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Obviously this sort of stuff will not do. It shows a loss of the charm of the original autocratic narrative, with probably no corresponding gain in democratic feeling.

The substance of the folk legends of the nursery can no more be changed than the mythology of Greece or Scandinavia. We must concede to our infants their kings and princesses along with their giants and witches and fairies, trusting that as the young minds mature they will realise that the royal persons of the stories are compounded of the same stuff of unreality as the hobgoblins. There are no such animals.

Conscientious democratic parents

can easily prove this, when the time comes, by calling the child's attention to photographs of really-truly royal ties in the illustrated magazines. The picture of some vacuous king, discreetly bearded to hide his recessional features, pinning a medal on a mutilated soldier and saying: "I only regret that you have but two legs to lose for my country," or whatever the court chamberlain or press agent has told him to say-this is a great help in weaning the child from monarchism. A similar purpose is served by the photograph of a typical princess, whose hat and features alike seem so unfortunately chosen, opening a Red Cross bazaar with the words "Eeney meeney miney mo," or some appropriate phrase of similar meaning.

Of course the disillusion must not be made too abruptly, or the child might do himself some injury.

Harold Kellock.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A LIBERALIST*

BY LUTHER E. ROBINSON

"WHEN we see a soul," says Emerson, "whose acts are regal and graceful and pleasant as roses, we must thank God such things can be and are." When a great book appears, garnering into the world's treasure-house the ripe fruitage of a long rich experience for the delight of souls coming after, civilisation is the grateful gainer. Such a book is Lord Morley's Recollections. These two handsome volumes contain the modestly written account of his distinguished career as a man of letters, as confrère of men eminent for their liberalisation of the human mind, and as public servant long devoted to the social improvement of the state. In the midst of the daily journalisation of world-wide dissonance, a work like this comes among us like a fostering voice of culture to render the "feelings more sane, pure, and per

manent.

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Native of Blackburn in Lancashire, Morley was educated at Oxford, where he just missed the tutelage of Mark Pattison and where Connington, Stanley, Mansel, and Goldwin Smith were among his instructors. There also he came under the liberalising speech of Cotter Morison, a senior commoner, who, we are told, brought more than one undergraduate into contact with the awakening ideas of Carlyle, Emerson, and Comte. Morley took his degree in 1859, a time of tense mental atmosphere in England. Darwin, Buckle, Tennyson, and Ruskin were among those producing the literature of a new era of thought. The spirit of liberalism, which had proved too

*Recollections. By Lord Morley. New York: The Macmillan Company. In two volumes. $7.50.

potent for the Tractarians, called for a definition of knowledge based upon scientific inquiry and radical thinking. Gladstone, following the impress of Peel, was breaking away from his earlier conservatism to become the protagonist of a more democratic order in political life. In the field of thought Mill's doctrines vindicated the compatibility between liberty and discipline. Carlyle had given impulse to the study of German literature and history, and Comtism had become a cult among certain English intellectuals whom the young Oxonian was shortly to count among his intimate friends. Morley "revelled" in the books of Victor Hugo and felt the warm glow of Mazzini. The genius of George Sand served him as a "stirring rebuke to the loitering quietism of the brain," and George

the

Eliot kindled his enthusiasm for her "wide and profound culture." He makes acknowledgments to books of Adam Smith, of Bentham, Maine, and Turgot; but for "practical principles in the strategy and tactics of public life" he admits his chief indebtedness to Burke. "Well might Macaulay exclaim, "The greatest man since Milton.""

Finding the law unalluring, Morley became a journalist. For fifteen years he was editor of the Fortnightly Review and served in similar capacity on the Pall Mall Gazette and Macmillan's Magazine. His editorial posts brought him into intimate and sympathetic relations with Swinburne, Meredith, Gabriel Ros setti, Bagehot, Huxley, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Matthew Arnold, Frederic Harrison, and others active in visualising and shaping the more progres

sive mental and moral conceptions of the Victorian age. These friends stood for the "spirit of liberalism in its most many-sided sense." Under the mirror of their independent criticism traditional beliefs were interrogated and the new theories of science were examined under the militant rationalism of the day. Huxley probably denoted the intellectual altruism of these battling agnostics as clearly as any in his feeling that "there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is, when the garment of make-believe, by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features, is stripped off.”

Uniting him with this powerful circle of diverse minds and talents was the author's indubitable spirit of friendship. He has possessed a genius for maintaining affection mutuelle with those whose intellectual conclusions clashed in action with

his own. His keen and generous discernment of excellence gives fascination to his critical judgments. Representative of this is his estimate of Meredith. None knew better than that abstemious philosopher of life that his books could make no popular appeal. Yet his "brave faith in good," says Lord Morley, "in the rise of good standards. . . made him a teacher of many a sane and wholesome lesson, among those who had the happiness to be his friends, long years before the world found out the fire and strength and richness of his genius." Similarly with John Stuart Mill. At Blackheath Morley often shared the table-talk of Mill in company with other intellectuals, among whom were Herbert Spencer, Grote, Froude, Charles Kingsley, Faucett, and Louis Blanc. "What gave value to his talk . . . was mental discipline at least as much as his tenets." Mill's generalisations were were usually well freighted; for example, this pregnant remark: "The future of man

kind will be gravely imperilled if great questions are left to be fought out between ignorant change and ignorant opposition to change." His quality of quickening other minds is apparent in advice to Morley like this: "Keep yourself in the fresh air of the world; do your best in the world's affairs; study the active rather than the passive; do not be an ergoteur, but take pains for clear and limpid expression.

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Morley's friendship for Joseph Chamberlain began in 1873, the year of Mill's death. The commensal discourse under Chamberlain's roof at Birmingham, where other guests included Mazzini, Carlyle, and Emerson, was not "brilliant contention, but fruitful co-operation in thought and knowledge for plain common ends." Popular education, municipal life, and "religious equality above all," were among the themes discussed. Unlike many others, Chamberlain had not been brought up in an atmosphere of books. His politics came to him from penetrating observation of his environment. Under his inspiration Morley began his Parliamentary career in 1883. In spite of their unfailing mutual regard, they gradually drifted apart politically. Morley's friendliness to the Home Rule programme never fitted with the imperialistic philosophy of the Birmingham statesman; it agreed with Gladstone's views and led to their political alliance and personal friendship, which endured to the end. A touch of pathos glows under. neath the Greek-like restraint and directness with which is told the story of Gladstone's final discomfiture over his last Home Rule measure and the impasse in the Cabinet which brought about his retirement from political life and leadership. Mrs. Gladstone importuned Morley to tell her how matters stood. "The poor lady was not in the least prepared for the actual stroke.... What a curious scene! Me breaking to her

that the pride and glory of her life was at last to face eclipse, that the curtain was falling on a grand drama of fame, power, acclamation." Another political current had already set in, antagonistic to the old leader's Irish and peace policies. The new ideal was imperialistic, and one of its most significant moves was the exchange of Heligoland for Zanzibar. On this event Lord Morley refrains from comment.

To the Gladstone-Morley school of politics this new ideal was portentous. Out of it grew the Boer War, which Morley denounced in the face of a determined popular sentiment in its favour. It enlarged the military establishment in the interest of imperial defence. The Foreign Office acquired greater power of self-direction. Morley as head of the Indian Office, maintaining the generous principles he had employed as Secretary for Ireland and sympathising with the native aspirations of the imperial population, knew nothing of what was passing in the diplomatic office. His correspondence with Lord Minto, Indian Viceroy, introduced at this point in the Recollections, contains no reference to foreign events beyond a notice of the German Emperor's visit to London in 1907. This visit he describes as an event which would "much improve the chances of a little decent calm all over Europe." Almost in vain, too, the reader of these instructive pages waits for some comment upon the present world conflict, whose beginning led to Lord Morley's voluntary withdrawal from political responsi bility. The meagre statement touching the matter contains a piquant reminder that the "new Liberalism" in power at the opening of the war had proved no more "fertile than the respectable old;" that its representatives had broken down, "or thought they had (1915) and could discover no better way out of their scrape than to seek deliverance (not without

a

trace of arbitrary proscription) from the opposing party that counted Liberalism, old or new, for dangerous and deluding moonshine."

More characteristic of the writer's genial moods is the impressive question he frankly raises whether the influence of Liberalism in the "civilised world" has been "so much more potent than the gospel of the various churches"? The question baffles, for he finds that diplomacy is "as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed by grand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplic able purposes, and turning the whole world over with blood and tears to a strange Witches' Sabbath." As a matter of fact Lord Morley's England felt the powerful leaven of both Liberalism and religion as they have united to advance the ideals and practices of an enlightened and progressive democracy. He is more accurate in his estimate of Liberalism than Arnold was, or could be, fifty years ago. His appraisement of the Victorian period is the most satisfactory that has yet been written:

Some ages are marked as sentimental, others stand conspicuous as rational. The Victorian age was happier than most in the flow of both these currents into a common stream of vigorous and effective talent. New truths were welcomed in free minds, and free minds make brave men. Old prejudices were disarmed. Fresh principles were set afloat, and supported by right reasons. The standards of ambition rose higher and purer. Men learned to care more for one another. The rational prevented the sentimental from falling into pure emotional. It was Bacon who penned that deep ap peal from thought to feeling. "The nobler a soul is, the more objects of compassion it hath." This of the great Elizabethan was one prevailing note in our Victorian age. The splendid expansion and enrichment of Toleration and all the ideas and modes that belong to Toleration was another.

In these Recollections autobiog raphy as such is artistically subdued.

Self-predication is everywhere subordinated to the interpretation of his age and its leading forces and personalities. His tastes and character, his ideals and his achievements, are delightfully reflected in the wide range of serious literature he draws upon to illustrate the changing scene of life as he has seen and lived it. His method is that of the literary workman setting down, in the spirit of in tellectual repose, the more striking and essential events of a long and supremely inviting experience, from the heights of a detached and unclouded eminence. He is one of the last survivors of a great circle of personages to whom scholarship and reason stood as the guides of a creative and disinterested social service. They sought to make their conception of civilisation prevail, and were in large

measure successful. That conception at heart is "Respect for the dignity and worth of the individual . . . pursuit of social good against class interest and dynastic interest." In public life Lord Morley opposed the extension of the imperial frontiers; he preferred to strengthen, through benevolent measures, the human interests already under the broad lines of the imperial ægis. Probably he did not clearly discern upon the horizon the greater struggle yet in store for the very principle of Liberalism to which he had devoted his own great talents. Be this as it may, he has made a rich and noble contribution to life. Like the eminent Roman essayist and statesman to whose higher tastes and virtues his own bear a marked resemblance, he may truly write, Diu multumque vixi.

SNAP-SHOTS OF FOREIGN AUTHORS: FRANCE

BY RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER

THE sanctum of your mind
Must be an enchanting spot
For eclectics to luxuriate:
Athanasius communing with Renan,
Joan of Arc gossiping with Thaïs,
Rabelais jesting with Paracelsus—
A gathering gorgeous with irony
But manipulated without discords
Like a Liszt fantasy

Played by Joseph Hofmann.

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