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appalling frequency and atrocity is still rampant, and where, while in too many cases the police suffer the worst malefactors to clude their vigilance and baffle pursuit, the judges, with their unconscionable delays and tedious proceedings, too often doom an innocent man to languish in jail month after month, year after year, in some instances even prolonging his suspense till death comes to his relief before they vouchsafe him his trial.

Of the measures on the passing of which the men of the Left staked their existence on coming into power six years ago, only the two financial schemes already mentioned-the grist tax and the Forced Paper Currency-are now in progress of execution. About the success of their trump-card-the Electoral Reform, which is now the theme of debate in the Chambers-great doubts are still entertained; and yet it is on the alleged necessity of getting at the real will of the nation that King Humbert, with honourable but somewhat exaggerated ideas of his duties as a Constitutional Sovereign, resisted, during the recent crisis, all suggestions about dissolving the Chamber of Deputies, putting off all appeal to the people till the present Legislature is brought to its natural close, or till the question of the electoral franchise is decided. Everybody about the King, though perhaps not the King himself, well knows how little reliance can be put on the results of a general election. In a country so new as Italy is to constitutional life, the popular vote is either unduly swayed by the ascendancy of the Government functionaries, high and low, or actually hocus-pocussed and falsified by the sleight-ofhand tricks of its underhand agents. At any rate, it very seldom happens on the Continent that a majority is returned hostile to the Government which manipulates the election. And it is in this respect that Democrats in those Southern communities have succeeded in perverting the ideas of the unthinking multitude: they contend that in their scheme of universal suffrage and the ballot lies the panacea for all electoral disorders. Some of the Conservatives, however, if they would speak out, might object that the electoral franchise, far from needing extension, ought on the contrary to be limited, at least until the electors show a better consciousness of their public duties, and are cured of that indolence or timidity by which they allow the rough and desperate to have their own way at the polls. In Italy, at all events, with a suffrage still grounded on property qualification or superior education-limited to the payers of 40 francs yearly of direct taxes, and to members of the learned professions—it not unfrequently happens that the election of a "College" or constituency mustering 1,500 registered electors, is barely attended by one-tenth of that number. With such a disposition on the part of what is considered the élite of the people, what other results can be expected from manhood suffrage and secret voting than what we see in France-the reign of the multitude, which is

another word for the Dictatorship of a Napoleon or a Gambetta. One might well accept the Vox populi as Vox Dei, if the mass acted on its own impulse and not often on its worst enemies' suggestion, and if zeal for its class interests did not interfere with its sense of the public good.

By thus freely and fairly, to the best of my abilities, pointing out the shortcomings of the Italians in such experiment of an independent political life as they have up to this moment gone through, I think I have made the best case for them in what concerns the past, and set out the most encouraging prospects of what may be expected of them in the future. Twenty or even two-and-twenty years is but a short period in the existence of a nation-a brief lapse of time to efface the marks of years, to correct the stoop of the shoulders contracted by long submission to a home and foreign yoke. The Italians are not now what they were in the palmy days of ancient Rome, or what they again became in the stirring times of mediaval Florence, Genoa, or Venice. Four centuries of priestly and princely misrule could not fail to leave on their mental and moral character an impression so deep as to seem, on a cursory view, indelible; and nothing but a miracle could at once raise them to the ideal of their too sanguine well-wishers. But the question is whether any nation, under the same circumstances, would be very much better; or whether, as it used to be said before 1860, "men of any other race of duller fibre and grosser habits would, after undergoing so demoralising an ordeal, still preserve the features and upright bearing of human beings, and not crawl, like brutes, on all fours."

The Italians, it must be allowed, have not, during this last score of years, done the best for themselves; but surely they could have done worse; and a sufficient defence for them would be the mere enumeration of the many mistakes and misdeeds which they might not unpardonably have committed, but from which they have wisely abstained. In their foreign policy, to begin with, they have not been free from vague aspirations and tender or even morbid susceptibilities-but they have, after all, always commanded their temper, soothed or quelled insane agitation, disavowed rash and absurd pretensions, put up with deliberate, galling provocation. They have not been that "sure guarantee of European peace" which would have become the mission assigned to them; they have not trusted to an inoffensive attitude as their best safeguard, and have followed their neighbours' bad example by arming themselves to the teeth. But the War Minister who called for more cannon and gunpowder had to withdraw before the prudent vote of his colleagues in the Cabinet. The charge of a military establishment has been heavy for Italy, it must be granted; but it has not, as elsewhere, led to the prevalence of militarism; it has never subjected the country to the sudden catas

trophe of a Pronunciamiento. The evils of an armed peace, added to those of an overgrown and improvident Administration, have led to financial distress, and to a ruthless taxation, exhausting the resources and all but breaking the back of the nation. But even in that respect the Italians have reached the limits beyond which recklessness cannot go; they seem now bent on retrenchment; their Budget has for the last four or five years presented, if not quite a satisfactory, at least a more encouraging balance-sheet. Public confidence has risen at home and abroad, and Italian Five per Cents. are at 931.

In matters of home policy, again, it must be granted that Italy has not well withstood the influence of pseudo-democratic and ultrahumanitarian Utopias. But the Bill introducing universal suffrage and that abolishing capital punishment have not yet become law, and are hardly likely to pass without amendments that will take the sting from them-amendments, not only accepted, but even suggested by the Radical Government, always half-hearted about the measures to which it is bound by its precedents, yet which it has for these last five years managed to postpone. Italy would, moreover, not be the first country in which measures of that nature have not been repealed by the very men by whom they were most ardently and most persistently advocated.

Finally, the Italians cannot deny the charge that they have been, in politics as in crinolines, chignons, or idiot fringes, servile imitators of French fashions, aping almost exclusively the very nation which harbours perhaps the least good-will to them, and deals them the hardest snubs and slaps in the face. But they have hitherto followed their leaders at a tolerably safe distance; they have not carried French theories to their ultimate conclusions. The Italians have a readymade "Head of the State," a corner-stone of the constitution, in their loyalty to their King and dynasty. They are not by nature hero-worshippers. Since Cavour's death and Garibaldi's marriage there has been no case of transcendent genius or miraculous valour to call forth their veneration or enthusiasm. Italy supplies Napoleons and Gambettas to her neighbours, but will have none for herself. It is fortunate also that France should show so much ingenuity, and be so ready to seize every opportunity to affront the Italians, that she should become more exacting and overbearing in proportion as she, notwithstanding her great wealth, sinks in importance and loses prestige. It is not many years since an Italian Deputy, on his visit to Madrid, "thanked Heaven that had created Spain, lest his own Italy should be the lowest in the scale of civilised nations." For what concerns Government, it is questionable whether either Italy or Spain herself can find anything to envy in the condition of their Gallic sister.

A. GALLENGA.

"THE FOUR WINDS OF THE SPIRIT."1

THE patron-saint of the nineteenth century is most unquestionably St. Thomas, and it may possibly be the influence of that fainthearted apostle which makes many people welcome a new book by an old favourite with some qualms and trepidation. With authors who are at once very prolific and somewhat unequal the mixture of doubt is apt to become very considerable, and it is not uncommon to hear devotees who retain their faculty of criticism fervently wishing, when a new book by one or other of the few great writers whom Europe now boasts appears, for an arbitrary censorship with power of summarily extinguishing work unworthy of that which has gone before it. M. Victor Hugo's well-known habit of keeping his written work in a more than Horatian novitiate of seclusion before publishing it makes the danger less in his case than in some others. But it may be admitted by all but uncompromising Hugolaters that a good deal of the poetical work issued since the second Légende has been not altogether up to the author's high-water mark. The present volumes, however, it may be said at once and without fear, show us yet another springtide of poetry. The "Four Winds of the Spirit"—satire, drama, lyric, epic—give the author a subject of the kind certain to put him in the right vein as to general treatment. A fanciful critic seeking for picturesque analogies could find few better for Victor Hugo himself than the image of a "rushing mighty wind." The peculiar faculty of carrying his readers off with him which he possesses, the impetuous indifference with which he attacks every subject that presents itself, the very mechanical and technical structure and sound of his verse lend themselves equally to the simile. The work by which under the four heads the poet has by turns illustrated his conception and his mastery of the four modes of poetry is very miscellaneous in kind (at least in the satiric and lyrical sections), but for the most part has a pervading unison of sentiment -that of the well-known Hugonian perfectibilism. The book seems to have been composed at dates ranging over a wide period, but very many of its parts are of that time which was perhaps the most fertile of all the fertile years of M. Victor Hugo's long life, the first decade of his exile, which saw the publication of the Châtiments, the Contemplations, and the first Légende. Nor will some of the poems here printed bear unfavourable comparison even with the Chasseur Noir and the Aventuriers de la Mer.

The first division of the book is on the whole by far the weakest; despite the Châtiments, it may be doubted whether satire is the poet's forte, unless one is prepared to concede (which I certainly do not

(1) Les Quatre Vents de l'Esprit. Par Victor Hugo. 2 Vols. J. Hetzel, A. Quantin. Paris: 1881.

concede) that indignation and a faculty of expression combined
suffice to make a satirist. Among the defects which sane criticism
must note in Victor Hugo, an insufficient sense of humour and a
certain incapacity to appreciate the proportions of things must be
counted, and both these are terrible drawbacks to successful satire.
The satirist has no need of the vague and the vast, the special regions
in which this poet's genius delights to expatiate. He must be cool,
and M. Victor Hugo is never cool; dispassionate, and M. Victor Hugo
is never dispassionate; able to guard himself at all points while he
attacks others, and M. Victor Hugo is always laying his flanks open
to the archers. He has taken d'Aubigné and Juvenal rather than
Regnier and Aristophanes for his models. But it is very doubtful
whether Juvenal was in such a rage as he pretends to be in, and the
admirable author of Les Tragiques had, with all his heat, a cool logical
faculty and a sevenfold shield of humorous appreciation which have
hardly come down to his spiritual descendant. It is positively
painful to an admirer of the greatest poet of the last half-century to
find him still harping on the trumpery Brussels business, when a
few dozen ragamuffins, overcome with faro and zeal, threw or did not
throw a handful or so of pebbles at his windows. The piece "Muse,
un nommé Ségur" is in every way inferior to the poem on the same
subject in L'Année Terrible, of which it seems to have been a first
and
very properly withdrawn draft. The lines—

"Ah! ces gueux devant qui ma jeunesse eût frémi,
Pires que Mérimée et Planche, nains horribles,"

are almost shocking in their littleness, and I can only hope, without much confidence in the reasonableness of the hope, that the piece beginning "C'est bien: puisqu'au sénat," is not meant for the same address. But even in this, the only unsatisfactory part of the book (I shall not have to make a single other uncomplimentary criticism), the splendid and imperishable literary workmanship which makes Victor Hugo what he is, appears everywhere, and more than reconciles the reader. In the midst of the complaints and hallucinations of the terrible year occurs this admirable passage of self-portraiture, a passage for the most part as literally true as it is artistically beautiful :

"Le ciel qui cache au fond des antres de Sicile

La flûte de Moschus, chère aux échos profonds,

Livre Arioste au vol fantasque des griffons,

Et fait dialoguer le prophète avec l'aigle,

Le grand ciel d'où sur nous descend l'ombre et la règle
M'avait créé pensif, de sorte que j'avais

L'oeil fixé sur la route incertaine où je vais,

Et que je n'étais guère autre chose qu'un homme

Attendri, de colère et de haine économe,

Vieux par les souvenirs, jeune par les penchants,

Fait pour la vénérable allégresse des champs.

Mais en même temps j'ai, comme Eschyle, deux âmes,
L'une où croissent les fleurs, l'autre où couvent les flammes;

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