taking the effort which the real sciences | strengthened, just as much as if one had with their claim on the understanding de- bathed in a fresh spring." But then mand... He who, like myself, cannot Schopenhauer had no school associations help in all history seeing ever the same with the classics. Would experience bear thing, as in a kaleidoscope by every turn him out that a knowledge of Latin compoone sees ever the same things under other sition is an indispensable preliminary to configurations, cannot cherish that pas- great authorship? Yet is it true that "the sionate interest, but will not however man who knows no Latin is like a person bne it. It is only laughable and absurd who finds himself in a beautiful country that many should wish to make history a in foggy weather; his horizon is extremely part of philosophy or even philosophy it- limited . . . the horizon of the Latin self, under the fancy that it can take its scholar on the other hand stretches very place." far, through the latter centuries, the Middle Ages, and antiquity." ... history and leading articles are the chorus that accompanies the drama of passing events." But since exaggeration of every kind is essential to newspaper writing, all journalists are, by the nature of their trade, alarmists, in order to be interesting. They are like small dogs who whenever anything moves, forthwith set up a loud barking. Schopenhauer deplores the growing neglect of the study of the ancient lan- The immense amount of mischief caused guages, and there is a passage in his main by the development of the modern press work that is worth quoting in these days by magnifying or gratuitously producing of the revival of superstition and the de- causes of public alarm for the sake of the cline of classical learning. "The study momentary sensation was one of the evils of the classical authors is very properly of our time noticed by Schopenhauer. called the study of humanity, for through The expression is a happy one, that "the it the student first becomes a man again, newspapers are the seconds-hands of for he enters then into the world which was still free from the absurdities of the Middle Ages and of Romanticism, which afterwards penetrated so deeply into mankind in Europe that every one even now comes into the world covered with it, and has first to strip it off simply to become a man again. Think not that your modern wisdom can ever supply the place of that initiation into manhood; ye are not, like the Greeks and Romans, born freemen, unfettered sons of nature. Ye are first the sons and heirs of the barbar ous Middle Ages, of their madness, and of infamous priestcraft." It is perhaps owing to their never having been taught in this sense in England that the modern revulsion from the classics is due. Schopenhauer, who knew how to use strong language, was so disgusted with this tendency that he calls even the editing of Greek and Latin authors with German notes "a swinishness and an infamy." But it is surely carrying it too far to complain, as he does, that in scientific and learned works quotations from Greek and Latin authors should be accompanied by German translations. The fact that Schopenhauer did not begin to learn even Latin before he was twenty perhaps helps to account for his genuine devotion to the classics. How few of the victims of an English classical education would sincerely re-echo the following? "There is no greater refreshment for the spirit than the reading of the ancient classics; as soon as one has taken up any one of them, were it only for half an hour, one feels oneself immediately refreshed, alleviated, purified, raised, and VOL. LXIII, 3227 LIVING AGE. With the thing he disliked Schopenhauer knew no such thing as toleration or resignation. His crusade against beards is a case in point. His objection to them was founded on the absurd idea that they put a man's masculinity in greater prominence than his humanity. In all highly civilized times and countries the shaving of the beard has betokened, he argues, the desire of men to distinguish themselves as men from the common animal world. This shaving has ever been the barometer of intellectual culture, among the Greeks and among the Romans. Charlemagne suffered not beards, Louis XIV. abolished them. They had always increased step by step with barbarism, which was the reason they flourished so much in the Middle Ages, "that millennium of coarseness and ignorance," and was also the proof of the growing barbarism of his own time. He would have them forbidden by the police. But is there, for all this fulmination, one bearded barbarian in Europe the less? From his hatred to noise Schopenhauer would find fewer dissentients than in the matter of beards. He devotes a short chapter entirely to this subject, and one can only wish that it. were compulsorily taught in all schools both at home and abroad. Dislike of noise he holds to be one of the signs of a superior mind, instancing for proof of this, Goethe, Kani, Lichtenberg, and Jean Paul; people who are indifferent to noise are also indifferent From Blackwood's Magazine. CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR. A VOLUME of letters is generally a very one-sided performance. It contains to arguments, to thought, to poems and the opinions of one mind upon a number works of art. Noise is the interruption of subjects introduced probably by others of thought, but of course where no thought of which we do not know either the origis, there is no sense of interruption. Few inal statement or the subsequent discuswho have travelled abroad will disagree sion; or it consists of information, perhaps with Schopenhauer that the most shame- of counsel and advice, addressed to an ful of all noises is what he calls "the truly unseen interlocutor, of whose circuminfernal cracking of whips." No sound stances, save as they dimly appear by incuts through the brain so sharply as this. ference, we are unaware. Sir Henry TayIt goes through a thinker's meditations lor, in the leisure of an old age which he like a sword through the spinal cord. enjoyed more than most men, after the "Nothing gives me so clear an idea of the occupations of a life more full than that of stupidity and thoughtlessness of men as most men, and with perceptions and sense the license of whip-cracking." "I do not of what life demands correspondingly amsee that a fellow who is moving a wagon-ple, has arranged better for his readers. load of sand or manure should thereby be He has left us, after the autobiography, privileged to quash at birth every rising which was in its way a kind of private thought in ten thousand heads in succes- history of his time, a book of real corresion in half an hour's journey. The beat-spondence, the record of actual intercourse ing of hammers, the barking of dogs, the between himself and his playfellows, comshrieks of children are horrible; but the panions worthy of him men, like himreal thought-murderer par excellence is self, occupied not only with the highest the crack of a whip." It is an impudent literary and moral studies, but taking their insult by that portion of the community full share in everything that was passing which works with its arms against that in their time. The effect is a quite unu which works with its head. That is per- sual, and, at the same time, an exceedingly haps to put it strongly; but if we begin a agreeable and attractive one. crusade against noise, do not let us forget spondence is naturally not very extensive. the railway whistle, the muffin-bell, and It is carefully selected. No doubt hunthe organ-grinder. dreds of letters could have been added, all with a certain interest; but it is much more effective to have exercised the wise restraint which gives us one volume where no doubt we might have had twenty, and makes it possible to extend our interest to all that is set before us - an incident here and there, a brief discussion never carried to the point of exhaustion, with no attempt at lengthened argument, or a question prolonged beyond the statement and reply. Another modern evil that Schopenhauer showed his sound sense in denouncing was the practice of overworking. The brain should be allowed its full amount of sleep, which is for man what winding-up is for a clock, and the more developed and active a brain is the more sleep will it require. One should accustom oneself to regard and to treat one's intellectual qualities as physiological functions, and not do, as Frederick the Great did, who once tried to wean himself from the habit of sleep altogether. It is from neglect of this principle that so many able men, as Sir Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, and Kant, tempted by the high rewards offered them for work which put too great a tension on their brain, sank in their later days into second childhood. Schopenhauer rightly considered that health was so far the largest element in such happiness as was possible to man that he made all other considerations secondary and subordinate to it. Other philosophers have taught the same thing, but the world for the most part has paid them little attention. J. A. FARRER. The corre men Such a volume reveals to us, not one man in many lights, but a little group of men, not too distinct, nor pressing their individuality too much upon us, who have their own ways of thinking, and are not afraid to express them; women, too, occasionally introducing a softened note. We sit as if outside an open window, listening to the talk that goes on within, pleased to exercise our ingenuity and make guesses by their voices at the personality of the speakers. That is Spedding, the man absorbed in one subject, the student in whose mouth one name is al • Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor. Edited by Edward Dowden. Longmans: 1888. ways recurring. Or here, with his talk about the theologians, the one shelf of books which he possesses in his villeggiatura, and his boys tramping on the mountains in Scotland or in Switzerland, who could it be but Stephen, who once set our young imaginations aflame with Xavier and Loyola? After a while these companions withdraw, who are full of events and questions, and the great occupations of the world; and there pipes in a milder voice, full of half-adoring revelation of the great poet of whom she is a sort of veiled prophetess. It is charming to hear them answer each other, perhaps pleasantly contradict each other, each man keeping to his own view, yet with the accord of disciplined minds and elevated aims. One is respectfully indifferent to religion, and says so (although highly indignant at a later period with some one else Miss Martineau, for example who is more than indifferent); another perhaps is faintly, respectfully bored by Wordsworth, which is a less pardonable blasphemy. (We confess to being ourselves in this class.) By turns they discuss poetry in the abstract, and the best subjects for those compositions called plays, by the author himself, or we should not venture to use the word in reality dignified dra. matic poems, such as "Philip van Artevelde," by turns political subjects. Sometimes a feeling that it is all very long ago, and that these are ghosts which are speaking through a thin clearness of atmosphere unlike our troubled breathing of to-day, comes into the listener's mind. Macaulay, glad to hear what a poet thinks of his "Lays," which have not been well treated in the papers; Taylor, himself taking his own work very seriously, as great poems destined to survive like Milton, sound strangely to us out of the seclusion in which they are talking. We long to tell them what has happened since, what wonderful ideas posterity begins to have on these subjects; but why interrupt the air serene in which they talk with our harsher voices? Things are all as they ought to be in that delightful calm. We ourselves are more or less posterity, so far as they are concerned. Already we have begun to rectify, or at least to change, the proportions. In their day, Wordsworth and Southey had all the appearance of being on the same altitude. Both of them are spoken of by these accomplished critics with more or less reverential worship as the greatest men of their day. Now Wordsworth, if with a little less personal devotion, is still to us one of the greatest of poets; but Southey, whom every good man must love― Southey, the excellent, the pure, the unselfish, helper and friend of all who had the smallest claim upon him- has slipped aside out of that high place. When we think of him, it is scarcely as a poet at all. He is a man of letters, admirable in certain kinds of composition if supreme in none, admirable above all for his character and example, but no more to be placed by the side of Wordsworth than the first comer who has ever written irregular or even classical verse. Nevertheless, as Taylor and his friends talk over the matter in that thin air serene, while we listen and overhear, there is something very delightful in their mingled certainties and mistakes. We have changed everything in our hasty human fashion, deciding and then reversing our decision, as our custom is-but they retain their first impression as if it were as sure as heaven and earth, and discuss it with a sense as of boundless leisure, and the calm of those who have passed beyond all the small strife of voices. And they are all well worth listening to when they speak, full of just views, often forestalling our best conclusions, but always with that stumble of imperfect prevision which is more human than universal foresight and correctness could be. It is dif. ficult to tell which is the most pleasant to listen to. We should say for delightful humanness and spontaneity, that Stephen was the best; but Sir Henry Taylor himself is naturally the central figure, and they all defer to him. It is he whose opinion is sought by all, and whose judg ments, full of good sense and temperate wisdom, are of most importance. And we have them upon all kinds of subjects — poetry, politics, morals, men, the latter the most graphic and important of all. If there is one of these to which we would take exception, it would be the space allotted to Wordsworth, and the profound admiration and devotion which every mention of the poet's name calls forth. It will be seen from what has been already said that we are not wanting in respect for that great name. The first place in which it received its full and fitting meed was in the very room from which these pages come; and he would be a bold man who would express an opinion derogatory to Wordsworth within the storied walls of the Old Saloon, where Wilson first stood forth in his defence. But if Wordsworth the poet is immortal, we doubt if it can be said that Wordsworth the man is equally so, or that this record of him materially increases our satisfaction in his image. Some of Miss Fenwick's descriptions of him, however, are pleasant enough. The aspect of the old man reading to a devout feminine listener the long cantos of "The Prelude," has a solemnity in it which readily sways into the comic, though we indulge our smile with a little fear of a reproachful look from either idol or worshipper which may turn us to stone. "From time to time," the lady says, "I have heard portions of that marvellous work of his which is to appear when he ceases to be." After hearing it, I think I must have felt as the Queen of Sheba felt after hearing all the wisdom of Solomon. "There was no more spirit in her; " and so it was with me. I wish you could hear it as I did: though you, I trust, may live to read it, it is something more to hear him recite it, or, as his little grandson says, "Grandpapa reading without a book." The beloved old poet has again begun to read me his MS., so in time I hope to hear it all. You will read it in time, my dear cousin, but I fear you may never hear that song divine of high and passionate thoughts, to their own music chanted, as I have heard it. It was almost too much emotion for me to see and hear this fervent old man, the passionate feelings of his youth all come back to him, making audible this "linked lay of truth," and forgetting for a while, in these varied impressions of the past, all that these strug gles and passionate feelings have worked out for him, and returning with gratitude and deep humility to a sense of present peace and an assurance of future glory. That never flagged in him. He recognized his own greatness in the midst of the neglect, contempt, and ridicule of his fellow-creatures, which strikes one as what is most extraordinary in his character, when one keeps in view his ardent sympathies with them, and how alive he is in all his affections. These litanies, however, come from a female hand, and not from that of Sir Henry, whose record is of the poet in London, where, apparently, though so much older a man, his walking powers alarmed his younger companion. How ever, there would seem to have been no question of reading the fifteen books of "The Prelude" to the much-occupied official whose leisure was filled with poetry of his own. Wordsworth's own appearance in this volume as one of the correspondents does not, however, give so favorable a view. The subject on which he writes is poetical plagiarisms, and especially those of Byron from himself, in which his tone of remark towards the younger poet, whose "impudent thefts "he comments upon, is not what the lover of poetry likes to see. I have not, nor ever had, a single poem of Lord Byron's by me except the "Lara" given me by Mr. Rogers, and therefore could not quote anything illustrative of his poetical ob ligations to me. As far as I am acquainted with his works, they are the most apparent in the third canto of "Childe Harold:" not so much in particular expressions, though there is no want of these, as in the tone (assumed rather than natural) of enthusiastic admiration for Nature, and a sensibility to her influences. the blank-verse poem on the river Wye to be Of my writings you need not read more than convinced of this. This surely is both unfair and ungenerous. An accusation of plagiarism founded upon a "tone of enthusiastic admiration for Nature" is quite incapable of proof, and rather discreditable to the maker of the imputation; and it is not, in our days at least, an agreeable thought that one great poet should, with a primin his feminine devotee, make it known ness of tone which would be absurd even that he "had not a single poem by me of a powerful rival. Still more curiously mean and small is the suggestion that Byron's well-known "hell of waters " is an "impudent theft" from Raymond's translation of Cox's "Travels in Switzerland." We have seen some ingenious articles which have proved Lord Tennyson the most obscure productions in literature to be guilty of plagiarisms from some of an effort which is quite legitimate, and no doubt amusing, to a literary skirmisher in search of a subject. But when a great poet is guilty of such petty foolishness, the utterance of it should at least be suppressed. It is the only fault we have to find with this book. Sir Henry's own opinions are more interesting and more noble. They show none of the disrespect for others which so strangely finds its place in a mind devoted to the exposition of the highest subjects, and which had consciously withdrawn from all the clang and struggle of the world in order to be able to pursue its own highest development and the elevation of mankind undisturbed. We should say that to mix freely in the most madding crowd, to rub elbows with all kinds of men, to encounter the stupid and the clever, the great and the small, impartially, was, judging by the result, much the better discipline of the two. Many of Sir Henry Taylor's opinions of men and things are open to animadversion. For ourselves, there are several points in I which we do not agree with him; but he | opinions were first formed-the eager and is always honest and manly, and gener- rapid grasp with which every system congenial ally without pettiness. When he talks of with a happy nature was caught, the fond and "the defect of moral force " in the char- firm belief with which it was held; how all acter of Scott, we are disposed to "open how the busy absorbents opened their mouths knowledge was devoured and digested, and wide astonished eyes," and the reason he gives for this defect is equally wonderful. nourish and support the system, rejecting all upon the chyme, taking up all that would "Power of the imagination in conceiving that would undermine it. Looking back to and depicting strongly a great variety of the formation of opinions in myself, as far as characters seems scarcely compatible with such an operation can be said to have taken a strong individuality of character in the place, I perceive from the first a watchful disperson possessing that power." In this trust of every good feeling which arose in my -a captious case we presume Shakespeare must have own or appeared in other minds, had no character at all, which is perhaps scrutiny of any notions which presented themwhy we have so little record of him. And, ideas, and opinions float and fluctuate: subselves in a confident shape. I see sentiments, again, there is a deep shadow of preju-jects of doubt and speculation, and of reason. dice not unnatural, perhaps in what ing and counter-reasoning, which showed them he says of Lord Jeffrey, "the clever little in all lights and consigned them back to darkworldling," who "for twenty years kept ness. With any natural impulse of pleasure 'the sunshine from the cottage door' of a came the inquiry, how and why it was a man of genius." But in most cases we pleasure, and through what delusion. have no such fault to find. His sketch of am sensible of the benefits of religion, but not our own Christopher is genial and de- as one who has tasted them. I appreciate lightful. He was, we hear," a jovial, fair- them coldly and imperfectly doubtless, estihaired ruffian, full of fire and talent, big reason and observation of others' experiences, mating what is alien from my own nature by and burly, and at the same time wild and in such manner as he can apprehend the obanimated. His forehead is one of the jects of a sense who has been born without most lively and capacious-looking fore- that organ. It is no idle vanity which has heads that I have seen, and he has the made me an unbeliever. I have not taken peculiarity of a flashing eye under a light- pride in metaphysics, or piqued myself on any colored eyebrow. His talk I find answer- fancied strength of my reasoning faculty. I able to his looks, and well worth listening never knew what it was to have a devotional to. I have seldom met any person more feeling; and reason, therefore, had nothing to striking." Perhaps, however, the most able piece of character-painting which is here to be met with, is given in the companion sketches of Southey and himself, which we find in a letter to Southey. The elder poet had named the younger his executor, and the following comparison between their ways of thinking and characteristic differences, which are great, but in no way interfere with the entire harmony between them, occurs in the letter accepting this trust: As to discrepance of opinion, I dare say it is, as you observe, of no consequence in this matter; and in some points I may, as you anticipate, come to agree with you in time, whether from a further knowledge or truer judgment, or a change in the circumstances upon which the opinions are to be formed. But there is a discrepance in our natures which time cannot wear away, and the discrepance in opinion originating in that will remain. Our opinions cannot on any subject be more opposite than are, on all subjects, the manners in which we come by them, and the moods in which we maintain them. Your opinions were the growth of many years when I first saw you, but from some observation of the habitual action of your mind, and its laws and customs, I can easily imagine how your overcome. The comparison thus made, with its apparent elevation of the other more impulsive and simple nature, but real satisfaction in the greater complexity and richness of the self thus placed in a more or less apologetic attitude, is exceedingly clear, and admirably done. It marks, moreover, a curious change in the mental characteristics of the time. No unbeliever would now make such an apology. Even atheism in our day is devout nay, often claims a higher devotional feeling than is held by professors of that faith which has an object for its devotion. This is a mys terious development of modernism which we do not pretend to be able to explain. The old attitude was the more reasonable and comprehensible one. And here is a piece of description of another kind, which has the same quaint aspect of a past which as yet is scarcely historic-only yesterday, so to speak, about the time of the queen's accession who still reigns (and will reign, we hope, for long) so happily over us. fashioned it is, breathing of a world more limited self-contained, as we say in Scotland-less accustomed to compare Yet how old |