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stood long enough. After tea, if there was news from the seat of war, I called in my maids, who brought down the great atlas and studied the chances of the campaign with me. Then there was an hour or two for Montaigne, or Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Tennyson, or some dear old biography."

The only productions of this time worth mentioning are the History of the Thirty Years' Peace (1849) and the condensed version of Comte's Positive Philosophy (1853), both of them meritorious and useful pieces of work, and both of them undertaken, as nearly all Miss Martineau's work was, not from merely literary motives, but because she thought that they would be meritorious and useful, and because nothing more useful came into her head or under her hand at the moment. The condensation of Comte is easy and rapid, and it is said by those who have looked very closely into it, to be hardly free from some too hasty renderings. It must, however, on the whole be pronounced a singularly intelligent and able performance. The pace at which Comte was able to compose is a standing marvel to all who have pondered the great and difficult art of composition.

It must be admitted

that the author of the English version of him was in this respect no unworthy match for her original. Miss Martineau tells us that she despatched the last three volumes, which number over 1,800 pages, in some five months.

She

thought the rendering of thirty pages of Comte a fair morning's work. If we consider the abstract and difficult nature of the matter, this must be pronounced something of a feat. We have not space to describe her method, but any reader who happens to be interested in the mechanism of literary productions, will find the passage in vol. ii. p. 391. The History of the Thirty Years' Peace is no less astonishing an example of rapid industry. From the first opening of the books to study for the history, to the depositing of the MS. of the first volume at press, was exactly six months. The second volume took six months to do, with an

interval of some weeks of holiday and other work!

We think all this worth mentioning, because it is an illustration of what is a highly important maxim; namely, that it is a great mistake to expend more time and labour on a piece of composition than is enough to make it serve the purpose in hand. The immeasurable moment and far-reachingness of the very highest kinds of literature are apt to make men who play at being students forget that there are many other kinds of literature, which are not in the least immeasurably far-reaching, but which, for all that, are extremely useful in their own day and generation. Those highly fastidious and indolent people, who sometimes live at Oxford and Cambridge, with whom indeed for the most part their high fastidiousness is only a fine name for impotence and lack of will, forget that the less immortal kinds of literature are the only kinds within their own reach. Literature is no doubt a fine art—the finest of the arts-but it is also a practical art, and it is deplorable to think how much stout, instructive work might and ought to be done by people who, in dreaming of ideals in prose or verse beyond their attainment, end, like the poor Casaubon of fiction, in a little pamphlet on a particle, or else in mediocre poetry, or else in nothing. By insisting on rearing nothing short of a great monument more durable than brass, they are cutting themselves off from building the useful little mud-hut, or some of the other modest performances, by which only they are capable of serving their age. It is only one volume in a million that is not meant to perish, and to perish soon, as flowers, sunbeams, and all the other brightnesses of the earth are meant to perish. There are some forms of composition in which perfection is not only good but indispensable. But the most are designed for the purpose of a day, and if they have the degree of elaboration, accuracy, grasp, and faithfulness that suffice for the given purpose, then we

may say that it is enough. There is literature proper, for which only two or three men and women in a generation have the true gift. This cannot be too good. But besides this there is a mass of honest and needful work to be done with the pen, to which literary form is only accidental, and in which consummate literary finish or depth is a sheer work of supererogation. If Miss Martineau had given twice as many years as she gave months to the condensation of Comte, the book would not have been a whit more useful in any possible respect-indeed, over-elaboration might easily have made it much less so-and the world would have lost many other excellent, if not dazzling or stupendous services.

66

"Her original power," she wrote of herself in that manly and outspoken obituary notice to which we have already referred, was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularise, while she could neither discover nor invent. . . . She could obtain and keep a firm grasp of her own views, and moreover she could make them understood. The function of her life was to do this, and in as far as it was done diligently and honestly, her life was of use." All this is precisely true, and her life was of great use; and that makes what she says not only true, but an example worth much. weighing by many of those who meddle with literature.

Miss Martineau was never tired of trying to be useful in directing and improving opinion. She did not disdain the poor neighbours at her gates. She got them to establish a Building Society, she set them an example of thrifty and profitable management by her little farm of two acres, and she gave them interesting and cheerful courses of lectures in the winter evenings. All this time her eye was

vigilant for the great affairs of the world. In 1852 she began to write leading articles for the Daily News, and in this department her industry and her aptitude were such that at times she wrote as many as six leading articles in a week. When she died, it was computed that she had written sixteen hundred. They are now all dead enough, as they were meant to die, but they made an impression that is still alive in its consequences upon some of the most important social, political, and economical matters of five and twenty important years. In what was by far the greatest of all the issues of those years, the Civil War in the United States, Harriet Martineau's influence was of the most inestimable value in keeping public opinion right against the strong tide of ignorant Southern sympathies in this country. If she may seem to some to have been less right in her views of the Crimean War, we must admit that the issues were very complex, and that complete assurance on that struggle is not easy even at this distance of time.

To this period belong the Biographic Sketches which she contributed to a London newspaper. They have since been collected in a single volume, now in its fourth edition. They are masterpieces in the style of the vignette. Their conciseness, their clearness in fact, their definiteness in judgment, and above all the rightly-graduated impression of the writer's own personality in the background, make them perfect in their kind. There is no fretting away of the portrait in over-multiplicity of lines and strokes. Here more than anywhere else, Miss Martineau shows the true quality of the writer, the true mark of literature, the sense of proportion, the modulated sentence, the compact and suggestive phrase. There is a happy precision, a pithy brevity, a condensed argumentativeness. And this literary skill is made more telling by the writer's own evident interest and sincerity about the real lives and characters of the various conspicuous people with whom

she deals. It may be said that she has no subtle insight into the complexities of human nature, and that her philosophy of character is rather too little analytical, too downright, too content with averages of motive, and too external.

This is so in a general

way, but it does not spoil the charm of these sketches, because the personages concerned, though all of them conspicuous, were for the most part commonplace in motive, though more. than commonplace in strength of faculty. Subtle analysis is wholly unreasonable in the case of Miss Martineau herself, and she would probably have been unable to use that difficult instrument in criticising characters less downright and objective than her own.

The moment of the Crimean War marked an alarming event in her own life. The doctors warned her that she had a heart disease which would end her days suddenly and soon. Miss Martineau at once set her affairs in order, and sat down to write her Autobiography. She had the manuscript put into type, and the sheets finally printed off, just as we now possess them. But the hour was not yet. The doctors had exaggerated the peril, and the strong woman lived for twenty years after she had been given up. She used up the stuff of her life to the very end, and left no dreary remnant nor morbid waste of days. She was like herself to the last-English, practical, positive. Yet she had thoughts and visions which were more than this. We like to think of this faithful woman and veteran worker in good causes, in the stroll which she always took on her terrace before retiring to rest for the night:

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"On my terrace there were two worlds extended bright before me, even when the midnight darkness hid from my bodily eyes all but the outlines of the solemn mountains that surround our valley on three sides, and the clear opening to the lake on the south. In the one of those worlds I saw now the magnificent coast of

Massachusetts in autumn, or the flowery swamps of Louisiana, or the forests of Georgia in spring, or the Illinois prairie in summer; or the blue Nile, or the brown Sinai, or the gorgeous Petra, or the view of Damascus from the Salahiey; or the Grand Canal under a Venetian sunset, or the Black Forest in twilight, or Malta in the glare of noon, or the broad desert stretching away under the stars, or the Red Sea tossing its superb shells on shore in the pale dawn. That is one world, all comprehended within my terrace wall, and coming up into the light at my call. The other and finer scenery is of that world, only beginning to be explored, of Science.

It is truly an exquisite pleasure to dream, after the toil of study, on the sublime abstractions of mathematics; the transcendent scenery unrolled by astronomy; the mysterious, invisible forces dimly hinted to us by physics; the new conception of the constitution of matter originated by chemistry; and then, the inestimable glimpses opened to us, in regard to the nature and destiny of man, by the researches into vegetable and animal organisation, which are at length perceived to be the right path of inquiry into the highest subjects of thought. Wondrous beyond the comprehension of any one mind is the mass of glorious facts and the series of mighty conceptions laid open; but the shadow of the surrounding darkness rests upon it all. The unknown always engrosses the greater part of the field of vision, and the awe of infinity sanctifies both the study and the dream."

It would be a pity if difference of opinion upon subjects of profound difficulty, remoteness, and manifold perplexity, were to prevent any one from recognising in such words and such moods as these what was, in spite of some infirmities, a character of many large thoughts and much generous purpose. And with this feeling we may part from her.

J. M.

OLD GREEK ATHLETICS.

Now that the old Greeks are beginning again to be properly appreciated, and researches are being made into the secrets of their art, and the lessons of their politics, it may be worth while to turn our attention to a feature in which the modern English strongly resemble them-I mean in the feature of athletics. This word is said to be very new in English, and only to have come into use with the fashion of those prize meetings which are every year rising in importance, and which are already seriously interfering with the music of our education, as the Greeks would have called it. From this side it is worth noticing that the term atheltic was used by the Greeks for that professional development which they reprehended as the exaggeration of the elder gymnastic, with its accompaniment of public games (agonistic) at which the contests were amateur performances, and which were for centuries the glory and the pride of Greece. Thus athletic was rather a low thing among the Greeks, who looked upon

running for the pot" with a highbred contempt which is not SO common nowadays. When the wise priests of Delphi determined to establish (Ol. 48) a public competition in imitation of the great Olympic games, they offered money prizes the first year, but (as I believe) as soon as they saw that the thing was to be a success, they abolished their money prizes, and gave a mere crown of laurel. There were indeed ample rewards at home for the victors when they returned, so much so that it was almost a provision for life to have won at Olympia; but direct money prizes were quite beneath the dignity of these games; and when the people of Sybaris attempted to establish opposition games, with golden crowns

for prizes, they failed miserably, and produced no impression on the Greek public; for though all the great contests were crown contests (σrepavirai), it is to the honour of the Greeks, who were otherwise fond enough of lucre, that the distinction of a parsley, fir, or bay crown should have (in theory at least) been the only reward for long and arduous labour.

The establishment of these games, especially of those at Olympia, was assigned by the poets to mythical ages, and not only is there a book of the Iliad devoted to funeral games, but in Pindar's 11th Olympic Ode their establishment is made coeval with the labours of Herakles. Whether this evidence is indeed conclusive may fairly be doubted. The 23rd book of the Iliad shows traces of being a later portion of the poem, and the mythical founders enumerated by Pausanias (v. 7) are so various and inconsistent that we can see how obscure the question appeared to Greek archæologists, even did we not find at the end of the enumeration the following significant hint:-"But after Oxylus-for Oxylus, too, established the contest-after his reign it fell out of use till the Olympiad of Iphitus;" that is to say, till the first Ol., which is dated 776 B.C., Oxylus being the companion of the Herakleidæ who obtained Elis for his

portion. Pausanias adds that when Iphitus renewed the contest, men had forgotten the old arrangements, and only gradually came to remember them, and whenever they recollected any special competition, they added it to the games. This is the excellent man's theory to account for the gradual addition of long races, of wrestling, discus throwing, boxing, and chariot racing, to the original sprint race of about 125 yards, which was at first the only known competition.

The facts seem to me rather to point to the late growth of games in Greece, which probably first began at Olympia in the eighth century, but which only rose to importance during the reign of the despots throughout Greece, when the aristocrats were prevented from murdering one another, and compelled to adopt more peaceful pursuits. It was in the end of the seventh and opening of the sixth centuries that the Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games show by their successive establishments the rapid spread of the fashion, and a vast number of local contests diffused through every district in Greece the taste and the training for such competitions. These games lasted all through classical Greek history, the Olympian even down to later times, for it was not abolished till nearly 1,200 years (Ol. 294) had elapsed since the historical foundation. But the day of their real greatness was gone long before. Cicero indignantly repudiates the report that he had gone to see such games, just as Lord Shaftesbury, within our memory, repudiated the report that he had attended the match between Sayers and Heenan. The good generals of earlier centuries, such as Alexander the Great and Philopomen, set their faces against athletics as bad training for soldiers. Nay, even earlier, the Spartans, though they could contend with success in the pentathlon, when they chose, did not countenance the fiercer competitions, as engendering bad feeling between rivals, and, what was worse, compelling a man to declare himself vanquished, and feel disgraced. The Athenians also, as soon as the sophists reformed education, began to rate intellectual wrestling as far superior to any bodily exercise. Thus the supremacy of Athens and Sparta over the other Greek cities in the fifth century marked, in my opinion, the

1 The fact that some of these public meetings are associated with the fall of tyrants does not, I think, disprove what is here advanced.

real turning-point in the Greek estimate of athletics, and the fact that the great odes of Pindar sing the glories of no Spartan, and only twice, very briefly, those of Athenians, seems to indicate that even then men began to think of more serious rivalries, and more exciting spectacles, than the festive meetings at Olympia. In the very next generation the poets had drifted away from them, and Euripides despises rather than admires them. The historians take little note of them.

Two circumstances only tended strongly to keep them up. In the first place musical competitions (which had always been part of the Pythian) and poetical rivalries were added to the sports, which were also made the occasion of mercantile business, of social meetings, and not seldom of political agitation. The wise responses of the Delphic oracle were not a little indebted to the information gathered from all parts of the Hellenic world at the games, some important celebration of which, whether at Nemea, the Isthmus, or the greater meetings, occurred every year.

Secondly, if the art of poetry soon devoted itself to the higher objects of tragedy, and created for itself the conflict which it celebrated, the art of sculpture became so closely connected with athletics, as to give them an aesthetic importance of the highest kind all through Greek history. The ancient habit of setting up ideal statues of victors, which were made special likenesses if the subject was specially distinguished, supplied the Greeks with a series of historical monuments, and a series of physical types not elsewhere to be matched, and thus perhaps the most interesting part of Pausanias' invaluable guide-book to Greece is his collection of notes (lib. vi., 1-20) on various statues set up in this way at Olympia, of which he mentions about two hundred, though he only professes to make a selection, and though several of the finest had already been carried off by Roman emperors.

These things kept alive the athletic

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