—this remarkable conclusion. How- ever much it may be the historian's duty to investigate the unseen causes of the events which it is his business to chronicle, he cannot neglect the visible results which swell the current of history. The material progress of England is, after all, the greatest fact in her modern history, and the writer who omits to notice it cannot hope to make his labours complete.
We venture also to think that Mr. Paul has to some extent reduced the value of his work by a too slavish adherence to the principle, which he ascribes to the first Lord Ellenhorough, that chronological order is the best. "There is sting as well as point," so he writes, "in Sterne's remark that he will now bring up the affairs of the kitchen, as Rapin brings up the affairs of the Church. The essence of History is narrative, not disquisition, and narrative must be continuous. I pro- pose to divide this book into periods, not into subjects. Sequences, as David Hume says, we know. Causes we can only conjecture." An admirable conclusion perfectly ex- pressed. We have no protest to record against Mr. Paul's theory of history ; though we are disposed to complain of the manner in which he applies it. He is so wedded to chrono- logical sequence that he forgets the necessity of continuous narrative. If we are to discuss the affairs of the kitchen we must separate them from the conversation of the drawing- room. But Mr. Paul blends the two inextricably. He actually mentions Lord Palmerston's tribute to Mr. Joseph Hume and the death of the Emperor Nicholas in consecutive sentences in the same paragraph ; and in another chapter, on the second part of the Russian War, he compresses into two pages and a half the institution of limited liability, the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the riots in Hyde Park caused by the Bill to put down Sunday trading, the capture of Kertsch, and the battle of the Tchernaya! In such examples chronological order absolutely destroys con- tinuity of narrative. We have every hope that Mr. Paul will himself admit the force of this criticism. If he will compare the chapters (e.g., his admirable account of the Indian Mutiny) in which he has departed from his rule of chronological sequence with those (like that entitled "The End of the Joint Reign") in which he has slavishly adhered to it, he will himself see, we think, how greatly continuous narrative surpasses in clearness and interest disjointed observations on many subjects.
There is a third criticism which we wish to make on Mr. Paul's book, because it can easily be met by comparatively small alterations in later editions. Eminently judicial as Mr. Paul almost uniformly is in his judgment of events, he is not impartial in his appreciation of men. And this fault is the more conspicuous because he embodies his opinion in an epi- gram, which always carries its sting. If we may apply to him his own saying of Mr. Lowe, when "he has to say a disagree- able thing, he never stoops to say it in an agreeable manner." Is it quite fair to say of the great ladies of London society in the " sixties " that "fashionable women, who are always well bred, stared at him [Mr. Cobden] through their glasses "P Is it not the opposite of fair to write that the Prince Consort's "political mentors were Peel, who did him nothing but good, and Stockmar, who did him nothing but harm " ? Has Mr. Paul ever read Baron Stockmar's Memoirs? Is it quite true to talk of Lord Palmerston and Mr. Cobden as "the great man in the World's estimation, and the great man in the did not mean it much or long" ? Epigram is a delightful
gift, and when it is occupied with coining such phrases as , Lord Granville's "long career of successful suavity," in 'describing Lord Derby as the "most simply and frankly .1-human of all public men," or in saying of Mr. Smith O'Brien that "he never ceased to behave like a gentleman, and seldom
failed to behave like a fool," we feel that Mr. Paul succeeds' in conveying in a sentence a judgment which we should fail to express with equal force in a paragraph. But when the epigram is unjust we resent its sting. We sympathise with the victim, and not with the author. We are particularly anxious to make this criticism because we think that Mr. Paul is specially unjust in his verdicts on public men of other countries. We have no especial liking for Mr. Jefferson ,Davis ; we have still less for the cause which he endeavoured to uphold. But we simply cannot understand the writer who dubs the President of the Confederate States, the statesman who, in Mr. Gladstone's indiscreet language, "made a nation," as." .a man of no account." We have no special partiality for bountlfralewski, but we know nothing to justify Mr. Paul alluding to him as "the corrupt and incompetent Walewski." Lord Clarendon on one occasion paid him a striking compli- -ment by saying of him that he had never told him a lie. Mr. ;Paul's stinging epigrams on these men, however, are mild in couvarison with the language which he habitually applies to Napoleon In Mr. Paul's pages he is "a public criminal " ; is "Jonathan Wild the little" ; he is "a liar, a murderer,
• and a thief " ; be is "the perjured President of a throttled -republic"; and when the Church of France received him "in -the Church of our Lady" Mr. Paul sees fit to add that "the neighbouring morgue" would have been "a fitter place." -These phrases are applied to the man who at the time when they are fastened on him was the ally of this country, and engaged with it in a great war. We have no desire to defend 'Napoleon III. His private character was not above reproach his conduct in 1852 deserves the censure of history. But we cannot forget that throughout his reign he was the faithful friend of this country, and that he risked popularity in Trance for the sake of maintaining the English alliance. If, indeed, we compare Napoleon III.'s attitude to Lord Palmerston with Lord Palmerston's habitual suspicion of Napoleon III. from 1860 to 1865, we are disposed to think -that the Emperor behaved better to the British Minister than the Minister to the Emperor. At any rate, the historian, even if he has no pity for the victim of the greatest tragedy
• of the nineteenth century, should recollect that there is such :a thing as international courtesy, and that international courtesy requires that we should speak with moderation and • consideration of the head of a neighbouring Empire.
We have discharged a reviewer's duty in pointing out what we consider the defects in Mr. Paul's work. But these defects do not blind us to the many excellences of his narrative. And what a period it is with which Mr. Paul is dealing. So ;*far as our domestic affairs are concerned, if it be somewhat "barren of legislative progress, it records a material advance in all that contributes to a nation's happiness and wealth which had never taken place at any other time, or in any other , country. But so far as foreign policy is concerned, it deals with matters of still greater importance. For the days with which Mr. Paul is dealing are the days in which the French Empire was constituted; in which the Crimean War was 'fought out; in which India was reconquered; in which Italy achieved her unity ; in which the United States consolidated their power; in which Prussia, at the expense of Denmark, *arranged the first act in the great drama which was concluded seven years later at Versailles. Whether we like or dislike all or any of these great events, every reasonable person must desire a better acquaintance with their history, and in no other work with which we are acquainted will the ordinary reader ' find them told with more freshness or with more skill than in Mr. Paul's pages.
FROM . KABUL TO KIIMASSI.*
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