An

finds in the sack and pillage of the ideals of the race. irruption of Montaigne into Pascal, an uprising of La Rochefoucauld in Bossuet, might have induced a kindred effervescence.

My argument is now complete; its content may be thus recapitulated:

First, the gravity, decorum, and pietism of the Danish

court.

Second, the seemingly complete impregnation of the young prince with this spirit.

Third, the dormancy or latency in the young prince of a powerful mind which nothing, up to the hour of his mother's second marriage, had freed or quickened.

Fourth, the simultaneous arrival of a profound moral and emotional convulsion and of the liberation of the intellect.

Fifth, the retreat in consciousness of the moral and emotional convulsion before what was, to an essentially intellectual being, the superior interest of the enfranchised and emergent mind.

Sixth, a resultant pre-occupation with the affairs of the mind which made concern with immediate duty uninterestand laborious.

Seventh, a falling-off in the distinction and significance of the crimes that had shocked Hamlet through the extension and completion of the misanthropy which those crimes had bred.

Do I believe that Shakespeare really meant what I have imputed to Hamlet in the present article? Ah, what Shakespeare meant, what one secretly and genuinely believes! I had rather argue half a day in defense of a theory than face the probe of one such deadly question. A theory is an excellent strap with which to bind facts together for convenience of transport; it is an excellent shelf on which to set them forth in compact array for summary or survey. Speculation on Hamlet is inevitable. Hamlet is a mystery; he is said to illustrate the charm of mystery: but a mystery which is put aside or left alone cannot be said to fulfill its office or exert its charm. Yet at the end of speculation comes the chastening sense of the arrogance of the attempt to explain a mind like Shakespeare's on a point on which that mind has failed or declined to explain itself. O. W. FIRKINS.

TWO VICTORIAN PORTRAITS

BY MURIEL HARRIS

LORD MORLEY was lunching at Frederic Harrison's house when the conversation turned on toothache. Lord Morley said he had never had toothache in his life. "Then that's why you're so great and good was the prompt rejoinder of the woman sitting next to him.

Lord Morley's great-and-good reputation has always been accepted with singular unanimity-even by those who disagreed with him as only your peers can disagree with you. "Honest John" to the general public, he has also compelled a similar deference from his particular public. At the same time, reputations have to do with more than character. Lord Charles Beresford, for instance, got the reputation of the breezy sailor chiefly by reason of his face, which was like a bull-dog's. There is a certain saintliness, a stained-glasswindow suggestion, about Lord Morley's face which has corroborated the inward light. Of Frederic Harrison, now one of his few remaining contemporaries, with his masculine, forceful head, no one would say great-and-good. Great, yes. Good, yes. But not great-and-good.

At this time of general reconstruction a comparison of the lives of these two men has a peculiar aptness-perhaps a greater aptness than a similar comparison of other notable octogenarians, such as Lord Bryce, Thomas Hardy, Sir George Trevelyan. For one thing, there have been quite unusual similarities in their lives. Agreeing closely, they have differed as widely. With common sympathies, they are fundamentally apart. More perhaps than any of their contemporaries, they have influenced British thought, and their total influence has yet to be appraised. One made a religion of philosophy; the other harnessed statesmanship to literature. Together they brought into the water-tight compartments of history, statesmanship, literature, the common

factor of humanity, identifying with humanity in general the different phases of humanity in particular.

Both men were born round about a period corresponding in many ways with our own. Frederic Harrison just remembers being taken as a very little boy to Queen Victoria's coronation. Both began life during a period of history still heaving with the ground swell of the Napoleonic wars. Then, as now, spirits had been called up from the vasty deep, which people feared. Shape after shape marked the political remodelling of Europe, and liberty and repression were rapid alternations. Both men grew to manhood amid the ferment of thought that was the outcome of the long war-period. It was a time when philosophic speculation was everywhere trying to reconstruct a shattered world and reconstruct it differently. Frederic Harrison fell under the spell of Auguste Comte; John Morley under that of John Stuart Mill; both took much from the philosophy of the other, just as Mill appreciated Comte, even while, in some directions, falling foul of him.

It is as difficult to decide as is the problem of the hen and the egg whether a philosophy so influences a man as to shape him fundamentally other than he might have been, or whether, in a given philosophy, a man finds the echo of his own inarticulate convictions. Much philosophy consists in voicing what is already there, rather than in producing original material. A determination of the question would provide many a clue to character. Morley, for instance, became the rationalist, the exponent of moderation, of how to do a thing rather than of the doing of it. Was this tolerance learnt of the ultra-tolerant Mill, or was it perhaps in part due to a certain sensitiveness, perhaps to a certain deeprooted loneliness, which shrank from the personal contact of the intolerant? Did Frederic Harrison's own passion for history, whether of Byzantium or of the year of our Lord, 1920, chime so perfectly with Comte's idea of synthetic history, that his conversion was there, almost before it started? Is it possible that Mill fettered and constrained Morley, whereas Comte, with all his formalism, freed and amplified Harrison? Subtracting the common ground of wide experience, scholarliness, intimate knowledge over more than half a century of everybody worth knowing, intense sympathy with France, as opposed to Carlyle's deification of brute force in Frederick, the characters of the two men are

poles asunder. That of Frederic Harrison is ardent, robust, fearless; that of Morley isolated, cautious, and fearful-in the sense of fearing to take a wrong step. I remember them both during a week-end at Frederic Harrison's country house in Kent. Both sat under the wide branches of the yew-tree on the lawn looking at the rose-walk. Harrison talked vigorously, urging, suggesting, putting his points, one leg outstretched, the other drawn up as though to anchor himself against the pull of his own vehemence. Morley sat back, listening, appraising, saying very little. They were talking of Chamberlain and the Protectionist movement, and while they were both ardent free-traders, Morley had a deep admiration for Chamberlain-the admiration perhaps of the man of thought for the man who acted at once-while Harrison thought friendship for the man compromised by the wrong-headedness of his principles. Only a year or two ago at Bath, the same attitude was evident in the two men. Although several years his senior, Frederic Harrison guided Lord Morley when they crossed the street together, and it was the older of the two who made the suggestions, raised the arguments, was the vital member of the discussion. It is something of a paradox that of the two, the less vigorous should have had most of the rough-and-tumble of political life. It was Morley who emerged from his library to take a share in the government of his country; it was Frederic Harrison who refused offers to become even member of Parliament, and whose official life was confined to a London County Councillorship under the chairmanship of Lord Rosebery.

The careers of the two men were the direct result of their respective philosophies. Mill was in Parliament himself, where Gladstone called him the saint of rationalism, and, almost against his own inclinations, Lord Morley has felt that knowledge of men is not contained in books alone. His natural tendency towards reserve and isolation possibly influenced him the more towards the public life which should complete his knowledge. Frederic Harrison, on the other hand, has felt, with many other thinkers of his day, that Parliament is least helpful towards the world of ideas. Moreover, his own natural inclinations take him widely among men. His autobiography tells of his friendships with Gladstone, Tennyson, Rosebery and the rest, and to this day, when he is known as the Grand Old Man of

Bath, he finds pleasure in meeting everybody, discussing everything. The chief exponent of the religion of Humanity is himself the most human of men. During the war, when Bath became once more a fashionable centre for politicians, literary men and the like, Mr. Harrison was the centre to whom they all gravitated, foreigners and Englishmen alike-Lord Rosebery, Lord Morley, Mr. Raemaekers, Prince Cantacuzene. I remember how at one of the Bath tea-parties a rather foolish woman, after listening to his stories, asked him why he did not write his memoirs. He did not snub her, but replied mildly that he had -several times. With all the difference in their careers, therefore, Lord Morley and Frederic Harrison had this in common each of them possessed two great interests. One was absorbed in government and literature; the other was absorbed in Positivism and literature. Perhaps each would say that their two interests were one-certainly in the case of Mr. Harrison there would be truth in this. But to the outsider the mere reader of the lives of Chatham, Cromwell, Voltaire, of Compromise and of The Meaning of History-it is probable that literature will best represent them. It is difficult, for instance, for any but the actual friend to realize, except through literature-as opposed to more active work--the spirit moving such a personality as that of Mr. Harrison. His is the secret of eternal youth. Everything is vital to him. Dead bones live under his touch; ashes become flesh and blood. His knowledge of the past is the knowledge of seventy years from which nothing has been lost. But it is his knowledge of the present which differentiates him from his contemporaries, a knowledge enabling him to a just balancing of past and present and giving him an almost uncanny prescience with regard to the future. In 1886 he was advancing powerfully all the reasons now being giving for a self-governing Ireland. In the Franco-German war, when much sympathy was felt in England for the Germans, he foresaw the aggressive policy which culminated in the Great War, and advocated preparation at a time when it laid him open to the charge of having departed from his life-long principles. At one time strongly anti-suffragist, he again disappointed those who cannot see that other times imply other manners, by declaring himself in 1916 in favor of women's suffrage. I think it was that historic sense of his, which never stagnated but was always