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must subscribe, whose leading conventions he must accept. Sainte-Beuve has no point of view save that of a lover of good art and a mind hospitable to ideas. It would be too much to say that truth was the goddess of the one school, beauty of the other; but it is not untrue to say that any high æsthetic could scarcely be looked for from one who styled the Greeks of Homer's day "mere barbarians," nor is it unfair to say that the many-colored aspect of modern life has turned the eyes of many of our contemporary critics from simple principles to a highly complex state of moral bewilderment. We are now soft and pliable. There seems so much to be said for any point of view. Even science is monthly revising some of its most cherished dogmas, the mathematicians are beginning to doubt some of their accepted maxims, Herr Nietzsche tells us we must have a complete moral revaluation. When in such bewilderment how can we afford to treat any new writer with scorn? Perchance we may have the secret, and so we put aside our lingering doubts and find out what can be genuinely said for him. Life is so puzzling, the mind has so many facets.

We are all living, not under the sway of positive convictions, but under the reign of analysis, in an atmosphere saturated by the critical spirit. Johnson firmly believed in the spiritual efficacy of those hot cross buns, unmilked and unsweetened tea, and the pew in St. Clement-Danes on Good Friday. As Carlyle said, he "worshipped in the era of Voltaire." We neither find now the intense narrow conviction of Johnson nor the confident and sneering persiflage The Spectator.

of Voltaire. We have no mind for either. We are too conscious of intellectual and moral cross-currents for the one, too burdened with the weight and mystery of the world for the other. We are in a mood to taste everything, and, like the Athenians of old, we are ever calling for something new. Our impressionism in art has extended itself to the whole of life, and as we have no leisure for very deep and prolonged study, we are glad to fall back on any new, or apparently new, experience of life. "What have you to say?" we ask each new writer, and we please ourselves for the hour with his reply. This, to be sure, is not the true attitude of the great school to which we have referred, but it is the attitude of what Arnold would have called its "lighter self;" and it is substantially the literary criticism of the moment. Probably each school has its uses as it has its defects. Johnsonian criticism hardened into the "This will never do" of the Edinburgh Review greeting to the "Lyrical Ballads." French criticism has degenerated into the sloppiest phrase-mongering which the world has ever known. But the excess of either has never, we think, prevented a good book from being known, or made of a bad writer much more than a nine days' wonder. The intellectual world rights itself after the see-saw of literary fashions. We are inclined to agree with the writer in the Dial that, after all this syrup, some wholesome physic would not now be amiss. But happily the progress of the critical spirit, spite of vagaries, is such that no undue lowering of the patient's constitution need be seriously appre hended.

ON CIVIL MODES OF ADDRESS.

Sir is a noun substantive, masculine and applicable, in the vocative case, to a whole sex. The first meaning of elder, which in the Latin belonged to the word (corrupted at a remote period in the mouths of the Gaulish provincials, and brought still curtailed out of France into England), is almost obliterated under its modern connotations. It is now and has long been a title, personal or heritable, attached to the Christian names of some fortunate subjects who are not yet, alas! a majority of the nation. But besides, it is (or may be) used to address all and sundry in one of these two principal senses:

Man whom I honor, knowing who you are;

Man whom I honor, not knowing who you are.

The plural of this word is, in the same case, Sirs. It is true this is denied as well by some grammarians as by many unlearned persons. They will have it this monosyllable is anomalous, and makes, pluraliter, Gentlemen. They adduce a vast number of examples out of the best authors for this use, and are never tired of throwing ridicule upon the other as a Scotticism. For my part I should have no trouble, if space were given me, in rebutting an allegation that must, I confess, damning if it were proved; but what I would insist on here is that, whatever the authority for this gentlemen, the perversity of the practice is obvious enough to have warranted the breach of a far more uniform tradition. Public speaking made it; indeed, as a manner of addressing several people at once, the word is seldom heard but in drillhalls, music-halls, assembly-rooms, pump-rooms, lecture-rooms and other

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places where crowds are harangued with a ceremony rarely used towards the units which compose them.

Now the reason why gentlemen cannot be the plural of Sir is not only that the former word is more restricted in its application than the latter (for, I repeat, every one in breeches is Sir, but, define the other as you will, it wants something more to be that), but gentlemen is not a title of address at all. It is a qualification; it asserts a number of facts concerning a number of persons of whom it is improbable, normally, that the speaker should have so much knowledge; but, if he had, the word should not stand first in a sentence as a call, summons, greeting or ejaculation. My Lords likewise implies a fact and is of yet more restricted application; but it is an appelative, not a qualification; and, so far, it would be more proper to hail the whole world My Lords (as, indeed, several nations do) than Gentlemen.

When you look into this matter you will be apt to suppose the explanation why gentlemen came to be made the plural of Sir is that it seemed to square with ladies, by which word we address the other sex collectively. Why Madam should not take on a simple s in our language I cannot imagine. But so it is; and we have been forced to press into this service a word which (having lost its ancient sense of bread-keepers) was already distracted by a double use; for it was both a prefix, or title of dignity, and a qualification. So, from the circumstance that for the plural of Madam we had adopted a word correlative in one of its uses with gentlemen, this latter attribute came to supply a want appropriately provided for by the regular plural Sirs.

As Sir is any one in breeches, so Madam is any one in petticoats. Until the end of the eighteenth century the word was fully pronounced even in casual colloquy; then it became the general practice to say Ma'am, and that prevailed I know not how long. But at present it is certain Ma'am is seldom heard, except at Court; elsewhere few persons who are civil enough to address a woman (not being their superior) by any title at all say Madam-an archaism whereby they show that this civility is something utterly artificial in them. Drapers, indeed, have a pronunciation of their own; they say Modam, and write Madame. The English, unlike most other languages, makes no difference in addressing women between the feme sole and the feme coverte. They are all equally Ma'am, at least in theory; but, for some reason, it struck every one suddenly as an absurdity that a girl should be called like a matron, and therefore, this last fifty years, the practice has been with people of condition to call her nothing at all.

But, however, the fact is (and this is where I have been coming all along) that all civil modes of address are becoming rarer and rarer in this country. It is a thing to be deplored, but a thing quite incontestable. Α ceremonious vocative is, perhaps, a very little part of politeness, but it is by far the easiest and most evident of any. It is interesting to consider when and why it decayed. If novels were a safe reflexion of manners, I should say that in Thackeray's time every man among equals of a certain refinement was Sir, and every woman Ma'am. In Thackeray's? why, even in Mr. Meredith's middle age it should have been so. But these novelists archaize a little by dramatic sympathy, and it is almost a matter of style with them to embellish the manners of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, it is certain the rusticity which withholds these formulas is very mod

ern. As for the reason why they are withheld, the definition I gave above suggests it. For when I say Sir to a man, I mean simply to be civil to him, either because I know who he is, or because I do not know who he is. It is, therefore, a title implying distance between the speaker and the person addressed; and the distance may spring from the veneration in which the speaker holds, or affects to hold him, because of his years, his eminence or his dignity; from a particular subordination (as a servant's to his employer, a school-boy's to his master, a soldier's to his officer, and the like); or else from the mere circumstance that a stranger or a casual acquaintance is the person spoken to, not an intimate. In this last implication, it is a buffer that saves you from indiscriminate familiarity, exacts just what respect it pays, and puts the two parties in their place; and it is on this account that Sir was, a hundred years ago, a useful word in the mouths of women; it is a protection they disdain to-day. Now of these three manners of using the word Sir (or Ma'am, it is all one), two are become discredited, principally because the third is the most notorious; because the notion of subordination drove out the notions of proper respect and cautious courtesy; and confounded civility with servility. It became offensive to a great many people, who were by no means levellers, to address their equals by a syllable which they exacted jealously from their inferiors. Besides, that Plain Man, at whom not so far back I tilted (and shall presently have at him again), in his rage against all symbols and ceremonies and his zeal for simplifying life, was ready at once to tell the world that true politeness does not consist in a form of words, but is only in the heart. And, lastly, our travelling Englishmen, some eighty years ago, having earned abroad a reputation for surliness and summary manners, made

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Weariness, if not despair, must be the dominant feeling of the writer upon the Far East who takes up his pen once more, at this moment of latest and greatest crisis to discuss British policy in relation to the Chinese Empire. A dozen, perhaps a score of writers in this country know the Far East well, they have clearly foreseen what has been coming, they have persistently issued advice and warnings. As each fresh rebuff or crisis has confirmed their prophecies they have redoubled their appeals for something in the shape of a definite, consistent and supported policy. For all the effect they have had upon the Foreign Office they would have been more usefully employed in whitewashing its cellars.

Meanwhile, the great rival has withstood us to our face in the daylight, and sown tares in our fields in the night, and in the body we have tried to preserve, the process of decay has gone so steadily on that probably no political antiseptic will now be able to save it from dissolution. Suddenly except to those who have cried from the watch-towers in vain-an appalling situation faces us;1 every foreigner in Peking, including diplomatists, ladies and children, is virtually a prisoner, in imminent peril of outrage, torture

1 I write on the 23rd of June.

and death; a foreign relief force of 2,000 men has not been heard of for a week; the famous but old-fashioned Taku forts, having fired upon the foreign fleet at midnight, obviously by order of the Chinese Government, have been bombarded, blown up and occupied at a serious loss of foreign life; the railways are destroyed and all the telegraph wires are cut-if the 250 Europeans in Peking had been massacred eight days ago we should not know it yet; and all the foreign buildings at Peking, except the legations, including the large Roman Catholic Cathedral, upon the porch of which is an Imperial inscription hitherto supposed to guarantee it under all possible circumstances from injury at Chinese hands, and the buildings of the Chinese Maritime Customs, Chinese property and the bulwark of such Chinese solvency as exists, have been burned. The Western world has never found itself in such an embarrassing position in China before, and if, as seems probable at this moment, all the organized Chinese forces join in an attempt to expel the foreigner, and the always simmering rebellions of the south break into flame, as they are almost certain to do if the situation is prolonged, it is impossible to foresee the end or to say how the West is to re-establish its prestige and authority.

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