Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. by Various

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"I must be cruel, only to be kind," says Hamlet. In a different sense
the kindness of some people is pretty sure to be cruel, their very
charity ferocious. There is a story of an old maiden lady whose
affection was centred on an ugly little cur, which one morning bounded
into her room with a biscuit in his chops. "Here, Jane," cries the
good lady, twisting the tidbit out of his mouth and giving it to her
maid, "throw away the bread--it may be poisoned; or stop, put it in
your pocket, and give it to the first poor little beggar you find
in the street!" The story is hardly overdrawn, for if "all mankind's
concern is charity," as Pope says, yet at least some of mankind's
methods of exhibiting generosity are questionable. An English paper
recounts that a Croydon pork-butcher was lately arrested for selling
diseased pork, and the man from whom he bought the pig, being summoned
as a witness, admitted that the animal had been killed "because it was
not very well"--that he was just about to bury the carcass when the
butcher opportunely came and bought it; but the strange point is that,
in a burst of munificence, "the head had already been given to a poor
woman who lived near." Evidently, the worthy pair thought this to be
the sort of charity that covers a multitude of sins; and to a question
whether their intents, as a whole, were wicked or charitable, they
might properly have answered "Both." The "charities that soothe and
heal and bless" are not the only ones that pass current under the
general form of almsgiving.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

Literature and Dogma: An Essay toward a Better Apprehension of the
Bible. By Matthew Arnold. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

This is a tract issued in the author's apprehension that our popular
view of Christianity is false, our conception of the Hebrew and Greek
Bible altogether hidebound and deadening, our notion of the Deity a
picture that is doomed to destruction in the face of science. As it
is a sincere scheme of individual opinion (though not of original
opinion, being largely made up of graftings from a certain
recognizable class of modern scholars), it could only be finally
disposed of by following it up root and branch in nearly all its
details, at the cost of writing a much larger book. No opponent will
be likely to give it so much importance. For our part, we are quite
content to exhibit a little tableau of the main theory advanced, and
let this tableau speak for itself.

We should perhaps begin with Mr. Arnold's matter, but it is hard to
represent him at all without doing some preliminary justice to
his manner--his attitude toward the Christian public, his dogma of
urbanity, and the value of his way of putting things as a likelihood
of making converts. This is the more appropriate as he thinks the
Founder of Christianity, and its chief promulgators, such as Peter
and Paul, gained most of their successes through manner. "Mildness and
sweet reasonableness" he believes to be the characteristic of Christ's
teaching--a presentment of truths long afloat in the Jewish mind
so winningly and persuasively that they became new and profound
convictions in all minds; and he believes that when these
characteristics were withdrawn or veiled the teaching was so far
ineffectual; that when Christ, addressing the Pharisees, abandoned
"the mild, uncontentious, winning, inward mode of working," there was
no chance at all of His gaining the persons at whom His sayings were
launched; and that Saint Paul certainly had no chance of convincing
those whom he calls "dogs." Now, it is inevitable for us to ask
ourselves what chance Mr. Arnold, undertaking the most delicate and
critical crusade that can possibly be imagined against the dearest
opinions of almost everybody, will have with _his_ method. The hard
hits which the Pharisees got, and which the early churches sometimes
received from Paul, were direct, terrible blows, adapted to a
primitive age: Mr. Arnold's hits, full of grace and sting, are adapted
to our own age, and are rather worse. When he calls Pius IX. the
amiable old pessimist in Saint Peter's chair, or when he calls Dr.
Marsh, an Anglican divine who had hung in the railway stations some
sets of biblical questions and answers which he does not approve, a
"venerable and amiable Coryphaeus of our evangelical party," he uses
expressions that will lash the ordinary Catholic and Churchman of his
audience harder than the fisherwoman was lashed in being called an
isosceles and a parallelopipedon. Not much more "sweetly reasonable"
will he seem to the ordinary Cantab. when he says that the Cambridge
addiction to muscularity would have sent the college, but for the
Hebrew religion, "in procession, vice-chancellor, bedels, masters,
scholars, and all, in spite of the professor of modern philosophy,
to the temple of Aphrodite;" nor anymore "sweetly reasonable" will
he seem to the ordinary innocent, conventional Churchman in asserting
that the God of righteousness is displeased and disserved by men
uttering such doggerel hymns as "Out of my stony griefs Bethel
I'll raise," and "My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow;" or in
asserting that the modern preacher, who calls people infidels for
false views of the Bible, should have the epithet returned upon him
for his own false views; and that it would be just for us to say, "The
bishop of So-and-so, the dean of So-and-so, and other infidel laborers
of the present day;" or "That rampant infidel, the archdeacon of
So-and-so, in his recent letter on the Athanasian creed;" or "_The
Rock_, the _Church Times_, and the rest of the infidel press;" or "The
torrent of infidelity which pours every Sunday from our pulpits!
Just it would be," pursues the author, "and by no means inurbane; but
hardly, perhaps, Christian." The question is not so much whether such
allocutions are Christian--which they possibly may be in Mr. Arnold's
clearer aether--as whether they are adapted to his purpose of winning.
He manages here and there, indeed, in trying on his new conceptions of
old truths, to be exquisitely offensive. It will seem like trifling,
and it will keenly wound, for instance, the person of ordinary piety,
to have his "Holy Ghost," his promised "Comforter," called "the
Paraclete that Jesus promised, the Muse of righteousness, the Muse of
humanity," and to have this solemn Mystery lightly offset against the
literary Muse, "the same who no doubt visits the bishop of Gloucester
when he sits in his palace meditating on Personality." But he becomes
most elaborately and carefully outrageous when, combating this same
idea of Personality in the Holy Trinity, he calls it "the fairy-tale
of the three Lord Shaftesburys," in allusion to a parable which he is
at the pains of constructing about a first Lord Shaftesbury, who is a
judge with a crowd of vile offenders, and a second Lord Shaftesbury,
who takes their punishment, and a third Lord Shaftesbury, "who keeps
very much in the background and works in a very occult manner." This
seems like the talk not of a man who wishes to convince, but who
wishes to wound: it appears to be completely parallel with the method
of those dissenters, whom Mr. Arnold is never tired of inveighing
against, who use invective because Christ used it, and who hurl
epithets at a state church or titles. As for the new light which Mr.
Arnold has to shed on the Bible and religion, it is a recasting in
his own way of the old interpretation. He deals with miracles as Renan
deals with them, believing that credence in "thaumaturgy" will drop
off from the human mind as credence in witchcraft has done--that
Lazarus underwent resurrection, since, having found the Life, he had
passed through the state of death. The Hebrew God he believes to have
been a conception, not positive and pictorial as ours is apt to
be (influenced, perhaps, though Mr. Arnold does not say so, by the
efforts of Christian art), but a tendency to righteousness, a current
of superior virtue, plain enough to the Oriental mind without mere
personality; yet it may be objected to this that the Oriental mind
made for a personal God, when Jesus came, as delightedly as our Aryan
race could do. It is not, however, our purpose to expose much of Mr.
Arnold's theory. It will be accepted by some as the last effectual
mingling of literary grace and spiritual insight; but others,
especially when they find him saying that conduct cannot be perfected
except by culture, will think this work the sheep's head and shoulders
covering the bust of a Voltaire.

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Rhymes Atween Times. By Thomas MacKellar. Philadelphia: J.B.
Lippincott &Co.

When we find actually embalmed in a book the simple and touching song,
"Let me kiss him for his mother," our first inclination is to take all
its merit for granted and hurry by, capping the matter as we pass with
the inevitable quotation which also begins with a _let me_, and refers
to making the songs of a people, with infinitive contempt for the
adjustment of their laws. The people for whom Mr. MacKellar's ballad
was made, being young women in ringlets who press the suburban piano,
have, we may reasonably hope, small need of the law any how, and
we may be pretty sure that the verses which have touched the great
popular heart are made in a spirit which is better than any law, even
the law of metre. On reading attentively the poem in question we
find a touching theme handled with simplicity, and in a certain sense
earning its popular place, though no poem could possibly be so good
as the simple fact--an ancient woman in a hospital at New Orleans
arresting the coffin-lid they were placing over a young fever-patient
from the North with the natural impulse, "Stop! let me kiss him for
his mother!" That little sunbeam of pure feeling, sent straight from
the affections of the people, is the real poet in the affair, though
Mr. MacKellar has succeeded in investing himself with its simplicity,
supporting his subject with tenderness and directness. When a writer
happens, with luck in his theme and luck in his mood, to strike such
a keynote, he is astonished in a moment by a mighty and impressive
diapason, a whole nation breaking into song at the bid of his whisper.
Mr. MacKellar doubtless would think it strange, and a little hard to
be told, that this trifle outweighs the whole bulk, body and sum of
his collection. He is a writer of old acceptance and experience, who
began to rhyme long ago in _Neal's Gazette_, with "occasional verses"
about "no poetry in a hat"--a question which was bandied, in the
fashion of the times, through half a dozen assertions and replies,
assisted by voluntaries from the public. A stage-ride from New York
to Singsing at that day was something of an adventure, affording a
subject for six cantos, which Neal was doubtless very glad to get for
his journal. Neal's death, and the parting with Henry Reed and Dr.
Kane, with some other local changes, extracted short laments from the
author, whose tone is nevertheless usually cheerful and canny; but his
ballad is his best.

* * * * *

_Books Received_.

The Philosophy of Art. By H. Taine, Professor of Aesthetics and of
History of Art in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Translated by John
Durand. Second edition. Thoroughly revised by the translator. New
York: Holt & Williams.

Fleurange: A Novel. From the French of Madame Augustus Craven, author
of "A Sister's Story," "Anne Severin," etc. Translated by M.M.R. New
York: Holt & Williams.

Love is Enough; or, The Freeing of Pharamond. By William Morris.
Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Ralph Harding's Success. By the author of "Robert Joy's Victory."
Boston: Henry Hoyt.

The Mysterious Guest. By Miss Eliza A. Dupuy. Philadelphia: T.B.
Peterson & Brothers.

Madame de Chamblay. By Alexander Dumas. Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson &
Brothers.

Not Forsaken. By Agnes Giberne. Illustrated. Boston: Henry Hoyt.

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