justice to Christians, and would not receive their evidence. The punishments inflicted under Turkish or Chinese law are very cruel and abhorrent to us. But the Native Civil Servant who is a judge will administer the same laws by the same methods as the European Civil Servant who is a judge.

As for the prophesies of the flight of capital and the ruin of trade, they date from the Black Act, and have been falsified too often to impress the mind much, even when repeated by Lord Salisbury.

Then shall we abandon the noble principles of government which have animated our statesmen for more than half a century? I am only too well aware of the recrudescence of the doctrine of force, and the doctrine that mankind are mostly fools who require the strong and wise Ruler to break their heads if they do not conduct themselves as he thinks proper. I am aware what charm such doctrines have for those who are pleased to identify themselves with the strong and wise Ruler, and their weaker neighbours with the fools. We have seen lately, with reference to our invasion of Afghanistan, the naked assertion of principles over which even Napoleon Buonaparte, while he acted on them, thought it best to throw a decent veil of fine sentiment-that there is one moral law for men acting in their private affairs, and another for the same men acting in their national affairs. Never since the days of the Melian Conference has it been more boldly asserted that in dealing with their neighbours nations have only their own interests to consider. And now we are told-not by Lord Salisbury I am glad to say—as a weighty argument against Lord Ripon's measure, that we hold India by conquest, and that if do not govern in the spirit of conquerors, and by open straightforward assertions of our superiority, we are shifting the foundations on which our government rests. I cannot discuss these matters at the end of a paper already too long. I will only say that I consider such principles of government to be shallow, short-sighted, and dangerous, and I for one disclaim them as earnestly, though I cannot do so as eloquently, as Macaulay disclaimed them in 1833 and in 1853.

What may be the progress and outcome of our rule in India, no man is wise enough to foresee. Its origin and history are without precedent, and so must be its end. But we may feel confidence that we are acting most wisely when we advance towards the highest ideal by the most cautious and well-considered steps. That appears to me to have been, in the main, the animating principle of our Government for at least half a century, and there is no reason to believe that the present Government are departing from it now.

ARTHUR HOBHOUSE.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

THE

HE normal Englishman certainly is not a philosophical animal. Metaphysics in his conception mean nonsense, and theory castles in the air. Even in practical matters compromise is his compass, and the assertion of a great principle apt to excite his suspicion. Nor has he any cause to be ashamed of this negative feature of his otherwise sufficiently positive character. The people that produced Shakespeare and Lord Bacon, and all that those two names imply in modern art and science, need not be ashamed of any deficiency in the complete circle of human perfections. It is not given to any race to be great all round. The Romans conquered the Greeks and all the world in one direction, but the Greeks conquered the Romans and all the world in another. Even in individuals, where Nature is free to put forth her greatest strength, many sidedness does not mean allsidedness. The wonderful combination in the great German poetthinker of poetical sensibility, scientific acuteness, speculative depth, practical sagacity, and knowledge of affairs, is justly admired; but even Goethe ignored mathematics, and turned his back on the French Revolution and modern Liberalism in all its shapes, as decidedly as Plato did on Athenian democracy, and all that the word democracy implies in the history of human civilization. But whatever divine and generally incompatible excellencies may be heaped on a few individuals, the masses of men, growing up into nations, are always moulded after a more or less one-sided type. In this region the maxim of Spinoza applies with unqualified force-omnis affirmatio est negatio. The affirmation of one tendency in any associated body of men implies the negative of its opposite; and so a people predominantly practical and political, like the ancient Romans and the modern English, will not shine in speculation. Curiously, the Germans owed the great glory

which they have gained as the leaders of speculative thought in Europe to their having been shut out, till quite recently, from the sphere of political action, which to nine-tenths of the English people exhausts the greater part of their intellectual functions and their social energy. What is the philosophy of the British people, or rather what voice of philosophy among the British people, makes itself most audible at the present moment? Likely enough the noise which is made by the flapping of the bird's wings is not exactly a measure of the significance or the potency of its flight; but no doubt the kind of philosophy, or would-be philosophy, that one most frequently encounters in the current speculation of the hour, is of an extremely one-sided and inadequate character-what we may most fitly characterize as Baconism run mad, or Baconism divergent from its proper sphere, and rushing with an extravagant sweep into a region with which it has nothing to do. The Baconian philosophy, however catholic its conception might have been in the mind of its author, has acted in this country mainly as a corrective to the evil habit inherited from the Greeks of explaining physical phenomena by constructive theories, rather than by accurate observation and careful induction; and the action of this corrective has been so drastic and its results so brilliant, and, in not a few directions, so useful to society, that men have allowed themselves to be run away with by this word induction, as if it were the one talisman by which any reliable truth of great human value could be attained. And not only induction in the widest sense of the word, but the special kind of induction that is active in physical science-viz., induction ab extra, or by fingering, weighing, and measuring of ponderable materials or measurable forces-has been allowed to usurp the province that in the nature of things belongs to deduction; while that which lies at the root both of induction and deduction—viz., mind or λóyoç, eternal, self-existent, self-energizing, self-plastic reason, recognized alike by the wise Greeks and the inspired Hebrews-has been disregarded and altogether thrown aside. It is in the domain of morals and æsthetics that the inadequacy and absurdity of the inductive method comes most prominently into view. Not from any fingering induction of external details, but from "the inspiration of the Almighty," cometh all true understanding in matters of religion, morals, and beauty. All moral apostleship and all high art come directly from above and from within, and their laws are not to be proved by an external collection of facts, but by the emphatic assertion of the divine vitality from which they proceed.

These remarks apply to Great Britain generally, England as well as Scotland, but there is a specialty in regard to this latter country which, in a general estimate of British æsthetical philosophy, cannot be omitted. Scotland, as is well known, had its school of philo

sophy, illustrated by the names of Reid and Stewart, Hume and Hamilton, not indeed standing in the van of modern speculative thought, like the army of great thinkers, represented by Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel; but still of sufficient significance to warrant the hope of a reasonable philosophy of the fine arts to have been promulgated there. But, however satisfactory it may be to think that the large and capacious intellect of Sir W. Hamilton, in a quiet way, protested against the shallow aesthetics so long fashionable in his native city,* it is none the less true that the Scotch philosophy, in its general action, has tended rather to degrade than to elevate the theory of the fine arts as an independent domain of speculative inquiry. The fact is, the Scotch are, of all modern peoples who have obtained any fame in poetry, perhaps the most unaesthetical; they have produced some writers of first-class excellence, and in these latter days landscape painters not unworthy of the picturesque country which gave them birth; but, taking the people overhead, there can be no doubt that a certain prosaic practicality and hard realism give the dominant tone to their character; and whatever of the beautiful in art, or the tasteful in decoration, may now be visible amongst them, always excepting their lyric poetry and their landscape painting, is imported and artificial, not the natural growth of the soil. In one department-architecture-in which notable improvement has recently been made, the Scotch stood below even the lowest standard that ever prevailed in England. The beauty of church architecture in England, even during the supremacy of pseudo-classicality, kept alive amongst the people a genuine native taste for the graces of stone-work; but in Scotland ecclesiastical architecture existed only in a few elegant minds, used as an occasional stimulant to a sentimental verse, but not as a living fount of healthy action. We must consider also that the extreme form of Protestantism, which struck such deep root in the Scottish soil, is in its nature, if not doctrinally antagonistic, practically averse to any acknowledgment of the divine right of the beautiful. The majority

of Scotsmen even at the present hour, we apprehend, would object to paintings in the churches, for the same reason that they object to instrumental music-viz., because both sacred pictures and instrumental music are largely patronized by the Pope. Not to mention a certain ethical hardness which long-continued religious persecutions under the Stuarts worked into the bones of the nation, the theology of Calvin impressed on the piety of the people the type of stern volition rather than of elevated enjoyment. The religion of the Scot at its best rejoiced in producing strength of character, exhibited in an earnest life, rather than in the appreciation of the beautiful in Nature issuing in works of art. To the Scotch Calvinist

* See the evidence in the Preface to my book on Beauty. Elinburgh, 1858. VOL. XLIII.

3 I

nature has no sacredness, art no divinity, and this not only among vulgar religionists, but to a great extent among the best educated classes. The proof of this lies in the once largely current association theory of beauty, which had its birth in the first decade of the present century under Alison, an Episcopal clergyman, the father of the historian, and Jeffrey, a clever barrister and reviewer, in the metropolis of the north, and which, even now, may be found haunting the back chambers of the brain of some old Edinburgh Whigs, who take their notions on æsthetical subjects from the old edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica."*

This theory was merely a revival, under the depressing influences of the last half century, of the sceptical doctrine taught by the Greek sophists in the fifth century B.C., to the effect that rò kaλóv in art, as in morals, was merely a matter of individual feeling, local convention, or arbitrary fashion; a doctrine which, as everyone knows, was effectively opposed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and all the great leaders of Hellenic thought. Looked at as a contribution to mental philosophy, it is one of the most transparent sophisms that ever sprung out of a shallow soil, and waved its crop of twinkling leaflets for an hour and a day in the sun of ignorant applause. The function of association in the domain of poetry and the arts is obvious enough. Associations of every kind, some necessary, some accidental, some noble and elevating, some low and degrading, cling to words as naturally as the snow clings to the roof when it is drifted by the blast; and it is part of the art, or, as we should prefer to say, of the cultivated and trained inspiration of the poet, so to handle his words, as constantly to select those which are most rich in noble associations, and to avoid those which cannot be used without calling up a coarse, trite, vulgar, or too heinous adjunct. And here we see at a glance how it is that men of great talent and undoubted genius sometimes fail in making the desired impression on their audience; they are destitute of the fine perception of the humorous which teaches a man in his serious addresses to steer clear of images and expressions which, being deeply seated in the popular ear, are ever at hand to jump up and turn the sublime into the ridiculous. In actual life, association -often plays the very pleasant and profitable part of making ugly things appear less ugly, or even, if the associating force be very -strong, quite beautiful. A very plain cottage, for instance, with not a single architectural feature to raise it from the category of mere masonry, if pleasantly situated, under the shade of graceful leafage, and with roses or wild creepers decorating its porch, especially if it has been the scene of bright youthful memories, may appear beautiful

*In the old edition of this great work, under the article "Beauty," seven distinct reasons for the pleasing effect of Greek architecture are given, of which symmetry is not

one !