620 



The Review of Reviews. 



MORIER AS A WRITER. 



Now for a few extracts illustrative of Sir Robert 

 orier's style and manner of thinking. It is amusing 

 find that his daughter, unable to resist the delight 

 quoting her father's remark that Mr. Frederic 

 irrison, when on the rampage against Germany in 

 ; autumn of 1870, supplied a type which "appears 

 be a cross between a prize-fighter and a lady's- 

 lid," satisfies her conscience by printing the name 



H . But all who remember the dithyram- 



; outpourings of the great Positivist over the 

 ;rman invasion recognise at once who it was who 

 cited Morier's wrath. Sir Robert himself was a 

 ize-fighter who occasionally revelled in the large free 

 go of the bargee. 



HIS ESTIMATE OF GLADSTONE. 



He told Madame Novik off once that Mr. Gladstone 

 d " no more judgment than a cow," but filial piety 

 nietimes dictates a bowdlerising that robs the actual 

 rase of much of its pungency. Here is Sir Robert's 

 scription of Gladstone after spending some time 

 th him and Dollinger at ISIunich : — 

 \s a general verdict of his intellectual putting together, I 

 76 come to it under this similitude, that his mind resembles 

 fasces of a Roman lictor, a bundle of sticks (each of them 

 to beat a dog with !) with no organic vegetable life binding 

 ni together, and made up promiscuously of every kind of 

 iber — strong ash, oak saplings, and also rotten reeds — and 

 the middle a great axe with which he can at any moment 

 V to pieces any opponent who personally attacks him. — 

 1. 2, p. 302. 



Sir Robert's capacity for effective literary expression 

 )rd Lytton summed up well when he wrote : — 

 First, you have the merit of thoroughly understanding down 

 the roots of it any subject you write about ; secondly, your 

 ellectual powers are an uncommon combination of severe 

 ;ical method and the lively play of imagination over the 

 face of acquired fact ; thirdly, you have remarkable force of 

 Dression ; and fourthly, you have passion, which is always 

 : secret of power. — Vol. 2, p. 306. 



HIS FAITH IN ENGLAND. 



Sir Robert Morier recovered some of his faith in 

 igland and the English in his later years. But in 

 7 1-6 he was in doleful dumps indeed. He believed 

 England, but he thought the English people of those 

 ars unworthy of her greatness : — - 



" The raw material of the Englishman, both moral and 

 ysical," he assured Jowett, " is enormously superior to that of 

 y other existing nation. We arc the only truthful people in the 

 ■rid, the only people who arc able to produce a gentleman as 

 ethical being ... the only people who are not petty and 

 ttifogging in their international dealings, and the only people 

 10 with great self-assertion and a bulldog kind of courage 



have yet a singular amount of gentleness and tenderness . . . 

 [But] England, which has a larger land-boundary than any 

 nation ever had before, has_ convinced herself that she lives 

 alone in a little island whose parochial concerns are all in all 

 to her, and turns away with contempt and disgust from the 

 affairs of a world in which she has ten times the stake of any 

 other nation." 



He defies any ordinary Englishman, " however 

 boisterously hopeful his natural temperament may be, 

 to do aught but tear his beard, strew ashes on his 

 head, and gnash his teeth." 



HIS CONTEMPT FOR POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 



It was all due, in his opinion, to the one deep- 

 seated vice of our political system, the idea that it is 

 the duty of a Constitutional Government to be an 

 echo and not a voice : — 



The leaders of the people silting in Whitehall and Downing 

 Street call to the leaders of the people sitting in editorial chairs 

 in Printing House Square and the back slums of the Strand for 

 ideas wherewith to be inspired ; the gentlemen of the scissors 

 and glue-pot return the compliment, and assure the former of 

 their highest consideration. Each suggests to the other what 

 he believes that he thinks that the other would think of suggest- 

 ing. It is impossible to tell which is the voice and which is the 

 echo. — Vol. 2, p. 209. 



HIS PICTURE OF THE PRESS. 



In another passage Morier tells Jowett that Plato 

 in his picture of the Sophist describes with exactitude 

 the modern journalist : — 



Now the account of the way the Sophists sophise, not so much 

 from malice prfpt'iisc, or from a belief in their sophistries, as from 

 the venal impulse of pandering to the taste of the public by, as 

 it were, precipitating into intellectual crystals the base motives 

 and accommodations by which the Philistine multitude rule 

 their lives and ordain their conduct, the Sophist, as the sounding- . 

 board which gives back to the vulgar in a most distinct and 

 articulate manner the tones of its own voice and of what it is 

 pleased to call its thoughts, is so exactly what the Press is 

 nowadays, that I do not think you are justified in omitting to 

 call attention to this analogy. The two or three pages in which 

 the process is described might be applied word for word to the 

 Times. — Vol. 2, p. 316. 



Where, he asked Jowett, where are " the brain and 

 heart of England"? Jowett had told him that "if 

 you are to succeed you must lake men as they are, 

 not complaining of them overmuch, and then you 

 may raise them to something better. But if you 

 become isolated from them you are nowhere." 



Sir Robert never quite learned that lesson. But it 

 is well to know that in his old age he recovered a 

 somewhat more comfortable estimate of his fellow- 

 men and their ability and resolve to play the part in 

 the world to which he firmly believed they were 

 called by Providence. 



