to finds food for laughter in the sweetmeats he is wont attachment of a woman of provide. Catherine's lovers, if sixty for a boy of twenty-two we except Potemkin, who was must entertain a truly savage far more than a lover, were of notion of what is farce. When, no more importance to her then, was Catherine comic? than her bootmakers. They When she made a desperate came and went, they carried attempt to appear intellectual? off their bags of roubles, and We think not. That was but as the State profited not by a sorry concession to a pre- their coming, so it lost nothing vailing fashion. The one but roubles by their going. passage of pure comedy in There may have been something Catherine's life was the journey in Catherine's plea, that she to the Crimea, a comedy ex- converted her favourites into quisitely designed and admir- wise and useful officials. Even ably played, in which wit never if the plea be admitted, it is fell into the gulf of vulgarity, a plea not of comedy but and in which scandal was cast of common-sense. It is easy only for a subordinate rôle. But enough to find fault with evidently this is not the kind of the kind of history that is comedy which the new history profitable in the "schools." demands, and we can only sup- Too many treaties, an indispose that we are expected tinguishable mass of superfluous documents, may perchance obscure the motives of the men and women who dominated the past. Yet understanding may make even treaties human, and industry may discover some sort of a synthesis in historical manuscripts. What can never serve any clear purpose is to mistake scandal for biography, and to raise "love-affairs," which, as we have said, are precisely the same for king and peasant, poet and comedian, to the pomp and circumstance of high policy. to hold our sides whenever Catherine chooses a favourite. A sad kind of merriment truly! Lady Wishfort is a tragic figure when she makes an incidental appearance. Who would call that drama a comedy in which Lady Wishfort is never absent from the stage? If this be not tragedy, then "Hamlet" is a farce and "Othello" a knockabout interlude, fit only for the Music Hall. But Mr Gribble is compelled to live up to his reputation 88 an amatory expert, and therefore if he condescends to Catherine the Great, a very poor subject from his point of view, he must think only of her lovers, and of them only as embodiments of the comic spirit. He could not have found a worse excuse for the However, Mr Gribble having accepted the role of comedy, does his best to be fair to his readers. If Catherine is not comic, then he must be comic himself. himself. And so he attempts always to write in a light and flippant manner. For instance, he never mentions Panin with kind. out a reference to his fat. she shared with others of her Page by page the statesman grows fatter and fatter. Here we are told "he that is no not too fat to slip down from the fence and pray on the winning side"; there he is described for our delight as "the fat, plausible, oleaginous intriguer, the Count Fosco, as it were, of the conspiracy," until at last we are sick to death of him and his obesity, which has little more and little less reality than Catherine's lovers. Potemkin fares better at Mr Gribble's hands. An old dressing - gown is the signal of his appearance, and it is donned and doffed so often and so inappositely that at last it is inextricably mixed up in our mind with Panin's oleaginous plausibility. The truth is, Potemkin was a man of genius, in spite of his barbarous eccentricities, and Mr Gribble's method will not let us catch even a passing glimpse of him. To say, as Mr Gribble says, that "he sometimes reminds one of the late Sir Augustus Harris," is merely to prove how false are the impressions which a writer with a bias may receive from a reading of history. He might just as well compare Richelieu with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. And if Potemkin meets with less than justice at the hands of Mr Gribble, what shall we say of that writer's sketch of Catherine? Nothing, save that it omits all that is essential to a fair understanding, and distorts into an absurd importance all the traits which The late Professor Green was wont to inveigh against what he called drum-andtrumpet history. A hundred times worse is this new history of the alcove and the powderpuff. The writers of it enumerate the charms of their heroines and the sentiments of their heroes with an unctuously professional air. They set forth their "points" with the assured manner of judges at a cattle-show. They confuse history and make literature ridiculous. The one excuse for their existence is that they tickle the taste of the illiterate reader, and that excuse hardly be called adequate. In conclusion, we can only marvel at the audacity of their enterprise. It is a strange function, truly, to be an expert in the love-affairs of other people! can The late Victoria Lady Welby, whose death we regret to record, belonged to two worlds, and may be said to have lived two lives. Born in the year of Queen Victoria's accession, she was a part, on the one hand, of what is known as the early Victorian era. Linked to the future by the studies which for many years she pursued, she looked forward with a spirit of confidence to the achievements of science. If her youth was spent in travel, her later years were devoted entirely to patient research. More than this: she had known Courts, and the life of the great world. The wife of a county gentleman, she had profited by an experience which falls to the lot of few metaphysicians. The friend of philosophers, she was an adept in the discussion of abstruse questions, which have small chance of being asked or answered in an atmosphere of quarter-sessions. Her mother, Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, deserves more than a passing memory. A woman of character and enterprise, she travelled far and wide, from Norway to Mexico, from the United States to the Holy Land, at a time when long journeys were neither easy nor fashionable. Whatever countries she visited she looked upon with her own eyes, and judged with her own understanding. Her knowledge of the Southern States of America, for instance, persuaded her, in spite of the prevailing cant, to defend the slave-owners against the false charges of cruelty which were brought against them, and to paint the lot of the slaves in the true colours of happiness, in which British liberalism dared not look upon them. Her independence of spirit and her intellectual honesty she bequeathed to her daughter, who in her girlhood shared the hazard, in those days not inconsiderable, of her mother's wanderings. Miss Stuart - Wortley, indeed, was little more than a child when her mother's sudden death left her isolated and friendless in the Syrian desert, and thus compelled her to begin her own life with an experience in grim contrast to the career of sheltered research which was presently to be hers. After some years spent at Frogmore with the Duchess of Kent, she was appointed Maid of Honour to Queen Victoria. But it is not as a lady of the Court that she will be remembered. For many years before her death she had been a profound student of science. and philosophy. Above all she had devoted herself to the study of Meaning, or Significs as it is called, which she hoped would enable us to revise the many errors which befog our judgment and to understand the problems of philosophy, politics, and literature without the intervention of false symbols. Much work has been done by others in the same field, notably by Professor Bréal. By none have clearer results been achieved than by Lady Welby. That language as it is written and spoken to-day is an imperfect instrument will not be denied even by the sanguine. The precision which is indispensable in the mechanical apparatus of life still seems beyond the attainment of speech. Each man puts upon words his own burden of history and association. Rarely do we meet one who speaks precisely the same language as ourselves. The others may be before us or behind. A hundred prejudices or superstitions separate us from those about us. We hear as in a dream; we look upon the printed page as upon a set of blurred images. The work of the Tower of Babel is not yet undone. And the confusion is greater to-day than ever it was, because new continents of thought, of knowledge, are coming daily into our ken. How shall we fit our faulty speech to the new experience ? As old words, diverted to another purpose, refuse to perform their old office, new words are still to seek which shall help us to pierce the fresh mysteries of science and philosophy. We are bound in the ancient chains, and know not how to shake them off. In other words, as Lady Welby once wrote, "we complain now of the tyranny of language just as we used to complain of the tyranny of slow and inconvenient modes of locomotion. Only then we became discontented, and our discontent issued in concerted and energetic efforts to improve what we had, and that on fresh lines; leaving the horse first for the steam engine, then for the electrical engine. It once seemed that we could never send news quicker than a horse could gallop or a ship sail; next we sent it by steam, and now our telegrams travel in a few moments all over the world, and sometimes arrive before they were sent.' But in language we may say that we are still in the 'horse' stage; just as an army with its cavalry is still in the oarand - sail stage. Why not seriously face the fact that we have only to utilise an undoubtedly growing discontent and apply it to the discovery of more effectual modes of expressing our minds, and that then we shall find general raising of the standard of news-sending?" All that is true. If only we could perfect the instrument of speech, we should put an end to half the controversies of the world; we might change politics from the wasteful thing of rancour and falsehood that now it is, to a series of easy agreements; we might make science and philosophy intelligible to the simple mind; we might, in brief, achieve what now is impossible, without ridding ourselves of the ambiguity which is necessary if we are not to fall at once into a fatal precision of thought and word. It is, indeed, proof of Lady Welby's wise method that she refused to regard definition as a true remedy for defects of expression. She clung to ambiguity, "an inherent characteristic of language." But she made a clear distinction. "The kind of ambiguity which acts as a useful stimulant to intelligence and enriches the field of conjecture, is very different from that which in the intellectual sphere begins and ends in confusion, or in the moral sphere begins in disingenuousness and ends in deliberate and successful imposture. We all alike, in fact, suffer and lose by these; by the endless disputation which the one entails, and the force given by the other to the specious oratory of charlatans.' With this exception made, Lady Welby would have subordinated every other subject "to the study of that sense, of that meaning, and above all of that significance, which makes the whole value of facts or ideas, and of the order and sequences of either." To attain her end, she would have inereased in any and every direction the boundaries of speech. She was ready for drastic changes. "I want Greek," she said, "I want Chaucer, I want Esperanto, or rather its worthier successor, when that shall appear. I want the the Zulu clicks." The list of her wants proves the difficulty of her enterprise. Though we all agree in hoping for the day when language shall become a perfect instrument for exchanging thought, we must all agree also that good counsel is not enough to bring it nearer. A language is not a mechanism; it is something organic, which grows to maturity and fades like the trees and flowers. A new word may be invented by this man or that; its acceptance depends upon something which resembles a natural force more nearly than an act of volition. The proper use of language, again, is an art as well as a science, and, being an art, it can be practised only by highly endowed individuals. Nor is this all: the man who thinks most profoundly is rarely gifted with a clarity of expression, and thus it is that science and philosophy are constantly setting up fresh barriers between them and the general understanding. Moreover, the tendency of VOL. CXCI.NO. MCLIX, language, in spite of new ideas and new mechanical discoveries, has for some three centuries leaned towards attenuation. We are no longer catholic in our use of words, as they were in the Elizabethan age. Our modern sensitiveness rejects slang, and accepts barbarous technicalities. We kill the living plant and cherish the dried specimen of the herbarium. The harm done by Addison and Steele in the wanton simplification of our English tongue still endures. How, then, when we have wantonly set up a false standard, shall we dare to look back to Chaucer or forward to Zulu clicks? And by a customary irony, at the very moment when we begin to understand the importance of clear expression, we are doing our best to banish from our schools the study of Latin and Greek, which was the best preparative ever devised for the writing and understanding of English. The economy of words, the excision of superfluous particles, the close knitting of sentences,these viroues were best attained by the study of what foolishly called the "dead" languages. And now that democracy regards them as a vain sign of superiority, we run the risk of losing the valuable lessons which they taught. The newspapers, moreover, which serve the most of men, compelled to read by Act of Parliament, for literature, display little respect for any language, dead or alive. The few words which they have 3 в are |