THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, DECEMBER, 1889
ONE of the privileges of the larger survey of historical phenomena enjoyed by our own generation, looking back now over many unexpected revivals in doctrine and practice, is the assurance that there are no lost causes. Through the complexity of things, as of men’s thoughts about them, the last word, on this side or that, never gets spoken. For example: the force, the secret, if not of the future, at the present, may seem to be with ‘the idea, the faith, the dogma,’ (if indeed there really was anything of the kind) ‘underlying’ that blind conflict labelled historically as The French Revolution. Yet Catholicism, which, if any vast practical movement ever had one, has an idea underlying it (Catholicism, which the Revolution certainly did its best to destroy but only succeeded in putting on its mettle), possessing its share of permanent truth to human experience, still finds therefore from time to time its adherents, alike among the simple who ‘must needs live’ and the wise who must needs reflect, as it has found just now an able and animated vindicator in the author of A Century of Revolution.
As such a vindicator Mr. Lilly proposes to test the Revolution by its fruits from 1789 to 1889 — by its supposed operation in the world, its effort ‘to mix with life,’ in the three spheres of politics, science, and art. Judged by his chapter on ‘The Revolution and Liberty,’ he would appear peculiarly well fitted for that useful function of excepting against, and qualifying, any too confident faith in the final acceptability of this or the other theoretic programme. He is no idolàtor, for instance — no idyllist, shall we say? — of the French peasant, as the Revolution has left him. It is sad to think that, after paying such a price for emancipation, so many millions of the French people still not only eat the bread of sorrow, but with so sordid a heart. As a critic of the worship of the Revolution, affected or sincere, and the somewhat second-rate performers therein, as also of those later phases of Liberalism which figure as derivative from it, he proves himself an effective controversialist, capable of a good deal of fine raillery, sometimes of racy mockery for his opponents, equipped with various reading and a style singularly well adapted to the purpose of popular exposition.
But Mr. Lilly is not only a critic of the Revolution, of the tree and its supposed fruits. His exceptions come by way of the assertion of a counter-principle, an abstract ideal of his own; and effectiveness in asserting an abstract ideal can, for the most part, be attained only at the cost of those very qualifications in which at times Mr. Lilly shows himself so expert, and in which what we may call the ‘aesthetic’ spirit, driving always at the concrete, at the precise differentiation of the concrete, event or person, finds its opportunity. It is the spirit which in dealing with the Revolution, for instance, or with the Catholicism Mr. Lilly here so ably upholds against it, does justice to the irregularities, the inconsistencies, the ‘faults’ as the geologist calls them, which traverse and set at nought our abstract or ideal assumptions of the nature of this or that ‘tendency’ in human affairs. One thing, certainly, the Revolution left to the century which followed it — a large stock, not merely of questionable abstract propositions, but also of abstract terms of very doubtful serviceableness in the study of history. Abstract terms like Liberty, Democracy, Atheism — abstract propositions about them in whatever interest, make one think sometimes of those worn old screws which turn either way with equal facility, and compact nothing. What we mean might be illustrated by Mr. Lilly’s chapter on ‘The Revolution and Art;’ telling as it really is as an attack on the ‘naturalism’ which he holds to be the fruit of the Revolution, especially in literature. But was ‘naturalism,’ even as he understands it, finding it at its height in M. Zola’s Nana, really born in 1789? did it not exist, like the revolutionary temper itself, from of old? Is not a certain kind of naturalism an element in all living art?
And then Nana is very far from being characteristic of the whole scope of M. Zola’s work. Was not the Revolution, after all, a kind of vicious running to seed of that principle of Individualism so nobly vindicated by Mr. Lilly himself as a discovery of Christianity or Catholicism?
For in developing the spirit, the, of Catholicism, compatible or incompatible as it may be with Revolution, he writes admirably, with a fulness of historic and personal insight into what Christianity, in that most venerable of its forms, has been to each and all of us, with touches also of a really masculine eloquence, and a dignity worthy of so great a subject, of his own chivalry for it. A Catholic, writing for the general public, with a sense perhaps that reason is not too obviously on his side, may sometimes be tempted to be more ingenious than he needs. There is nothing of that kind in Mr. Lilly. Not so much ingenious as ingenuous in the best sense, he takes our old-fashioned Catechism as a ‘summary of the fundamental religious and ethical conceptions of Christendom,’ and (must it be said? ) with true ‘liberalism’ after all, is ready to accept what is popularly known as Darwinism; feels as strongly as Newman himself the unreasonableness of forcing people’s opinions; makes in passing an effective attack on vivisection; and is catholic in his aesthetic tastes, at least till 1789 is concerned. If he deals a little too much with abstractions, yet he has real insight into, a real power over them, available both for thought and utterance, which we would willingly illustrate by quotation.
‘The past is really indestructible. You do not destroy it by destroying its symbols.’
‘An artist is one who reproduces the world in his own image and likeness.’
‘The advance of the general mind is so slow as to be imperceptible unless viewed at a distance.’
Mr. Lilly’s judgments are not seldom as compact, as aphoristic, as these; and, if only by way of a variation of routine, in this age of foregone conclusions, it is a pleasure to see gifts and accomplishments such as his in service, not as a mere matter of course, on the side of Revolution.