suppress as well as to degrade him, that it would be difficult even to
make out from his pages who and what the once divine Tully was. Much of
Dr. Mommsen's dashing criticism on Cicero's writings appears just,
though we might trust the critic more if we did not find him in the next
page evading the unwelcome duty of criticising Caesar's "Bellum Civile,"
under cover of some sentimental remarks about the difference between
hope and fulfilment in a great soul. Cicero was no philosopher, in the
highest sense of the term; yet it is not certain that he did not do some
service to humanity by promulgating, in eloquent language, a pretty high
and liberal morality, which both modified monkish ethics, and, when
monkish ethics fell, and brought down Christian ethics in their fall,
did something to supply the void. The Orations, even the great
Philippic, I must confess I could never enjoy. But all orations, read
long after their delivery, are like spent missiles, wingless and cold:
they retain the deformities of passion, without the fire. A speech
embodying great principles may live with the principles which it
embodies; otherwise happy are the orators whose speeches are lost. The
Letters it is not so easy to give up, especially when we consider of how
many graceful and pleasant compositions of the same kind, of how many
self-revelations, which have brought the hearts of men nearer to each
other, those letters have been the model. That, however, which pleases
most in Cicero is that he is, for his age, a thoroughly and pre-
eminently civilized man. He hates gladiatorial shows; he despises even
the tasteless pageantry of the Roman theatre; he heartily loves books;
he is saving up all his earnings to buy a coveted library for his old
age; he has a real enthusiasm for great writers; he breaks through
national pride, and feels sincerely grateful to the Greeks as the
authors; of civilization, rogues though he knew them to be in his time;
he mourns, albeit with an apology, over the death of a slave; his slaves
evidently are attached to him, and are faithful to him at the last; he
writes to his favourite freedman with all the warmth of equal
friendship. In his writings--in the "De Legibus," for instance--you
will find principles of humanity far more comprehensive than those by
which the policy of the empire was moulded. His tastes were pure and
refined, and though he multiplied his villas, and decorated them with
cost and elegance, it is certain that he was perfectly free alike from
the prodigal ostentation and from the debauchery of the time indeed his
vast intellectual industry implies a temperate life. For the game-
preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike
and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, though obscure, episode of
his divorce from his wife Terentia, he was evidently a man of strong
family affections, the natural adjuncts of moral purity; he is
inconsolable for the death of his daughter, spends days in melancholy
wandering in the woods, and finds consolation only in erecting a temple
to the beloved shade. His faults of character, both in private and
public, are glaring, and the only thing to be said in excuse of his
vanity is that it is so frank, and says plainly, "Puff me," not "Puff me
not." As a political adventurer of the higher class, pushing his way
under an aristocratic government by his talents and his training,
received in course of time into the ranks of the aristocracy, yet never
one of them, he will bear comparison with Burke. He resembles Burke,
too, in his religious constitutionalism and reverence for the wisdom of
political ancestors and perhaps his hope of creating a party at once
conservative and reforming, by a combination of the moneyed interest
with the aristocracy, was not much more chimerical than Burke's hope of
creating a party at once conservative and reforming out of the materials
of Whiggism. Each of the two men affected a balanced, and in the literal
sense, a trimming policy, as opposed to one of abstract principle,
Burke, perhaps, from temperament, Cicero from necessity. Impeachments at
Rome in Cicero's time were no doubt the regular stepping-stones of
rising politicians; nevertheless, the accuser of Verres may fairly be
credited with some, at least, of the genuine sentiment which impelled
the accuser of Warren Hastings. We must couple with the Verrines the
admirable letter of the orator to his brother Quintus on the government
of a province, and his own provincial administration, which, as was said
before, appears to have been excellent. Cicero rose, not as an adherent
of the aristocracy, but as their opponent, and the assailant, a bold
assailant, of the tyranny of Sulla. He was brought to the front in
politics, as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and
social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy
was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not
the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is
ridiculously overpraised by himself. Not only so, but he begs a friend
in plain terms to write a history of it and to exaggerate. Now, it is
denounced as brutal tyranny and judicial murder. But those who hold this
language have new lights on the subject of Catiline. I confess that on
me these new lights have not dawned; I still believe Catiline to have
been a terrible anarchist, coming forth from the abyss of debauchery,
ruin, and despair, which lay beneath: the great fortunes of Rome. The
land of Caesar Borgia has produced such men in more than one period of
history. The alleged illegality of the execution was made the stalking-
horse of a party move, and scrupulous legality found a champion and an
avenger in Clodius. On his return from exile, Cicero was received with
the greatest enthusiasm by the whole population of Italy, a fact which
Dr. Mommsen is inclined to explain away, but which we should, perhaps,
accept as the key to some other facts in Cicero's history. The Italians
were probably the most respectable of the political elements, and it
seems they not only looked up to their fellow-provincial with pride,
but saw in him a statesman who was saving their homesteads from a reign
of terror. That Cicero had the general support of the Italians was quite
enough to make his adherence an object of serious consideration to
Caesar, though Dr. Mommsen persists in interpolating into the relations
of the two men the contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar
must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to
think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can
a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of
antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician?
Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the
same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science;
but rhetoric was, at all events, an improvement on mere force. The
situation at Rome had now become essentially military; and Cicero having
no military force at his command could not really control the situation.
His attempts to control it exposed him to all the miscarriages and all
the indignities which such an attempt is sure to entail. He was a vessel
of earthenware, or rather of very fragile porcelain, swimming among
vessels of brass. Self-respect would perhaps have prescribed
retirement from public life; but, to say nothing of his egotism, he had
done too much to retire. Egotistical he was in the highest degree, and
that failing made all his humiliations doubly ignominious; but still, I
think, if you judge him candidly, you wilt see that he really loved his
country, and that his greatest object of desire was, as he himself says,
to live in the grateful memory of after-times; not the highest of all
aims, but higher than that of the political adventurer. When the civil
war came, his perplexity was painful, and he betrayed it with his usual
want of reticence. In that, as in other respects, his character is the
direct opposite of that of the "gloomy sporting man," whose ways Louis
Napoleon, it is said, avowed that he had studied during his exile in
England, and followed with profit as a conspirator in France. Cicero and
Cato knew too well that Pompey had "licked the sword of Sulla;" but they
knew also, by long experience of his political character, that he shrank
from doing the last violence to the constitution. On the other hand, all
men expected that Caesar, who had formerly given himself out as the
political heir of Marius, who had restored the trophies of Marius, and
had undertaken the conquest of Gaul, evidently as a continuation of the
victories of Marius, descending upon Italy with an army partly
consisting of barbarians and trained in the most ferocious warfare,
would renew the Marian reign of terror. This fear put all Italy at first
on Pompey's side. Caesar had not yet revealed his nobler and more
glorious self. Even Curio told Cicero, in an interview, the object of
which was to draw Cicero to the Caesarian side, that Caesar's clemency was
merely policy, not in his nature. The best security against the bloody
excesses of a victorious party at that moment, undoubtedly, was the
presence of Marcus Cato in the camp of Pompey. After Pharsalus, Cicero
submitted like many men of sterner mould. This departure of the advocate
from the Pompeian camp is surrounded by Dr. Mommsen with circumstances
of ridicule, for which, on reference to what I suppose to be the
authorities, I can find no historical foundation. The fiercer Pompeians
very nearly killed him for refusing to stay and command them; his life
was in fact only saved by the intrepid moderation of Cato; and this is
surely not a proof that they deemed his presence worthless. Once more,
orators were not ridiculous in the eyes of antiquity. Cicero accepted,
and, in a certain sense, served under the dictatorate of Caesar; though
he afterwards rejoiced when it was overthrown, and the constitution, the
idol of his political worship, was restored; just as we may suppose a
French constitutionalist, not of stern mould, yet not dishonest,
accepting and serving under the empire, yet rejoicing at the restoration
of constitutional government. In the interval, between the death of
Caesar and Philippi, he was really the soul and the main support of the
Restoration. I have said what I think of the Philippics; but there can
be no doubt that they told, or that Brutus and Cassius thought them,
worth at least a legion.
Cicero met death with a physical courage, which there is no reason to
believe that he wanted in life. His cowardice was political; his fears
were for his position and reputation. If Cato survived in the tradition
of public virtue, so did Cicero in the tradition of culture, which saved
the empire of the Caesars from being an empire of Moguls. The culture of
a republic saved Caesar himself from being a mere Timur, and set him
after his victory to reforming calendars and endowing science, instead
of making pyramids of heads. Is it absurd to suppose that the great
soldier, who was also a great man of letters, had more respect for
intellect without military force than his literary admirers, and that he
really wished to adorn his monarchy by allying to it the leading man of
intellect of the time?
Our accounts of Marcus Brutus are not very clear. Appian confounds
Marcus with Decimus; and it appears not unlikely that "Et tu Brute," if
it was said at all, was said to Decimus, who was a special favourite of
Caesar, and was named in his will. Marcus seems to have been a man of
worth after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced
in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an
oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the
proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite
compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that
Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of
lending money to provincials at exorbitant interest, and abusing the
power of the Imperial Governments to exact the debt. One can imagine a
West Indian slave-owner, dealing with negroes through his agent
according to the established custom, and yet being a good citizen in
England.
Cicero, though he suffered from the imperious temper of Brutus, speaks
of him as one of those, the sight of whom banished his fears and
anxieties for the republic. That the most famous and most terrible act
of this man's life was an act of republican fanaticism, not of selfish
ambition, is proved by his refusing, with magnanimous imprudence, to
make all sure, as the more worldly spirits about him suggested, by
cutting off Antony and the outer leading partisans of Caesar, and by his
permitting public honours to be done to the corpse of the man whom he
had immolated to civil duty. One almost shrinks from speaking of the
death of Caesar; so much modern nonsense on both sides has been talked
about this, the most tragic, the most piteous, and at the same time the
most inevitable event of ancient story. Peculiar phases of society have
their peculiar sentiments, with reference to which events must be
explained. The greased cartridges were the real account of the Indian
mutiny. Caesar was slain because he had shown that he was going to assume
the title of king. Cicero speaks the literal truth, when he says: that
the real murderer was Antony, and the fatal day the day of the
Lupercalia, when Antony offered and Caesar faintly put aside the crown. A
dictator they would have borne, a king they would not bear, neither then
nor for ages afterwards; because the title of king to their minds spoke
not of a St. Louis, or an Edward I., or even a Louis XIV., but of the
unutterable degradation of the Oriental slave. To use a homely image, if
you put your leg in the way of a cannon ball which seems spent, but is
still rolling, you will suffer by the experiment. This is exactly what
Caesar, in the giddiness of victory and supremacy, did, and the
consequence was as certain as it was deplorable. The republican
sentiment seemed to him to have entirely lost its force, so that he
might spurn it with impunity; whereas, it had in it still enough of the
momentum gathered through centuries of republican training and glory to
destroy him, to restore the republic for a brief period, and to make
victory doubtful at Phillipi. He began by celebrating a triumph over his
fellow-citizens, against the generous tradition of Rome: in that triumph
he displayed pictures of the tragic deaths of Cato and other Roman
chiefs, which disgusted even the populace; he sported with the curule
offices, the immemorial objects of republican reverence, so wantonly
that he might almost as well have given a consulship to his horse; he
flooded the Senate with soldiers and barbarians; he forced a Roman
knight to appear upon the stage: at last, craving, as natures destitute
of a high controlling principle do crave, for the form as well as the
substance of power, he put out his hand to grasp a crown. The feeling on
that subject was not only of terrible strength, but was actually
embodied in a law by which the state solemnly armed the hand of the
private citizen against any man who should attempt to make himself a
king. How completely Caesar's insight failed him is proved by the general
acquiescence or apathy with which his fall was received, the subdued
tone in which even his warm friend Marius speaks of it, and the
readiness with which his own soldiers and officers served under the
restored republic. We have nothing to do here with any problem of modern
ethics respecting military usurpation and tyrannicide, two things which
must always stand together in the court of morality. Tyrannicide, like
suicide, was the rule of the ancient world, and would have been
acknowledged by Caesar himself, before he grasped supreme power, as an
established duty. And certainly morality would stretch its bounds to
include anything really necessary to protect the Greek and Italian
republics, with the treasures which they bore in them for humanity, from
the barbarous lust of power which was always lying in wait to devour
them. I have said that the spirits of Cato and Cicero lived and worked
after their deaths. So I suspect did that of Brutus. The Caesars had no
God, no fear of public opinion at home, no general sentiment of
civilized nations to control their tyranny. They had only the shadow of
a hand armed with a dagger. One shrewd observer of the times at least,
if I mistake not, had profited by the lesson of Caesar's folly and fate.
To the constitutional demeanour and personal moderation of Augustus the
world owes an epoch of grandeur of a certain kind, and an example of
true dignity in the use of power. And Augustus, I suspect, had studied
his part at the foot of Pompey's statue.
Plutarch parallels Cato with Phocion, Demosthenes with Cicero, Brutus
with Dion--the Dion whose history inspired the poem of Wordsworth. Greek
republicanism, too, had its fatal hour; but we do not pour scorn and
contumely on those who strove to prolong the life of Athens beyond the
term assigned by fate. The case of Athens, a single independent state,
was no doubt different from that of Rome with so many subject nations
under her sway. Still in each case there was the commonwealth, standing
in glorious contrast to the barbarous despotisms of other nations, the
highest social and political state which humanity had known or for ages
afterwards was to know. And this light of civilization was, so far as
the last republicans could see, not only to be eclipsed for a time or
put out, as now in a single nation, while it burns on in others, but to
be swallowed up in hopeless night.
Mr. Charles Norton in the notes to his recent translation of the "Vita
Nuova" of Dante quotes a decree made by the commonwealth of Florence for
the building of the cathedral.
"Whereas it is the highest interest of a people of illustrious origin so
to proceed in their affairs that men may perceive from their external
works that their doings are at once wise and magnanimous, it is
therefore ordered that Arnulf, architect of our commune, prepare the
model or design for the rebuilding of Santa Reparata with such supreme
and lavish magnificence, that neither the industry nor the capacity of
man shall be able to devise anything more grand or more beautiful,
inasmuch as the most judicious in this city have pronounced the opinion,
in public and private conferences, that no work of the commune should be
undertaken unless the design be such as to make it correspond with a
heart which is of the greatest nature because composed of the spirit of
many citizens united together in one single will." [Footnote: In his
later and very valuable work on _Church Building in the Middle
Ages_, Mr. Norton casts doubt on the authenticity of the decree. It
is genuine at all events, as an expression of Florentine sentiment, if
not as an extract from the archives.]
Let Imperialism, legitimist or democratic, match that! Florence, too,
had her political vices, many and grave, she tyrannized over Pisa and
other dependants, there was faction in her councils, anarchy, bloody
anarchy, in her streets, for her, too, the hour of doom arrived, and the
conspiracy of the Pazzi was as much an anachronism as that of the
republicans who slew Caesar. But Florence had that heart composed of the
united spirits of many citizens out of which came all that the world
admires and loves in the works of the Florentine. She produced, though
she exiled Dante. That which followed was more tranquil, more orderly
perhaps, materially speaking, not less happy, but it had no heart at
all.
AUSTEN-LEIGH'S MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN
[Footnote: "A Memoir of Jane Austen. By her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh,
Vicar of Bray, Berks." London: Richard Bentley; New York: Scribner,
Welford & Co.]
The walls of our cities were placarded, the other day, with an
advertisement of a new sensational novel, the flaring woodcut of which
represented a girl tied down upon a table, and a villain preparing to
cut off her feet. If this were the general taste, there would be no use
in talking about Jane Austen. But if you ask at the libraries you will
find that her works are still taken out; so that there must still be a
faithful few who, like ourselves, will have welcomed the announcement of
a Memoir of the authoress of "Pride and Prejudice," "Mansfield Park,"
and "Emma."
If Jane Austen's train of admirers has not been so large as those of
many other novelists, it has been first-rate in quality. She has been
praised--we should rather say, loved by all, from Walter Scott to
Guizot, whose love was the truest fame. Her name has often been coupled
with that of Shakespeare, to whom Macaulay places her second in the nice
discrimination of shades of character. The difference between the two
minds in degree is, of course, immense; but both belong to the same rare
kind. Both are really creative; both purely artistic; both have the
marvellous power of endowing the products of their imagination with a
life, as it were, apart from their own. Each holds up a perfectly clear
and undistorting mirror--Shakespeare to the moral universe, Jane Austen
to the little world in which she lived. In the case of neither does the
personality of the author ever come between the spectator and the drama.
Vulgar criticism calls Jane Austen's work Dutch painting. Miniature
painting would be nearer the truth; she speaks of herself as working
with a fine brush on a piece of ivory two inches wide. Dutch painting
implies the selection of subjects in themselves low and uninteresting,
for the purpose of displaying the skill of a painter, who can interest
by the mere excellence of his imitation. Jane Austen lived in the
society of English country gentlemen and their families as they were in
the last century--a society affluent, comfortable, domestic, rather
monotonous, without the interest which attaches to the struggles of
labour without tragic events or figures seldom, in fact rising
dramatically above the level of sentimental comedy, but presenting
nevertheless, its varieties of character, its vicissitudes, its moral
lessons--in a word, its humanity. She has painted it as it was, in all
its features the most tragic as well as the most comic, avoiding only
melodrama. "In all the important preparations of the mind, she (Miss
Bertram) was complete, being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home,
restraint and tranquillity, by the misery of disappointed affection and
contempt of the man she was to marry; the rest might wait." This is not
the touch of Gerard Douw. An undertone of irony, never obtrusive but
everywhere perceptible, shows that the artist herself knew very well
that she was not painting gods and Titans, and keeps everything on the
right level.
Jane Austen, then, was worthy of a memoir. But it was almost too late to
write one. Like Shakespeare, she was too artistic to be autobiographic.
She was never brought into contact with men of letters, and her own fame
was almost posthumous, so that nobody took notes. She had been fifty
years in her grave when her nephew, the Rev J. E. Austen-Leigh, the
youngest of the mourners who attended her funeral, undertook to make a
volume of his own recollections, those of one or two other surviving
relatives, and a few letters. Of 230 pages, in large print, and with a
margin the vastness of which requires to be relieved by a rod rubric,
not above a third is really biography, the rest is genealogy,
description of places, manners, and customs, critical disquisition,
testimonies of admirers. Still, thanks to the real capacity of the
biographer, and to the strong impression left by a character of
remarkable beauty on his mind, we catch a pretty perfect though faint
outline of the figure which was just hovering on the verge of memory,
and in a few years more would, like the figure of Shakespeare, have been
swallowed up in night.
Jane Austen was the flower of a stock, full, apparently, through all its
branches, of shrewd sense and caustic humour, which in her were combined
with the creative imagination. She was born in 1775, at Steventon, in
Hampshire, a country parish, of which her father was the rector. A
village of cottages at the foot of a gentle slope, an old church with
its coeval yew, an old manor-house, an old parsonage all surrounded by
tall elms, green meadows, hedgerows full of primroses and wild
hyacinths--such was the scene in which Jane Austen grew. It is the
picture which rises in the mind of every Englishman when he thinks of
his country. Around dwelt the gentry, more numerous and, if coarser and
duller, more home-loving and less like pachas than they are now, when
the smaller squires and yeomen have been swallowed up in the growing
lordships of a few grandees who spend more than half their time in
London or in other seats of politics or pleasure. Not far off was a
country town, a "Meriton," the central gossiping place of the
neighbourhood, and the abode of the semi-genteel. If a gentleman like
Mr. Woodhouse lives equivocally close to the town, his "place" is
distinguished by a separate name. There was no resident squire at
Steventon, the old manor-house being let to a tenant, so that Jane's
father was at once parson and squire. "That house (Edmund Bertram's
parsonage) may receive such an air as to make its owner be set down as
the great landowner of the parish by every creature travelling the road,
especially as there is no real squire's house to dispute the point, a
circumstance, between ourselves, to enhance the value of such a
situation in point of privilege and advantage beyond all calculation."
Her father having from old age resigned Steventon when Jane was six and
twenty, she afterwards lived for a time with her family at Bath, a great
watering-place, and the scene of the first part of "Northanger Abbey;"
at Lyme, a pretty little sea-bathing place on the coast of Dorset, on
the "Cobb" of which takes place the catastrophe of "Persuasion;" and at
Southampton, now a great port, then a special seat of gentility.
Finally, she found a second home with her widowed mother and her sister
at Chawton, another village in Hampshire.
"In person," says Jane's biographer, "she was very attractive. Her
figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her
whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion, she
was a clear brunette, with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks,
with mouth and nose small and well formed; bright hazel eyes (it is a
touch of the woman, then, when Emma is described as having _the true
hazel eye_), and brown hair forming natural curls close round her
face." The sweetness and playfulness of "Dear Aunt Jane" are fresh after
so many years in the memories of her nephew and nieces, who also
strongly attest the sound sense and sterling excellence of character
which lay beneath. She was a special favourite with children, for whom
she delighted to exercise her talent in improvising fairy-tales. Unknown
to fame, uncaressed save by family affection, and, therefore, unspoilt,
while writing was her delight, she kept it in complete subordination to
the duties of life, which she performed with exemplary conscientiousness
in the house of mourning as well as in the house of feasting. Even her
needlework was superfine. We doubt not that, if the truth was known, she
was a good cook.
She calls herself "the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever
dared to be an authoress;" but this is a nominal tribute to the jealousy
of female erudition which then prevailed, and at which she sometimes
glances, though herself very far from desiring a masculine education for
women. In fact, she was well versed in English literature, read French
with ease, and knew something of Italian--German was not thought of in
those days. She had a sweet voice, and sang to her own accompaniment
simple old songs which still linger in her nephew's ear. Her favourite
authors were Johnson, whose strong sense was congenial to her, while she
happily did not allow him to infect her pure and easy style, Cowper,
Richardson and Crabbe. She said that, if she married at all, she should
like to be Mrs. Crabbe. And besides Crabbe's general influence, which is
obvious, we often see his special touch in her writings:
"Emma's spirits were mounted up quite to happiness. Everything wore a
different air. James and his horses seemed not half so sluggish as
before. When she looked at the hedges, she thought the elder at least
must soon be coming out; and, when she turned round to Harriet, she saw
something like a look of spring--a tender smile even there."
Jane was supremely happy in her family relations, especially in the love
of her elder sister, Cassandra, from whom she was inseparable. Of her
four brothers, two were officers in the Royal Navy. How she watched
their career, how she welcomed them home from the perils not only of the
sea but of war (for it was the time of the great war with France), she
has told us in painting the reception of William Price by his sister
Fanny, in "Mansfield Park." It is there that she compares conjugal and
fraternal love, giving the preference in one respect to the latter,
because with brothers and sisters "all the evil and good of the earliest
years can be gone over again, and every former united pain and pleasure
retraced with the fondest recollection: an advantage this, a
strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the
fraternal." It was, perhaps, because she was so happy in the love of her
brothers and sisters, as well as because she was wedded to literature,
that she was content, in spite of her good looks, to assume the symbolic
cap of perpetual maidenhood at an unusually early age.