(1) Wordsworthiana:  A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth Society.  Edited by William Knight. (Macmillan and Co.)

(2) Mary Myles.  By E. M. Edmonds. (Remington and Co.)

(3) Art in the Modern State.  By Lady Dilke. (Chapman and Hall.)

(4) Cressy.  By Bret Harte. (Macmillan and Co.)

(5) Poems.  By Richard Day. (New York:  Cassell and Co.)

(6) A Game of Chance.  By Ella Curtis. (Hurst and Blackett.)

MR. FROUDE’S BLUE-BOOK

(Pall Mall Gazette, April 13, 1889.)

Blue-books are generally dull reading, but Blue-books on Ireland have always been interesting.  They form the record of one of the great tragedies of modern Europe.  In them England has written down her indictment against herself and has given to the world the history of her shame.  If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions.  The last of these Blue-books, Mr. Froude’s heavy novel, has appeared, however, somewhat too late.  The society that he describes has long since passed away.  An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American and his influence.  To mature its powers, to concentrate its actions, to learn the secret of its own strength and of England’s weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic.  At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality; in a strange land it realised what indomitable forces nationality possesses.  What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish.  America and American influence has educated them.  Their first practical leader is an Irish-American.

But while Mr. Froude’s book has no practical relation to modern Irish politics, and does not offer any solution of the present question, it has a certain historical value.  It is a vivid picture of Ireland in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a picture often false in its lights and exaggerated in its shadows, but a picture none the less.  Mr. Froude admits the martyrdom of Ireland but regrets that the martyrdom was not more completely carried out.  His ground of complaint against the Executioner is not his trade but his bungling.  It is the bluntness not the cruelty of the sword that he objects to.  Resolute government, that shallow shibboleth of those who do not understand how complex a thing the art of government is, is his posthumous panacea for past evils.  His hero, Colonel Goring, has the words Law and Order ever on his lips, meaning by the one the enforcement of unjust legislation, and implying by the other the suppression of every fine national aspiration.  That the government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems to Mr. Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of political science.  Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword.  Where England has had to struggle she has been wise.  Where physical strength has been on her side, as in Ireland, she has been made unwieldy by that strength.  Her own strong hands have blinded her.  She has had force but no direction.