has helped us on to that higher standpoint | the Italians made no real advance beyond of culture which he supposes us to occupy; the point reached by Greek sculpture, and that the Renaissance, in fact, was but the that the nations of the north have not been first act in a great drama of mental evolu- able to develope their inheritance of Italian tion, of which the Reformation was the sec- painting. There is, however, a still more ond act, and the French Revolution the serious barrier to investigation, in the conthird. The nations, he tells us in a passage stitution of our own nature. If the human somewhat poetically coloured, are engaged mind were simple in structure, if it were in a Lampadephoria or torch-race :-- either intellectual or moral, but not both, the law of its growth would be much more But its nature is readily ascertained. mixed, and its constituent parts are by no means harmonious. On the contrary, the testimony of St. Paul, no less than of Plato, speaks of the perpetual conflict that rages within us: 'I find then a law that when I would do good evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man. Greece stretches forth her hand to Italy; Italy consigns the sacred fire to Northern Europe; the people of the North pass on the flame to America and the Australasian isles.' In We will not pause to consider the nature of the consolation that is offered in this idea of the sacrifice of the individual to the general good, or to ask whether each nation which passes on the torch of culture is to sink exhausted in the race like Italy and But I see another law in my Greece. It is more material to inquire members warring against the law of my whether there is any satisfactory evidence mind, and bringing me into captivity to the of the existence of the law of spiritual evolaw of sin which is in my members.' lution imagined by our author. We must the presence of this perpetual discord, what do Mr. Symonds the justice to say that he proof have we of the existence of any law uses the word 'progress' in a frank and so simple as that of unbroken progress, or rational sense, not confounding it, as is so of that further point' (to quote Mr. Sycommon, with the improvement of man's monds) outside both Christianity and Pacircumstances the increase of wealth, rela-ganism, at which the classical ideal of a temtive knowledge, speed of travel, and the perate and joyons life shall be restored to like-but using it to indicate a positive ad- the conscience educated by the Gospel?' vance in man's capacities of virtue and hapThe law of co-existing good and evil prepiness. The history of the Renaissance is vails in the various stages of society. Progthe history of the attainment of self-con-ress in arms generally implies the contracsciousness by the human spirit as manifested in the European races.' But allowing this to be an intelligible definition, how is the continuity of such progress to be measured or verified? If it be true that in 'Following life in creatures we dissect We lose it in the moment we detect,' what is our prospect of arriving at a scientific knowledge of the laws of our own being? How can any of us, unable as we are to realise the exact nature of the consciousness of our dearest friends, pretend to enter into the spirit of those who lived, under conditions as different as possible from our own, centuries ago? It is evident that we can but judge by rough standards of action manifested in arms, laws, arts, or letters. But here again the greatest difficulty of measurement exists. For granting, as we of course grant, the unity of human nature, it is obvious that the varieties of national action and character are as numerous as the nations themselves, and though we may find humanity in every type of culture, it is not so easy to discover a continuous line of culture running from one portion of humanity to another. For instance, it is evident that เ tion of commerce; progress in commerce not unfrequently involves the decline of art. Every great nation, it is true, can boast of progress up to a certain point, and can show moments in its history when the conflicting elements of which it is composed. seem to blend their opposing forces into a balanced and harmonious whole, but hitherto in all nations the common interest has been sooner or later sacrificed to some principle of selfishness: 'Utcunque defecere mores Dedecorant bene nata culpæ.' It is, we think, not too much to say that in the Pagan world the animal and intellectual parts of human nature overbalance-* the spiritual. In the greatest days of A ens and Rome the social equilibrium f preserved by the noble virtue of patriotism, but when patriotism decayed, human intelligence wasted itself on speculation, or sensuality. Christianity redressed the balance. The doctrines of sin, of repentance, of the Resurrection, of moral responsibility and future judgment, restored the spiritual vitality of our nature. And if, during the long period of expiring Paganism and barbarian anarchy, the spiritual part of human 'Since the Apostle speaks of the several members as having distinct offices, which implies the mind, it cannot but be thought an allowable liberty, instead of the body and its members to substitute the whole nature of man and all the variety of internal principles which belong to it. And then the comparison will be between the nature of man as respecting self, and tending to private good, his own preservation and happiness and the nature of man as having respect to society, and tending to promote public good, the happiness of that society. These ends do indeed perfectly coincide: and to aim at public and private good are so far from being inconsistent that they mutually promote each other; yet in the folentirely distinct, otherwise the nature of man, lowing discourse they must be considered as as tending to the one or as tending to the other, cannot be compared.' Hence Butler derived his well-known con ity usurped an undue share of authority, | body in Christ, and every one members one still it was on this that were built the foun- of another: dations of modern civilisation-the Catholic Church and the feudal system. Form and beauty were given to the new fabric by the revival of learning, and once again a true balance was established, when the taste and refinement of antiquity were employed in the service of the Christian religion. But, as we have said, in Italy, the mother of the Renaissance, union was never long possible. The men of letters began to cultivate Paganism for its own sake, and placed the end of life in the worship of intellect to the disparagement of morality. Mr. Symonds is quite right in identifying the movement of the Renaissance with that of the French Revolution; but he supplies nothing in the way of evidence that intellectual progress towards a goal of self-conscious' freedom has been anything but a of destruction. It has operated as progress a dissolving force on the great fabrics of clusion of happiness consisting in the wellCatholicism and feudalism. The Renais- adjusted balance of our different natural Nothing could contrast more sance in Italy, by reviving Pagan standards powers. in opposition to Christian ideas, helped to strongly with this than the ideal of the Italundermine the national genius, even in the ians as exhibited in the Renaissance; no art in which it most excelled. The Refor- two histories are more dissimilar than those mation was a protest against the corruption of England and the cities of Italy. The of the Roman Church: its effects have been development of England has been in all most beneficial in impressing on every of the establishment of an Empire which directions slow and gradual, but it can boast Christian community the necessity of per- of the establishment of an Empire which sonal religion; but it has increased the diffi- may compare with that of ancient Rome. culties of Church government and common Its progress has been achieved by reconcilworship; and in Germany, where the move-ing the interests of opposing powers. We ment began, it threatens to end, as may be have struck a balance between the preroga seen from the proceedings of the Protestant tives of the Crown and the liberties of the Synod, in open infidelity. The French people; between the authority of society Revolution struck a deathblow at the feudal and the freedom of the individual; between institutions of France, and at the Gallican interests that are temporal and interests Church; but we may well ask to-day what that are spiritual. The character of our sohas the philosophy of Voltaire or the legis-ciety is derived from a Catholic and feudal Jation of Robespierre contributed towards origin, though it has been gradually modithe formation of that temperate and joy-fied, without being destroyed, by the spirit ous natural life,' the vision of which fascinates the imagination of Mr. Symonds? Bearing in mind, then, the course of the Renaissance in Italy, and the goal to which, according to our historian, it points the buman race, it will be well for us to inquire to far we in England have advanced upon Fame path. For whether Mr. Symonds's ideal be true or false, it is certain that the ideal which the English nation has hitherto respected has not been that of self-conscious, but of constitutional, liberty. And in following this they have observed the law of human nature, as defined by their own Butler, who says in a sermon on the text,For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office; so we being many are one of liberty and the genius of learning. 'So tenacious are we,' writes Burke, in the spirit of cities, our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution, that very little alteration has been made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries; adherold settled maxim never entirely nor at once ing in this particular, as in all else, to our to depart from antiquity. We found these institutions on the whole favourable to morality and discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment without altering the ground. We thought they were capable of receiving and meliorating, and, above all, of preserving the accessories of science and literature as the order of Providence should successively produce them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish education (for such it is in the groundwork), we may put in our claim to as ample and early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have illuminated the modern world, as any other nation in Europe: we think our main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.' No words could more vividly express the character of the Renaissance in England. Such has been the course it has hitherto kept; such is the faith we still profess. Nevertheless, with all the authority and antiquity of our national ideal, there can be no doubt that, if we have not yet reached the extreme limits of constitutional liberty, we are at least proceeding to a very high degree of self-consciousness. The theory of our constitution is strained by one of the parties in the State, to make it express, a far as possible, the personal wants and desires of every Englishman: every section of the nation has its organ in the press, in which daily or weekly it sees a reflection of its own thoughts; last, but certainly not least, the most highly educated portion of society is deliberately setting up the worship of the best self' as a religion quite distinct from the vulgar traditions in class and herited from our fathers. This new re ligion, revealed to us by the apostles of culture, is one of the most surprising achievements of the modern Renaissance in Eng land. We think it must be allowed that the following paraphrase is no caricature of the religious system that is offered to us for serious acceptance :— 'Gratitude and veneration are due to the admirable Butler, one of the most truly Hellenic of our divines, for his theory of the balance of human nature. And our veneration and gratitude must not be lessened by the thought that this great man was incapable, from the place he occupied in the progress of thought, of understanding the true natur of his own reasoning. He was indeed th tim of a deplorable delusion, in his beer that it was necessary for the balance of our nature to be regulated by reference to some external object or positive law instead of by our own right reason. If, like those who have developed his system, he had been able to take a survey of his own consciousness, he would have seen that man's nature has two sides, the Hebraic and the Hellenic, each of which requires its own free and harmonious development. He would further have seen that our gross British nature, with its unfortunate tendency to one-sidedness, has cultivated itself on the Hebraic side, but altogether neg have understood that the only way to redress the balance was by getting men to rid themselves of their rigid Hebraic belief that words are intended to express things. Let this ob lected itself on the Hellenic. And he would | ject once be attained, let men but once understand how impossible it is to confine those fine and delicate phases of perception, which are the true groundwork of religion, in the hard and fast lines of dogma, and the Promised Land of perfection will come full in view. All our old stock phrases will then receive entirely fresh meanings. For even though we confess, as we must confess, that our belief in the personality of God must be exchanged for a belief in the stream of tendency, though we perceive that St. Paul, with his great but ill-regulated intelligence, had no clear understanding of what he himself meant that our sense of religion itself is but the by the Resurrection, though we recognise product of primeval forces,-this must not frighten us out of our conviction that religion is both natural and necessary to us. have the ideas still in our minds, and, by letting our consciousness play freely upon them, the bracing effect of such a moral shampooing will be to invigorate our devotional feelings For we with a new vitality. Nor is there any danger of the feelings themselves becoming exhausted. For, though we know that we have fathomed the entire mystery of the universe, and that religious knowledge cannot advance beyond our own standpoint, still the change and play of ideas will go on perpetually, and the convenient old phrases will still remain to be used through all eternity in ever-varying senses. Another apprehension may occur to us: it is equally groundless. We may be told that, when we have let our consciousness play freely round all external objects, the images of perfection that we shall derive from them will have no basis of reality, since we shall only have been travelling round the But the person four walls of our own mind. who may make this observation will certainly be some barbarian or Philistine, to whom it will be quite sufficient to reply that when he has had our experience he will know better.' It must be acknowledged that those who profess such a creed as this have advanced to a very elevated point of self-consciousness. But if this creed be supposed to be a development of Butler's philosophy, then we must conclude that its authors see no difference between grafting Pagan culture on the vigorous stock of Christianity, and eviscerating the substance of Christianity to ensconce Pagan sentiment within conventional Christian forms. We have her something of making clean the outsiof the platter, but we have never before seen the process elevated into a religious principle. It is intelligible that Pico della Mirandola should have reconciled Platonism with Christianity; the sublime speculations of the Greek philosopher have an obvious affinity to the Christian doctrine of immorality. It is intelligible, on the other hand, that men of the world like Macchiavelli, while themselves living by a Pagan standard, should have recognised the utility | manly,' and Chatham would have declared that a nation which is not prepared to bear the burden of its greatness, and to make the maintenance of empire the first object of existence, is no longer capable of preserv ing its position. of the Church as a safeguard of decency and order. But it is not intelligible that any man should deny that words stand for things, or that he should avail himself of the commonly received names, ideas, and even rites of Catholic Christianity to assist him in propagating the creed of Epicurus. Again, if we watch the operation of the new ideal on the sense of national unity, we shall scarcely be able to forbear the conclusion that, as the force of self-consciousness has increased, so, as in Italy, the national feeling has declined. We do not believe in any radical change in the English character. The popular feeling during the Crimean war showed that, once in action, the English people retain all that fierceness and pugnacity for which Benvenuto Cellini gives them credit; what we are now speak ing of is the change in the national ideal, and this may be tested by a crucial instance. A century ago there was great diversity of opinion upon the abstract justice of our dealings with our American colonies, but, when agreement became impossible, there was no question whatever as to the right and propriety of our enforcing our sovereignty by force of arms. Neither Burke nor Chatham, though disapproving of the ministerial policy, sought to thwart the full exercise of the imperial power. As Pericles said of the Athenians, these men speculated without falling into effeminacy.' To-day the phrase that excites the most bit ter vituperation is 'British interests,' an expression which, in so far as it is considered dishonourable to shrink from a manly assertion of our own rights and duties, might be advantageously changed for 'British honour.' Mr. Gladstone warns us solemnly of the corrupting influence of national prestige. Mr. Freeman exclaims, Perish India! sooner than my ideal of right and justice should be destroyed.' One of the most distinguished of our poets describes his country under the uncomplimentary figure of an aged Titan 'Staggering on to her goal, Well-nigh not to be borne, Of the too vast orb of her fate.' All this appears to us to be the weakness of self-consciousness. The national instinct of honour is to be sacrificed to some private ideal, whether, as in Mr. Gladstone's case, of goodness, or, as in Mr. Freeman's, of antiquarianism, or, as in Mr. Arnold's, of culture. Burke would have described such ideology by his favourite epithet of 'un Not only has the standard of self-consciousness diminished our national unity of feeling, it has also affected our social tone. The word honour' may be said to be one which Englishmen pride themselves on understanding by instinct. It has a feudal origin; the moral code which it implies is one that is primarily framed for aristocracy; it can only be truly understood by gentlemen.' And though its sense has been modified by changes of society, though much of its significance has been destroyed by the predominance of commercial standards and of city life, though it has to contend with such rival ideals as competition, self-help, success, and the like, it is still a great force in English society, and differs, as light from darkness, from the Italian quality described by the same word. The latter is defined by Mr. Symonds in the following striking passage : 'The mental atmosphere was critical and highly intellectualised. Mental ability combined with personal daring gave rank. But the very subtlety and force of mind, which formed the strength of the Italians, proved hostile to any delicate sentiment of honour. Analysis enfeebles the tact and spontaneity of feeling which constitute its strongest safeguard. All this is obvious in the ethics of the "Principe.' What most astounds us in that treatise is the assumption that no man will be bound by laws of honour when utility or the object in view require their sacrifice. tegrity, honesty, probity, or pride, their posiAlthough the Italians were not lacking in intive and highly analytical genius was but little influenced by that chivalrous honour which was an enthusiasm and a religion to the feudal nations, surviving the decay of chivalry as a preservative instinct more unwith the northern gentry was subjective; definable than absolute morality. with the Italians Onore was objective-an addition conferred from without in the shape of reputation, glory, titles of distinction, or offices of trust.' Honour demned to the outer circle of his 'Inferno.' They do wrong, not from any subtlety or force of mind,' like the Italians described by Mr. Symonds, but simply because their principle of honour is utterly inadequate to withstand the immediate seductions of pleasure. Thus Phinehas Finn, on learning from a woman with whom he is in love that she is engaged to another man, says, 'As we are parting, give me one kiss, that I may think of it and treasure it in my memory.' Immediately afterwards he sees little dishonour in making love to another girl, though his intimate friend has confided to him that he is trying to gain her affection, and still less dishonour in asking his former lover to aid him in his suit. Not content with this, and while still in love And to come down to a more ordinary level, we think it is demonstrable that the lapse of a hundred years has made a vast change in the standard of this most spiritual quality. The test of measurement we propose is a comparison of the views on this subject of two popular writers of English fiction. A novelist is never far in advance of the opinions of his readers, and if he has many readers, we may fairly accept his fiction as an adequate representation of the spirit of his times. The two writers we would select for comparison are Fielding and Mr. Trollope. Both of them are representative men. Fielding is a great English classic, and of Mr. Trollope an eminent contemporary has lately said, 'We have little did, in fact, was to press her hand and say, hesitation in asserting that the present gen-Dear Mary, things will get themselves seteration owes a larger debt of gratitude to tled at last, I suppose.' Upon which Mr. him than to any other writer of fiction liv- Trollope naively remarks, He was behaving ing or lately dead.'* Both of them are very ill to her, but he did not mean to bepainters of common life, delighting in the have ill. And indeed society in general is representation of common types of character, and in the treatment of common situations of moral casuistry. with Violet Effingham, on falling in with a third heroine for whom he had felt a boyish affection, he feels that he would like to take her in his arms and kiss her.' All he as lenient in its view of Mr. Finn's charac truly heroic stature, on resigning his post from sentimental considerations, and marrying the lady to whom he had behaved badly without meaning it. ter as the novelist himself; for he appears to be regarded by all the men as a manly But with these superficial resemblances and honourable person; he is loved by the agreement ends. Fielding's casuistry is every woman he meets; he obtains an Unwholesome, open, and intelligible. For in-der-Secretaryship of State; and attains to stance, all of us agree with Allworthy in thinking on the whole better of Jones for the lie by which, at the expense of a severe beating to himself, he kept the gamekeeper whom he had employed from losing his place. His lie was due to a mistaken sense of honour. To whatever depths of degradation Jones on other occasions descended, his fall was the result of passion, not of want of principle: 'Mr. Jones,' says his biographer, had something about him which, though I think writers are not thoroughly agreed in its name, doth certainly inhabit some human breasts; whose use is not so properly to distinguish right from wrong as to promote and incite them to the former and withhold them from the latter;... though he did not always act rightly yet he never did otherwise without feeling and suffering for it.' Very different are the representative heroes of Mr. Trollope, the Eameses, Crosbies, Newtons, and Finus. All of these are the embodiment of the spirit of vacillation, being neither good nor bad, but souls whom Dante would unceremoniously have con Lest it should be supposed we are wronging Mr. Trollope by the selection of a single instance, we quote an apology which he himself makes for another of his shilly-shally' heroes-an apology which we consider as one of the gravest possible symptoms of the growth in society of a diseased self-consciousness: 'What youth in his imagination cannot be as brave and as loving, though as hopeless in his love, as Harry Esmond? Alas! no. one would wish to be as was Ralph Newton But for one Harry Esmond there are fi Ralph Newtons-five hundred and fifty of them; and the very youth whose bosom glows with admiration as he reads of Harry, who exults in the idea that as Harry did so would he have done, lives as Ralph lived, is less noble, less persistent, less of a man than not be taught to see the men and women was even Ralph Newton. Should we among whom we really live-men and women such as are we ourselves--in order that we may know what are the exact failings which oppress ourselves, and thus learn to hate, and |