Heroes and Valets.

THE great secret of political health is the right distribution of responsibility. Public like private servants become corrupt when nobody checks their accounts, and imbecile when they are checked at every turn. Every officer in the State, as in the army, should have a sphere of discretion, subject to the general supervision of his commander. The general should be allowed to plan a campaign; the private to select an object for his bullets. The perfection of military organisation depends as much upon leaving sufficient play to component parts as in securing the unity of the whole machine. Unluckily we are apt, in this as in some other cases, to oscillate from one extreme to another; we remedy insubordination by excessive centralisation and suppose that organisation (the favourite catchword of modern reformers) implies the substitution of passive mechanism for intelligent co-operation. When in old days the hands of our rulers were untied, they helped themselves too freely from our pockets. We have since tied their hands so tight that they have a permanent cramp in their fingers. The approval of the public is not only to be the sole end of their activity, but the sole rule in each particular action. To destroy the abuse we suppress the one great stimulus to intelligent energy. The doctrine becomes important as the facility of abuse increases. We possess a most elaborate and skilful machinery, daily growing in perfection of organisation, for compelling our officials to feel that some millions of eyes are riveted upon their most trifling motions. It is no wonder if they become nervous and fidgety, and are sometimes more anxious to avoid failure than to pluck success from danger. “What will they say in England?" was a very good question at the proper moment, but a general ought not to ask it every morning before he posts a sentry. The "master's eye" is an admirable tonic; but a sensible master does not mistake his eyes for Sam Weller's miraculous microscopes. Their powers of vision are limited, and a good master knows when to shut them. This danger of confusing between the responsibility which stimulates and that which enervates and oppresses, is recognised in theory if not always borne in mind in practice. There is another confusion, as mischievous and, it would seem, in still greater need of elucidation. A general should be responsible for the success of his measures, though he should not be worried about every petty detail. But it does not follow that a general or any other public servant should be responsible to the public for the cut of his hair, for the mode in which he spends his holidays, for the taste in which he furnishes his rooms, or

for the conversations which he carries on with his wife. So long as he breaks no recognised code, moral or social, the public has no concern with his actions, and interference of a million is as impertinent as the interference of an individual. If a stranger peeps through the keyhole of my study, I may rightfully give him at least a moral slap in the face. His publication of the news thus acquired is clearly a great aggravation of the offence. The eminence of his victim should increase rather than diminish the indignation due to such offences, as implying a want of reverence as well as a want of manners. Conduct which would be intolerable as between two private gentlemen does not become venial because the injured person possesses unusual claims upon our respect.

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Formerly, it must be granted, there was some excuse for such performances. The distinction between a man's public and his private capacity was not drawn so clearly as it is now. The ruler of the State was hardly distinguished from the landlord of the territory. national debt was confused with the private debt of the monarch. Till a very late period, Ministers were literally as well as technically the servants of the Crown, and a secretary of state might be appointed or dismissed like a footman by the private taste of the King. Almost to the present reign, the government of the nation depended avowedly on mere backstairs intrigues, and a State revolution might be caused by the tricks of a chambermaid. As long as the people were really at the mercy of the pettiest personal interests, there was some excuse for publishing personal gossip. We ridicule Horace Walpole and his like for gathering up savoury morsels of Court scandal. Doubtless the practice does not imply a high standard of personal dignity. But in his day, and even later than his day, such scandal was really a part of history. We despise the talebearer; but his information was really of interest. We do not envy the men to whose lot it fell to record instances of the drunkenness, the frivolity, the petty selfishness, and ignoble vices of some of our former rulers. Such annalists have had to dabble in very repulsive filth to acquire their knowledge, and may have broken confidence in betraying it. When, however, the great wheels of State were revolving in such a medium, it was as well that the facts should be known. Nay, we must even feel a kind of gratitude to men who soiled their own hands in showing with how little wisdom and how little virtue the world has sometimes been governed.

Things are happily now altered; and the private life of our rulers should be their own. As they have become more responsible in their public, they should become freer in their private capacity. We have no longer to seek for the causes of the rise and downfall of Ministers in the retired recesses of palaces. To go there at all is an impertinence. Queen Anne turned out Ministers because she had been "got at " (in sporting slang) by one of her attendants. Queen Victoria dismissed Mr. Gladstone when he ceased to command a majority in Parliament. It was natural to inquire into the petty intrigues of Queen Anne's

household, when it would be the grossest breach of good manners to ask questions about the maids and the footmen employed by her present Majesty. It is well, indeed, that we should know in general that our rulers are virtuous and honourable in their private relations. The domestic purity of a Court, as no living Englishman will dispute, may be a legitimate source of strength to the constitution. We may be sincerely grateful when the persons concerned themselves sanction the publication of materials upon which a sufficient estimate of their characters can be formed without involving a breach of private confidence. But we can know all that we have a right to know, or ought to wish to know, without retailing the petty tittle-tattle which gratifies the curiosity of country tea-tables and loungers at London clubs; and certainly without giving it the benefit of circulation in the press, and advertising it on a thousand placards.

The general principle thus seems to be simple enough. Whatever a man does as a public servant is a legitimate subject of inquiry to his superiors and ultimately to the public. Publicity in this sense is not only legitimate, but the essential and indispensable guarantee of purity. What a public man does in a private capacity may also be properly known so far as it directly affects his public character. If an archbishop were in the habit of drinking to excess, or a Chancellor of the Exchequor of gambling on the Stock Exchange, the facts should be known; for nobody will deny that such facts would affect the public character of the accused. On the other hand, the details of a man's private life, his special tastes, his family relations, his modes of dressing, eating, and drinking, are matters into which the public has no sort of right to concern itself. The habit of prying into matters with which we have no concern is fully as bad for the public as for its component parts; it may inflect cruel hardships upon individuals, and it demoralises the persons who indulge in it. No one with the common feelings of a gentleman will deny that it ought to be suppressed. The only difficulty is in defining the precise limits of public interference. How are we to define the sphere within which a man may properly shut himself up and defy all intruders? The fact that there is some difficulty in drawing the line is the cause of the existing mischief. We have gradually slid into a laxity which threatens pernicious consequences; but the first stages of the process are harmless enough and even desirable.

We desire and who can blame us ?-to know something of our rulers, not only of that part of them which can be discovered in a blue-book, but of their characters, as living, moving, feeling beings. Are they true men or "miserable creatures having-the-honour-to-be?" mere clotheshorses, or flesh-and-blood realities? Brilliant journalists gratify our tastes by elaborate "psychological analyses," and carefully drawn portraits, which often reveal very high artistic skill. Mr. Punch presents us with good-humoured caricatures which hurt nobody, and give more character by a stroke of a pencil than is contained in a volume of solid history. Photographers make the features of great men familiar, and their portraits

draw crowds to the walls of the Academy. In due time their memoirs will be published, and details will be cleared up which are still a mystery for contemporaries. There is nothing illegitimate in these proceedings, for nothing has been told which can give pain to a becoming sensibility. Our guides must make themselves known to us, if they would challenge our confidence, and they, doubtless, would generally be the last to complain. A man may well be proud the first time that he appears in a cartoon of Mr. Tenniel's.

But our appetite grows by what it feeds on. We ask for more facts, without inquiring too nicely whether our demand is fair. There is no want of men ready to supply the demand. The "interviewer" is on the look-out. He hunts for gossip as keenly as a dog for truffles. He scents a bit of scandal from afar. It is nothing to him whether the savoury morsel is picked up in a gutter or on a private dinner-table. The more private, the better chance that it will be his exclusive property. When the statesman fondly supposes that he is taking a holiday, the eye of his persecutor follows him. The penny-a-liner springs from the earth as vultures in the tropics seem to drop mysteriously from the clouds. A well-known gentleman lately got into an awkward place in a holiday scramble. "Ah, sir," were the first words that came to him as he reached a safe place, "this will be in the papers to-morrow." If a Minister amuses himself in his garden, and talks to a miscellaneous visitor, his words will be published to a listening universe. If he stops at a station, he is asked to make an address instead of swallowing a pork-pie. The smaller political fry who bask in the sunshine of great acquaintance make notes to be used in memoirs or to be used in popular lectures in America and the colonies. The memoir-writer is a posthumous interviewer, and publishes scandals, the more piquant for a little keeping, mixed with any scraps that may have been swept out of the great man's writing-table.

In all this, it may be replied there is little mischief and little cause for pitying the victim. A man who leads a public life must put up with the penalties of publicity. If the fine gloss of sensibility be rubbed off his nature, that is part of the price which he pays for his position. If this be granted for a moment, the question still remains, who is public? It seems often to be answered very vaguely. A popular novelist or poet, for example, is taken to be public property. If so many thousand copies of a book are published, its author becomes a legitimate victim. The instant he is dead, we have a right to know all about him. The most careless letters, written to the most intimate friends, are printed, regardless even of living sensibility. We are to know what he (or she) said about his acquaintance; to plunge into the details of his love affairs, and to know the ins and outs of his petty quarrels. Perhaps it would have been agony to him, when alive, to have his secrets laid open to the million. Perhaps it is still agony to those who are still living. No matter, the man has written a good book, and he is doomed. What would we not have given, it is said, for similar information about VOL. XXXV.-No. 205.

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Shakespeare? I am unfeeling enough to rejoice that we know so little. A man who cannot understand Hamlet without knowing the rights of Shakespeare's relations with Anne Hathaway would not really understand it the better if the minutest details had been published at his death. The microscopic writers who spend years in the attempt to "illustrate" the history of a great author by unearthing some forgotten entry in a register are, as a rule, the worst of all judges of his merit. Hamlet and the Faery Queen have stirred the human imagination as powerfully as though Spenser and Shakespeare had been treated like some modern authors. It is pleasant to think that their memory is safe in the deep waters of oblivion from all the impertinence of literary pettifoggers. Biography is indeed one of the most charming and valuable of all forms of literature. Boswell and Lockhart, and some more recent writers, deserve our very warmest gratitude. But the biographer has many temptations due to the very charm of his work, and it would be superfluous to prove that biographers have often yielded to temptation.

To publish all the rubbish that a great man has written, and would, if he could, have suppressed, and to revive every scandal once attached to his name, is becoming the accepted mode of honouring his memory. But the mischief inflicted is palpable. The commonest weakness of modern authors is certainly their excessive self-consciousness. How can it be helped when every foolish adorer is gaping for every scrap of knowledge about the petty details of their lifewhen fragments of infinitesimal information about their sayings and doings are treasured up as in old days men treasured bits of the old clothes of saints; when well-meaning Americans-and there is really something touching about the simplicity of Transatlantic adorers-tout for introductions as they might struggle at home for the keepership of a lighthouse? I have known such an admirer literally cherish a hair brushed off the coat of a celebrated author; and I imagine that some famous men must have a heavy postage to pay for the supply of autographs. When such things are done in the lifetime of eminent men, what will be done when they are dead? What ransacking of old drawers, what hunting up of schoolboy exercises, of scrawls hastily drawn on the backs of letters, and especially of letters in which there is anything really interesting, that is to say generally, of some unpleasant remark about a friend! I may remark innocently enough that someone whom I really esteem is a bore; perhaps he has been telling me a story when I had a toothache or had heard of the loss of an investment; my phrase may imply no scruple of settled illwill, and it has been frankly written in the confidence of private correspondence. To publish it, without a word of explanation, may inflict a cruel and merciless pang on my friend; but who of the race of memoir-writers would be stopped by such a consideration? Or I am a lady, and have laughed to my closest confidant at a gentleman who made me an offer. I would not for the world hurt a worthy man who has paid me the highest compliment in his