appear at first sight. An age of decorous platitudes, whose truest prophet is the satirist, and which reserves its hero-worship for the man best accredited by success, is not, on the very face of it, one that can create a literature of lofty idealism. It may look at its own surroundings, from above or below, like a squirrel turning in its cage, and may so regard them as objects to be trampled on or clung to; but it has no external standingpoint from which it can gaze forth upon heaven and earth. The philosophy of shams is the decent apology for faith in the unheroic. It would be curious to trace the gradual steps by which literature has declined from tragedy and the epic, upon the vaudeville and the lyrical romance. We can only notice here that in the last thirty years,-and it would be easy to go back further still,-in spite of one or two partial but splendid exceptions, such as Scott and Miss Brontë, the novel of home-life has gradually become the accredited type of romance; domestic virtues have been the staple of interest; and the decalogue of creative art is summed up in the commands, to be genteel, and marry at the end of the third volume. There is much to be said for this phase of triviality. As novels in England are written especially for ladies, their writers are never tempted to deviate into immoral descriptions, and are commonly very respectable. It is a great thing to be provided inexpensively with "the pleasure of despising one's inferiors," which a late dignitary of the church is said to have classed on a level with the joys of heaven; and any reader who is conscious of unimpeachable h's and decent orthography may read Thackeray, Trollope, and half a hundred others, and thank Heaven that he is not as other men are-in the pages of romance. The weak side of the school is exposed in such a book as Salem Chapel, not because it is not a consummate work of art, but because its author is more fearless than most in her portraitures. She has pushed the theory to its climax of logical absurdity. Her women in Mr. Thackeray's hands would be as dull as Amelia or Laura Pendennis, and we should pass them quietly by as failures. Salem Chapel we are riveted by the artist's skill, and see the meanness of the type all the better, because of the keen scalpel which has dissected it. The obvious answer is, that the actual has its peculiar charm and claims to be eternalised precisely because it is the actual. Herein lies, we believe, the essential fallacy. That there is in every life, however trivial, a latent something which might have been great; and that every nature, however dull, may be lighted up with a casual gleam of beauty, is happily so true as to be beyond dispute. But the artist's concern is like Mary's, with the spiritual guest, not like Martha's, with the platters and household serving. It is at his

In

peril if he bring the tables of the money-changers and voices of the street into the House Beautiful.

Our censure may seem exaggerated. We are not pleading, however, against miniature sketches of grotesque life, but against their absolute substitution for ideal art. We incline

to believe that there is a craving in the mind for something beyond meals, dress, and small-talk, which demands satisfaction, as imperiously in its way as the lower appetites. Nay more, the monotony of common things, after a point easily reached, becomes unnatural. "Il n'y a que l'imprévu qui ne m'étonne jamais," was the saying of one who knew life well; and it holds true of virtues and vices as much at least as of events. The sensation novel itself is proof of it. The description of average men and women, who can neither think, or do, or love more than their neighbours, palls after a time upon the reader; and his jaded attention demands to be excited by stimulants. There is a column in every newspaper which suggests the expedient. Transplant the vulgar vice of our policecourts into the upper classes of society; give it the reserve and complexity of cultivated natures, and arm the innocence that it threatens with the cunning and resource of a Bow-street detective; and we have at once the modern counterpart of the Æschylean drama,—the good man suffering and triumphant. It is curious to think what a picture of modern society will go down to the future antiquarian, if he estimates the importance of books by their circulation. In one of those novels which have been the delight of a season, the heroine's penchant is for murder and forgery: in another, the graceful charming squire's lady is a bigamist, an assassin, and an incendiary, with the taint of madness in her blood; in a third, we are let off more gently with a stolen register, a false wife palmed on the world, and the real one shut up in a madhouse under the orders of an Austrian spy; in a fourth, a good woman, who has committed adultery because she loves her husband, comes back to educate her children under the eyes of that husband and of her old rival, his second wife. It is characteristic enough that the apostle of the Dutch school, Mr. Thackeray, gave the hints which have been so fruitful of result. His wife with two husbands, a baronet and a convict, preceded the present fashion by some years. But Mr. Thackeray's novels are studied for the English and the irony, not for the plot. He might throw a piece from Astley's into the appropriate novel form, and would still fascinate readers. With the author of Salem Chapel it is different. Her power of character-sketching is so perfect up to a certain level, that she might almost have written the under-plot for a Shakespearian drama. Dogberry and Verges would have come out under her

hands a little less simple in effect, but yet exquisitely felt and rendered. Her weakness-and she seems conscious of it-is, that her sympathy is less appreciative than her satire. She has learned to disbelieve in all singleness of motive and grandeur of life, and the feeling comes out painfully in all she writes. In default of this, she tries to crowd her pages with startling incident. She can believe in great crime and extravagant folly, if she distrusts absolute virtue. All this appears to us to be full of evil augury for her future success. She cannot write up to her own mark without conviction, and she cannot have appropriate figures with a dash of moral excellence sketched-in for her. by an artist of the ideal. Her rare talent, to which we willingly do homage, will be crippled by the one-sidedness of her perceptions. Not even Tozer and Mrs. Vincent could save a second work from the judgment, which is rather deferred than doubtful, over the first. Voltaire once said that the heart of man would never endure a religion visibly below its moral instincts. We may say with at least equal certainty, that society will never definitely accept an art below its own average of excellence. Sint ut sunt, aut non sint-the Realist's canon-applies surely to the degrading as much as to the fanciful estimate of character.

ART. V.-STANLEY'S LECTURES.

Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. Part I. Abraham to Samuel. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. London: Murray. 1863.

"IN the marvellously tesselated workmanship," says the author of the eloquent and instructive volume now before us, "which" the historical books of the Old Testament "present,-in the careful interweaving of ancient documents into a later narrative, in the editing and reëditing of passages, where the introduction of a more modern name or word betrays the touch of the more recent historian,-we trace a research which may well have occupied many a vacant hour in the prophetic schools of Bethel or Jerusalem, and at the same time a freedom of adaptation, of alteration, of inquiry, which places the authors or editors of these original writings on a level far above that of mere chroniclers or copyists. Such a union of research and freedom gives us, on the one hand, a view of the office of an

inspired or prophetic historian, quite different from that which would degrade him into the lifeless and passive instrument of a power which effaced his individual energy and reflection; and, on the other hand, presents us with something like the model at which an historical student might well aspire, even in our more modern age. And if, from the handiwork and composition of these writings, we reach to their substance, we find traces of the same spirit, which will appear more closely as we speak of the prophetical office in its two larger aspects. By comparing the treatment of the history of Israel or Judah, in the four prophetical books of Samuel and of Kings, with the treatment of the same subject in the books of Chronicles, we are at once enabled to form some notion of the true characteristics of the prophetic office as distinguished from that of the mere chronicler or Levite."*

In these words Dr. Stanley has not only given us the true point of view for estimating his own work, but has at the same time disclosed to us the rationale of all historical composition. The chronicle is not, and cannot be, history in its highest sense. As the eye cannot see the objects which are in immediate contact with it, so even the acutest observer can have no adequate appreciation of the true bearing and real significance of events of which he is the contemporary. He records impressions without the power of interpreting them. He may be a photographer, but he cannot be an artist. Old legends, popular poetry, local chronicles, diaries, correspondence, every notice, however insignificant, which reflects the belief and feeling of the time, all these are invaluable as materials for history,what the French comprehensively designate "mémoires pour servir à l'histoire," but are not history itself. The mind must be at some distance from a period to comprehend it; and the greater the distance, provided the records remain, the more perfect will be its judgment. There is no shallower prejudice than the contempt sometimes expressed for history by 'calling it an old almanac, which has told us all it can, and may be cast aside. The fact is, the teachings of history are inexhaustible. God speaks to us directly, in the living contact of mind with mind, not only in our own thoughts and aspirations, but on a still grander scale, and with a more emphatic voice, in history, -which is their permanent outward realisation. It is the continuous evolution of his mind and will; the oracle, never dumb, through which He utters his eternal purpose in the ear of each succeeding age,-an everlasting witness of the mysterious union between the human and the divine. Going down into the Infinite, its moral depths are not to be fathomed; but the more

• Jewish Church, p. 445.

they are explored again and again, by the aids of an exacter criticism and the established principles of a truer philosophy, the richer must be the results which they will continually yield. Philosophy, taking its stand on the highest point of an advancing civilisation, claims the whole of the past as its vast domain of thought; and if history would be an unmeaning chaos, without the interpreting voice of philosophy, philosophy, it may be observed, invariably loses itself, and begins to dote, the moment it relinquishes its footing in history. It is surely a consideration of no little weight, that the inspirations, which make all the difference between Heathenism and Christianity, are brought to us by the witness of history.

If it be a true definition of history, that it is a construction of the traditions of the Past, from the view of the Present, -two questions, it is obvious, will have to be considered before we can form an opinion of the value and true character of any historical work: first, What is the nature of the original materials on which it is based? and secondly, What has been the animating idea of the historian in interpreting and combining them? This distinction could of course never have been entirely absent from the mind of a thoughtful critic. Men must always have perceived that different historians took a different view of the same events, and wrote of them with their peculiar party bias; and that their title to credibility must depend on their having made a faithful and intelligent use of the sources from which they drew their accounts. But neither of these considerations has, till quite recently, been allowed its full weight. Modern writers have been too much disposed to imagine an ancient historian in the same intellectual position with themselves; to presuppose him under the influence of the same ideas; with all his materials laid before him in the same positive and authentic form; testing and comparing them with the critical eye of a Grote or a Ranke. They have confounded an author in his study, surrounded by books and papers, with the wanderer after legendary lore from city to city, and the collector of myths and oracles at widely-scattered sanctuaries,the λογοποιοί and χρησμολόγοι of the early dawn of civilisation. Niebuhr, following up with more fertile genius and a profounder erudition the tracks already opened by Heyne and Herder, and perhaps still earlier by Vico,-was the first to bring out broadly and clearly the wide difference frequently existing between the real meaning of the primitive materials of history, and the interpretation subsequently put on them; the first also to illustrate extensively the obscurities of ancient usage and speech, by those broad parallelisms in the underlying thought of all periods of human culture, which are so remark