THE MAGAZINES.
Blackwood is eminently readable this month. There is no political article, and a review of Lord Dolling's "Life of Lord Palmerston" is disfigured in only one instance by an out- burst of Tory zeal, with its inseparable vituperation of Liberal majorities, who are oddly described, in conclusion, as composed of "men responsible only to their immediate constituents, and whose support can only be obtained by piecemeal concession to their views." We had hitherto supposed such a condition of support to be common to all parties. Are we hence- forth to believe that Conservative majorities are to be won by opposing their views? Novel and pleasing discovery in the difficult game of politics ! With the exception of this superero- gatory weakness, which injures its style and obscures its sense, the review is clever, and it possesses the chief merit of a review, —it gives us the gist of the book. A pleasant and apprecia- tive article on the admirable series of "Ancient Classics for English Readers," edited by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins (whose personal contributions to it are highly valuable), is the bonne Londe of Blackwood; though we have nothing but appreciation for the grave and dignified rebuke of "Modern Scientific Materialism,' in prose, and the capital quizzing of the same, in rhyme, in "Notes of the President's Address, British Association, 1874.' Since the late Professor Aytoun's verses on "Monads," we have not had anything so good as the latter. The solemn pomp of the lines is delicious, and the vivid funniness of the final drop from the sublime to the ridiculous is nearly as good as the savage humour of Bret Harte's summary of the consequences to the learned geolo- gist, when, "a chunk of old red sandstone" having "caught him in the abdomen," "the subsequent proceedings interested him no more." Professor Tyndall's eloquent description of the eman- cipation of science from the trammels of creeds is cleverly paraphrased in six lines :— "In the very beginnings of science, the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men. Till commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power, Supplanted both demons and gods by the stoma which last to this hour. Yetthey did not abolish the gods, but they sent them well out of the way. With the rarest of nectar to drink, and blue fields of nothing to sway."
The atomic theory is delightfully put from the comic point of view, and the jeu d'esprit ends with the following version of the Professor's pyrotechnical peroration :— " First, let us honour the atom, so lively, so wise, and so small, The atomists next let us praise, Epicurus, Lucretius, and all; Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call—his mind.
Last, praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong, 'Ere yet the swift whirl of the atoms has hurried us, ruthless, along, The British Association—like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes, The incarnation of wisdom, built up of our witless nobs, Which will carry on endless discussions, when I, and probably you,
. Have melted in infinite azure—and, in short, till all is blue.'
It is a long time since we have had anything so amusing in Blackwood, or, indeed, in any magazine, and we confess to being tired of the prevalence of dulness, and longing for a laugh. Part ELL of "The Abode of Snow" is dismal. "The Valley of the Shadow of Death" is the appropriate title of the author's journey through the hot Sutlej Valley, wherein he encountered foes innumerable, from precipices to poison. Part III. is, how- ever, also interesting and picturesque, but it is a pity the serial form has been adopted for the publication of the work. It would be much more interesting as a whole. The author's description of his ride, on a yak, along a pathway which slanted across the face of an immense slate precipice in the Riihang Pass, is enough to make one giddy at one's desk, especially when one has just read his account of "the comfort of riding upon a yak,"—presumably not along a shelf with a sheer descent of 800 feet below you, and the prospect of reaching another shelf at an elevation of 13,000 • feet, both shelves being so narrow- that he had to dismount occa- sionally and take the saddle off the broad brute, in order that it might find room to pass. Even on the level there are pleasanter ideals than "a seat between two Prussian spiked helmets close together on the back of a great kill, the helmets connected on each aide by ribs of particularly hard wood."
The article on Sir Robert Peel contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes by the. Comte de. Jarnac, than whom few persons -were better qualified to form an accurate judgment on the political life of- Sir Robert,. supplies the topic of the leading paper in Macmillan. The Comte de Jarnac, and Mr. Stapleton, in his summary of the Counts reminiscences, fismish a pleasant supple- ment to Lord Drilling's book ; but -Mr. Stapleton is not so free from political and religious prejudice as the Count, and few of his readers, we think; will endorse his views of the iniquity of Sir Robert Peel's conduct with respect to the grant to the College of Maynooth, or of the past or present character of that institution. Mr. Stapleton, like Mr. Vansittart, has seen "a. Jesuit in a blue cloak" somewhere, and ever since sees one everywhere. Miss Smedley's article on Mrs. Nassau Senior's "Report on the Condi- tion and Results of Pauper School Training" is a truly admirable production, which we earnestly recommend to the consideration of all who are in any way concerned in the administration of the system of which these schools form a portion. It is sad, even painful, to read, but it ought to be 'read, and the moral results which it points out and analyses ought to be regarded as an evil of such magnitude as to override all the advantages which can be enumerated from the evidence of statistical records ; for it is an evil which produces a uniformly low type of character, in which hardness and helplessness are almost invariable defects. It is impossible to discuss here the reform, or rather the reconstruc- tion of the system, which is urgently demanded—(it is the .system, not the administration which is to blame)—we can only praise the lucidity of Miss Smedley's statements, and the reason- ableness of her arguments, and 'express our own hope that the admirable practical suggestions with which the article concludes may be carried into action. They indicate a sphere for women's work, in which we should rejoice to see women working ; a sphere which we hope women's advocates in Parliament will endeavour to have opened for them. "Notes on Rome," should be read there ; they are too terrible for London, in November. So is "The Oldest Fairy Tale in the World." Of course, it is interesting, from the antiquarian point of view, —as a story written by a Pharaonic scribe, for the edification of the young Crown Prince Seti Manephta, the son of the Pharaoh at whose Court Moses was educated,—but as a fairy-tale, it is a failure. There are no fairies in it, and it reads like bits out of Genesis adapted to the history of the tenants of a Noah's ark. It would be more attractive if we were allowed to regard it as a genuine child's story, written for the child-Pharaoh, but the deep allegorical meanings which -we are expected to find in it spoil the illusion. Might not the Egyptian princeling have had his "Little Bo-peep," and his "Goody Two-Shoes," in their native nonsense, as our happier progenitors had theirs, before children's books were improved off the face of the earth? The third paper of the series on " Prussia and theVatican," which embraces the history of the growing strife from 1850 to the Vatican Council, is written with well-sustained ability ; but a letter from Archbishop Manning as to the former paper establishes that the author is not always accurate. "Old Labels" is an amusing Wile.
Cornhill is less brilliant than it was last month, but still it is the brightest of the Magazines, and takes an easy lead in subjects of eclectic interest, though it has no "actuality "this time. A very interesting article on "Feudal China," a little difficult to follow, on account of that very ignorance which it is designed to lessen, is the most important item of the contents. The author truly says, "a concise, but graphic history of China is a desideratum," but he proceeds to enumerate the difficulties in the way of the production of such a history, and their number and magnitude are impressive. If, however, the Cornhill Magazine continues to supply instalments of information on China and the Chinese of the quality of this and its preceding articles, the general public will consider them fully equivalent to as much of a history of China as the general public wants. "A Visit to Miinster " is one of those out-of-the-way essays, a mixture of antiquarianism, history, the picturesque, literary lounging, and biographical gossip, which we all recognise, and most of -us like. 'This one is pleasant speculation about Munster, interspersed with facts and topography, from the Middle -.Ages to the days of Baron `von Fiirstenberg, famous as an educational reformer,. and Princess Gallitzin, whose history was amusingly told in the Cornhill some time ago. An essay on "Don Quixote "is not attractive, for the same reason that an essay on " Hamlet " requires courage to read. The subject is not worn out, indeed, but it is overlaid with theories and 'views,' BO that it is only enjoyable after one's own fashion, in its suggestions to one's own self, ignorantly, it may be, but satis- factorily. To this mood one comes at last, after having read so much of what other people think about the Royal Dane, and the immortal Don, that one does not dare to have any thoughts of one's own,—it is a mood of revulsion and rebellion, in which one purges one's memory and resolves to be free. Readers who have not undergone this process will be less bewildered by the Cornhill Don Quixote than by most of those analyses which we have rigidly determined to forget for ever. " Agathe Marron "is a short story, a tragedy of the Commune, "and after "—as Carlyle said about "shooting Niagara "—written with remarkable power. Mr. Black has grown so tired of Mr. Boscorla, that he has shipped him off abroad for three years ; he will return, no doubt, because Mr. Black will never commit the error of making him tragic, but he will return, like Miss Austin's Sir Thomas Bertram in "Mansfield Park," to find himself superseded, -without the moral strength of Sir Thomas to restore the balance of power. We are quite certain of our sentiments towards the young ladies now. We much prefer Mabyn, and we think Mr. Black is in some danger of tiring of Wenna, and deposing his heroine.
• Not the -most striking, but perhaps the most generallyinterest- ing, articles in the Contemporary are the first and-the last,—the very lucid exposition, by Professor Tyndall, of the law of what he calls the atmospheric transparency of sound, and the experi- ments which prove it ; and the new step taken by Mr. -Matthew Arnold in his rapid advance on the way to Nihilism. 'Professor Tyndall proves, not only by inductive reasoning from natural facts, but by a very beautiful experiment, that what arrests sound is a variation in the density of the gaseous strata through which it passes, a great portion of the sound being reflected or echoed, instead of transmitted, at every passage from a rarer to. & denser, or a denser to a rarer medium, and this, though the varying medium may be perfectly transparent to light. The experiment by which he proved this was very beautiful. He transmitted a sound through a small tube or tunnel, a little distance from the other end of which was one of those musical flames which dance in harmony with all the sound-vibrations that reach them. Then he pat the flame of a spirit-lamp a little below the outside end of the tunnel so as to heat the air above it, and send a stream of rarer air up across the outlet of the tunnel. This stratum of rarer air immediately caused the sound to be arrested on its way to the musical flame, and to be echoed, instead of transmitted. He then placed a new tunnel so as to receive the echo, and put a second musical flame at the end of it (which end, of course, was very near to the origin of the sound), and this last flame rose and fell to the echo, whenever the first musical flame was steady, and was quite steady whenever, after removing the spirit-lamp and the upward stream of rarer air, the first musical flame again began dancing to the sound.—Mr. Arnold takes up the metaphysical side of his polemic to show that we have no right to assume God to be a person who knows and loves. His argument goes, however, a good deal further, and is intended to show that we have no such idea as " being " at all, and that the phrase "1 am" really means nothing except "I manifest some sort of activity." We know what we mean by our various activities, says Mr. Arnold, but not what we mean by existence beyond. or underneath those activities ; and evidently he does not accept the fact of any such existence at all. Thephllological argument for this position from the connection of the root of the verb "to be" in different languages with that of "to breathe or "to grow," or other verbs of activity, is very flimsy. Mr. Arnold should work out his own vein of thought, and prove by a similar philological argument, as he could easily do, that "I," "thou," &c., have no real meaning for us beyond numerical distinctions. But further, he should ex- amine what right he has to treat the stream of tendency which "makes for righteousness" as even numerically distinct from the stream of tendency which makes for umighteousness. He would find that on his new principles he has absolutely no reason at all to make any such assumption,—that probably all "streams of ten- dency" are as likely as not to be identical in origin,—and further, that they cannot be assumed to have any origin at all ; and then he will have reached the goal to which he is fast tending,— the. " reine Nichts," or pure Nothing, as the chief object of the new -worship which he evidently hopes to found.—For the general reader, however, we suspect the most interesting papers in the Contemporary will be one on the failure of Constitutional Monarchy in France, by Lord Lytton ; and another on Saxony, by Julian Hawthorne. Lord Lytton, who, we trust, is not going to be banished to Constantinople, where they want a totally different man, writes -better than his father ; his plea for the monarchy of July is most eloquent, and his special view, that the bourgeoisie approved the doctrines which led to the revolt of the middle-class against itself, and in so doing gave those doc- trines a fatal power, deserves consideration. He attributes to it, however, too much force, ignoring too completely the fact that the - peculiarities of Louis Philippe's temper and position made him in many most important respects a reign- ing king who, when his throne is assailed, must save it by his own energy; or not at all. Louis Philippe had lost his energy, and of course when the assault came the bourgeoisie, who had before abandoned their own cause, had neither leader nor enthu- siasm. The throne fell, and with it fell the ascendancy of the middle-class, which in France always lacked the first condition of governing power, —physical force enough to make a struggle doubt- fuL Mr. Plawthorne's "Saxon Studies" are marvellous pieces of writing, filled with his peculiar humour, and sometimes display- ing gleams of insight that positively startle. For example :— " We behold, on jambs and lintel, an uncouth display of architectural ornamentation ; and here are inscribed the date of erection, the name or initials of the founder, and same baldly pious motto,—a Scriptural pro- verb, or other scrap of religious truism. 'Inc Gottes Segen let Alles gelegen,' ' liVer Gott vertrant hat wohl gebaut,' and so on indefinitely. These may be, and I suppose they generally are, taken as evidences of a childlike simplicity and faith. But I would rather they had been written on the inner side of the lintel. Thaintroduction of God's name to every base occasion is a trait of this people, and crops out in their daily conversation to a degree quite astonishing. It is not a sincere or wholesome practice, rather a kind of religious snobbishness."
The whole, however, is penetrated with a. bitter dislike of the Saxon people, whose lymphatic temperament seems to the keen, nervous American positively hateful, till after justly condemning the frightful over-toil imposed upon the peasant women, he thus attacks the national amusement, listening to fine music in a beer- garden
The Saxon's sentimentalism is vitiated by his moral and physical ill- health. He is continually doing things false in harmony, and incom- prehensible, as all discord is. Who but he can sit through a sym- phony of Beethoven's, applauding its majestic movements with the hand which has just carried to his lips a mug of beer, and anon returns thither with a slice of sausage? It seems as if no length of practice could marry this gross, everlasting feeding, to any profound apprecia- tion of music. He frowns down the laughter of a child, the whispering of a pair of lovers, as disturbing the performance ; but the clatter of knife and fork, the champing of jaws—offends him not. He seems to recognise the noble beauty of the theme ; he nods and rolls his eyes at the sublimer strains. Does he comprehend them ? He reminds me of the Jews, who, indeed, possess the Bible ; written, moreover, in their native Hebrew ; who peruse it daily, and can repeat much of it by heart ; and who yet have never read so ranch, as a single line of the word of God."
His final judgment is that the Saxon has a strong resemblance to the goose—" that pig of the bird race," and he accuses him of a "cold, profound selfishness, which forms the foundation and framework of the national and individual character, in every walk of life,—the wretched chill of which must ultimately annul the warmth of the most fervent German eulogist, provided he be bold enough to bring his theoretical enthusiasm to the decisive test of a few years' personal intercourse and conversation with the people."
We have analysed the most striking article in the Fortnightly elsewhere, but must call attention also to Professor Beealy's clever but not quite accurate resume of the history of France since Sedan, —he clearly does not know the shade of M. de Fallous's politics at all,—and his summary of the evidence in favour of the proposi- tion that the Republic will live. Our readers will rise from it, we think, with the conviction that although the success of the Third Republic is not certain, the chances in its favour exceed tenfold those which existed in favour of any previous experiment.
Fraser has not interested us greatly, but it contains a most able paper against the whole of our modern legislation about betting. The object of that legislation has been to suppress ready-money betting, whereas the object should be to suppress all betting except for ready money. The writer, we think, proves his case, though he does not clearly show us any method by which betting on honour can be suppressed. A legal right to recover a bet is worthless, compared with the right enforced by social opinion.
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