Fifth Series, No. 1816.- April 5, 1879. {From Beginning, Vol. OXLI. CONTENTS. TRANSLATION OF GOETHE'S "HAIDEN ROSLEIN." GREW a baby rosebud rare Lonely 'mong the heather; One looked long who, ling'ring there, "Then I'll prick thee," laughed she low, "Heedless, heartless- -even so, Thou'lt think on me ever." Rosebud 'mong the heather. Chambers' Journal. From The Quarterly Review. THE REFLECTION OF ENGLISH CHARAC TER IN ENGLISH ART.* EVERY great nation has a life of its own, as distinct from the will of the majority of individuals of whom it is temporarily composed, just as the passing moods of the individual himself are separable from his consciousness of his personal identity. We are all of us sensible of the actual existence of a public conscience, though none of us can define precisely wherein it consists. The image of the State was in the mind of Pericles, when he told his hearers "not to view it merely in the abstract, but rather to contemplate it day by day as it actually existed, and to become enamored of it, and, when they felt its greatness, to bear in mind that their ancestors constituted it by their valor, their sense of duty, and their principle of honor in action." † It inspired the bold figure of Demosthe"Would you act up to the spirit of your fathers, each one of you jurymen ought to think, when he enters on the judgment of a public cause, that, together with his staff and ticket, he takes upon himself the genius of his country." + nes: Two portraits of our own country have lately been presented to us by the hand of a master, which might be entitled respect ively " England as it is under the Tories," and "England as it ought to be under the Liberals." In the one she is represented, if we may put it in that shape, under the image of a harridan, full of the spite and impotence of old age, whose years have only increased her vices, and who not only interferes in all the brawls of her 1. England's Mission. By the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. The Nineteenth Century, September. London, 1878. 2. Imperialism. By the Right Hon. Robert Lowe. The Fortnightly Review, October. London, 1878. 3. The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds. London, 1797. 4 Catalogue of the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. London, 1878. Grosvenor Notes. Edited by Henry Blackburn. London, 1878. 6. History of the British Drama. By Mrs. Inchbald. London, 1820. 7. Daniel Deronda. By George Eliot. London, neighbors, but seeks to exercise a domestic tyranny over the independent families of her adult children. In the other she appears as a respectable grandmother, who, conscious of her age and infirmities, has retired from active participation in the business of life. The painter, with a fine dramatic sense, shows her to us seated on her chalk cliffs, in the warmth of the declining sun. Colonies of grandchildren, in the remote distance, bend an admiring gaze on her majestic decrepitude. She appears to have uttered a dignified remontions of the Continent are seen suddenly strance, for, nearer home, the armed nadropping their swords and daggers, as the combatants do at the command of the Beefeater in "The Critic." They recognize her as "the tribunal of civilized mankind." Between the two ideals of national life, thus portrayed to them with all the earnestness and indignation of a political Hogarth, the people of England are told that they may make their choice. Is Mr. Gladstone's representation of Tory policy just? Is his own portrait of England worthy of the subject? He is well aware that to both of these questions his opponents reply with an emphatic negative. Before what tribunal, then, must the question be settled? Undoubtedly before the conscience of the country. Then, as we are to be the judges in our own cause, by what method shall we obtain that true knowledge of ourselves which may enable us to return an impartial verdict? "I know an infallible moral test," replies Mr. Gladstone: "search," as Pope "the ruling passion." says, In the sphere of personal life most men are misled through the medium of the dominant faculty of their nature. It is round that dominant faculty that folly and flattery are wont to buzz. They play upon vain glory, by exaggerating and commending what it does, and by piquing it on what it sees cause to forbear from doing. It is so with nations. For all of them the supreme want is to be warned against the indulgence of the dominant passion. The observation is perfectly just, but its application will carry Mr. Gladstone far The Wandering Heir. By Charles Reade. Lon-ther than he intended. For instance, the don, 1873. t Thucydides, ii. 43. Demosthenes, De Coronâ, 210. dominant passion of the Athenians was individual liberty. So long as this was associated, as in the policy of Pericles, | the distractions of democracy and the tyranny with the idea of the State, no personal of monarchy, its happiness is to be found in sacrifices were too great, no national en- its mixture of parts. It was this mixed conterprises too burdensome, for the Athenian stitution which the wisdom of our ancestors citizen. At times his identification of him- devised, and which it will be our wisdom inself with his city carried him into injustice vicissitudes and distractions of a republic. violably to support. They experienced all the and excess, as in the case of the exter- They felt all the vassalage and despotism of a mination of the Melians, the Mitylenean simple monarchy. They abandoned both, and, decree, and the Sicilian expedition. But by blending each together, extracted a system when the sense of the imperial greatness which has been the envy and admiration of of Athens declined, liberty began to asso- the world.* ciate itself with domestic religion, social pleasure, and intellectual refinement; the citizen shrank from the burdens of per sonal service and taxation; he learned to prefer an existence of ease and slavery to a life of political honor. The dominant faculty of the Romans, on the other hand, was empire. Fully entitled to command by her genius for administration and the patriotic self-sacrifice Very true, says Mr. Gladstone, but this nice equilibrium has now been overthrown by the wickedness of the Tories. The course of our national life has been violently arrested by the antagonism of its two great internal principles. Liberty and and, amid the fatuous applause of the peoauthority are arrayed against each other, ple, the latter has asserted its supremacy. The monster vice so long hidden has at last appeared. "The dominant passion of England is extended empire.” conceives to be its characteristics into his of her citizens, Rome, while the idea of empire was joined with the idea of justice, while she developed her policy by the Mr. Gladstone, we think, has been so equalization of her own orders, and the extension of her franchise to the states features of the party to which he is oplong and so diligently studying the hideous which acknowledged her supremacy, advanced with safety on her road to universal posed, that he has transferred what he dominion. But her principle of empire portrait of the people of England. He is had always a tendency to degenerate into entirely unconscious that his own policy the principle of centralization. She condescended no further than to spare the may be exposed to the same method of conquered, after she had vanquished the grotesque caricature that he has adopted towards the policy of his rivals. It was proud. She did not care enough for justice of course open to him to derive his conto rule her subjects for their own good, or ception of the character of England from to transfuse the political life of the centre into the extremities of her dominion. establish his indictment he ought to have a study of her political action. But to Hence, though the traditional virtues of taken a wider survey of things than the the Roman character exhibited an aston- acts of Liberal and Conservative governishing vitality, the corruption of the Statements since 1868. He was bound to have was progressive; the wisdom of the sena- shown that "a dominant passion for extorial government declined into the nar-tended empire" is manifest through the rowness of oligarchy; the integrity of the whole history of England. If he choose elder Cato became less characteristic than the greed of Verres; and the discipline of Trajan weighed light against the excesses of Commodus. Which of these two extremes is "the dominant faculty" of England, the ruling passion of her people, which, "like Aaron's rod, must swallow up the rest" "? The Constitution of this country [said Pitt] is its glory. But in what a nice adjustment does its excellence consist! Equally free from to rest his case on this broad ground, we ask him with confidence to indicate to us at what point in our annals the tendency towards imperialism first becomes apparent. Was the early colonization of America due to a deliberate policy of royal aggression or to commercial enterprise, and a desire to escape from arbitrary gov Speech of Pitt on Fox's motion of address to the king, March 1, 1784. J t guishes English literature, for instance, is its balance of liberty and authority. No doubt its prominent characteristic is a certain Gothic greatness and freedom. As Pope says, ernment? Was the foreign policy of | English people is to the spirit of the ConCromwell, the most aggressive in our his- stitution described by Pitt. What distintory, determined by a desire for universal dominion, or by mixed motives of commerce and religion? In our settlements in Australasia did the trade follow the flag, or the flag the trade? Was not the natural extension of our Indian empire resisted by company, crown, and Parliament? In short, does not the entire course of our national history indicate rather a dominant passion as far as there is any predominance at all-for individual liberty, like that of the Athenians, than a deliberate resolve, like that of the Romans, for universal empire? But we brave Britons foreign laws despised, But through all the vigorous originality of But history is made up of politics, and, in England, wherever there are politics there is passion. The political action of a nation is doubtless the index of its character, but where the nature of its action is disputed, as at present, we must endeavor to find a clue to its character in some other quarter. Such a clue may, we think, be obtained by examining the tendencies of popular taste. The character of every great nation is reflected indirectly in its art and literature, as well as directly in its bistory. Poets, painters, sculptors, musi5 cians, and architects, show us the thoughts that pass through the mind of a people, and embody in an ideal form the objects that appear to it most noble, or beautiful, his own chivalrous sympathies by the esor worthy of pursuit. Art, again, shows the most sensitive sympathy with every social change which a nation undergoes. If therefore we can discover any masterful tendencies in our contemporary art, which can only be explained by the predominant influence of what is known to be a strong national passion, and if these are also found to co-exist with analogous forces in the political world, then we shall be able to form a much more satisfactory judg-itive liberty and the deadening artificiality f 1 e e e e 6 ment as to the nature of our ruling passion, than if we were to draw our conclusion from politics alone. tablished standard of constitutional common sense. In short, we may say that English artists have followed out the line suggested to them by their national instinct, without excluding influences from abroad; and that, while trusting confidently to their own genius, they have never revolted against the prerogative of authority and experience. They have observed a just mean between the rudeness of prim of academic rule. Whether our literature and art still preserve their ancient constitutional balance; First, then, we may say with certainty or whether the balance has been unduly that, if contemporary English art afford any depressed in favor of one or other of the indication of the dominant passion imputed two great principles by whose counterpoise to the nation by Liberal critics, or of any it exists; and if so, which that principle other absorbing and exclusive principle of is, these are the questions which we now He, it will be as untrue to the spirit of its propose to discuss. And as we have treattraditions, as Mr. Gladstone thinks the led the subject by implication, as far as it |