more or less distinct, of what he thought and felt on a great variety of subjects, and by setting these indications side by side a united whole may be gained which tells us a good deal about his mind and heart in this or that. We propose in these remarks to examine how he wrote, and to infer as nearly as may be how he thought, on the subject of personal beauty.

We think it was Lord Chesterfield who once described personal beauty as "a good letter of introduction." Good looks certainly do the work of such letters very well in a great number of instances; but the description will be felt to be mean, feeble, and inadequate. Shakspeare would not have endured it for a moment. He might have put it for dramatic purposes into the mouth of a calculating lago or a cynical Jaques; but it is the last thing that he himself would have accepted as a description of beauty, for his thoughts ran altogether on another level. They may not win general acceptance just now. It is possible that they may incline some readers to ask, as George III. once asked of Miss Burney (in_confidence), "Was there ever such stuff as a great part of Shakspeare?" But they are, notwithstanding, on a level which no one would be the worse for trying to reach once more. Beauty, in his conception, was, in the first place, one of the great prime gifts of life. He is continually given to rank it among these. He classes it with

Wit,

High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity,

It "provoketh thieves sooner than gold";
it often makes women proud, and men
effeminate. On the other hand, it can and
ought to exercise a sovereignty for good-
sovereignty, because it is itself hedged
round with a kind of regal divinity.

Confounds the tongue and makes the senses
Beauty's princely majesty is such,
rough.

If it drove Angelo into insane and reckless
villany, it more often reclaims the tyrant,"
and wins "respect" and "privilege." It
can shame the purse-proud into submission,
and it can annihilate time.

A withered hermit, fivescore winters worn,
Might shake off fifty, looking in her eye:
Beauty doth varnish age, as if newborn,
And gives the crutch the cradle's infancy.

tions and the influence of beauty. There is We have so far spoken only of the relano dramatic poet who writes so clearly, so consistently (within reasonable limits), and so nobly as Shakspeare does about its nature and quality. Every now and then it suits him to write hyperbolically, as when the servant in Troilus and Cressida calls, not beauty in the abstract only, but the actual embodied Helen, "love's invisible soul." But Shakspeare's own thought and feeling about the nature of beauty was exA score of pasactly the opposite of this. sages show that he habitually conceived of it as a kind of semi-corporeal essence, the soul or vital principle of which is goodness. We do not care to inquire how far this was due to the higher influences of Euphuism, or to the mysticism of Italian poets. For, with education, youth, honesty, worth, cour-like everything else that he touched, he had age, and wisdom. Like all of these, it is to be regarded more as a trust than as a gift. It may be disfigured and wasted, a thing which it is criminal to allow; or increased and transmitted, which is not a matter of caprice, but a duty. Whatever view may be held about the Sonnets in general, no one who knows well that exquisite and difficult series of poems will have much doubt that the reiterated injunctions to perpetuate the great endowment of beauty by transmission, which abound in the first twenty or thirty sonnets, are something more than the expression of a wish regarding a particular case, and represent general and permanent persuasions.

Like those other prime personal faculties or acquisitions, beauty is also, in Shakspeare's view, a potent influencer. It is sometimes mysteriously powerful for evil.

Beauty is a witch

made these thoughts essentially his own;
and they had been removed by him (though
at this time of day they may look almost too
delicate for common use) out of the region
of the transcendental, and worked into the
relations of actual and practical life. In
Measure for Measure, the loftiest in some
respects of all the Shakspearian dramas, the
Duke tells Isabella that "the goodness that
is cheap in beauty (in other and less appo-
site words, venality in beauty) makes beauty
brief in goodness (shortlived); but grace,
being the soul of your complexion, shall
keep the body of it fair for ever." Antonio,
in Twelfth Night, mistaking Viola for Se-
bastian, and bitterly believing himself dis-
owned, tells the supposed fair traitor that
he has done good feature shame" :-

In nature there's no blemish but the mind;,
None can be called deform'd but the unkind;
Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous evil

Against whose charms faith melteth into blood. Are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the devil.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever — has performed such severe and unremitting duty as a quotation that we are ashamed once more to recall it. But perhaps it is not and the whole passage where they stand, very common to recollect that the words, indicate a thought which is instinctive in natures of a certain degree of feeling and perception, and which has been seized and embodied by the loftiest minds in their loftiest moods. Keats is possessed primarily by the thought of the abiding effect of things beautiful; but he also conveys what Shakspeare and Spenser and Milton express again and again - the idea of permanency in beauty itself, its association in the mind, not with what is transient, but with what is eternal. We all know what it is to grudge even the passing of a beautiful day

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die;

These with Shakspeare are not transient whimsical phrases. They are his habitual thoughts. They are put into the mouths of we wish to hold fast the "shapes of sky or the most various characters, and they are plain"; and, moved by a stronger instinct intensified by some of his most powerful still, we cannot lose without unwillingness writing. They differ from the Platonic and the present light and glory of personal huSpenserian phantasies so pleasantly dis- man beauty. Permanency is not only the coursed upon by Charles Lamb in the essay thought or emotion of reflecting minds on on Mrs. Conrady. Delicate and true as fronting beauty; it is more than that; it is these are, there is an air of ingeniousness the blind intuition even of natures that about them by reason of which they strike never were and never will be able to comless directly home. In them the virtuous pass in thought such abstractions as beauty soul is the cause of a beautiful exterior, or permanency at all. Reflection, stimprovided always that the material is plastic ulated perhaps rather than dulled by freenough. But the doctrine that the exterior quent loss and familar disappointment, casts beauty is proportioned to the internal intel- about to find what the elements of permalectual light is too glaringly contrary to nency may be, and the great poets, "in facts to be impressive; and the saving pro- clear dream and solemn vision," have found vision that some material is so obstinate it, and declare it to be the prime germ of that it cannot be worked upon is too general beauty, its life and soul. Call it what you and too elastic. In Shakspeare the beauti-will-grace, virtue, goodness - this “luce ful exterior is not attempted to be accounted for; but the laws of its life and death, its durability and decay, are delineated with a fineness and precision of thought which genius might inspire, but which nothing but virtuous soundness of nature could dictate and render habitual.

If, however, we have mentioned Spenser's "Hymne in Honour of Beautie" with a slightly unfavourable contrast on a particular point, it is impossible to end without stopping again to extol it. There is one thought pervading it in which the two great Elizabethan contemporaries could not but agree in which perhaps all the greatest mediæval and modern poets have agreedand that is, the immortality of beauty. The line in Keats

intellettual, piena d'amore" is the real rem-
edy of lossor of decay in beauty, the guaran-
tee of perpetuity; it casts a
beam upon
the outward shape,"

66

And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal,

And Shakspeare, whenever he has occasion
to do more than merely transmit the name
of beauty through bis verse, is never far
from thoughts like these. He is always
ready to pass from the outward to the in-
ward; from the form to the idea; from the
corporeal reflection to the inextinguished

ray

which

Is heavenly-born and cannot die;
Being a parcell of the purest skie.

of a

From The Pall Mall Gazette.

this fact will be soonest or most keenly SOME POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE WAR. felt. The victories of Prussia must awaken FIRST of all, Europe has been confronted a far more lively interest in Russia than in by a new and startling fact. A colossal any other of the neutral States. For some military Power has unexpectedly risen up years past it has been the policy of the among us. We say has unexpectedly risen Berlin Cabinet to keep on good terms with up, because the most favourable estimates the Czar. Family alliances made it natural of the Prussian military organization had and decent to do so, and there was an not prepared us for anything like the re- obvious prudence in not provoking Russian ality. Many people thought that the result hostility until it was possible to provoke it war between Prussia and France without danger. Consequently, Prussia would be to displace the latter from the and France have been allowed to bid position of military pre-eminence she was against each other at St. Petersburg, and supposed to have regained under the Second as it was not the aim of the Russian GovEmpire. But if the contest ends as it has ernment that either of them should become begun, it will do very much more than this. much stronger than the other, the Czar's It promises to place Prussia in a position Ministers have been careful to encourage such as France has never held except under both a little, and neither very much. Each Louis XIV. and under Napoleon I. There rumour of an alliance to be concluded beis much the same sort of difference between tween France and Russia has been followed this and the position France has lately at no long interval by hints that the relaclaimed to hold as there is between the tions between Russia and Prussia were Ultramontane theory of St. Peter's su- never more friendly, and these again have premacy and the Anglican theory of his been the forerunner of significant suggestprimacy. As a military Power France has ions as to the great things France and been, as theologians would say, primus Russia might do if they could but recognise inter pares, and the utmost that was looked the real identity of their interests. Now for from the war was the transfer of this pre- Russia has been deprived without any warneminence to Prussia. But the utter col-ing of the second string on which she has lapse of the French army, supposing it relied for the success of her archery. She really to take place, carries with it some- will have to confront Prussia in future with thing very different. With France dis- no strong Power in the background ready, posed of, Prussia will be the possessor of as well as eager, to take advantage of an unchallenged supremacy over every Prussia's attention being engaged elsewhere other Power taken singly. England certainly could not stand up against her. Austria failed to do so when Prussia was weaker than she is now. Russia may some day have the necessary strength, but at present, according to the best accounts, she neither has nor thinks that she has it. It is too soon to determine how this sudden aggrandizement of one Power may affect the politics of Europe, but it is quite time to point out that the state of things to which it introduces us is one for which we were quite unprepared. It may be all that it is described, but certainly there cannot yet have been time enough to allow a cool observer to come to any final conclusion upon the subject. There are some reasons, no doubt, why Englishmen may fairly rejoice in a great accession to German strength, but it remains to be seen how far these special grounds for self-congratulation on their part will have to be qualified by the commonplace reflection that even Prussians are but men, and that uncontrolled power will still perhaps be capable of abuse, though it may be wielded by Teutonic hands and guided by Teutonic brains.

It will not, however, be in England that

in order to undermine her position in Germany. If the policy of the two Governments were really one and the same, this might not be altogether disagreeable to Russia. They would agree to go their own way and to use their common strength for the attainment of their separate objects. But with the consolidation of Germany under Prussian rule the reasons for employing their common strength in this way will ease to have any weight at Berlin. So long as Prussia wanted to extend her influence in Germany Russia might have offered her the inducement of being left to do so in peace. But now that the process is virtually completed, now that Germany south of the Main as well as north of it is virtually one nation and one army, Russia has no longer this bait at her disposal. Prussia has secured all she wanted by her own unassisted strength, and any designs that Russia may entertain in the East will be judged at Berlin with no reference to the bribe that she could once have held out in the shape of a full permission to Prussia to work out her own designs nearer home.

We may look, therefore, for the assumption of a far more independent attitude

towards Russia on the part of the Berlin | military information of the past and present Cabinet as one of the most immediate re- events has yet reached us. No diligent sults of the war, and it happens that so military correspondents have hovered about soon as Count Bismarck has any time to the battle-fields to cull from them the inturn his thoughts in that direction he will struction which they were capable of affordnot be without an opportunity for making ing; the facile pen which told of the Bohethis result apparent. For some time back mian triumphs, and which taught us SO Russia has been engaged in a species of much, is perforce idle. Even the wellcrusade against her German subjects in the known correspondent who accompanied the Baltic provinces. She has set herself to Crown Prince has as yet been able to reroot out the German language and the Lu- cord little of permanent military value and theran religion to destroy, in fact, all the interest. And yet day by day in the Alsamarks which have hitherto distinguished tian battle fields lessons of the highest imthe German nationality in these provinces portance to the soldier and to the nation from the Slavonic type which she has suc- are being spelt out. We may be told that cessfully established throughout the rest of it is too soon to attempt to generalize from her empire. In this respect her policy has the present struggle, that a day's events been identical with that attributed, whether may upset all our conclusions, that, after truly or falsely, by the Germans to the all, the campaign is scarcely opened, that Danish Government in Sleswick-Holstein, nothing absolutely decisive has yet been and consistency has already demanded that done. In this there is no doubt much truth. the same ultimatum should be presented at It is too soon to attempt to generalize exSt. Petersburg as was presented at Copen-haustively, or to pronounce dogmatically as hagen in 1864-the full recognition, that to the ultimate solution of all the great is, of German claims, or the compulsory problems now being worked out upon the severance of the German territories. Hith-Meuse and Moselle. We have, of course, erto Count Bismarck has been prudently blind to this logical necessity. He was not prepared to fight Russia, and he justly argued that Russia would listen to no interference in her internal affairs which could not be backed in the last resort by an appeal to force. The mission of Prussia as the protector of German interests in all parts of the world was therefore suffered to lie in abeyance, and the Russian government went its own way. It is not likely that this policy will be pursued any longer. The Germans of the Baltic provinces are keenly interested in the events of the war, and when they say to their Russian neighbours, on getting the news of a Prussian success, Our troops have beaten yours," there may be something prophetic in the instinctive identification of Russia with the defeated army.

64

From The Pall Mall Gazette. MILITARY LESSONS OF THE WAR.

much more to learn, and many questions are still in suspense. But it is not too soon to appeal to the experience of the present war as establishing certain facts, or as affording indications, more or less decided, of important conclusions of grave military import. We have got, at any rate, to the words of one syllable, and these it will be well to make our own before we attempt to master the more difficult lessons. For the present, we shall confine ourselves to setting forth the points which seem to be plainly proved. The instruction to be derived in this way groups itself naturally into several large divisions. There is, for example, that division which connects itself with the personnel of the contending armies, and the organization under which that personnel is directed. There is, again, the question of material of war, its efficiency and application; there is the large and important division which comprehends the various tactical considerations; there is the strategy of the compaign; there is the home application of these and various other lessons to ourselves and our soldiers. To exhaust these subjects would be to write sevoferal treatises, and no attempt of the sort will be made here. All we propose to do is to note down from time to time the points which become more or less decidedly established; thus accumulating as the war proceeds some raw material of instruction which may hereafter be usefully applied to the strengthening of our own system.

THE absence of military correspondents with the French and Prussian armies critical, professional observers of the incidents of the great struggle between the two greatest military nations of Europe is to be regretted not merely on account of our present loss, great as that is, but because we thus run a risk of wholly missing some of the more important lessons of the war. It is surprising how little really detailed

It is surely not too soon to bear testimony

into neglecting the lessons so admirably taught him during peace. He has not fired away all his ammunition like a feu de joie, or at impossible ranges; he has not trusted to unreasoning or unnecessary onsets for victory; he has not omitted to fight under cover as far as possible; he has not fought indiscriminately or blindly, although when required, as at Spikeren, he has been ready to execute assaults of the most desperate and bloody kind, and he has throughout exhibited a certain gentleness which is admirable. It seems to us, if the accounts which we have received may be relied upon, that the Prussian soldier has approached as near perfection in his conduct on the march and in action as it is possible to attain to. In gallantry he may not have surpassed the French, but he has equalled them, and he has coupled that gallantry with a discretion and a moral sobriety and quiet earnestness of purpose which the French soldier does not always seem to have exhibited. His very enthusiasm also is of a totally different character from that of his foe. Much of all this, no doubt, is natural to the Prussians; but much of it is the direct offspring of an excellent discipline. And that discipline begins, not in the army, but in the national schools.

to the excellence and efficiency of the Prus- | intrepidity, a coolness, a discipline which sian soldiers. This is the more, important place him at once in the very highest milibecause those who, like ourselves, have ad- tary ranks. While full of a deep fury and vocated a reorganization of our military intense national dislike of his foe, he has system on something approaching the Prus- yet carefully subordinated his feelings to sian basis have been frequently met with his discipline. He has not been betrayed the statement that the reputation of this army rested upon no solid foundation. The supporters of the old standing army system, as contra-distinguished from what we may call the national military system, have urged that the successes of the Prussians in Denmark, or against an internally divided and badly administered military Power like Austria, afforded no guarantee of the success of the Prussian arms against a really first-rate military Power, against a welltrained, vigorous, compact standing army, such as that of France. All advances towards the Prussian system have been met by a depreciation of the performances of the Prussian army in Bohemia and elsewhere. Prussia was ready while her opponents were not; or she happened to be better armed; or she was inherently stronger; or the generals opposed to her were weak and incapable; or there were dissensions in the enemy's camp; or the campaign was too short to admit of sound conclusions being drawn. In fact, the Prussian military strength was hollow. Prick it with a French bayonet, and who should say that it would not go to pieces? The past few weeks will have supplied a complete answer to this criticism. The Prussian arms have achieved a series of extraordinary successes against a French army. And the The Prussian soldier is an important facFrench army, be it observed, has fought in tor in the results which we have described. some respects under what may be regarded The military system completes and comas great advantages. It has been animated pacts what the national education has comby all the first fire which lights up and al- menced. That system is essentially an inmost sanctifies a popular campaign- by all telligent one in its two main features. In the confidence of men who anticipated a de- the first place, it draws into the ranks a cided victory. There were new and won- large proportion of superior recruits; in the derful weapons, too, to exhibit their prow- second place, it subjects the whole army to ess; there were French generals of Italian a training of the highest character. The and Algerian reputation, who for years had expression" superior recruits" is sometimes been studying the question which this war sneered at in this country by military men. was destined to solve; there was an army They tell us that we want a soldier to do numerically stronger, we believe, than any what he is told-neither more nor less. which France bas before placed in the field. But we have never been able to compreIf there was numerical inferiority, there hend why an intelligent recruit should be was the compensating advantage of position. less likely to be amenable to discipline than There was, in brief, a military machine be- one who recognizes in it nothing more than lieved to be the highest quality, which for a mechanical coercive force. Is it not from years had been undergoing all sorts of pol- our superior recruits that our non-commisishing and improvement specially in view sioned officers are made? And we may of the occasion which had at last arrived. also fairly urge that the Prussian army, This was the force against which the Prus- which is without doubt the most intelligent sian soldier was called upon to fight. How in the world, is also probably at this mohas he acquitted himself? No one will de- ment the most efficient. As to the system ny that he has shown a determination, an❘ of training, we have spoken of this on many