bringing the mind beyond its usual limits, by giving it a view, here and there, of a more lively world than the ordinary, yet without refuting or confounding the ordinary world, lead first to a secure and tranquil frame of mind, and then, in that calm weather, to a sense of the life of the universe. So the mind attains its proper freedom, through imagination. And at the same time this religion is protected from the shallowness of the "false infinite," of the conventional vague optimism, by the difficulty and complexity of the process that leads to it. In the life of Wordsworth there may be many faults and fallacies, which the critics have sufficiently displayed, but his biography of the Imagination is without a flaw in its sincerity, and every step in it is an ordeal.

XXXV

ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

ONE of the stories in the life of Hegel tells how another philosopher asked him to "deduce his quill pen," i.e. to prove and justify on metaphysical grounds a particular accidental thing. The problem, it is held, was ridiculous, and showed in the other philosopher a misapprehension of the scope of philosophy. Yet when Hegel deals with history, one is reminded of this frivolous problem, and led to ask whether the Philosophy of History is not the same kind of impossibility—a deduction, a metaphysical proof, of particular contingencies, which are in their nature unreasonable. The dilemma seems to be obvious. The philosopher in dealing with history may work out a formula of progress or development; but to do this effectively and clearly must he not neglect the accidents and chances of the mortal life which is the matter of history? Or on the other hand, if he attends to particular accidents, i.e. if he is an historian—a reader and interpreter of the drama of history, of the unreasonable fluctuating human temperaments that make the tissue of history-he will get into serious difficulties with his formula. He may be tempted to give it up altogether, to forswear philosophy and become a mere historian.

Hegel does not shirk the difficulty, and it would be

W.K.E. II.

289

T

a mistake—a mistake in history, or at any rate in biography-to dismiss his work as an abstract a priori construction. He has the dramatic and imaginative interest in character, will and temper, and he makes this plain at the outset in his notes on great men, choosing Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon as his instances. No imaginative writer, neither Carlyle in his Heroes nor Mr. Hardy in The Dynasts, has a stronger interest than Hegel in the persons who seem to be the most extreme contradiction to all abstract and summary formulas of history. The achievements of the men of destiny may indeed be summarised, but that sort of work, however philosophical, is not enough for Hegel. They are the instruments and vehicles of the meaning of the world, but they have an independent meaning and value of their own, besides: Caesar is Caesar still, something different from his effect in history, and Napoleon is Napoleon, as they are known roughly to common sense, and more thoroughly to the dramatic imagination.

This is one of the strong points of Hegel, an essential part of his own character, that everywhere he recognises and appreciates character, in the sense which the word has for the reader of novels and plays, and quite apart from any moralising judgment. What he admires in Dante is the distinct and individual impression made by everyone in the poem, the independence and sufficiency of each character, whatever his place and surroundings may be like Farinata, thinking meanly of Hell :

Come avesse lo inferno in gran dispitto.

He does not reduce Shakespeare to a play of ideas, and does not wish to improve him. Ancient Pistol is good enough as he is, and Hegel laughs and applauds.

Sometimes one is inclined to think "how great a critic was in Hegel lost": he is so inspiriting in his judgment of character, so sound in his policy towards Romance; his sane appreciation (like Goethe's) being quite another thing from coldness. But possibly his digressions and escapades of criticism are all the better as they are, being unprofessional and unexpected.

Dealing with historical characters, he is at some pains to put the moralist in his right place, and to show the irrelevance of moralising with regard to Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon. He does not want any sermons on the vanity of human wishes; the preacher with his commonplaces about the pitiful deaths of great men seems to Hegel only to be saying: "Look at me! Take example by me! I am not Alexander the Great ; I am not ambitious; do not be Alexander! I am not Julius Caesar; he was killed in the Capitol; Brutus killed him; do not be Caesar!"

Hegel was a moralist himself, and those remarks of his bring out a great difference, which may be observed elsewhere, between the moralists who judge conduct, and the others who think mainly of character. With the former class the heroes are frequently dismissed as bad men. The second order of judges often seem to be rather antinomian if not anarchical in their sentences. Wordsworth is one of them; read what he says of Tam o' Shanter in his Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, and in the same context his appreciation of the "clachan yill": "How happily does he lead his reader into that tract of sensations!" Principal Shairp, with the other standard, makes a different sort of estimate, and is pained by The Jolly Beggars. In the writings of Mr. Holmes, the Police Court Missionary, there is a standard of judgment which is nearer to that of Wordsworth,

and which finds an infinite variety in human beings, apart from the record of their vices. Another instance was given me lately by a friend of mine who is both historian and moralist; the difference of opinion about that wonderful piece of Diderot's which Goethe translated, Le Neveu de Rameau. Rameau's nephew is a blackguard musician of genius, without a rag of decent conduct (something like the goliardeis in Piers Plowman), who is taken by Diderot to confound all respectability and pedantry by the miracle of his lively spirit. The God of the old Comedy has had few more glorious triumphs in modern times. But Lord Morley of Blackburn, who also has translated Rameau's Nephew in his Diderot, can hardly endure him, and takes the value of the piece to lie in its exposure of that corrupt world, which (in the words of a classical translator) so soon was to meet "the severe, the very severe chill of a hostile public executioner." Or, in another figure, to quote exactly: "We see the rotten material which the purifying flame of Jacobinism was soon to consume out of the land with fiery swiftness."

History has often been turned into a Mirror for Magistrates, or Gesta Romanorum, a stock of instances and illustrations with the edifying conclusion: “And this, my friends, ought to teach us!" No doubt the study of history has flourished, in a way, through this moral application of it; the preachers give it a recognised and appreciable value. It is not a thing to be scoffed at or condemned; many a one would be glad to know as much history as Montaigne, to read and remember Plutarch in Plutarch's own spirit; to enjoy, on any terms whatever, such acquaintance with the lives of famous Greeks and Romans as was common in the easy old-fashioned days.