SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 1881.
No. 486, New Series.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

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LITERATURE.

Les Origines de la France contemporaine.

Tome

Par H. Taine. La Révolution.
II.-La Conquête jacobine. (Paris:
Hachette.)

beneath the flood of M. Taine's eloquence,
but others will hardly fail to catch the atten-
tion of the most casual and ignorant reader.
M. Taine's conception of the Jacobins as a
party, and of the sources of their influence,
is singularly meagre and defective. He does
not attempt to distinguish between the
different elements of which the societies were
composed, but treats a complex and, in its
origin, spontaneous movement as the work
of a small group of factious, unscrupulous,
and designing men, encouraging pillage and
murder, bent on the acquisition of power for
themselves, and already deducing from the
doctrine of the social contract their right to
principles as their own.
exterminate whoever did not hold the same

"Ainsi le dogma qui proclame la souveraineté
du peuple aboutit en fait à la dictature de quel-
ques-uns et à la proscription des autres. On
est hors de la loi quand on est hors de la secte.
C'est nous, les cinq ou six mille Jacobins de
Paris, qui sommes le monarque légitime, le
pontife infaillible, et malheur aux récalcitrants
ou aux tièdes, gouvernment, particuliers, clergé,
noblesse, riches, négociants, indifférents, qui,
par la persistance de leur opposition ou par
l'incertitude de leur obéissance, oseront révoquer
en doute notre indubitable droit !"

M. TAINE's new volume, under the title of the Jacobin Conquest, brings his history of Les Origines de la France contemporaine down to May 31 and the ejection of the Girondists from the Convention. Its character is the same as that of the volume that preceded it. All the vigour of language, power of metaphor, and vivid representation of details of which he is master, M. Taine has devoted to exhibit the weaknesses and What may be conceded to be Jacobin dogma errors of the leaders of the Revolution and in 1793 is here represented as Jacobin dogma the crimes which accompanied the domination in 1790 and 1791. It is a common error to of the Clubs. We have exposed to us the ascribe to parties at their first formation Jacobins' love of dogmatism, their mental full-blown doctrines and distinct aims that arrogance, their political inexperience, their only belonged to them at a later stage; but indifference to what brute forces they un-history, by being so written, is perverted, and chained so long as by their aid they gained their immediate end. We are shown the dense ignorance of the lower classes, and their incapacity to exercise intelligently the rights which the Constitution entrusted to them; the little tenacity of will exhibited by moderate men, and the ease with which they were driven from the field of action. In no other History has been so clearly brought out the terrible state of anarchy that prevailed in greater or less degree throughout France subsequently to the fall of the throne. M. Taine takes us with him through Roland's correspondence with the administrative authorities, and shows how from every quarter of the country-east, west, south, north, and entre-came the same tale of violence, robbery, and murder.

never

just judgments rendered impossible. By the side of the men who developed into Robespierrists and Hebertists stood in 1790 hundreds who swerved from the doctrines of constitutional monarchy and the liberal theories of 1789; and, in fact, it is not till after the acceptance of the Constitution by the King in 1791 that the words Jacobins and Constitutionalists can with any propriety be used in opposition. In the same way the Girondists in their character of Jacobins are made responsible for doctrines which they certainly did not hold, and which M. Taine, before the close of his book, has himself to admit that they did not hold. Brissot, Vergniaud, Gensonné, as little before as after the fall of the throne justified riots on the principle of the soveThe point of view, however, from which reignty of the people, or maintained that M. Taine writes, if never represented so Paris, still less the Jacobins of Paris, reprercibly before, is not new; and to our actual sented France. When M. Taine comes to owledge of the Revolution this history of describe the Legislative Assembly, we find he Jacobin conquest contributes exceedingly that, although the deputies were the candittle. M. Taine has quoted the sum of dates of the Clubs, the great majority were When he comes authenticated murders; he does not give constitutional monarchists. elp to the understanding of men or events. to describe the Convention, we find that the He writes without discrimination of time; he great majority, though elected by still smaller produces effect by laying stress on whatever minorities, were honest, well-intentioned men serves to give force to his own point of view, who desired the maintenance of law and and leaves all else unnoticed, or in the back-order, and who had respect for human life. ground. He uses authorities without regard The contradiction is due to M. Taine's to the value of their evidence in the special faulty representation of the Jacobin societies Cike, so long as they serve his turn. Her ce as mere haunts of knaves and villains, making a parade of patriotism to cover their own greed and ambition.

men belonging to the revolutionary sic e, and every insurrectionary movement, ale -presented in a partial and one-sided light. Iuere is on occasions gross misrepresenta tion; and the book is full of unexplained contradictions, some of which may pass concealed

The truth is that M. Taine only regards the Jacobins from one point of view. He only cares to depict them as disorganisers of society. For them, as main

tainers of principles which lie at the base of modern life, he has no sympathy. There is no answer in his pages to the question how it was that a general, such as Hoche, sincere, patriotic, and disinterested, gave encouragement to the Clubs, and made use of the inflated language in vogue in them to excite the military ardour of his troops. The causes that at every crisis enabled the more violent and extreme party to triumph are, in consequence of the narrow aim that M. Taine sets before him, but imperfectly represented. Importance is only attached to those which it suits his purpose to throw light upon. He seeks constantly to demonstrate that the democratic Constitution of 1791, which, owing to the political inexperience of all classes, gave small but active minorities opportunity of monopolising the political arena, was in the main responsible for the anarchy and tyranny of 1793 and 1794. He has nothing to say of the conspiracies of the nobles, nor of the spirit of jealousy and distrust separating each class from the next above it. He does not show how fear of foreign interference excited men's minds nearly to madness, nor how impossible was conciliation between the representatives of the old monarchy and asserters of principles of popular government. The partiality of M. Taine's mode of treating his subject is never more apparent than when he discusses the conduct of the Girondists in involving France in war. The responsibility of the war is laid entirely on them, while their conduct is deprived of its best justification by complete misrepresentation of the royal policy. Louis, M. Taine says, sought of the Powers, not physical, but moral aid the formation of a congress outside France which would give encouragement to moderate men to rally round the throne and the laws.

En

"En acceptant la constitution, il avait jugé que la pratique en dévoilerait les défauts et en provoquerait la réforme. Cependant il l'observait avec scrupule, et, par intérêt autant que par conscience, il tenait sonserment à la lettre. L'exécution la plus exacte de la constitution, disait-il à l'un de ses ministres, est le moyen le plus sûr pour faire apercevoir à la nation les changements qu'il convient d'y faire.' d'autres termes il comptait sur l'expérience, et, très probablement, si l'expérience n'avait pas été derangée, son calcul eût été juste. Entre les défenseurs de l'ordre et les instigateurs du désordre, la nation eût fini par opter; elle se serait prononcée pour les magistrats contre les clubs, pour la gendarmerie contre l'émeute, pour le roi contre la populace."

Louis and Marie-Antoinette were sufficiently deluded to believe that after the meeting of a congress an agreement might be arrived at by negotiation between them and the nation; but, on this account, to assert that they did not apply to the Powers for physical support is merely playing with words. The idea was never entertained of relying merely on moral means. The plan which King and Queen incessantly urged on the Powers was the meeting of a congress with an armed force behind it. The King writes:

"Le langage ferme et uniforme de toutes les puissances de l'Europe, appuyées d'une armée formidable, aurait les consequences les plus heureuses, il tem érait l'ardeur des émigrés. Les factieux seraient déconcertés, et le courage

renaîtrait parmi les bons citoyens, amis de l'ordre et de la monarchie (Le Comte de Fersen et la Cour de France, i. 232).

As to the question of Louis' sincerity in relation to the Assembly of the Constitutionalists, it is not one over which it is longer

possible to dispute: -" Je n'entends pas moi même," Marie-Antoinette writes to her confidant, Fersen,

"et je suis obligée de réfléchir pour voir si c'est bien moi qui parle, mais que voulezvous? Tout cela est nécessaire et croyez que nous serions bien plus bas encore que nous sommes, si je n'avais pas pris ce parti tout de suite; au moins gagnerons nous du temps par là, et c'est tout ce qu'il faut. Quel bonheur si

adapted for representation by children, the pageant would even lose something in the acting by the difficulty of conveying by action the subtle sense of natural phenomena which finds perfect expression in the unspoken prose. No ordinary methods of presentment could afford an adequate concrete realisation of the sweetness of the idea embodied in the note employed to mark the departure of March and advent of April :"Before March has done speaking, a voice is heard approaching, accompanied by a twittering of birds. April comes along singing, and stands outside and out of sight to finish her song."

To grasp fully by seeing it depicted the whole sense of the ordinance of Nature by

But since the heart is yours that was mine own,

Your pleasure is my pleasure, right my right, Your honourable freedom makes me free,

And you companioned I am not alone."

Surely it is a mistake to think that even hopeful must, by virtue of these subjective "occasional" poetry that is cheerful and hopeful must, by virtue of these subjective qualities, be drawn merely from fancy; or that the poetry of which sadness is the drawn from feeling. The brighter side of governing constituent must of necessity be life has its appeal for the imagination and its profound response in the affections, though it is true that unhappiness calls the utmost powers and passions into play. It

à tous ces gueux que je n'étais pas leur dupe!"

There is something painful in such revelations as this of the feelings entertained by the Queen towards men who, whatever charges she had to make against them, at least loyally and sincerely stood by the constitutional throne, and were ready to risk their lives for hers. Among the gueux" of whom she speaks in these contemptuous terms are Barnare, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld d'Amville, and Count Louis de Narbonne, a man of whom Mortimer Terneaux asserts that he might have saved the monarchy. It is comprehensible that Marie-Antoinette should have regarded foreign aid as the one means for the restoration of order and revival of the royal authority; but can it be the serious opinion of M. Taine that a policy which relied on no party in the interior, and called on the foreigner to dictate to the nation at the sword's point, could in any resulted otherwise than in disaster? It is difficult to believe, and is rendered the more so by the concluding pages of his own book, where, in strange contrast with much that has gone before, he describes with what enthusiasm the country flew to arms in defence of its independence, and how faith in the Revolution and the ideas of liberty, equality, and the rights of man made of the volunteers on the frontier brave and mag

case have

nanimous heroes. BERTHA M. CORDery.

A Pageant, and other Poems. By Christina G. Rossetti. (Macmillan.) ANYTHING Sweeter or more beautiful and, at the same time, more subtly conceived than the title poem of Miss Rossetti's new volume it would be difficult to desire and unfair to expect. Those who long for something simply thought and felt, and yet informed throughout by strength and fervour, will find the "Pageant" grateful and charming. The personifications presented are the months of the year, represented half as boys and half as girls, and the dramatic element in the poem is concerned with the race of the seasons to overtake each other. Simple as the scheme is in outline, it affords opportunity for many a collateral touch of passion to which a more elaborate design might not so naturally lend itself. Even the stage directions are made the channel for the display of the closest insight into the workings of Nature, and are in themselves as poetic as anything communicated in the text. Indeed, though admirably

right in saying that, if the great poetess of to us, in lieu of the "Portuguese Sonnets," instead of happy, she would have bequeathed our own day and nation had been unhappy a "donna innominata ' more worthy to occupy a niche beside Beatrice and Laura.

66

"Oh, fair Milly Brandon, a young maid, a fair

maid!

All her curls are yellow and her eyes are blue, And her cheeks were rosy red till a secret care made

Hollow whiteness of their brightness as a care will do."

essence of her loveliness before the substance the observer all the instinct of the poet. In of it can yet be felt requires on the part of the simple note, however, the idea is projected, and stands revealed to eyes that do not of themselves penetrate that open secret Brandons Both," though touched with the of Nature; and the same observation of her poet's characteristic sadness, is a sweet little inner mysteries is throughout this poem idyl written in a rarely musical tripping made manifest. When May arrives, "unper-metre of which I do not remember to have ceived by April," she divides an armful of met with any other example. all sorts of flowers with her; when July comes, with a basket of many-coloured irises slung upon his shoulders, he finds that the longest day has slipped by his sister June while she slept. Than all this (done everydialogue itself does not contain a more exwhere with the eye direct on Nature) the quisite sensitiveness to change of mood. As The interweaving of various movements in to Miss Rossetti's especial vocation for de- this metre is very ingenious-lending itself picting Nature's changeful aspects, it must be to a most happy variety of feeling. The said, her prefatory" key-note" notwithstand- slower measure of the close of the line coming ing, that she is never so happy as when after the quick beat of the opening produces realising the gentler side of Nature's temper- a sensible effect as of certain Old-English her stillness, which the rippling of rivers or ballads when sung. The lyrics in this volume twittering of birds makes yet more still, her have that mingled music, sweetness, emcloudlessness, her hopefulness and peace.phasis, and condensation which should belong With Nature's less tractable moods of mist to all examples of pure song, whose first and wind, and with her sterner heights of function is to live in the air. hill and fell, the poet displays less sympathy, nothing better among them than the one and it may be doubted if, together with her called Golden Silences": that compasses them. love of loveliness, she could possess the gift This point is the worthier of remark from the clear tendency Miss Rossetti has shown, more than ever in recent years, to drop into a despondent personal tone, which, though wholly natural and unforced, is clearly somewhat pampered, even in the face of robuster promptings. Such a tone as I speak of finds vent in the admirable "Ballad of Boding" (a poem full of symbol, and surpassed for truth and fervour by nothing in this volume), and in certain sonnets distinguished by strength of exceptional ascetic passion. Tenderness more true, and resignation more beautiful, nevertheless, do not find utterance in English poetry than is found in the following, which I quote from a series entitled "Monna Innominata " "If there be anyone can take my place

A

66

There is

"There is silence that saith, 'Ah me!' There is silence that nothing saith; One the silence of life forlorn, One the silence of death; One is, and the other shall be. "One we know and have known for long, One we know not, but we shall know, All we who have ever been born; Even so, be it so,There is silence, despite a song. "Sowing day is a silent day,

Resting night is a silent night; But whoso reaps the ripened corn Shall shout in his delight, While silences vanish away."

T. HALL CAINE.

Dictionary of Quotations from the English

Poets.

By Henry G. Bohn. (George Bell & Sons.)

THE venerable author of this admirable selection of the choicest passages in our national poets printed, about fourteen years ago, 500 copies of this work for presentation to his friends. Since that time four copies have been sold at public auctions, three of them for five guineas a-piece, and the Such a other for only half-a-guinea less.

marked testimony of public approbation turns the critic's office into a sinecure. All that he can do is to applaud the liberality of Mr. Bohn in reprinting for the gratification of the world at large a volume which has received such a singular mark of private approval; and to express his confident assurance that the present edition, to be obtained at the cost of a few shillings, will be scanned as eagerly and referred to as frequently as that which changed hands after the expenditure of a five-pound note.

There are about 8,000 quotations in Mr. Bohn's treasure-house of extracts, covering the five centuries from The Canterbury Tales to the In Memoriam of the Poet Laureate. They show a breadth of reading which would be remarkable even in the case of a student who had confined the reading of a long life to poetry alone. Some of the extracts are from authors whose works were much admired when Mr. Bohn first commenced collecting quotations "sixty years since," and some are from writers who could never have been popular at all. In the first rank comes Pomfret; in the second, such scribblers as Francklin and Freeman, a brace of poor tragedians. The strangest part is that the few selections from such writers, thanks to the judgment of the extracter, are almost the only lines in which they deviated into sense. It is not difficult to discover in opening this volume which English writer has supplied the greatest number of quotations for the English market; it is the old story, "Eclipse first and the rest nowhere." Shakspere has furnished Mr. Bohn with at least three times as many extracts as any other writer. For the honour of the second place there is a gallant contest between Pope and Byron. Butler's Hudibras and Young's Night Thoughts should be bracketed for the third place; in fifty pages taken at random from the body of the book, eighteen passages were quoted from the one and sixteen from the other.

Scarcely a subject which the reader can think of has not, owing to the compiler's extensive range of reading, one or more apposite quotation ready for his purpose. Every incident in life may be found in these

some more.

pages. Life itself is the subject of nearly seven pages, and ten times as many extracts. Twenty-six pages are devoted to love and lovers, and eight more to marriage. On the "last scene of all," death, Mr. Bohn has filled about ten pages, and refers his readers to the kindred heads of grave and mourning for Still, with all the care and industry of the collector, a few quotations have been omitted which we might expect to have found in their proper places. I looked under the word "Loyalty" for Butler's lines on the dial and the sun, but found them not. There is no quotation under "Lark" from Shelley's ode, and no reference under the head of "Swans" to the bird which floated double on St. Mary's lake. It is inevitable that this should be so. Did not the compiler of a book on proverbs, when he presented a copy of his volume to Queen Elizabeth, discover, to his mortification, that he had omitted the first proverb which the Queen used to him?

But it is time to stop. I can only say in conclusion that it is as difficult for a reviewer

England Without and Within. By Richard Grant White. (Sampson Low.)

MEN who know both England and America almost equally well are sure to take up with some misgivings any book by an Englishman about America, or by an American about England, especially when written by a person whose acquaintance with the country he describes has been but a short one. They expect almost inevitably to find on either side much hasty misapprehension, much unreasoning prejudice, and much ungenerous criticism, which a fuller knowledge would probably have modified in a kindlier direction. It seems, indeed, as though Englishmen and Americans were destined to misunderstand one another on a short acquaintance-as though they required a long familiarity in order to recognise each other's good points.

From any such initial predisposition against England, however, Mr. Grant White is singularly free. Priding himself upon being a Yankee of the Yankees, born in the Wilderness of North-west New York, educated in New England, descended from eight generations of Anglo-American ancestors, and arbiter (as we all know) of the only real English undefiled now to be found upon the face of the earth, Mr. Grant White came to England as to the land of his forefathers, and he judges of everything English with a loving gentleness which prepossesses even the captious critic at once in his favour. The fact is, our author's prejudices are all of them almost more English than American. He has a low opinion of Irishmen, Germans, emigrants, and so-called "Americans" generally; he never prints the last-named noun, in fact, except, as we have done, in quotation marks; and he considers nobody as a real thorough going fellow-countryman except the descendants of those English families who settled in America before the revolution. His AngloSaxonism is as pronounced in its way as that of Mr. Freeman himself—if Mr. Freeman will pardon us the use of that heretical, but very convenient, phrase. As our great historian scorns Scots and Welsh and Irish so utterly that he wholly excludes them from his ethnical We, so Mr. Grant White excludes from his category of true Americans everybody whose ancestors landed in America since the eighteenth century. England is thus to him the old home of the Yankee race; and all English history before the revolt of the colonies is part of the annals of his own people. Never, he tells us emphatically in his first chapter, never was he so much at home as he was in England.

To do Mr. Grant White full justice, it must be admitted that most of what he has to say is truthful, that a great deal of it is acute and subtle, and that all of it is extremely interesting. It is always pleasant to hear what a friendly critic has to say about us; it is doubly pleasant when the critic is on the whole so flattering and courteous as Mr. Grant White. Why, he even praises our hotels-a piece of international generosity

which seems really incredible to any man who has ever tried and compared the average American and English inns. If good nature, kind appreciation, and a strong determination to be satisfied and delighted with everything -including our little boxes of railwaycarriages, our idle aristocracy, and our nationally disgraceful climate-if all this could soften the hearts of Englishmen to Mr. Grant White, surely his chatty, amiable, amusing book ought to be received all round with a perfect chorus of unmixed congratulation.

Nevertheless, there are some odd little points in these essays which candour can hardly permit us to pass by, for all the author's flattering salves to our collective vanity. The function of a review is to speak the truth without fear or favour; and we must not be led into abdicating our duty by the overwhelming consciousness of Mr. White's delicate and graceful compliments to the English nation. The truth is, a great deal of the book is, and must be, sadly superficial. The very title, in the vastness of its promise, reminds us somewhat too painfully of Count Smorltork's great work on England, composed after six weeks' acquaintance with our island and people. Almost every Americanborn man who comes to Europe can remember the time when he would have faced the task of writing on Britain within and without as easily and jauntily as Mr. Grant White; but, if he has lived a year or two in England, he has probably long outlived that facile stage, and would almost as soon dream of disputing de omni scibili like the Admirable Crichton. People accustomed to a relatively simple homogeneous society, with little history and few strongly marked classes, are prepared to describe the manners and habits of the English offhand, as readily as they would describe the manners and habits of the Andaman Islanders. But people who have once begun to comprehend the vast complexity of an old civilisation, with its ranks, its social classes, its civil and military organisation, its Church, its sects, its history, its ethnography, its universities, its institutions, its endless intricacies of law and procedure, would never venture upon framing all the easy generalisations which new-comers reel off so readily on the slightest hints or scraps of evidence. Just remember what a difficult thing it is to understand a single English parish, with its ecclesiastical history, its local arrangements, its manorial status, its infinite wheels and springs and bearings-or just try to set forth lucidly to an enquiring stranger the constitution of the University of Oxford, and then consider the value of the judgment a man is likely to pass upon England generally after a few weeks or months of residence in our midst.

Accordingly, it must be allowed that Mr. Grant White is often wrong, though more often in matters of feeling than in positive matters of fact. He himself believes that most Englishmen are disgracefully ignorant of America; but, indeed, the cases he cites seem to us natural enough, and not near so heinous as many to be observed in most educated Yankees when talking of Europe. His own little inaccuracies are just of the sort which he would seize upon at once in an Englishman speaking of America; as where