claims of justice are depicted as deeply rooted in all her relations. This feeling is painted as reproduced in full force both in brother and sister; and yet it never even occurs to the author that these deeply implanted principles would have exercised so powerful a latent effect as to counteract effectually any "elective affinities" between her and Mr. Guest. The whole of this portion of the book is a kind of enthusiastic homage to physiological law, and seems to us as untrue to nature as it is unpleasant and indelicate. The light of a character in itself transparently beautiful is here almost extinguished in very unfragrant fumes of physiological smoke. When we have said this, we have exhausted our moral protest. It seems to us entirely unjust to represent the final struggle as otherwise than decisive as well as noble. Exception has been taken to the following passage, as if it involved any hesitation as to the alternative between passion and duty: "The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question, whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master-key that will fit all cases. The casuists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed: the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot." The clear meaning of the author is,-and it is not only true, but evidently a result of deep and thoughtful moral sentiment, -not of course that passion can or ought ever to put in a claim above duty, but that the true course of duty will change from time to time if passion be indulged, so that a return to what would once have been the right course will often be the wrong course now. In other words, though it is never too late to clear any life of moral weakness or sin, it is often too late to clear it of the consequences of former moral weakness or sin; and the time will come when to attempt to ignore the past, and act as though the problem of duty were unchanged by what it has brought, will be itself the most lamentable symptom of a conscience weakened by transgression. For our own part, we hold that if once, without violence to all the impressions produced by the earlier part of the book, we could imagine Maggie in the situation towards Mr. Stephen Guest into which the author has driven her, there is the most perfect delicacy and truthfulness displayed in the description of her conflict and her victory. What we do cordially protest against, as a very dark blot on a fine picture, is the virtual assumption that the most deeply-rooted habits of thought and feeling in the finest natures are far too weak to paralyse the force of this assumed physiological omnipotence. There seem to us to be false and degrading assumptions in the delineation of the temptation, but the truest moral insight in the picture of the final conflict and the ultimate victory. We have now indicated, imperfectly enough, the leading characteristics of the genius, whose broad and humorous sketches of English life, and profound insight into the commonest parts of the commonest natures, are likely, we trust, often to rivet our admiration afresh. We will not believe that the flavour of bitterness, the tendency slightly to magnify the dreariness and dullness of human nature, to caricature the worldliness of the world, and all the blinding dust of life, the disposition to exaggerate the relative influence of the lowest elements in our moral constitution, which appear in The Mill on the Floss, are any indication that one of the most genial and sunny, as well as one of the most powerful and noble, of modern English authors is losing any part of her delicate apprehension of the unfailing springs of beauty and truth. She is not in any danger of falling into that unreal ideality which ignores the minute and frail and earthly side of human nature. But there is quite as great a danger of unreality in the opposite direction, of that unreality which is so intent on the skin and the wrinkles and the earthly fibres, that it loses all trace of the inextinguishable fountains of life beneath. The author of Adam Bede can scarcely fall into unreality such as this. ART. XI.-MR. GLADSTONE. Speech of the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Finance of the Delivered in the Corrected by We believe that Quarterly essayists have a peculiar mission in relation to the characters of public men. We believe it is their duty to be personal. This idea may seem ridiculous to some of our readers; but let us consider the circumstances carefully. We allow that personality abounds already, that the names of public men are for ever on our lips, that we never take up a newspaper without seeing them. But this incessant personality is wholly fragmentary; it is composed of chance criticism on special traits, of fugitive remarks on temporary measures, of casual praise and casual blame. We can expect little else from what is written in haste, or is spoken without limitation. Public men must bear this criticism as they can. Those whose names are perpetually in men's mouths must not be pained if singular things are sometimes said of them. Still some deliberate truth should be spoken of our statesmen; and if Quarterly essayists do not speak it, who will? We fear it will remain unspoken. Mr. Gladstone is a problem, and it is very remarkable that he should be a problem. We have had more than ordinary means for judging of him. He has been in public life for seven-andtwenty years; he has filled some of the most conspicuous offices. in the State; he has been a distinguished member of the Tory party; he is a distinguished member of the Liberal party; he has brought forward many measures; he has passed many years in independent Opposition, which is unquestionably the place most favourable to the display of personal peculiarities in Parliament; he is the greatest orator in the House of Commons; he never allows a single important topic to pass by without telling us what he thinks of it;-and yet, with all these data, we are all of us in doubt about him. What he will do, and what he will think, still more, why he will do it, and why he will think it, are quæstiones vexata at every political conjuncture. At the very last ministerial crisis, when the Government of Lord Derby was on the verge of extinction, when every voice on Lord John's resolution was of critical importance, no one knew till nearly the last hour how Mr. Gladstone would vote; and in the end he voted against his present colleagues. The House of Commons gossips are generally wrong about him. Nor is the uncertainty confined to parliamentary divisions; it extends to his whole career. Who can calculate his future course? Who can tell whether he will be the greatest orator of a great administration; whether he will rule the House of Commons; whether he will be, as his gifts at first sight mark him out to be, our greatest statesman? or whether, below the gangway, he will utter unintelligible discourses; will aid in destroying many ministries and share in none; will pour forth during many hopeless years a bitter, a splendid, and a vituperative eloquence? We do not profess that we can solve all the difficulties that are suggested even by the superficial consideration of a character so exceptional. We do not aspire to be prophets. Mr. Gladstone's destiny perplexes us-perhaps as much as it perplexes our readers. But we think that we can explain much of his past career; that many of his peculiarities are not so un accountable as they seem; that a careful study will show us the origin of most of them; that we may hope to indicate some of the material circumstances and conditions on which his future course depends, though we should not be so bold as to venture to foretell it. During the discussion on the Budget, an old Whig who did not approve of it, but who had to vote for it, muttered of its author, "Ah, Oxford on the surface, but Liverpool below." And there is truth in the observation, though not in the splenetic sense in which it was intended. Mr. Gladstone does combine in a very curious way many of the characteristics which we generally associate with the place of his education with many of those which we usually connect with the place of his birth. No one can question the first part of the observation. No man has through life been more markedly an Oxford man than Mr. Gladstone. His Church and State, published after he had been several years in public life, was instinct with the very spirit of the Oxford of that time. His Homer, published the other day, bears nearly equal traces of the school in which he was educated. Even in his ordinary style there is a tinge half theological, half classical, which recalls the studies of his youth. Many Oxford men much object to the opinions of their distinguished representative, but none of them would deny that he remarkably embodies the peculiar results of the peculiar teaching of the place. And yet he has something which his collegiate training never would have given him, which it is rather remarkable it has not taken away from him. There is much to be said in favour of the University of Oxford. No one can deny to it very great and very peculiar merits. But certainly it is not an exciting place, and its education operates as a narcotic rather than as a stimulant. Most of its students devote their lives to a single profession, and we may observe among them a kind of sacred torpidity. In many rural parsonages there are men of very great cultivation, who are sedulous in their routine duties, who attend minutely to the ecclesiastical state of the souls in their village, but who are perfectly devoid of general intellectual interests. They have no anxiety to solve great problems; to busy themselves with the speculations of their age; to impress their peculiar theology-for peculiar it is both in its expression and its substance-on the educated mind of their time. Oxford, it has been said, "disheartens a man early." At any rate, since Newmanism lost Father Newman, few indeed of her acknowledged sons attain decided eminence in our deeper controversies. Jowett she would repudiate, and Mansel is but applying the weapons of scepticism to the service of credulity. The most characteristic of Oxford men labour quietly, delicately, and let us hope usefully, in a confined sphere; they hope for nothing more, and wish for nothing more. Even in secular literature we may observe an analogous tone. The Saturday Review is remarkable as an attempt on the part of "University men" to speak on the political topics and social difficulties of the time. And what do they teach us? It is something like this: "So-and-so has written a tolerable book, and we would call attention to the industry which produces tolerable books. Soand-so has devoted himself to a great subject, and we would observe that the interest now taken in great subjects is very commendable. Such-and-such a lady has delicate feelings, which are desirable in a lady, though we know that they are contrary to the facts of the world. All common persons are doing as well as they can, but it does not come to much after all. All statesmen are doing as ill as they can, and let us be thankful that that does not come to much either." We may search and search in vain through this repository of the results of "University teaching" for a single truth which it has established, for a single high cause which it has advanced, for a single deep thought which is to sink into the minds of its readers. We have, indeed, a nearly perfect embodiment of the corrective scepticism of a sleepy intellect. "A B says he has done. something, but he has not done it; CD has made a parade of demonstrating this or that proposition, but he does not prove his case; there is one mistake in page 5, and another in page 113: a great history has been written of this or that century, but the best authorities as to that period have not been consulted, which, however, is not very remarkable, as there is nothing in them." We could easily find, if it were needful, many traces of the same indifferent habit, the same apathetic culture, in the more avowed productions of Oxford men. The shrewd eye of Mr. Emerson, stimulated doubtless by the contrast to America, quickly caught the trait. "After all," says the languid Oxford gentleman of his story, "there is nothing true and nothing new, and no matter!" To this, as to every other species of indifferentism, Mr. Gladstone is the antithesis. Oxford has not disheartened him. Some of his colleagues would say they wished it had. He is interested in every thing he has to do with, and often interested too much. He proposes to put a stamp on contract notes with an eager earnestness as if the destiny of Europe, here and hereafter, depended upon its enactment. He cannot let any thing alone. |