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those few among us who are always eccentric about everything, and those Irish and other Ultra-Romanists who, being at a distance from the Papacy, have of course a much more correct theory of what the Papacy should be than the Italians among whom it festers. It is rarely that so general and simple a belief corresponds so absolutely with that which all study and all high authority also pronounce to be the right one. It is interesting at the present moment to know, for example, that the unity of Italy, besides being the idea of all the greatest Italians from Dante downwards, and of all the ablest political thinkers who in other countries have recently concerned themselves about Italy, was also an idea of the First Napoleon-is, in fact, one of the Idees Napoléoniennes. Among Napoleon's dictations at St. Helena was one remarkable memoir about Italy, which, besides being the very best geographical description of any country in a small space with which we are acquainted, contains the great exile's views as to the necessary political future of the land that was his native land till France borrowed him. "Italy," he there says, "isolated by her natural "limits, separated by the sea and by 66 very high mountains from the rest of Europe, seems to be called to form a " great and powerful nation; but she "has in her configuration a capital vice, "which one may consider as the cause "of the misfortunes she has experienced, "and of the morselling out of this beau"tiful land into several independent "monarchies or republics. Her length "is out of proportion to her breadth." Even this difficulty-now nearly annihilated by the railways and steamers which he did not foresee-Napoleon was convinced might be got over. predicted that Italy would one day be a nation; he specified particularly that, owing to the extent of her sea-coast, it would be as "a maritime power" that she would be great-greater, as such, than either France or Spain; and he occupied himself with the question, which of all the chief Italian cities would be the best capital for the new

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European State. "Opinions," he said, are divided as to the place which "would be the most fitting capital of "Italy. Some mention Venice, because "the first want of Italy is to be a mari"time power." Then, after some detail of the reasons assigned in favour of Venice, he proceeds :

"Others are led by history and by ancient memories to Rome. They say that Rome is more central; that it is within range of the three great islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica; that it is convenient for Naples, the largest population of Italy; that it is at a proper distance from all points of the frontier that can be attacked; that, whether the enemy presented himself on the French frontier, the Swiss frontier, or the Austrian frontier, Rome is at a distance of from 120 to 140 French leagues; that, were the boundary of the Alps forced, Rome is protected by the boundary of the Po, and, finally, by the boundary of the Apennines; that France and Spain are great maritime powers, although they have not their capitals at a port; that Rome, near the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, is in a position rapidly and economically to provide, by the Adriatic and through Ancona and Venice, for the defence of the frontier of the Isonzo and the Adige; that, by the Tiber, Genoa, and Villafranca, she could provide for the needs of the frontier of the Var and the Cottian Alps; that she is happily situated for harassing, by the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, the flanks of any army that should pass the Po and engage in the Apennines without being mistress of the sea; that from Rome the supplies which a great capital contains could be transported upon Naples and Tarento, so as to recover them from a victorious enemy; that, in fine, Rome exists; that she offers many more resources for the wants of a great capital than any city of the world; and that, above all, she has in her favour the magic and the nobleness of her name. We also think that, though she may not have all the desirable qualities, Rome is, beyond contradiction, the capital which the Italians will one day choose."

This, it will be observed, was dictated at St. Helena; and it may be only of those Idees Napoléoniennes which the First Napoleon ventilated when he was Emperor of the French that his successor, the present Emperor, may consider himself bound to be the executor. Indeed, in the very picture sketched by the First Napoleon, of the future of the United Italy-of the power of such a State to rival France herself-there is much to dissuade his successor from being in any violent hurry to see the picture realized.

Doubtless this feeling-dislike to see the new Power of formidable promise, which he has helped to build, fairly launched, and desire to prolong her weak and incomplete condition, or, at least, to keep her on the stocks a little longer has operated in the Emperor's protracted obstinacy in keeping his French troops in Rome. Else, surely, the opportunity he has recently had of leaving the Pope to his own subjects, without disgrace and without giving the French Catholics any reasonable ground for finding fault, was as good as he could look for. But he may feel himself, on the Roman question, in a greater complication of difficulties than we in Britain can understand. Here we press for a simple solution. But the French Emperor is not a man whom simple solutions suit. "A simple solution!" he is said to have replied to a British diplomatist, whom he invited to be frank with him as to what he would do in this very matter of Rome, and who hinted the simple solution of withdrawing the troops; "Oh, yes, I dare say! It would be a simple solution of that, and of many other things at the same time, if I were to leap out at that window; and many people would be glad to see it. But I am not going to do it, for all that." Nevertheless, it is the part of Great Britain, by all prudent means, to press, through the French Emperor-or past him, if it cannot be through him-towards this simple solution. He has, in the meantime, signalled the indefinite continuation of his past Italian policy, by appointing as his foreign minister, and as his ambassador at Rome, men who are pledged to that view of the Papacy which regards it as a cosmopolitan institution requiring for its soil and territorial basis a temporal kingdom in Central Italy-which illfated portion of Europe must, if requisite, be deprived of that right of independence and self-government accorded to all the rest, in order that the cosmopolitan tree may have quiet manure at its roots. Even among French liberals this view has supporters. But here in Britain -among Protestants, at least-it can have none. Nay, and the Roman

Catholics in these islands would do well to think that, by maintaining it in the manner some of them have been doing lately, they may perchance rouse among their fellow-subjects a new and reinvigorated and even more reasonable form of that "No Popery" cry which has long been unheard among us save in fanatical corners. We have not for many a day seen a better, a more finelyworded, or a more truly English bit of remonstrance, than that which has been addressed by the Saturday Review to Cardinal Wiseman on his recent pastoral apropos of the Garibaldi Riots, through the Cardinal, to British Roman Catholics. The passage on the Cardinal's rhetoric ought to be preserved as a piece of descriptive criticism quite masterly for its verbal exactness:

"If we might be permitted to describe in appropriate language Cardinal Wiseman's Pastoral, addressed on Sunday last to his dear children, we should say that it was what the ladies call a sweet pretty letter. It is so very rich and unctuous in language, so greasy and slobbering in thought and diction, such a feast of luscious things compounded of lollipop and goody, that it very nearly turns a man's stomach. Perhaps it is of the nature of these ecclesiastical writings, which survive as the sole relic of the style of the Lower Empire, that they suggest how a Narses would have written. There is a semivirous and emasculate squeaking treble in the whole composition. There is no manly ring-no plain, bold, decided exhortation-no clear, strong enunciation of duty-but a coaxing, wheedling, purring, and fondling tone, which is only not simply disgusting because here and there the manly tones of Scripture are struck. Of course, we are not such judges as the Cardinal is likely to be what suits his dear Children of St. Patrick ;' but we should much doubt whether an English cabman or costermonger would feel complimented by being addressed in language fit, if for anybody endowed with a rational soul, scarcely for a puling girl just in her teens. To judge only by the sort of language addressed to them, one would imagine the London Irish to be some soft, flaccid, placid, mild-eyed Tahitan people, full only of gentle thoughts, and susceptible only of mild, affectionate intercourses. ***** If the demon of Irish discord can be soothed by these honey-cakes, the Roman Catholic clergy have been much to blame for not scattering such very cheap oil on the waves of many an old and bloody sedition and rebellion."

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It is to be hoped that there are Roman Catholics in Britain capable of another

rhetoric and another style of thought than those of the Cardinal. There are signs that such is the case; among which is the starting of a new first-class Roman Catholic periodical in London, not devoted to the Cardinal's views of what Catholicism is and requires. But the prime necessity for the development of such a style of thought among British Roman Catholics as shall exempt them from that richly deserved castigation of the Cardinal which we have quoted, and shall give any expositions they may have to make of the claims of Catholicism a chance of being listened to by men who know manly thought when they see it, is that among them too there should be a recognition and open avowal of the doctrine held by many eminent Catholics abroad, that the Papacy is a spiritual institution, to be left to its own intellectual chances in the world, and not a temporal power requiring, for the benefit of all, to be rooted in the misery, the corruption, and the detestation of any mass of selected victims.

The French Emperor, it is believed, looks forward to the death of the present Pope as likely to be a fit moment for

some modification of the Papacy in its political relations with Italy. Waiting for this moment, he is content to keep things as they are at Rome, and to bear with both the obstinacy of the Pope and the indignation of the Italians. But that he should thus, in the face of the opinion of all liberal Europe, still persist in avoiding the "simple solution" that seemed the other day almost forced upon him, suggests ominously the nature of the arrangements which he hopes to make when the proper moment comes. It seems clear that, if he can help it, the unity of Italy will not be achieved, and that he is still occupying himself with some dream of a divided or federalized Italy in which the Papacy shall have its suitable part and French influence shall be maintained. That he may be thwarted in this, and that he may find himself compelled after all to accept "the simple solution," is what we are bound fervently to wish. It is to his advantage, and to the detriment of the Italian cause at present, that the administration of the kingdom of Italy should be in the hands of a Ratazzi. But Italy will find means to accomplish her destiny.

MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1862.

GENIUS AND DISCIPLINE IN LITERATURE.

BY THE EDITOR.

THERE is a passage in Cæsar in which he tells of the panic that there was among all ranks of his army at the first prospect of having to fight with men of such tremendous reputation for size, strength, and courage as the Germans. He had to call an assembly of his officers and soldiers and reason with them on the subject. The substance of what he said was, that superiority of discipline, such as the Romans possessed, had always been found to be more than equivalent to the kind of odds that was then causing alarm, and that so confident was he in this experience, that, should all the rest of his army desert him, he would march against the Germans with the Tenth Legion alone. The reasoning had its due effect at the time; and, so long as the Romans kept up their superiority of military discipline, and had leaders with a touch of Cæsar in them, their armies, though composed of men of moderate stature and strength individually, were more than a match for those masses of great-limbed and blueeyed Goths that lay on the frontier of the empire. In the end, the sons of Odin did thunder in victoriously and trample the Roman rule to pieces; but by that time the balance of discipline had been turned, and the intrinsically more vehement human stuff was also the better led and the more strongly regulated.

The maxim which Cæsar propounded so long ago has received many confirmaNo. 38.-VOL. VII.

tions since, and is now a commonplace in all our discussions respecting the military prowess of communities in comparison with each other. But there is a world of undeveloped meaning in the maxim, as applicable not only to collective bodies of men, but to individuals, and not only to the conduct of war, but to matters more intellectual and spiritual. Every individual man among us may be viewed in respect of what may be called his natural powers, or the quantity of various faculty discernible in him; but he may be viewed also in respect of the discipline to which he subjects these powers, and by which he directs, increases, and regulates their use. Essentially, the two things are inter-related. The nature of the discipline to which a man will of his own accord submit his natural powers is determined ultimately by the nature and the mutual proportions of those powers themselves; and, on the other hand, whatever a man gains from discipline may be considered as so much added to his stock of natural endowments. But the distinction is not, on this account, the less real or useful. The military discipline of the Romans was undoubtedly a gradual creation of the natural powers and dispositions of the Roman people, and would have been different had these been different; and yet we speak properly enough of the Roman discipline as something distinct from the natural Roman virtus, and rendering it tenfold more

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terrible and effective. And so, in the case of an individual, we adhere with equal certainty to the distinction that may be drawn between the amount of natural faculty apparently possessed and the discipline needed to turn that amount of possibility to good actual account. Every hour we are using the distinction. Here, we say, is So-and-So, a man of splendid abilities, who might have been or done almost anything he had chosen in the world, but who has wasted his life, done nothing of visible mark or worth, and sunk, already a veteran, into the mere oracle and cynic of a dinner-table. There, we say again, is Such-another, a tight well-knit fellow of by no means great natural capacity, but who has worked what he has to the uttermost, and achieved results and position accordingly! But perhaps we realize to ourselves most strikingly both the distinction between natural power and discipline and their relations to each other, when we think of instances of men who have combined original genius of the highest mortal order with a co-equal stringency of self-discipline. Perhaps in the whole history of the world there is not such another instance of this combination as in Cæsar himself. He was the greatest and ablest of all Roman men, or actually by nature the most powerful brain that Rome in all her generations produced-no mere soul, either, of cool regular procedure, but with all that liability to phrenzy and inspired ecstasy, all that power of erratic and inexplicable resolve, which we associate with the word genius; a man who would stake his life on a vast cast, and cross a Rubicon, or dash open the doors of a treasury, after one meditative motion of his finger to his forehead. Yet, in this man, so endowed, what superb self-control, what ruling of the life from enterprise to enterprise and from moment to moment, what severe rationality of end and method! There is an ancient bust of Cæsar in the British Museum before which one could stand and look for hours. Gazing at this bust, one seems to see in the massive temples broadening back to the space over the ears, in the total

length and grandeur of the head, and then in the care-worn, thought-worn, and sorrow-furrowed face, that matchless union of vast original power with laborious and highly-disciplined purpose. It is in thinking of such a man, at all events, that one sees what discipline is and may be in an individual life-not a mere substitute for genius, or the mere drill of poor natural stuff into some show of efficiency; but the means by which genius itself is fitted to do its utmost, and leave a train of adequate results. What was the life of the Mongolian Attila, squab-visaged sovereign though he was of a momentary empire extending from China to the Danube, or what were the nobler lives of the Gothic Alarics and Hermanns, those savage sons of genius and chiefs of the yellow-haired hosts, compared with the life of the civilized, pale-faced, fastidious, and epileptic Roman Imperator?

What has been said more than hints in what Discipline, as regards the individual, may be said to consist. It consists in law or regulation-in power used to govern power. It identifies itself with Reason or Will, considered as the master-faculty of the total mind. The mind is compounded of tendency, appetite, acquisition, habit, wish, power, aptitude, and other things; and at each moment this compound of powers and dispositions may be considered as having rushed on to a given point, beyond which, if nothing interferes, its course is a matter of physical certainty. But at this point, we know, there may be interference. Reason, which is speculative Will, or Will, which is practical Reason, may step in-a power belonging to the same mind, and yet somehow rising freely out of it and looking down upon it; and this power may arrest the current, dam it back, send it on at an angle to its original direction, or let it proceed in that direction charged with a new impulse. The power of the mind to say No to itself is one of the most eminent, as it is one of the most common, parts of discipline. But discipline does not consist exclusively in restraint or conti

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