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The Arians of the Fourth Century; their Doctrine, Temper. and

Conduct, chiefly as exhibited in the Councils of the Church be-

tween A.D. 325 and A.D. 381. By John Henry Newman, M.A.,

Fellow of Oriel College. Second edition, literally reprinted

from the first edition. 8vo. London: E. Lumley. 1854.

Callista; a Sketch of the Third Century. By Dr. J. H. Newman.

12mo. London: Burns and Lambert. 1856.

The Defence of the Archdeacon of Taunton, in its complete form.

8vo. London: J. Masters, and J. H. and J. Parker. 1856.

Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous. By Samuel

Taylor Coleridge. Edited by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, M.A.

London: Moxon. 1853.

Charges to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Lewes, delivered at

the ordinary Visitations in the years 1843, 1845, 1846. By

Julius Charles Hare, M.A., Archdeacon. Never before pub-

lished. With an Introduction, explanatory of his position in

the Church with reference to the Parties which divide it. Cam-

bridge: Macmillan and Co. 1856.

The Doctrine of Sacrifice deduced from the Scriptures. A Series

of Sermons by Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A., Chaplain of

Lincoln's Inn. Cambridge: Macmillan and Co. 1854.

St. Paul and Modern Thought: Remarks on the Views advanced

in Professor Jowett's Commentary on St. Paul. By J. Llewelyn

Davies, M.A., Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and In-

cumbent of St. Mark's, Whitechapel. Cambridge: Macmillan

and Co. 1856.

Passages selected from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. With a

Biographical Memoir. By Thomas Ballantyne. Post 8vo.

London: Chapman and Hall. 1856.

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THE NATIONAL REVIEW.

JULY 1856.

ART. I.-THOMAS MOORE.

Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore. Edited by the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M.P. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853-1856.

Ir is the favourite notion of modern biographers that a man ought to be made to write his own life; that a vivid and faithful image can only be obtained, and can be fully obtained, from the self-delineation, conscious or unconscious, of the man himself, in memoirs or letters. This is one of those ideas which carry so plausible a self-recommendation with them, that they are accepted without examination; and it is not until they have been worked some time as undoubted truths, that, in the course of wear and tear, they begin to betray their alloy of error. The fact is, that though some degree of direct self-delineation may be necessary to supply any complete conception of a man, yet. without accessory sources of information it can never be suffi cient; and for this there are several simple and sufficient reasons. A man won't tell us all about himself, nor can he if he would. Even a man like Rousseau, who makes it his special boast to let shameless day into the most secret recesses of his life and heart, yet keeps a shade for the devouring cankers of vanity and selflove, which eat deeper and more festering sores than even his morbid taste can bear to probe. We all have two opinions of ourselves: sane men look at the better one, and shake off the terror of the other; and that occasional recurrence to it by which every now and then we balance our self-estimate is not a thing we can place at the disposal of those around us. Nor would we if we could. We can more easily bear to think ill of ourselves than to have others do so; and the allusion by our friends to

No. V. JULY 1856.

B

faults of which we stand self-convicted, yet hoped were hidden, strikes us as one of the most flagrant forms of scandal. Besides we do not know all about ourselves: more than any other we know; but we are not only the being we appear to ourselves, we are also in some sense what we appear to others; and though we should hardly be willing to exchange our self-knowledge for that of others, yet should

"The Gods the giftie gie us

To see ourselves as others see us,"

it would certainly add, however unpleasantly, to the gross amount of our information. Hence, when we read the life of a remarkable man, we wish to know not only what he chooses to divulge of what he knows of himself, or what he unconsciously reveals in his writings; we wish also to know what impression he produced on external observers. Moreover, if a biography is to be a work of art, we must have a biographer: the work must bear the stamp of a creating mind-the artist, as well as the subject of his art, must have a recognisable impress. Rembrandt looks out from the canvas on which he paints the portrait of some burgomaster, and it is the spirit of Claude that is infused through those serene Italian landscapes. Nothing but a laguerreotype can be a mere copy; and what a daguerreotype is to a landscape, are diaries and letters to a biography,—an image true only of certain features, necessarily distorted in others, and not a work of art. But we like to have a work of art. We enjoy a pleasure from our sympathy with the creative spirit it displays, and we enjoy the reflected light thrown on the biographer. What would Johnson's life be without the naïve idolatry of Boswell? It is the salt of the whole, and gives the point to half the anecdotes. Moore himself notes down a happy case in point: "Boswell mentions Johnson saying to him, one night when they were sleeping in the same room and conversing, If you don't stop talking, sir, I will get up and tie you to the bed-post.' I mention this (adds. Boswell) to show the faculty he had of placing his adversary in a ridiculous position." What would the story be without the comment? What should we have learned of this same Samuel Johnson from his memoirs and correspondence? Fancy eight volumes of them. We should have had not a monument, but a sesquipedalian sarcophagus. Sometimes, indeed, the individuality of the historian is so prominent as to give the leading characteristic to his work, as when Carlyle uses history and biography as wax on which to stamp the image of his own mind, or Defoe ascribes his own marked traits of character alike to harlots, pirates, princes, quakers, and cavaliers. We are not urging that a biography is always better read

ing than a diary, only that it has a completeness the latter never can have. Even where a man writes his own life, as no doubt he may do, re-creates himself as it were, casts his own idea of himself into form,-such an image, though probably more exact, minute, and life-like than any other, will still be partial. As a man can never see his whole image in a glass, so he can never form a complete reflection of himself in his own mind. The external biographer meanwhile can walk round him; though he can never get quite close, he can gather up a thousand clues from the observation of others; fragmentary, and often, no doubt, delusive, yet still carrying with them on the whole, to a man of discrimination and imaginative insight, sufficient indicia of their truth or falsehood. From these and from his own experience,-for the biographer does not occupy the most favourable position for the exercise of his art unless he has himself been intimate with his subject, a man of genius may form a more complete, and on the whole a more truthful, image of another than any man can give of himself.

As to letters, usually so much relied on, they are of all things the most fallacious indications of character, whether they be the letters to a man or the letters from him. We don't write to a man to tell him what we think of him; we would not for the world he should know,-we wish to be agreeable, especially to our best friends, who are the people with whose faults we are most familiar: on the other hand, when we write, it is not to betray ourselves; and even in the very frankest and most intimate self-revelations of friendship and love, we unconsciously, and even necessarily distort the proportions and soften the edges of our characters. A sphere of isolation is granted to, nay forced upon each one of us; to be known strikes us as fearful, yet to be unknown carries with it sometimes a feeling of loneliness still more terrible, and a harassing sense of a want of genuineness in our relations to others. And hence it is one of the profoundest consolations and most enduring sustainments which Religion brings to the perplexed spirits of men, that it assures them of the presence of One by whom they are known even as they are, through every ravelled thread and fine-spun filament of their complicated existences-makes them feel that they are embraced and comprehended; and though an insoluble problem to themselves and others, are not without an explanation, a purpose, and a place.

Moreover, the degree in which a man's writings image himself varies infinitely. Some men know themselves, others don't; some write themselves, others are of so chameleon-like a nature that they take a tinge of each person whom they address, and in writing to a man become for a moment like him-their very

handwriting will often bear traces from the letter they are answering. Different lives are not alike expressible; some men live in thought, some in action, some in feeling. Different men express different sides of their character, often not the predominant one. A reserved man of feeling tells you only what he is doing; a thoughtful man of action (like Dr. Arnold, for instance) tells you of what he is thinking. Some men are not themselves when they write their letters: they become a correspondent. Do Pope's letters tell us any thing about him? He was thinking of absolutely nothing in writing them but of what would make a well-turned epistle; it is like reading deal-boards to peruse them.

Lord John Russell has not chosen to take the trouble of writing his friend's life. He has not even chosen to do common justice to the materials in his hands. Without the loss of a single trait of character, however minute, they might have been compressed into readable limits, and made into an interesting and entertaining book, instead of being flung in a mass before us, encumbered with a thousand characterless details and endless repetitions. Moore kept this diary as memoranda for memoirs he intended to write: he did not think the world would be called on to read it at large. He must be a very great man indeed of whom we wish to know where he dined seven days in the week. Much of this sort of thing would have been well exchanged for some fuller evidence from Lord John himself as to the habits and character of a man with whom he was intimate for so many years. The editor, however, has preferred a less laborious course. He supplies a short preface, insisting on one or two characteristics made sufficiently obvious in the voluminous pages of the diary, quotes from the biographies of Scott and Byron one or two tributes to his genius, and furnishes us at very disproportionate length with his own views about Tasso. Having done thus much, he launches us without further guide into a sea of letters and diaries, and concludes the work with a few pages of postscript, which add nothing to our knowledge of the man. From these, and from the various hints with which contemporary literature abounds, those of a generation too late to have known him in his prime must form their idea of the life and character of Moore.

It is not a difficult character to estimate. It contains none of those strongly-marked contrasts which make Byron an enigma. It is the easier because it is always the same. Most men go

through more or less of a process of development in their passage through life, and are different at different stages. Some slowly change, and you can mark the process; others move per saltum, and you see only the two contrasted pictures. Shake

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