ART. II.-RECOLLECTIONS AND LETTERS OF SOME VICTORIAN LIBERALS.

I. Recollections. By JOHN VISCOUNT MORLEY, O.M., Hon. Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. (London. Macmillan and Co. Ltd. 1917.)

2. Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton. Edited, with an Introduction, by JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS and REGINALD V. REGINALD V. LAURENCE. Vol. i. (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1917.)

3. Some Hawarden Letters, 1878-1913. Chosen and arranged by LISLE MARCH-PHILLIPPS and BERTRAM CHRISTIAN. (London: Nisbet and Co. Ltd. 1917.)

AT a time like the present, 'patriai tempore iniquo,' it is not easy to divert the mind from its inevitable and troubled preoccupation by the insistent and daily anxieties and sorrows of the War. Yet it is well, now and again, for at least a breathing space, 'to keep the ship away from this smoke and surge,' and, looking back to happier things, to draw, if it may be, from pictures conjured up by memory, some augury of hope, that after these sore trials the human race may again reach an epoch of comparative sunshine and peace.

Such a period, for the peoples of this Empire, was, on the whole, that in which the Victorian world lived and moved and had its being. That world has been much with us of late. Mr. Lytton Strachey, in his Eminent Victorians, has given us four brilliant portrait-sketches of such diverse personalities as Cardinal Manning, Dr. Arnold, Florence Nightingale, and General Gordon. Each of these eminent people touched the Victorian world at widely differing points: their areas of impact differed greatly in

extent, but, within those varying ambits, the influence of each of them was profound. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has recently given us a review in his accustomed stimulating and suggestive fashion of the Victorian Age in Literature. Most recent of all contributors to the discussion and evaluation of the Victorian world, Mr. Asquith, in the Romanes Lecture, delivered before the University of Oxford in the Sheldonian Theatre, on June 8 in the present year, discoursing on the text of Some Aspects of the Victorian Age,' has taken stock of the literary, speculative, and scientific output of the men and women of that era. The spatial and temporal limitations of a lecture precluded him from dealing, save in a few sentences, with their achievements in the domains of History and Art. Mr. Asquith was also forbidden by the conditions of the Romanes foundation to deal with either religion or politics, nor was it within the scheme of either Mr. Strachey or Mr. Chesterton to do so otherwise than incidentally; and it may well be held that we are not sufficiently far removed from the Victorians to view in their true perspective the religious and political issues which engrossed so large a share in their interests; which, moreover, even if themselves spent, have set in motion currents which still gravely affect the tendencies of the present age.

The three books whose names appear at the head of this article are very different in kind, and one of them (it is to be feared it must be said) is in point of matter relatively so trivial, when weighed in the same balance with either of the other two, as almost to kick the beam. The element which they all have in common is this—that they exhibit in varying degrees some of the characteristic traits of what may be called Victorian Liberalism; by which is to be here understood Liberalism, not solely as a political doctrine, but as a principle operating also in other realms of human activity, and held by persons who in many respects differed so widely in their outlook on the world in general that one would be, on the first view, a little surprised to find them, for any purposes, in the same fold.

Lord Morley's two volumes have been placed at the head of the three publications which form the subject of this review, first, because they are more important in bulk than the other two, and secondly, because he lived more in the public eye and in the full current of the Victorian development than either Lord Acton or those whose pens contributed most of the Hawarden Letters. Lord Morley's volumes, it would seem not unreasonable to feel, are to be taken in some measure as an 'Apologia pro saeculo suo,' or at least for that school in thought and politics in which he was nurtured, and to which he has kept a lifelong and untarnished loyalty. Throughout the pages of the Introduction and of the final chapter which he calls 'A Word of Epilogue,' one seems to hear the note of defence of the old politics, of the old philosophy, the note of challenge to, and of misdoubting of, the new age. As he finely says, 'One's first associations must have been ill-chosen, if fidelity to their essence and foundations comes to be overclouded by the falling mists of afternoon.' To the last he upholds the lamp of loyalty to Reason,' and to 'the Saint of Rationalism, my chief Master,' John Stuart Mill, of whom Lord Morley might well have said 'Prima dicte mihi, summa dicende Camena.'

Lord Morley tells us little of his boyhood; some autobiographers tell us too much of theirs. What he does give us is just what we want to know, the elements in his surroundings and atmosphere which may have been formative of his character. Not the least important among them may be conjectured to have been the somewhat strict and exacting though in essence genial and human father, whom destiny intended for a scholar but fortune made a surgeon, 'impatient, as if of some personal affront, of either Puseyites on the one hand or German infidels on the other.' Substitute Tories on the one hand and Socialists on the other, and one can almost imagine his distinguished son being similarly affected. Other influences which assuredly were potent were the Blackburn school which 'abounded in the unadulterated milk of the Independent word' and the general atmosphere of steady industry and iron regularity

which doubtless made a passage into the young Morley's ways and mental habits.

In the few pages devoted to the years spent at Oxford, as a Scholar of Lincoln, the most interesting point perhaps is the appreciative portrait of Cotter Morison, little more possibly than a name to the present generation, and the tribute to the high attainments and character of Thomas Fowler who, aided by the Lancastrian temperament, 'made me Aristotelian and not Platonist.' A curious

lapse of memory allows Lord Morley to refer to our pious Wycliffite founder four centuries ago.' The authoritative history of Lincoln College records that Bishop Fleming founded it with the object of raising up in the Church itself a succession of learned men instructed in the Scriptures and the Fathers such as might counteract what he thought the evil influence of the Lollard doctrines. It is to be feared that the good Bishop had not least in view the possible effect of these doctrines on men's attitude towards the great possessions of the mediaeval Church.

In the chapter entitled 'Spirit of the Time' we have Lord Morley's estimate of the influences to which are to be ascribed the chief characteristics of the Victorian Era, or at least of its Liberal representatives. First and foremost he would place the common readiness in the public mind to explain species and local phenomena alike by general laws at the expense of special providence. A new spirit of negation was abroad with widening doubts, misgivings and flat incredulities. Buckle, Spencer, Darwin, George Eliot were the food of what Lord Acton calls 'a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of beliefs.' To Lord Morley the influence of Rationalism is probably the main inspiration of Victorian Liberalism. Lord Acton would no doubt have preferred to find that inspiration in the unbiassed pursuit of Truth.

Side by side with the Rationalist movement went on the successive religious movements. As Lord Morley puts it:

'Well might students discuss how the epoch about the middle of the nineteenth century resembled in England the epoch of an older world seventeen centuries before. Tide swept

upon tide-Evangelicalism, all the movements of Liberal Theology, Catholic reaction within the Anglican Communion, stay of Ultramontane leanings among English Catholics, the school then so popular in our middle class of High and Dry. Those who are most alive to the great human impulses that reared the Christian fabric will most readily realize the analogy between this age and that which witnessed the introduction of Christianity, as it was put by Leslie Stephen from a point of approach opposed to Arnold's-much empty profession of barren orthodoxy, and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and natural bonds and a blind groping towards some more cosmopolitan creed, and some deeper satisfaction for the emotional needs of mankind.'

With the Rationalist influence there co-operated in the making of the Victorian Liberal the ideas of foreign liberalism reaching him through the media of Mazzini and Victor Hugo; and the great struggle of the American Civil War potently contributed its own effect.

Liberalism in Lord Morley's view is not so much a bundle of dogmas, held in this or that country and epoch, as 'a marked way of looking at things, feeling them, handling them, judging main actors in them, for which, with a hundred kaleidoscopic turns, the accepted name is Liberalism. It is a summary term with many extensive applications: people are not always careful to sort them out, and they are by no means always bound to one another.'

What are the leading characteristics of this Liberalism. in Lord Morley's view?

'Respect for the dignity and worth of the individual is its root. It stands for the subjection to human judgement of all claims of external authority, whether in an organized Church, or in more loosely gathered societies of believers, or in books held sacred. In law-making it does not neglect the higher characteristics of human nature, it attends to them first in executive administration; though judge, gaoler, and perhaps the hangman, will be indispensable, still mercy is accounted a wise supplement to

terror.'

Not that these exhaust the Articles of the Liberal belief: nor is it merely a formalized creed.