world's reformation, are seen destroying all the familiar symbols and properties of the old order, but appropriating to their own use all that to their unknowing eyes looks strange, perplexing, and splendid. We see wild men and unsexed dishevelled women, drunk with wine and blood, draping their uncouth persons in rich stuffs and decorations under which their native clumsiness takes a fresh touch, and their unused limbs move stiffly. The comparison may seem something too serious for what after all is only ridiculous; yet it is not inapt. The Jacquerie of the New Culture is quite as earnest in its way, would be quite as mischievous if it knew how to be, and is assuredly not less grotesque. Its earnestness is, indeed, its most characteristic and comical feature. Were not the most convincing proofs daily offered to our senses it would be impossible to conceive how seriously these poor people take themselves. It is something so tremendous that, were the subject less preposterous and the result less pitiful, it would really go far to constitute a title to one's respect. Having read that true culture will not be content with the mere selfish enjoyment of sweetness and light, but will endeavour to make the passion for them prevail, they assume the office of teacher, and endeavour to make their notions of sweetness and light prevail. And they have selected the medium of fiction, partly because, after the newspaper, it is the most popular form of literature, and partly because it is the most convenient. Fiction (as Madge Ramsay said of metaphors) is such a pretty indirect way of telling one's mind when it differs from one's betters;' it needs no proof, no evidence, no logic, none of the ordinary processes of reasoning. In what it does need, in imagination and invention, in the play of wit and fancy, of humour and pathos, in knowledge of life and manners, and of the arts of literary composition, it is true they are also somewhat deficient. But this deficiency they hope to conceal by affecting to change the purpose of fiction. Instead of the sweet influences it has exercised over so many generations of men worn with the common lot, whose hearts ache with sorrow or are heavy with toil, they would claim for it now the stern offices of the preacher, the law-giver, and the judge. These offices they interpret each one according to his own tastes; and in too many cases these tastes, as it will ever be in times of mental dissolution, seem frankly turning to the old primal tastes of the ape and the tiger, creatures which are never far from human haunts. As the intellectual forces grow weak, the animal instincts grow strong. In the dearth of the higher powers of the mind it will always be possible to fall back on those grosser materials which few men

are

are without, but which most men are fortunately not ambitious of parading. The history of society, wrote Newman, begins in the poet and ends in the policeman. The poet seems unlikely to play an important part in the history of society as these reformers would wish to see it reconstructed; but there can be no question of the necessity for the policeman, if indeed those useful guardians of public virtue are to be included in the economy of the new republic.

The misfortune of it all is that many of these wellmeaning but mistaken folk are really, if only they could be persuaded of it, very good citizens in their way, and capable, each according to his lights, of contributing, if not to our instruction, at least in a commendable degree to our entertainment. Who needs to be told how many clever novels Mr. Hardy has written? He was never indeed remarkable for the delicacy of his taste or the niceness of his judgment; but his vivacity, his freshness, his sense for natural beauty, his powers of description were undeniable. And now we see to what his acceptance of a great work, his consciousness of a mission to reform the art of fiction, and through fiction to redress the moral balance of the world-in a word, we see to what his taking himself too seriously has brought him. It has brought him to producing a work crammed with inartistic blunders and improprieties, disfigured by a grotesque jargon, and such as no clean-minded reader can get through without disgust. Mrs. Ward has indeed no such great career behind. her as Mr. Hardy. Her production is as yet scanty; but it has been sufficient to mark her as an accomplished woman, as one who, if she would have consented to give her powers fair play, might have proved an agreeable and graceful worker in those lighter forms of composition in which her sex has so often succeeded. But she too has been inoculated by the Spirit of the Time; she too has accepted a mission to reform the world through fiction. It is true that, being a gentlewoman she prefers to do her work in more orderly fashion than Mr. Hardy. She has indeed felt herself obliged to pay some sort of tribute to what one of its most passionate champions has called The great sexual insurrection of the Anglo-Teutonic race;' but it is, one can see, only a half-hearted tribute, and, on the whole, it is evident that she would prefer to see 'A revolution in due course of law.' And look at the result-talents wasted, energies misapplied on a work, of which the verdict can only be that it is tiresome as a novel and ineffectual as a sermon. Mr. Shorthouse stands in a somewhat different position. He is content to be a victim of the New Culture without aspiring

to

to be a leader; and the phase of it which appeals most strongly to Mr. Hardy, and to which even Mrs. Ward has forced herself to curtsey, has no attractions for him. Yet in other ways he is perhaps its most conspicuous victim, as naturally gifted with less vital energy to resist the insidious progress of the disease. The sentimentality, the puling melancholy, the assumption of learning, of grace and refinement,-in a word all the sweetness' of the New Culture—are paramount in his last work. And yet no one who has read John Inglesant' can refuse to accredit its author with a genuine literary gift, which under happier influences might have been turned to more profitable issues.

One knows not whether to laugh or to cry over it all. Perhaps, as our time is not rich in conscious humourists, it were better to take what we can get and laugh. And at least there is a source of consolation in the not distant future that we cannot be deprived of. If all this folly be really due to the mystic influence exercised by the end of a century, we shall soon be quit of it. Meanwhile we, even those of us who are most persuaded of its false pretensions and mischievousness, must not forget the famous words with which Burke closed his Thoughts on French Affairs :- If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of man. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.' If, when the year 1900 is turned, the national genius and the national taste have decided that seduction, adultery, and murder are an essential part of the great moral law of the universe: that in the commonplaces that have been rejected by sixteen centuries lies the key to the problem of man's relations with the unseen powers of the world; and that in the propagation of these two blessed truths is contained the whole duty of fiction, we shall be perverse and obstinate no longer. But during the eight years that intervene we shall continue to pin our faith on The ancient and inbred piety, integrity good-nature, and good-humour' of our nation, and look confidently forward to the passing of what we as confidently believe to be no more than the foolish fashion of a barren hour.

ᎪᎡᎢ.

ART. III.-The Life and Teachings of Mohammed, or The Spirit of Islam. By Syed Ameer Ali, a Judge of the High Court of Judicature in Bengal. London, 1891.

age

THE in which we live is often described as scientific. The description is more amply warranted than may, at first sight, appear. Our era is specially characterised not merely by the vast progress of physics, but by the application of the method so fruitfully followed in their domain, to all spheres of intellectual activity. We mean the method which starts not from abstract speculation, but from concrete fact; which advances to the idea of a principle as the explanation of a mass of phenomena, ascertained by observation and verified by experience; which finds in the comparison of these phenomena, and in the deduction of their effects, the guarantee of reality. It is, as we all know, by the employment of this method, that geology, astronomy, chemistry, have of late years made such. marvellous advance, conducting us from the commonest and most individual instances, to the most recondite and far-reaching laws. But this, too, is the method followed by Kant, when in his Critique of Pure Reason' he set himself to the removal of what he calls the scandal to philosophy,' involved in the necessity of assuming, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves. In like manner, in his 'Critique of the Practical Reason,' he builds upon a primordial fact of human nature the sense of moral obligation; a sense independent of all ratiocination, of all dogmatic belief, of all notion of reward and punishment. There, while the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples,' so long the homes of a whole world of à priori speculation, fall into dissolution, there is the rock upon which, serenely confident, he will rear the Divine shrine. In every intellectual province the chief work of modern thought has been to substitute facts for assumptions as the point of departure. Nor is it doubtful that to this we owe a vast expansion of our mental horizon, and the perception ever growing clearer, of the august verity that one law reigns throughout the universe; a law of progression, of development, of perpetual becoming.

Nowhere, perhaps, has this method been productive of greater results than in the province of history. It is not too much to say that one great achievement of the modern mind has been the entire reconstruction of historical science. With very few exceptions, the historians of the three centuries immediately preceding the French Revolution, were little more than annalists. That any moral significance underlay the tale of sound and fury

which they related, that the spiritual and intellectual movements running through the ages are the most important elements in the career of humanity, that the phenomena of history are not isolated and fortuitous, but are connected, are co-ordinate, and are the expression of laws, they never so much as dreamed. Here, as in so many other spheres of thought, Voltaire is the herald of the modern spirit. His erudition was inconsiderable. His philosophy was not very profound. But in originality of ideas, in knowledge of human life, in keenness of vision, and in clearness of conception, he stands alone among his contemporaries. How admirable the manner in which he blends with his narrative of important events the most luminous sketches of the literary characteristics of an age, of the state of arts and sciences, of the material elements of civilization! How penetrating his apprehension of the springs of political action, of the real causes of great revolutions! How acute his examination of the received fables, the accredited traditions with which passion and credulity had encumbered the story of nations and the exploits of heroes! In all this, he was the precursor of the more patient and philosophic, if less brilliant intellects, whose searching criticism of long-received narratives, whose patient investigations of hidden causes, whose laborious employment of analysis, comparison, deduction, have rewritten the history of well-nigh every nation under heaven.

Islâm is certainly one of the subjects in which the employment of this 'large discourse of reason, looking before and after,' has been singularly successful. Fifty years ago the stereotyped view of that great religion, as we find it, for example, in the quaint pages of Ockley, was generally received. Here and there, the more sagacious account of it given in Gibbon's masterly chapters found acceptance. But its real sources, its true character, its actual place in the evolution of religious thought, were as little understood as were the earliest years of Rome before Niebuhr wrote; as was the making of the English nation in the days of Hume. The works of Sprenger and Weil, of Dozy and Kremer, of Deutsch and Palmer, of Muir and Bosworth Smith, to mention only a few out of many who have laboured abundantly in this field, have let in a flood of light upon these subjects. Thanks to them, our information concerning the life and deeds of the Arabian Prophet, and the sources of his religion, is as complete and exact as is our information regarding the authors and the antecedents of the Protestant Reformation. Of course in their estimates of the last born of the world's great faiths, and its originator, there is considerable diversity. But certain it is that a general result of their labours

has