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where they are going. A pug dog sitting up at the end of the boat watches them with perplexity. The treatment is pretty, and the work good; but it seems a pity that so clever an artist should confine himself to painting sentimental young people afloat on the water. His craft always appear to be seaworthy, otherwise we should be disposed to invoke the interference of Mr. Plimsoll.

Mr. Hemy sends a clever picture of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, in which a line of skiffs, ready for hiring, and lying upon a floating raft, forms an excellent foreground. The water lapping round the edge of the raft is well executed, and the quiet colouring of the picture seems to befit the associations of the place.

Mr. Calderon is strong this year with pictures diverse in subject but equal in merit. Victory is a spirited affair of a group of women and children looking out with joy from a battlemented wail at the happy result of an affray just concluded below. The painting of the stone work leaves nothing to be desired; and there is a swift's nest or two with their occupants giving further reality to the scene. The different expressions in the human beings above display a skill, which well employed without being obtrusive in the representation of the medieval costumes. Especially good is the contrast between the absorbed deaf look of interest in the face of the old woman, who may be the grandmother perhaps of one of the chiefs in the combat below, and the triumphant excitement in that of the young woman next to her, who may perchance be his wife.

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The same careful study and use of its results are apparent in the Moonlight Serenade. An offended husband is chasing with a drawn sword, which glitters in a very real and untheatrical moonlight, a lover, whose abandoned guitar lies broken

on the ground, while its owner flies at his best pace round the corner of the house from the wrath of his pursuer. The anxious face of the lady seen through the bay of her window; and the little incident of the shoe which the fugitive has dropped in his precipitate retreat rouse an interest in his ultimate fate, which is more than he deserves. Good Night, again, is very different from these pictures. It is a quiet scene in a modern nursery of upper class life. A young mother, going out to a party, is saying good night to her child who stands up in his little crib to receive her adieux. The painting is good throughout, and notably in the colour and texture of the white satin skirt held over the lady's arm. The red colour of a rose in her hair is repeated with happy effect in the tassel of her fan: and the figures and faces of both mother and child are touched with a tender and delicate spirit. The child's crib, however, is a piece of very ugly and commonplace upholstery, and may be compared for its uncompromising realism with the green garden bench, on which the reproachful lover is seated in No. 120 -a picture otherwise full of poetry and meaning.

Among the works of Sculpture exhibited the most important is Mr. Woolner's statue of the late Dr. Whewell. He will sit in marble in the ante-chapel of the great college over which he presided when alive, in the goodly company of Bacon, Barrow, and Macaulay. This figure is worthy of the man and the place. The position is easy, but dignified: the massive brow and animated features are finely given, and the likeness is admirable.

But the most immediate attraction is to the very engaging terra-cotta. figure by Dalou. A French peasant woman, in sabots and the plainest rustic attire, seated on an upturned basket, is giving the breast to an infant

in a tight fitting cap. It is the very poetry of realism, in the beautiful feeling which is thrown into a subject so ultra-naturalistic and drawn from such a class of life. The face is tender and beautiful; the attitude of the arms is most graceful, and perhaps appears the more so from its contrast with the extremely natural but somewhat awkward posture of the lower limbs, one of which is slightly elevated, in order to raise the child to the

breast. The draperies are natural and exquisitely arranged. This has been called by some critics a painting in clay and the expression can only be taken to indicate the belief that the subject and its mode of treatment are more suitable to the pictorial than to the sculptor's art. To pursue this question, however, would lead us too far from Burlington House, and we must at least postpone the discussion of it for the present.

P.

*

IT

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNÍTY.'

T is a great lesson of nature which mankind have been very long in learning, and which many of us are still very unwilling to accept, that nothing is absolutely fixed. From the courses of the stars to the particles that make up the frame of the minutest living creature, we can find no such thing as unvarying identity in two successive instants. The incessant change which is the life of the world does indeed follow a uniform order, and has followed it from the remotest times to which inference or conjecture can go back until now. But this very uniformity of nature which makes knowledge possible is warranted only by the sum of all human experience. Nature has been and is uniform at all times and in all places of which men have come to know anything: and we have therefore become accustomed to act on the expectation of finding nature uniform, an expectation which in fact is not known to have been ever disappointed. Beyond this we can assert nothing, unless we claim to possess some source of knowledge independent of experience. Reflections of this kind have become almost a commonplace of science so far as the material world is concerned. The question whether they apply to the moral world also is still a vexed one. But every one who thinks for himself must practically adopt either the affirmative or the negative answer to it, and his opinions and conduct will follow the answer he adopts. Our own belief is that the affirmative answer is the right

one.

We do not undertake here to vindicate this belief, but we state it beforehand, and once for all, as being the foundation of what we

have to say on the very interesting questions raised by Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's book. We hold that at no given time and place can a final and complete answer be given to any of the problems of society and government. New statements and new solutions are required in some degree by every generation. The great epochs of history are those in which a pressing question and the conflicting answers to it are settled in forms definite and comprehensive enough to determine the course of men's thoughts for a considerable time. Any one who attempts to recast these questions will do it on a more or less ambitious scale according to his individual temper. If he looks much beyond his own time and place, he runs considerable risk of his answer not being the best for immediate use, balanced by the chance of its being more true hereafter than it is now, and so outliving its immediate competitors and being of more use in the long run. If he confines himself closely to his own time and place, he runs the risk of his answer being true and useful only within narrow limits, balanced again by the chance of the approximation to exactness within those limits being greater than if he had taken a larger view. But, however this may be, it is a very great merit, and by no means a common one, if he understands and takes care to let his hearers understand what are the limits within which he is prepared to maintain his conclusions.

This seems to us to be the one quality which gives its most eminent merit to Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's writing, and which, on the other hand, is least conspicuous in the social and political work of the

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. By James Fitzjames Stephen, Esq., Q.C. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873.

illustrious and lamented philosopher against whose widely expressed theories Mr. Stephen protests; and the difference between Mr. Mill's and Mr. Stephen's dispositions in this respect is at the root of most of the matters in controversy between them. We can here give but a passing word of tribute to the memory of John Stuart Mill. It would indeed be impertinent if we tried to add more to the words already spoken in his honour by those whose per. sonal knowledge gave them a fitness for the task to which we cannot pretend. One very small portion of the regret felt at this time wherever men are found whom the achievements of a lofty mind can stir to admiration, or its loss from the world touch with sorrow, is our regret that Mr. Mill could not take up the challenge offered to him while he was yet living by Mr. Stephen. The controversy would have been keen but not ungenerous; the subject full of interest and adequate to the combatants; the combatants worthy of the subject and of one another. But this was not to be; the first word of the challenger remains the last, and we are left to judge of it as best we may, without the opportunity of hearing a reply. We must seek our justification in the thought that, could the master whose voice is now silent utter any wish or counsel, he would surely bid us examine his teaching no less freely than if he were alive to defend it.

The contrast between Mr. Mill's and Mr. Stephen's ways of thought will be found to explain not only why they disagree so much in statements of principle, but why they nevertheless agree so much as they do in practical results. Mr. Mill's way is to start with the most comprehensive statement he can frame, and gradually work in the limita tions by a series of distinctions and refinements. The process is not unlike that by which our Courts expand or fritter away the general dog

mas of the law as occasion requires, and sets us thinking what might have been added to our triumphs of ingenuity in that kind if Mr. Mill had been a lawyer. Mr. Stephen, on the other hand, proceeds step by step, and will not take any step without knowing exactly what it means, and how far he is going. He is determined not only to understand himself, but to leave no one any excuse for misunderstanding him. Even his doubts are clearly defined as to their extent and importance. It is obvious that Mr. Mill's method is the more brilliant and attractive of the two, and also demands more skill in the writer and more judgment in the reader: and for this last reason it is perhaps not very well fitted for popular writings. However, Mr. Mill's subtraction from his generalities and Mr. Stephen's cautious addition of his particulars not unfrequently end in finding much the same level.

Mr. Stephen's purpose is not exactly a controversy with Mr. Mill: his object is to criticise certain doctrines of which, so far as they are expressed or implied in Mr. Mill's writings, he singles out Mr. Mill as the ablest exponent. He starts with this general description of the religion, as he calls it, of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.' 'It is one of the commonest beliefs of the day that the human

race

collectively has before it splendid destinies of various kinds, and that the road to them is to be found in the removal of all restraints on human conduct, in the recognition of a substantial equality between all human creatures, and in fraternity or general love. These doctrines are in very many cases held as a religious faith. I do not believe it for the following, amongst other reasons.'

As to the first part of this statement, we do believe that the human race or at any rate the progressive part of it has before it splendid

destinies of various kinds, provided The one statement is 'that the

the earth continues fit for habita

tion, and the course of nature otherwise such as it has been, for a reasonably sufficient length of time: a condition in which any one who desires it may perhaps find doubt enough to leave room for the luxury of faith. To those who thoroughly accept the theories of evolution and natural selection this is a truth of the same order, and likely to have the same kind of importance in life, as are the fundamental theories of the established religions of the world to the faithful of those religions. Mr. Stephen does not quite positively say he believes no such thing; but he seems at least very sceptical about human progress, and certainly does not attach very much weight either to the thing itself or to the belief in it, possibly thinking the improvement too slow and partial to be practically worth notice. So it is for some purposes, no doubt. Society cannot escape from reckoning with fools according to their folly by the probability that their great-grandchildren may be somewhat wiser. But that does not prevent the belief, that the human race is on the whole improving from generation to generation, from being ennobling and worthy of men's devotion. A certain failure to appreciate this is the drawback to the more speculative parts of Mr. Stephen's book. But as to the road to these destinies of mankind, we think Mr. Stephen is right in holding that it is not to be made merely by clearing away obstructions. We agree, therefore, to nearly all he says concerning Liberty, most of what he says concerning Equality, and much, though not so much, of what he says concerning Fraternity.

The principle of Liberty asserted by Mr. Mill is expressed in two slightly different forms in different parts of his well-known essay.

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sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collec tively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection;' the other is that the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself.” Mr. Stephen considers these propositions paradoxical. We should rather object to them that they are so vague as to be capable of meaning anything or nothing according to the sense assigned to the qualifying terms. What objects are included within the 'self-protection > of society? Does this self, for example, comprise future generations as well as the present? Does protection mean protection against vice and disease as well as violence? Again, it is really impossible that any act of any man should concern the interests of no one but himself. The question is, what acts affect the interests of others so definitely that the consequences are of calculable importance? By giving wide or restricted answers to such questions as these one could make Mr. Mill's maxims of liberty fit any scheme of law and government whatever. The legislature might claim, in the name of self-protection, to protect the commonwealth against all the follies of its individual members by ordaining that the individuals should follow a prescribed plan of life supposed by the legislature to be the wisest. On the other hand, by limiting 'protection' to protection against crime and personal violence, it might be concluded that all civil law is superfluous. It is true that Mr. Mill had his own answers, and those very decided ones, to most questions of this kind; but they come out as it were incidentally, and he does not seem to have seen that the questions are, as far as the text of his maxims goes, left quite open, and admit of

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