Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volume 6, 1874 - Academy

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THE ACADEMY.
[Due. 5, 1874.
Liiiic:i.ster, and silently regarded tlie •wlio.e period
which we are about to traverse as a blank, tliey
expressed not merely a legal truth but an historical
one. What the Great Kebellion in its final result
actually did was to wipe away every trace of the
New Monarchy, and to take up again the thread of
our political development just where it had been
•snapt by the Wars of the Roses."
The truth tlius stated is of even greater
value for the historian of the seventeenth
than for the historian of the fifteentli century.
But it may be asked whether Mr. Green has
dealt quite fairly by this New Monarchy.
He speaks of it as owing its rise partly to
the destruction of the Baronage in the Wars
of the Roses, partly to the selfish desire of
the propertied classes to keep in awe those
who were beneath them. If so, it is a unique
instance of the rise of a new power out of
causes purely evil, and the tales of oppres-
sioir and wrong doing with which the Paston
Letters abound would seem to point to a
desh-e for justice on the part of the weak as
one of the elements of the change. At all
events, the view taken of the Star Chamber
in the reign of Henry VH., as instituted
specially for the support of the royal au-
thority, without any regard for the suppres-
sion of abuses, is one which the prudent
reader will be cautions in accepting, and
will probably prefer to wait till the comple-
tion of Mr. Campbell's Materials for a His-
tory of Henri/ VII. enables him to form a
more complete estimate of the reign.
Ml'. Green's Henry VIII., it need hardly
be said, is not the Henry VIII. of Mr.
Fronde. His tyranny is unrelieved by any
brighter gleam, save by his love of learning,
ai:d his minister Cromwell is described as
alike able and unscrupulous, carrying out
the doctrines of the men of tlie New learn-
ing by a reign of terror. Mr. Green's weak-
ness in this epoch is perhaps his want of
sympathy with religious thought, as dis-
tinguished from religions morality, and the
great work of Luther in the individualisa-
tion of the conscience receives very little
appreciation by the side of the mingled com-
prehensiveness and tolerance of Sir Thomas
More, the Falkland of the sixteenth century.
Passing on to a happier time, it is impossible
not to be struck with admiration at Mr.
Green's masterly analysis of the character
of Elizabeth. His sketch of the politics and
literature of her reign ranks among the best
parts of the book. His account of James is
less satisfactorj. The claim to divine right
which Mr. Green puts in the foreground had
really much less prominence in James's mind
than his belief in his own sagacity. In the
next reign, too, Mr. Green misses the con-
nexion of thought between Laud and the
Latltudinarians, thus omitting the link
which bound the men of the New learning
in the sixteenth century to the Tillotsons and
Lockes of a later day. Nor does he remember
that the Parliamentarism which Charles I.
and Cromwell combated was not the Par-
liamentary system of our day, or that
the union of a predominant representative
assembly with the organisation of Cabinet
government is not the triumph of the prin-
ciples of the Long Parliament, but the em-
bodiment of that which was best in the ideas
of both parties in the civil war. In a later
chapter Mr. Green well points out that
the change made at the Restoration was
greater in appearance than in reality ; that,
on the one hand, Bacon was the precui'sor of
the founders of the Royal Society ; that, on
the other hand, the better influences of
Puritanism survived in Paradise Lost and
the Pilgrim's Progress, and leavened the re-
ligion and the morality of England when
Puritanism appeared to have been struck
down for ever.
Why is it that Mr. Green has so little to
tell us about post-Miltonic literature ? Has
he nothing to say, except incidentally, about
Dryden ; nothing at all about Addison and
Pope ? When he writes of the social disor-
ganisation of the days of the first Georges,
did not his fingers tingle to write of the
painter on whose canvas that disorganisation
is reflected ? Hume and Gibbon are alike
nnmentioned. It can hardly be that Mr.
Green was weary of his task ; and it looks
as if he had been tied down by some force
7n(ijem-e upon the Procrustean bed of 820
pages. Anyhow, the loss is his readers'.
They get a vivid and able narrative of the
political and social progress of the nation ;
but the special charm of the earlier part of
the volume is gone.
Even in the political part of the narrative
some improvement is to be desired in the
way of arrangement. The index tells us
that the good side of Warren Hastings'
policy will be found at pp. 759 and 7(50,
while for the severe side we must look to
pp. 760 and 7(51. What we find from p. 759
to p. 761 is an unmitigated panegyric, while
the evil deeds of the Governor- General are
relegated to p. 766, as if it were possible to
understand a man's character by halves.
Burke too is strangely treated. Whether
Mr. Green's depreciatory view of the Whig
oracle is a jtist one is a matter of opinion.
But common justice requires that he should
be introduced upon the stage in the best
period of his activity, and that the sketch of
his character should not be reserved for his
connexion with the French Revolution.
No nation upon earth has a nobler hi.story
than England, aud, as Mr. Green well says
(p. 762), England has become a mother of
nations.
" And to these nations she was to give not only
her blood and her speech, but the freedom which
she has won. It is the thought of this which
flings its grandeur round the pettiesst details of our
story in the past. The history of France has little
result beyond France itself. German or Italian
history has no direct issue outside the bounds of
Germany or Italy. But England is only a small
part of tire outcome of English history. Its greater
issues lie not within the lunits of the mother island,
but in the destinies of nations yet to be. The
struggles of her patriots, the wisdom of her states-
men^ ^the steady love of liberty and Law in her
people at large, were shaping in the past of om-
little island the future of mankind.''
Such is the story, fraught with such
mighty issues, which Mr. Green has under-
taken to tell. He would be himself the last
to deny that his work is not without defi-
ciencies. But no candid reader can finish
its perusal without discovering that the
theme has at last found an exponent worthy
of its grandeur.
Samuel R. Gaedinee.
A Quiet Corner of England : Studies of Land-
scape and Architecture in Winelielsea, Bye,
and' tlie Roianeij Marsh. By Basil Champ-
neys, B.A., Architect. With numerous
Illustrations by Alfred Dawson. (London:
Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, 1874.)
" A BUILDING," says Mr. Champneys, " can
never be like a picture, complete within the
limits of its frame and independent of in-
fluences beyond. It must be studied upon
its own site, and under all the conditions of
history, landscape and neighbourhood." We
may amplify this idea a little, or rather put it
in terms a little more general : The author
wishes people to look at what they see with
their eyes open, and not isolate special
things artificially, and look at these only to
the exclusion of the others. He is not one
of those who say they are looking at a
church when they are looking, in truth, at a
church complicated with a confusion of roofs
and chimneys, connecting itself naturally
with the sweep of the street that leads up to
it, and relieved against the blue distance
and the bright sky on the horizon. A build-
ing is a building, indeed, but it is mnch
more. It makes or mars the landscape, it
completes or nullifies the profile of a town
upon a hill top. I have in my eye two
notable instances. In one, a block of high
barracks, built in late days upon the battle-
ments of an old citadel, falls admirably into:
harmony with the situation, and carries upj
into the sky-line the sentiment of the steep
rock on which the place is founded ; sc|
that, although a common-place structure
in itself, it has become the most impres-
sive, and I had almost said the most ro-
mantic, feature in the pile. In the other.
a monumental tower of some architectura
pretensions has been put upon a poor litth
hill, the last buttress of a grand wall o
mountains ; and tho_3e who remember thi|
hill before it was thus burthened, the wholij
scene before it was thus burlesqued and
stultified, can alone appreciate the evil tha
has been effected.
The most delicate shades of relation ma^|
be traced between the sentiment of a build
ing and the sentiment of its surroundings
And in no place is this relation so delicat
and amialile, at least for Englishmen, as ii
quiet corners of England, such as the on^
Iilr. Champneys has set himself to realis
for us. He was moved, he tells us, by "
jealous desire that the modest and homel
landscape and architecture of our ow
country should receive more general apj^re
ciation." He has been justly irritated a
that very pinchbeck and undiscriminatin
enthusiasm which inspires so many of th
readers of the Continental Bradshaw, an
the followers after Mr. Cook.
"Those," he says, "whose association wil
either landscape or art is more or less occasiona
naturally find grandeur more efl'ective tha
modesty, scale more easy to appreciate than sent
ment. But such emotions as are engendered e:
clusively by gorgeous efltjcts are apt to be sens:
tional, and are neither so wholesome nor ;
enduring as those which arise in a quiet ai
homely atmosphere. Moreover, familiarity wi
the more specious is apt to render the more modt
permanently insipid."
There is a great deal of truth in this, ai
yet I should be inclined to regard this e