Ethel D. Puffer - "The Psychology of Beauty"

Arthur M. Winfield - "The Rover Boys at School"

J. Morris Slemons - "The Prospective Mother"

Upton Sinclair - "Prince Hagen"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Lectures and Essays

G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays




Attempts to revive old Roman simplicity of dress and habits in the age
of Lucullus, were no doubt futile enough: yet this is only the
symbolical garb of the Hebrew prophet. The scene is in ancient Rome, not
in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. The character as painted by
Plutarch, who seems to have drawn from the writings of contemporaries,
is hard of course, but not cynical. Cato was devoted to his brother
Caepio, and when Caepio died, forgot all his Stoicism in the passionate
indulgence of his grief, and all his frugality in lavishing gold and
perfumes on the funeral. Caesar in "Anti-Cato" accused him of sifting the
ashes for the gold, which, says Plutarch, is like charging Hercules with
cowardice. Where the sensual appetites are repressed, whatever may be
the theory of life, the affections are pretty sure to be strong, unless
they are nipped by some such process as is undergone by a monk. Cato's
resignation of his fruitful wife to a childless friend, revolting as it
is to our sense, betokens not so much brutality in him as coarseness of
the conjugal relations at Rome. Evidently the man had the power of
touching the hearts of others. His soldiers, though he has given them no
largesses, and indulged them in no license, when he leaves them, strew
their garments under his feet. His friends at Utica linger at the peril
of their lives to give him a sumptuous funeral. He affected conviviality
like Socrates. He seems to have been able to enjoy a joke too at his own
expense. He can laugh when Cicero ridicules his Stoicism in a speech;
and when in a province he meets the inhabitants of a town turning out,
and thinks at first that it is in his own honour, but soon finds that it
is in honour of a much greater man, the confidential servant of Pompey,
at first his dignity is outraged, but his anger soon gives place to
amusement. That his public character was perfectly pure, no one seems to
have doubted; and there is a kindliness in his dealings with the
dependants of Rome which shews that had he been an emperor he would have
been such an emperor as Trajan--a man whom he probably resembled, both
in the goodness of his intentions and in the limited powers of his mind.
Impracticable, of course, in a certain sense he was; but his part was
that of a reformer, and to compromise with the corruption against which
he was contending would have been to lose the only means of influence,
which, having no military force and no party, he possessed--the
unquestioned integrity of his character. He is said by Dr. Mommsen to
have been incapable of even conceiving a policy. By policy I suppose is
meant one of those brilliant schemes of ambition with which some
literary men are fond of identifying themselves, fancying, it seems,
that thereby they themselves after their measure play the Caesar. The
policy which Cato conceived was simply that of purifying and preserving
the Republic. So far, at all events, he had an insight into the
situation, that he knew the real malady of the State to be want of
public spirit, which he did his best to supply. And the fact is, that he
did more than once succeed in a remarkable way in stemming the tide of
corruption. Though every instinct bade him struggle to the last, he had
sense enough to see the state of the case, and to advise that, to avert
anarchy, supreme power should be put into the hands of Pompey, whose
political superstition, if not his loyalty, there was good reason to
trust. When at last civil war broke out, Cato went into it like
Falkland, crying "peace;" he set his face steadily against the excesses
and cruelties of his party; and when he saw the field of Dyrrhaeium
covered with his slain enemies, he covered his face and wept. He wept a
Roman over Romans, but humanity will not refuse the tribute of his
tears. After Pharsalus he cherished no illusion, as Dr Mommsen himself
admits, and though he determined himself to fall fighting, he urged no
one else to resistance: he felt that the duty of an ordinary citizen was
done. His terrible march over the African desert shewed high powers of
command, as we shall see by comparing it with the desert march of
Napoleon. Dr. Mommsen ridicules his pedantry in refusing, on grounds of
loyalty, to take the commandership-in-chief over the head of a superior
in rank. Cato was fighting for legality, and the spirit of legality was
the soul of his cause. But besides this, he was himself without
experience of war; and by declining the nominal command he retained the
real control. He remained master to the last of the burning vessel. Our
morality will not approve of his voluntary death; but then our morality
would give him a sufficient motive for living, even if he was to be
bound to the car of the conqueror. Looking to Roman opinion, he probably
did what honour dictated; and those who prefer honour to life are not so
numerous that we can afford to speak of them with scorn. "The fool,"
says Dr Mommsen, when the drama of the republic closes with Cato's
death--"The fool spoke the Epilogue" Whether Cato was a fool or not, it
was not he that spoke the Epilogue. The Epilogue was spoken by Marcus
Aurelius, whose principles, political as well as philosophical, were
identical with those for which Cato gave his life. All that time the
Stoic and Republican party lived, sustained by the memory of its
martyrs, and above them all by that of Cato. At first it struggled
against the Empire; at last it accepted it, and when the world was weary
of Caesars, assumed the government and gave humanity the respite of the
Antonines. The doctrine of continuity is valid for all parties alike,
and the current of public virtue was not cut off by Pharsalus. On the
whole, remote as the character of Cato is in some respects from our
sympathies, absurd as it would be if taken as a model for our imitation,
I recognise it as a proof of the reality and indestructibility of moral
force, even when pitted against the masters of thirty legions.

Against Cicero, again, Dr. Mommsen is so bitter, he is so determined to
suppress as well as to degrade him, that it would be difficult even to
make out from his pages who and what the once divine Tully was. Much of
Dr. Mommsen's dashing criticism on Cicero's writings appears just,
though we might trust the critic more if we did not find him in the next
page evading the unwelcome duty of criticising Caesar's "Bellum Civile,"
under cover of some sentimental remarks about the difference between
hope and fulfilment in a great soul. Cicero was no philosopher, in the
highest sense of the term; yet it is not certain that he did not do some
service to humanity by promulgating, in eloquent language, a pretty high
and liberal morality, which both modified monkish ethics, and, when
monkish ethics fell, and brought down Christian ethics in their fall,
did something to supply the void. The Orations, even the great
Philippic, I must confess I could never enjoy. But all orations, read
long after their delivery, are like spent missiles, wingless and cold:
they retain the deformities of passion, without the fire. A speech
embodying great principles may live with the principles which it
embodies; otherwise happy are the orators whose speeches are lost. The
Letters it is not so easy to give up, especially when we consider of how
many graceful and pleasant compositions of the same kind, of how many
self-revelations, which have brought the hearts of men nearer to each
other, those letters have been the model. That, however, which pleases
most in Cicero is that he is, for his age, a thoroughly and pre-
eminently civilized man. He hates gladiatorial shows; he despises even
the tasteless pageantry of the Roman theatre; he heartily loves books;
he is saving up all his earnings to buy a coveted library for his old
age; he has a real enthusiasm for great writers; he breaks through
national pride, and feels sincerely grateful to the Greeks as the
authors; of civilization, rogues though he knew them to be in his time;
he mourns, albeit with an apology, over the death of a slave; his slaves
evidently are attached to him, and are faithful to him at the last; he
writes to his favourite freedman with all the warmth of equal
friendship. In his writings--in the "De Legibus," for instance--you
will find principles of humanity far more comprehensive than those by
which the policy of the empire was moulded. His tastes were pure and
refined, and though he multiplied his villas, and decorated them with
cost and elegance, it is certain that he was perfectly free alike from
the prodigal ostentation and from the debauchery of the time indeed his
vast intellectual industry implies a temperate life. For the game-
preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike
and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, though obscure, episode of
his divorce from his wife Terentia, he was evidently a man of strong
family affections, the natural adjuncts of moral purity; he is
inconsolable for the death of his daughter, spends days in melancholy
wandering in the woods, and finds consolation only in erecting a temple
to the beloved shade. His faults of character, both in private and
public, are glaring, and the only thing to be said in excuse of his
vanity is that it is so frank, and says plainly, "Puff me," not "Puff me
not." As a political adventurer of the higher class, pushing his way
under an aristocratic government by his talents and his training,
received in course of time into the ranks of the aristocracy, yet never
one of them, he will bear comparison with Burke. He resembles Burke,
too, in his religious constitutionalism and reverence for the wisdom of
political ancestors and perhaps his hope of creating a party at once
conservative and reforming, by a combination of the moneyed interest
with the aristocracy, was not much more chimerical than Burke's hope of
creating a party at once conservative and reforming out of the materials
of Whiggism. Each of the two men affected a balanced, and in the literal
sense, a trimming policy, as opposed to one of abstract principle,
Burke, perhaps, from temperament, Cicero from necessity. Impeachments at
Rome in Cicero's time were no doubt the regular stepping-stones of
rising politicians; nevertheless, the accuser of Verres may fairly be
credited with some, at least, of the genuine sentiment which impelled
the accuser of Warren Hastings. We must couple with the Verrines the
admirable letter of the orator to his brother Quintus on the government
of a province, and his own provincial administration, which, as was said
before, appears to have been excellent. Cicero rose, not as an adherent
of the aristocracy, but as their opponent, and the assailant, a bold
assailant, of the tyranny of Sulla. He was brought to the front in
politics, as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and
social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy
was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not
the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is
ridiculously overpraised by himself. Not only so, but he begs a friend
in plain terms to write a history of it and to exaggerate. Now, it is
denounced as brutal tyranny and judicial murder. But those who hold this
language have new lights on the subject of Catiline. I confess that on
me these new lights have not dawned; I still believe Catiline to have
been a terrible anarchist, coming forth from the abyss of debauchery,
ruin, and despair, which lay beneath: the great fortunes of Rome. The
land of Caesar Borgia has produced such men in more than one period of
history. The alleged illegality of the execution was made the stalking-
horse of a party move, and scrupulous legality found a champion and an
avenger in Clodius. On his return from exile, Cicero was received with
the greatest enthusiasm by the whole population of Italy, a fact which
Dr. Mommsen is inclined to explain away, but which we should, perhaps,
accept as the key to some other facts in Cicero's history. The Italians
were probably the most respectable of the political elements, and it
seems they not only looked up to their fellow-provincial with pride,
but saw in him a statesman who was saving their homesteads from a reign
of terror. That Cicero had the general support of the Italians was quite
enough to make his adherence an object of serious consideration to
Caesar, though Dr. Mommsen persists in interpolating into the relations
of the two men the contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar
must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to
think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can
a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of
antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician?
Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the
same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science;
but rhetoric was, at all events, an improvement on mere force. The
situation at Rome had now become essentially military; and Cicero having
no military force at his command could not really control the situation.

His attempts to control it exposed him to all the miscarriages and all
the indignities which such an attempt is sure to entail. He was a vessel
of earthenware, or rather of very fragile porcelain, swimming among
vessels of brass. Self-respect would perhaps have prescribed
retirement from public life; but, to say nothing of his egotism, he had
done too much to retire. Egotistical he was in the highest degree, and
that failing made all his humiliations doubly ignominious; but still, I
think, if you judge him candidly, you wilt see that he really loved his
country, and that his greatest object of desire was, as he himself says,
to live in the grateful memory of after-times; not the highest of all
aims, but higher than that of the political adventurer. When the civil
war came, his perplexity was painful, and he betrayed it with his usual
want of reticence. In that, as in other respects, his character is the
direct opposite of that of the "gloomy sporting man," whose ways Louis
Napoleon, it is said, avowed that he had studied during his exile in
England, and followed with profit as a conspirator in France. Cicero and
Cato knew too well that Pompey had "licked the sword of Sulla;" but they
knew also, by long experience of his political character, that he shrank
from doing the last violence to the constitution. On the other hand, all
men expected that Caesar, who had formerly given himself out as the
political heir of Marius, who had restored the trophies of Marius, and
had undertaken the conquest of Gaul, evidently as a continuation of the
victories of Marius, descending upon Italy with an army partly
consisting of barbarians and trained in the most ferocious warfare,
would renew the Marian reign of terror. This fear put all Italy at first
on Pompey's side. Caesar had not yet revealed his nobler and more
glorious self. Even Curio told Cicero, in an interview, the object of
which was to draw Cicero to the Caesarian side, that Caesar's clemency was
merely policy, not in his nature. The best security against the bloody
excesses of a victorious party at that moment, undoubtedly, was the
presence of Marcus Cato in the camp of Pompey. After Pharsalus, Cicero
submitted like many men of sterner mould. This departure of the advocate
from the Pompeian camp is surrounded by Dr. Mommsen with circumstances
of ridicule, for which, on reference to what I suppose to be the
authorities, I can find no historical foundation. The fiercer Pompeians
very nearly killed him for refusing to stay and command them; his life
was in fact only saved by the intrepid moderation of Cato; and this is
surely not a proof that they deemed his presence worthless. Once more,
orators were not ridiculous in the eyes of antiquity. Cicero accepted,
and, in a certain sense, served under the dictatorate of Caesar; though
he afterwards rejoiced when it was overthrown, and the constitution, the
idol of his political worship, was restored; just as we may suppose a
French constitutionalist, not of stern mould, yet not dishonest,
accepting and serving under the empire, yet rejoicing at the restoration
of constitutional government. In the interval, between the death of
Caesar and Philippi, he was really the soul and the main support of the
Restoration. I have said what I think of the Philippics; but there can
be no doubt that they told, or that Brutus and Cassius thought them,
worth at least a legion.

Cicero met death with a physical courage, which there is no reason to
believe that he wanted in life. His cowardice was political; his fears
were for his position and reputation. If Cato survived in the tradition
of public virtue, so did Cicero in the tradition of culture, which saved
the empire of the Caesars from being an empire of Moguls. The culture of
a republic saved Caesar himself from being a mere Timur, and set him
after his victory to reforming calendars and endowing science, instead
of making pyramids of heads. Is it absurd to suppose that the great
soldier, who was also a great man of letters, had more respect for
intellect without military force than his literary admirers, and that he
really wished to adorn his monarchy by allying to it the leading man of
intellect of the time?

Our accounts of Marcus Brutus are not very clear. Appian confounds
Marcus with Decimus; and it appears not unlikely that "Et tu Brute," if
it was said at all, was said to Decimus, who was a special favourite of
Caesar, and was named in his will. Marcus seems to have been a man of
worth after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced
in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an
oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the
proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite
compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that
Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of
lending money to provincials at exorbitant interest, and abusing the
power of the Imperial Governments to exact the debt. One can imagine a
West Indian slave-owner, dealing with negroes through his agent
according to the established custom, and yet being a good citizen in
England.

Cicero, though he suffered from the imperious temper of Brutus, speaks
of him as one of those, the sight of whom banished his fears and
anxieties for the republic. That the most famous and most terrible act
of this man's life was an act of republican fanaticism, not of selfish
ambition, is proved by his refusing, with magnanimous imprudence, to
make all sure, as the more worldly spirits about him suggested, by
cutting off Antony and the outer leading partisans of Caesar, and by his
permitting public honours to be done to the corpse of the man whom he
had immolated to civil duty. One almost shrinks from speaking of the
death of Caesar; so much modern nonsense on both sides has been talked
about this, the most tragic, the most piteous, and at the same time the
most inevitable event of ancient story. Peculiar phases of society have
their peculiar sentiments, with reference to which events must be
explained. The greased cartridges were the real account of the Indian
mutiny. Caesar was slain because he had shown that he was going to assume
the title of king. Cicero speaks the literal truth, when he says: that
the real murderer was Antony, and the fatal day the day of the
Lupercalia, when Antony offered and Caesar faintly put aside the crown. A
dictator they would have borne, a king they would not bear, neither then
nor for ages afterwards; because the title of king to their minds spoke
not of a St. Louis, or an Edward I., or even a Louis XIV., but of the
unutterable degradation of the Oriental slave. To use a homely image, if
you put your leg in the way of a cannon ball which seems spent, but is
still rolling, you will suffer by the experiment. This is exactly what
Caesar, in the giddiness of victory and supremacy, did, and the
consequence was as certain as it was deplorable. The republican
sentiment seemed to him to have entirely lost its force, so that he
might spurn it with impunity; whereas, it had in it still enough of the
momentum gathered through centuries of republican training and glory to
destroy him, to restore the republic for a brief period, and to make
victory doubtful at Phillipi. He began by celebrating a triumph over his
fellow-citizens, against the generous tradition of Rome: in that triumph
he displayed pictures of the tragic deaths of Cato and other Roman
chiefs, which disgusted even the populace; he sported with the curule
offices, the immemorial objects of republican reverence, so wantonly
that he might almost as well have given a consulship to his horse; he
flooded the Senate with soldiers and barbarians; he forced a Roman
knight to appear upon the stage: at last, craving, as natures destitute
of a high controlling principle do crave, for the form as well as the
substance of power, he put out his hand to grasp a crown. The feeling on
that subject was not only of terrible strength, but was actually
embodied in a law by which the state solemnly armed the hand of the
private citizen against any man who should attempt to make himself a
king. How completely Caesar's insight failed him is proved by the general
acquiescence or apathy with which his fall was received, the subdued
tone in which even his warm friend Marius speaks of it, and the
readiness with which his own soldiers and officers served under the
restored republic. We have nothing to do here with any problem of modern
ethics respecting military usurpation and tyrannicide, two things which
must always stand together in the court of morality. Tyrannicide, like
suicide, was the rule of the ancient world, and would have been
acknowledged by Caesar himself, before he grasped supreme power, as an
established duty. And certainly morality would stretch its bounds to
include anything really necessary to protect the Greek and Italian
republics, with the treasures which they bore in them for humanity, from
the barbarous lust of power which was always lying in wait to devour
them. I have said that the spirits of Cato and Cicero lived and worked
after their deaths. So I suspect did that of Brutus. The Caesars had no
God, no fear of public opinion at home, no general sentiment of
civilized nations to control their tyranny. They had only the shadow of
a hand armed with a dagger. One shrewd observer of the times at least,
if I mistake not, had profited by the lesson of Caesar's folly and fate.
To the constitutional demeanour and personal moderation of Augustus the
world owes an epoch of grandeur of a certain kind, and an example of
true dignity in the use of power. And Augustus, I suspect, had studied
his part at the foot of Pompey's statue.

Plutarch parallels Cato with Phocion, Demosthenes with Cicero, Brutus
with Dion--the Dion whose history inspired the poem of Wordsworth. Greek
republicanism, too, had its fatal hour; but we do not pour scorn and
contumely on those who strove to prolong the life of Athens beyond the
term assigned by fate. The case of Athens, a single independent state,
was no doubt different from that of Rome with so many subject nations
under her sway. Still in each case there was the commonwealth, standing
in glorious contrast to the barbarous despotisms of other nations, the
highest social and political state which humanity had known or for ages
afterwards was to know. And this light of civilization was, so far as
the last republicans could see, not only to be eclipsed for a time or
put out, as now in a single nation, while it burns on in others, but to
be swallowed up in hopeless night.

Mr. Charles Norton in the notes to his recent translation of the "Vita
Nuova" of Dante quotes a decree made by the commonwealth of Florence for
the building of the cathedral.

"Whereas it is the highest interest of a people of illustrious origin so
to proceed in their affairs that men may perceive from their external
works that their doings are at once wise and magnanimous, it is
therefore ordered that Arnulf, architect of our commune, prepare the
model or design for the rebuilding of Santa Reparata with such supreme
and lavish magnificence, that neither the industry nor the capacity of
man shall be able to devise anything more grand or more beautiful,
inasmuch as the most judicious in this city have pronounced the opinion,
in public and private conferences, that no work of the commune should be
undertaken unless the design be such as to make it correspond with a
heart which is of the greatest nature because composed of the spirit of
many citizens united together in one single will." [Footnote: In his
later and very valuable work on _Church Building in the Middle
Ages_, Mr. Norton casts doubt on the authenticity of the decree. It
is genuine at all events, as an expression of Florentine sentiment, if
not as an extract from the archives.]