J. G. W. ON CARDINAL NEWMAN.

I

had my suspicions that J. G. W., who spoke so glibly in the October number of the glittering generalities' that abounded in Dr. Newman's works, had but scant grounds for the charge he brought forward, and now I am certain of it. More than this, it is tolerably certain that he (or she-let us for convenience sake say 'he') scarcely knows what a generality is, and that the expression glittering generalities' was a mere piece of false glitter in his own writing. J. G. W., referring to my remarks in the November number, says:

This

He (or she) thinks that, if the Church did something for the amelioration of slavery in distant ages, it is of little or no consequence that it has not exerted itself to put an end to the modern form of it which we know most about.' is a wholly unwarranted inference from what I said, as any one who turns to my remarks will see. I simply showed upon unimpeachable testimony that the Church had combated slavery in its most general form, and that the claim made in her behalf by Cardinal Newman was so far justified. My object was, not to defend the Church, but to show that Dr. Newman had not, as J. G. W. would have us believe, altogether sacrificed historical truth to rhetorical effect. The extinction of slavery in Europe, I now venture to add, is a much broader historic fact than the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indian colonies-a measure, however, which was due to nothing so much as to the ever increasing sense of the moral incongruity between slavery and Christianity. Had not slavery first been extinguished and become odious in Europe, it would never have been disturbed in the New World.

J. G. W. does not like my quotations from Lecky, and he makes thereanent some remarks, the oddity of which he scarcely appreciates. Lecky,' he says, rationalist though he is, is too ready to admit the statements of the ecclesias

tical historians of the period, and it is well known that their evidence requires to be carefully sifted.' (The 'and' here comes in rather funnily, and does not suggest that any very rigorous logical process was going on in the writer's mind. Let that pass, however) The inference to be drawn is that the 'rationalist' Lecky has not carefully sifted the statements of the ecclesiastical historians. What a precious specimen of a rationalist he must be! Is J. G. W. prepared to support this charge by giv. ing instances in which Lecky has shown an open mouthed credulity in regard to what ecclesiastical historians relate; or is this simply one of his own generalities,' like his remark about Cardinal Newman? To put aside the testimony of Lecky, however, in this airy fashion, simply because he testifies to facts which one would prefer to ignore, is not an honest style of argument. Moreover, to reduce the matter to believing or not what ecclesiastical historians have written, is to show a singular ignorance of the resources at the command of the historian; and I am led to the conclusion that J. G. W. is no more fit to set Lecky right than he is to convict Dr. Newman of the use of empty generalities.

I have said that it seems very doubtful whether J. G. W. used the expression glittering generalities' with any intelligent grasp of its meaning. Here is the proof. hallenged by me to produce other instances, he gladly complies,' by adducing as one of the worst,' a sentence in which Cardinal Newman makes a very specific statement as to Catholic doctrine. The Catholic Church holds it better,' &c., &c, says Cardinal Newman (it is not necessary to quote the whole passage, which is a very familiar one), and this is cited as a striking example of a littering generality'! Could the power of absurdity further go? A generality,' if I know the meaning of language, means a general statement -the truth of which is tested by its truth in the particular instances that it

covers. Cardinal Newman may or may not state the doctrine of his Church correctly, but to call a statement of doctrine a generality is either a wilful or an ignorant abuse of language. J.G.W. himself supplies the proof that the passage in question is not, even to his mind, a ‘generality,' for he proceeds to criticise it, not as being untrue to its particulars, but as revealing a state of mind 'seared by sacerdotalism' and 'dead to all sympathy' with the human race; whence he passes by a natural transition to witch-burning, and thence to some new systems of morality which he sees looming up. A more typical example of mental confusion never came to my notice.

I therefore again challenge J. G. W. to produce examples of the glittering generalities so plentifully strewed (as he alleges) through Dr. Newman's books,' and meantime I aver that the charge which he brings against Newman of indulging in these false ornaments of style, and the charge he brings against Lecky, in an equally off-hand manner, of being over-credulous in dealing with ecclesiastical historians, are mere examples of baseless-not very glittering-generalities which happened to suit the purpose he had in view.

FACTS.

TINEA.

THERE is a large class of persons who profess to found all their reasonings on facts, and who seem to find facts the easiest things in the world to get at. They constantly appeal to 'facts' with a comfortable assurance that the facts' are all on their side. Yet, in listening to them, I often wonder whether they really know what a fact is. They think they are in possession of a fact when they are able to utter a proposition that cannot be, in direct terms, negatived. The relevancy, the completeness, the significance of what they allege, are matters they have no appetite for discussing; and if you raise questions on any of these points, you only seem to them to be shutting your eyes to the 'fact.' The truth is, however, that the simplest fact can only be properly understood when seen in its relations. Your mental vision must take in enough to give the so-called fact a proper setting; otherwise you are but misled by what you

see.

'The memorable fly on the wheel saw, as a fact, that the wheel revolved; but, instead of being wiser, was the less wise, for that exercise of its powers of observation. And in general the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc consists simply in seizing a fact and neglecting its relations. A true fact is something organic; and we require to study it in its origin and development, before we are competent to cite it as a fact for purposes of argument or instruction. Well did the Epicurean poet exclaim,

If

'Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.' The more our knowledge increases, the more we perceive how powerless we are without the comparative method. he who knows but one language knows none; so he who knows but one of anything knows nothing of that. Above all, in the history of the human race, we need all the light that we can get from every quarter before we can appreciate facts aright; and, to the last, our judgments must remain open to revision. So, when people come brandishing 'facts,' the first thing to do is to see whether the alleged facts have a character of completeness, or whether they are but mangled fragments torn from some organic whole, and void therefore of all significance and value. method, I know, spoils a great deal of slashing argument, and robs life of many of its pleasures to a certain class of minds; but it tends to substitute breadth for narrowness, and moderation for hot-heated partizanship. Why be in such a hurry to conclude? I would say to the people I have in view. Why impatient to shut yourselves up in a little box of opinion? Is there no pleasure in feeling yourselves at liberty to judge of all things in a free and impartial manner, and to travel up and down the bye-ways of thought, instead of forever plodding heavily on the hard and dusty macadam? Who that knows what mental liberty is, would not rather, with Wordsworth, be

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This

'A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,' than be bound forever to the wheel of his own prejudices, even though those prejudices be all in favour of the most advanced' philosophy? Our business in this world is to live the fullest life possible; and that we cannot do unless we keep our minds open to suggestions

from all quarters, and unless, above all, we can hearken what the inner spirit sings.' A free consciousness, reflecting light and shade and colour from every part of the universe, is worth vastly

more than all the pitch and toss of opinions ever practised by sophists since the world began.

L.

That smuggling band,

Some in the water and some on the sand,
Ready their contraband goods to land!'

The smugglers were always brave and generous, with a penchant for Jacobite conspiracies and other trifling irregularities; the Custom-house officers were always baffled, stupid noodles, with just enough pluck to show fight and make their defeat a little interesting. We thought the bold smuggler had been neglected, but quite recently he seems to have come into fashion with the taste for Queen Anne furniture, and we see his well-known features again in Besant and Rice's 'Twas in Trafalgar Bay,' and now in this little tale. It certainly was a novel idea of Mr. Hardy's to make a young Methodist minister fall in love with a female smuggler, and spend the greater part of his time in watching her illegal operations by moonlight, while he pipes out his mild expostulations. The love affair and the smuggling take up so

much of the tale that the ministerial side of the young man's character is alanost entirely omitted, and we can only

imagine that he was made a minister in order to add piquancy to the position.

The idiotic conduct of the Customhouse officer, in sending off a lot of captured barrels across country roads by night, under charge of only four men, is also a little too much for our credulity; and the wind-up in which Lizzy, the fair smuggler, acknowledges the guilt of that occupation after the gang is broken up, is completely unnatural, since no argument, except want of success, is employed to bring about this change in her mind. We must excuse this, however, on account of Mr. Hardy's desire to settle his moral and distracted preacher comfortably for life.

We have only one more thing to draw attention to. In palpable imitation of a certain mannerism used by Kingsley, in his' Water Babies,' our author gives long lists of places where the excisemen hunted for the hidden tubs. These words are printed in double columns like extracts from a spelling-book. Now the sooner this is put a stop to, the better. Any scribbler can fill a page with lists like this:

come interesting. Iester is a tale written by an American, with the scene laid in France, and the usual disastrous results follow. The characters are not French, they do not act, speak, or think as French people would, their very names smell as of shoddy manufacture, and the heroine, in particular, has a perfectly impossible Christian name. When the authoress finds a young French girl of good family (although her genealogy is decidedly shaky as related in these pages) who is called Hester, it is possible she may find her indulging in long private conversations with a gentleman who 'kisses her passionately,' 'presses her in his arms,' and for a change (the said gentleman having married some one else in the interval) catches her in his arms and covers her face with kisses.' These remarkably free and easy manners may obtain in the society which Miss Butt adorns, but she must pardon our informing her that an ingenue is too carefully watched and guarded in good French society to be exposed to such conduct. The whole tale is full of absurdities. At one page Hester is certainly not beautiful,' at the next she 'strangely resembles her lovely grandmother.' Α private soldier escaped from Metz relates that he casually saw a wounded officer taken prisoner. Intense excitement on the part of Hester, who believes it is her married lover! Did the soldier hear his name? No, but he wrote his initials from the saddle-cloth of his horse, 'for fear of forgetting them!' Why should this miserable private take so much trouble about a man he never saw before, except to save our authoress the trouble of devising a more probable mode of communicating this important intelligence (which leads to nothing) to Hester? Then we have the touching and truly French expression, and now kiss me for good-by,' which tills up the measure of disgust, and makes us think that if many good Americans like Miss Butt are to go herefter to Paris, society there will become strangely altered for the worse.

Uncle César. By CHARLES REYBAUD. Appleton's New Handy Volume Series. New York: 1879.

VERY different is the account to be given of this tale, which is throughout racy of the French provincial life it de

picts. The Faubertons are, it seems, a race or dynasty of provincial magnates, with a rooted aversion to matrimony, and whose riches and influence have, for several generations, descended from uncle to nephew, for lack of direct descendants. Uncle César,the chief character in the book appears on the high road to confirmed celibacy; he has already his nephew Theodore with him, ready to succeed to his position, but in the meantime César Fauberton intends to amuse himself. In his young days he was a dandy of the first water, fond of flirtations, handsome and a great favourite among the ladies. Now he has grown more than middleaged he still has the relics of a fine figure and contrives by the aid of an expert tailor and wig-maker to present an almost dazzling appearance when, as mayor of the little town, he gives a ball at his hôtel. The description of the old-fashioned manners he is so pleased to keep up, is amusing and lifelike; for it is a homage that a small society readily pays to those old people who entertain it, in conforming to those trifling customs and habits which speak to us of a bygone generation. When we read the neverfailing complaint which each age brings against its successor, of failing courtesy, of diminished politeness, of forgotten forms that once enshrined a soul of gentleness and self-respect, we are tempted to wonder whether this degradation is to continue for ever till good manners are absorbed in self-satisfaction. But this is a digression and we must return to our tale. Still it will not do to let the reader into the secrets of the loves of Theodore and the fair but poor Camille, they are too interesting for us to discount in this manner. It will be sufficient for us to say that on the next day after the grand ball, Uncle César is invisible. Strange rumours creep about, he is not

In

ill, but he shuts himself in his room, admits no one but his valet Cascarel, throws all his cosmetics and toilet requisites out of the window, and from a gay old gentleman with pretensions to youth, sinks into a misanthropic old bachelor. this self-imposed imprisonment he is amused by trifles. Two sparrows that build their nest opposite his window afford him much occupation in watching them. At last, as their young fledglings are ready to fly away, he calls Cascarel, with all the caprice of an old man with nothing to do, and bids him catch them. Alas! in the attempt they all take flight,