RETROSPECT

OF

LITERATURE, ART, AND SCIENCE, IN 1873.

LITERATURE.

THE total number of books, pamphlets, &c., published during 1873, in the United Kingdom, amounted to 4991, nearly two hundred more than the publications of the preceding year. Deducting new editions, and a comparatively small proportion of books imported from America by English publishers, the number of new English books stood at 3463, a figure hitherto unprecedented. Works of fiction formed the most numerous class this year; taking the lead of theology which has usually stood before it, but which in 1873 formed only the second rank. Scientific works showed a rapid and continuous advance. History and biography were also on the increase. December, and then November, were the great publishing months.

We shall here, according to custom, note some of the prominent books which have appeared, giving a fair sample of current opinion on their merits. And we begin our notice with that which may be said to have caused on the whole the most sensation by its intrinsic originality, by the circumstances of its authorship, and by the interest attaching to the recent death of him who was at once its subject and its producer. We refer to the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill," which was given to the world by Miss Helen Taylor, Mr. Mill's step-daughter, late in the autumn, about six months after the philosopher's death at Avignon. The first edition, consisting of 3000 copies, was sold within six days of publication, and a second impression, about as large, was disposed of with scarcely less rapidity.

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The greater part of this remarkable personal portraiture was written in or before 1861, and the "Remainder of My Life," as Mr. Mill pathetically designates the period which followed the death of his wife, in 1870. The book is composed with the thoughtful care and finish of style which have made the writer's works popular notwithstanding the dryness and abstruseness of many of the subjects of which he treated. Probably no scholar or philosopher has left an equally full and faithful history of his education and his intellectual life. The unconscious revelations of character which are often the most valuable parts of an autobiography bear an unusually small proportion to the deliberate narrative, because Mr. Mill's purpose of writing a candid account of his life was made effective by his long practice of psychological observation. Having fully attained the objects for which he was trained in youth, and which he afterwards proposed to himself as the business and duty of his life, Mr. Mill thought, with a self-confidence unmixed with vanity, that his own progress must convey useful instruction to others.

His education, under the superintendence of his father, James Mill, the historian of India, was a gigantic experiment on the formation of mind. He began Greek at three. In his eighth year he had read a number of "Greek authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus, and of Xenophon's 'Cyropædia' and 'Memorials of Socrates;' some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertius; part of Lucian, and Isocrates' 'Ad Dæmonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem.' I also read in 1813 the first six dialogues (in the common arrangement) of Plato, from the Euthyphron' to the 'Theatetus' inclusive; which last dialogue," he adds with characteristic cantion, "I venture to think would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it." In his eighth year he began Latin, and between that and his twelfth year he read an immense quantity both of Latin and Greek. At or soon after twelve he began upon logic and history, and in particular he read his father's History of India," and shortly afterwards went through a course of political economy. At fourteen he went abroad for a year, and learned French, besides acquiring a great love for various French ways of thinking and feeling. At fifteen he read Roman law with Mr. John Austin, and studied Bentham. He also read a certain quantity of metaphysics, Locke, Helvetius, Hartley, and Condillac. In his seventeenth year (1822-3) he formed a little society called the Utilitarian Society, one of the members of which was Mr. Roebuck. In the same year he received an appointment in the India House which made him independent for life. At about nineteen (1824-5) he edited Bentham's "Rationale of Judicial Evidence," and at the same time, or rather earlier, he contributed to various newspapers and reviews. At about twenty he and about a dozen of his friends and contemporaries, of whom Mr. Grote was perhaps the best known, formed a sort of club, which met for the purpose of systematic study at Mr. Grote's house twice a week, for an hour and a half in the mornings. They studied successively in minute detail treatises by Mr. James Mill, Ricardo, Hartley, and certain writers on logic. After that he took a great part for several years in public speaking at debating societies. He was also for a great length of time a contributor to a series of reviews which were intended to be the organs of philosophical Radicalism. From about the year 1830 the events of his life have little interest, and indeed consist mainly of the production and publication of his different books. He retired from the India House when the Company was put an end to in 1858. He sat in Parliament from 1865 to 1868, and he died in 1873 at the age of sixty-seven.

or

In talking of his early precocity, Mr. Mill modestly says that it was all labour, for that he was singularly devoid of genius, or what is called quickness of parts. At a very early age he was reported to be a "made "manufactured" man, and strangers came expecting to be astonished, but without a thought that a warmer or kinder regard was possible. It was only when nature did at last break through the biggest and tightest swaddling clothes ever strapped round human soul that Mr. Mill was discovered to be a lovable and interesting person. Mr. Mill had never been allowed to be a child or a boy but the proper elements of these stages are irrepressible, and in course of time, ever through life, he showed that he had it all in him, though with an irregular development. His father had that estimation of the wisdom of youth as to hold that men under forty might be as justly ex cluded from the franchise as women, on the common ground that both are

adequately represented by men of forty, or over, if that ground be admitted. It was the wisdom of forty that he intended to give his son per saltum without a stop at the intermediate stages. Poetry, it might almost be said, was the one point of repugnancy between the father and the son. There was a felt difference between them. The father was enough under the spell of poetry to know its beguiling and weakening influences, and he knew how to separate the wheat from the chaff. He would make poetry do good work like any other beast.

Shakspeare my father had put into my hands for the sake of the historical plays, from which, however, I went on to the others. My father never was a great admirer of Shakspeare, the English idolatry of which he used to attack with some severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton (for whom he had the highest admiration), Goldsmith, Burns, and Gray's 'Bard,' which he preferred to his Elegy;' perhaps I may add Cowper and Beattie. He had some value for Spenser, and I remember his reading to me (unlike his usual practice of making me read to him) the first book of the Faerie Queene,' but I took little pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly became acquainted with any of it till I was grown up to manhood, except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his recommendation, and was intensely delighted with, as I always was with animated narrative."

At the age of twenty Mill was seized with one of those accesses of despondency which not unfrequently beset ardent and possibly overstrained minds in the course of their career. He says, "I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to, go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. When, however, not more than half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's 'Mémoires,' and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them-supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character and all capacity for happiness are made. . . . Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again enjoyed life."

An extraordinary proof of Mill's susceptibility to emotion was his absorbing devotion to the lady whom he finally married. For more than twenty years all his works were, as he persuaded himself, joint productions; and those thoughts which have contributed most to the success and reputation of his writings emanated, according to his belief, from her genius. He thus refers to her his estimate of Mr. Carlyle :-"I knew that I could not see round him, and could never be certain that I saw over him, and I never presumed to judge him with any definiteness, until he was interpreted to me by one greatly the superior of us both, who was more of a poet than he, and more of a thinker than I, whose own mind and nature included his, and infinitely

more." That a lady who never wrote anything, and who, except by a passionate lover, was not known ever to have thought or said anything worth recording, was far superior in extent and degree of power to a man whose lofty genius has been proved by writings of the highest order, is a paradox not to be accepted on the authority of a blind admirer. It may be believed that Mr. Mill is justified in tracing to the influence of his wife the change or deterioration of his economic doctrines by the admixture of socialism in his later writings. The encroachment of feeling and philanthropy on science would be a natural result of feminine influence. In other respects the supposed share of Mrs. Mill in the productions of her husband was probably the result of his wishes and his fancy.

The weakest part of Mr. Mill's career is the part in which he tried to apply his theories to human life. From the age of sixteen he was eager to reform the world, but he never at any time had much of a standard to reform it by. Benthamism, however admirable as affording an answer to problems capable of clear and systematic solution, fails where the mixed conditions of human nature are in question, and the ultimate sanction of morals was a point on which Mr. Mill could never express himself without ambiguity. His uttered opinion would seem to have been that the actual world was very contemptible, and that all its arrangements ought to be broken down; but that, somehow or other, quite a different and a very much better world, of which he had no distinct notion at all, so far as can be gathered from his books, lay behind it. His career would have been more consistent and imposing if he had narrowed it a good deal, especially in his later life; but in that case it would not have been his. His true self would seem to have been most fully displayed in his later works and in his parliamentary career, his account of which has a great deal of quiet vanity in it.

The public have read with avidity the record of another great writer and thinker, whose name stands in natural connexion with that of Mill. The "Personal Life of George Grote" is told by Mrs. Grote in accordance with an intention of which she herself informed her husband in his lifetime. One morning, she tells us, she was arranging some old letters and journals when enter Mr. Grote. "What are you so busy over there, H.?' inquired he. ‘Well, I am arranging some materials for a sketch of your Life, which I have been urgently invited to write by several of our best friends.' My Life!' exclaimed Mr. Grote, 'why, there is absolutely nothing to tell.' 'Not in the way of adventures, I grant; but there is something, nevertheless: -your life is the history of a mind.' 'That is it!' he rejoined, with animation. But can you tell it?' 'It is what I intend to try. You see, unless I give some account of your youth and early manhood, no other hand can furnish the least information concerning it.' 'Nothing can be more certain -you are the only person living who knows anything about me during the first half of my existence.' This short colloquy ended, the subject was never renewed between us; the historian feeling, as I believe, content to leave his life's story in my hands."

Grote had none of the proud confidence with which many authors, predestined to eminence, have fearlessly confronted the judgment of contemporaries, or, like Milton, silently anticipated the verdict of posterity. Early in 1845, when he had got two octavo volumes ready for the press, he said to his wife, "I suppose I shall have to print my history at my own expense; for, you see,

having little or no literary reputation as yet, no bookseller will like to face the risk of it." Protesting that he held himself much too cheap, she proposed that they should begin by inquiring among their learned acquaintances who were the booksellers in repute. The entire arrangements being left to her, she finally resolved on giving the refusal to Mr. Murray, and on her "reporting progress" after an interview with that gentleman, Grote observed, "I only hope the poor man will not be a loser by me, and then I shall be content, come what may."

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The first two volumes were published in March, 1846, and the author is described as unusually agitated and curious as to the result." His agitation was soon over, so far as it arose from apprehension or uncertainty. Compliments and congratulations poured in from all sides, and the general feeling was expressed by Hallam when, drawing Mrs. Grote aside, he said to her, "I have been familiar with the literary world for a very long period, and I can safely say that I never knew a book take so rapid a flight to the highest summits of fame as George's new History of Greece." Mrs. Grote gave all the help she could to her husband's labours. Besides helping to correct the proofs, she was "a diligent and conscientious critic, often suggesting changes, and sometimes excisions, in the text of the work."

"The author usually manifested respect for my remarks, and eventually came to regard my humble assistance as indispensable. I well remember exclaiming to him one day, when going through his account of the 'Weeks and Days,' Now, really, George, are you obliged to publish all this absurd and incredible stuff?' 'Certainly, my love; an historian is bound to produce the materials upon which he builds, be they never so fantastic, absurd, or incredible.'"

The third and fourth volumes appeared in April, 1847; the fifth and sixth in December, 1848; the seventh and eighth in March, 1850; the ninth and tenth in February, 1852; the eleventh in April, 1853; and the twelfth and concluding one in March, 1856. The last proof of the last sheet was returned to the printer on the 23rd of December, 1855. Mrs. Grote memorialized the finale. "I remember that I had a bowl of punch brewed at Christmas for our little household at 'History Hut,' in celebration of the 'opus magnum ;' Grote himself sipping the delicious mixture with great satisfaction while manifesting little emotion outwardly, though I could detect unmixed signs of inward complacency as I descanted upon the happiness of our living to see this day,' and so forth."

The progress of the work was for a time interrupted by Grote's entrance into political life, as member for the City of London in the first Reformed Parliament. He had previously become conspicuous in the small party then called the Philosophical Radicals, including Sir W. Molesworth, Mr. Roebuck, and Mr. Charles Buller. He took an active part in all the proceedings of the extreme Liberals, and introduced in several sessions Bills for the establishment of Vote by Ballot; but the country was averse to further organic changes; and the progress of natural reaction reduced the handful of ultra-reformers to a powerless condition. It was without regret on his own part, and perhaps without loss to the country, that Mr. Grote retired from Parliament in 1841, to devote the rest of his life to the composition of his History and of his treatises on Greek philosophy. Thirty years later, when his early opinions were adopted by Mr. Gladstone's Government, his enthusiasm for the Ballot