viated by the growing custom in Norway, could not allow a discussion of constituSweden, and Finland, of giving French or tional rights to be printed in the Russian German résumés of the most important language. papers; while the growth of a Finnish scientific literature will undoubtedly be an immense gain for the people. European science must recognize once for all that every decade will bring within its cycle more and more important works, written in an ever-increasing variety of languages. The true scientific man can no more ignore Scandinavian, Russian, Polish, Czechian, Hungarian, and Finnish scientific literature; and we must devise the means of systematically bringing all works of importance, written in any language, to the knowledge of the whole of the scientific world. Be this as it may, Finnish scientific literature is growing every day, so also Finnish historic science. Thus, after the preparatory works of J. J. Tengström, W. G. Lagus, F. W. Pipping, Gabriel Rein, and M. Akiander, who all wrote in Swedish, and after a first attempt, made in 1846 by J. F. Kajan, to write Finnish his tory for the Finnish, we had to greet a few years ago the appearance of the remarkable" History of Finland," by Yriö Koskinen, which is a serious attempt to write a history of the nation, and not alone of its rulers. It was immediately translated into Swedish and German. The periodical press does not lag behind, and offers a warm support to the national movement. The first paper published in Finnish in the last century failed for political reasons. So also several ulterior attempts, all killed in the bud by Nicholas I.'s censorship. It was only in 1863 that the Finnish press took a new start, the Russian government finding it useful to favor Fennomanes against Svekomanes. It has rapidly developed since, and now supplies the most remote pitäyä (farm) in the woods with plain and useful reading in Finnish at a very low price. But even yet the Russian government pursues with regard to the Finnish press its unwise traditional policy. It is tolerated on the condition of never criticising the proceedings of the government; and when, last year, some young Fennomanes, whose aim is closer union of the Finnish people with the Russian, proposed to start a paper in both languages, the censorship refused permission. It In 1881 Finland had sixty eight papers, out of which forty-two were Finnish and twenty-six Swedish; of the latter, seventeen appeared at Helsingfors. Such small towns as Jywäskylä and Uleaborg have six Finn ish papers each; and even Kuopio, Tammerfors, and Wasa have each three papers. From all that precedes it is easy to see that Europe has only to gain from the admission of Finland into its family. But to this end liberty and independence are before all things needful - not the ephemeral liberty which is bestowed on the people by the rule of the richer classes, whatever be their nationality, but that full liberty which would result from the people being their own rulers. Finland is in a fair way to accomplish this. Its national movement does not ask a return to the past, as has been the case with Poland; it aspires after a quite new, autonomous Finland. It is true that for the present the national question overshadows all others, and even the extremely important land question (for Finland has also its agrarian question) is nearly quite forgotten. The very existence of their nationality being menaced from St. Petersburg, will the Finnish nationalists repeat the error so often committed of forgetting that under the actual conditions of landed property, the peasant being overwhelmed with rents, taxes, and personal services, no national independence is possible, and if political autonomy be eventually realized under some exceptional circumstances it will be but a new burden on the laboring classes? The eminently popular character of Fennomanism leads to the belief that this mistake will not be repeated. But it must be acknowledged that until now Fennomanism has remained a merely literary movement -a movement for a language, and not a movement for social redemption. No more than the Svekomanes have the Fennomanes a distinct social programme; and if Fennomanism is, on the whole, more democratic than its Svekomane rival, it comprises at the same time, together with the peasant's son who longs after the free possession of soil, the son of the landowner who holds sacred the rights acquired by his forefathers under Swedish or Russian rule over the produce of the peasant's labor. Both unite for the awakening of a national feeling and the conquering for the Finnish language of equal rights with the Swedish; but the day will come when it will be asked whether the landowner's rights are really so sacred as they have been considered, and what will then become of the union? It is obvious that so long as all administrative procedure is conducted in a language which is foreign to five-sixths of "Russianizers" of the worst part of the Russian press are loudly crying out against "the prodigiously rapid Fennization" of Kexholm, Serdobol, and even of the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. As to the economical development of the country, it has really made a material progress during the last five-and-twenty years. Notwithstanding the loss of as much as one hundred and eighty thousand people during the famine of 1872, the population of Finland has increased by more than one-fifth during the last quarter of a century, reaching 2,060,800 during the last the population, and so long as Finnish children cannot receive instruction in their mother tongue, the language question will be a burning question; and all the more so, as to take the administration from the hands of the Swedish-speaking officials means to take it out of the hands of the Swedish nobility, landowners, and bank ers. This first step was partially realized last year, the equality of both languages in the administration having been recognized by law. As to Finnish schools, they have still to be created almost entirely. At the University of Helsingfors lectures are still mostly delivered in Swedish, census of 1881. The population of its though the students generally speak Finn- towns has doubled during the same period, ish. So also at the Polytechnic School, and the agricultural produce increased in and in twelve lyceums out of twenty-two. the ratio of three to two. The horned As to primary instruction, the great mass cattle have increased by four hundred of the people are still deprived of perma. thousand head in twenty-five years, and nent schools. Out of three hundred thou- the making of butter, with more perfect sand children of school age in 1881, only methods, has so extended as to produce 26,900 received instruction in five hundred from Russia an annual tribute of twelve and seventy-six permanent schools, of hundred thousand roubles (120,000.). The which one hundred and thirty-four were production of iron has trebled at the same Swedish. The remainder were taught in time, reaching the figure of three hundred ambulatory schools, a typical feature of and fifty-one thousand hundred weight in the Scandinavian north. When Nicholas 1879; and the aggregate produce of manI. forbade Finnish schools, ambulatory ufactures has decupled: it is estimated at schools, like those of Norway and Sweden, forty-nine million roubles, against only were introduced. Once a year the teacher five million in 1854. No less than five comes into the village, stays there for hundred and fifty miles of railway and some time, and teaches the children. fifty miles of canals have been built; and Such schools even yet are not the excep- the exports reached in 1880 one hundred tion, they are the rule; and while less and twenty-three million Finnish marks, than twenty-seven thousand children were or francs, against twenty-three million; taught in permanent schools, the remain- while the imports were one hundred and der received primary instruction either thirty-eight million marks, instead of from ambulatory masters (116,201 chil- forty-six million. Navigation has expedren) or at home (177,925), so that only rienced such a development that the com6,983 children, mostly feeble or ill, re-mercial fleet of Finland in the same year mained without instruction. (I take these figures from the well-informed pamphlet, by Max Buch, "Finland und seine Nationalitätenfrage".) But the instruction thus given is obviously quite insufficient, for only eight per cent. of the Finns can write, the remainder are only able to read. Finnish schools, Finnish administration —such is the platform of the Fennomanes. They do not neglect, however, at the same time to free the soil of Finland as much as possible from foreign landholders, and to develop their industry so as to render their country economically independent of its neighbors. A few years ago Russian monasteries had still large estates and fishing grounds on the western shore of Lake Ladoga. But arable soil, forests, lakes, all have now been purchased by Finns, and are sold in small parcels to Finnish peasants, so that the 2552 LIVING AGE. VOL. L. numbered 1,857 ships, 288,300 tons; 9,744 ships, 1,504,200 tons, entered its ports; and a considerable part of the foreign maritime commerce of the Russian Empire is conducted under the Finnish flag. As to the roads, they are mostly in so good a state as to be comparable to those of Switzerland; and the journeys on posthorses, by roads provided with plain but clean hotels, are a true pleasure. The lakes are literally furrowed by steamers, which penetrate into the remotest inlets; and, thanks to a masterly system of canalization, in which Finns excel, the smallest hamlets and saw-mills are within easy reach of the great lake-basins, which, in their turn, communicate with the sea by the monumental Saïma canal. All this has been done at surprisingly moderate expense, each mile of the Finnish railways having cost, on the average, only one-third of the average cost in Russia. As to finances, though supporting the heavy burden of obligatory military service recently imposed on the country, they are in an excellent state. When Russia finds it impossible to raise money at less than six per cent., Finland easily obtains loans at four and a half per cent., and its paper money circulates at par, while the Russian paper rouble is worth no more than six-tenths of its nominal value. They are not satisfied with imposing on her the burden of a seventy-thousandmen-strong army in war time; they would like to grasp in their own hands her poor revenues, and to conduct them, to pillage them, as they have conducted and pillaged the finances of the empire. even to export more than to import. The editors of the reactionary St. Petersburg papers would rather double the price of the paper on which they print their cheap ideas than to have it from Finland. And the Moscow protectionists, after having attracted, by almost prohibitory duties, German capital, German enterprise, Ger man manufacturers, and German workmen into Poland, demand now the erection of a Chinese wall against Poland, and even It is obvious that the more national con- against little Finland. They have sucsciousness is raised in Finland, and the ceeded in preventing the entrance of Finnmore education is spread among its peo- ish cattle into Russia, thus raising the ple, the more will it feel the weight of already high price of meat at St. PetersRussian sovereignty; and, while the Rus- burg; and they would like now to impose sian peasant is always welcomed by his still more their own dear produce on FinFinnish brother, every Russian suspected land, and not their produce alone, but also of being an official finds only coolness, the disorder of their own finances. Reand often hatred, among the people. Finn- turning to Nicholas I.'s time, they long ish nobles in Russian service may pro- to introduce into Finland the obligatory test their loyalty as much as they please: circulation of Russian paper roubles. they are not the people. They may refer also to the gallant behavior of Finnish troops in the last Balkan war: it proves nothing; the Finns were ever a gallant race, and it is not their habit to recoil before danger. But surely the last war has not increased their attachment to the Russian Empire; they have seen what Russian administration is, and the war is costing Finland too dear. True, there are plenty of men in Finland ready to say that their country is already quite independent, be ing only "united" with Russia in the person of the emperor; but the masses understand pretty well what a union means of which the weaker party is unprotected against the caprices of the stronger. If they should forget it, the reactionists now in power in Russia do not fail to remember it in the most brutal way. These people do not understand how wise Speransky was when he pointed out the dangers of having a hostile population at the very doors of the Russian capital; they seem to have set their hearts on rendering it hostile. The small dose of liberty enjoyed by Finland irritates them. A country where people travel without passports, and the dvorniks (porters) do not listen at the doors of lodgers, appears to them a hotbed of revolution. Even the industrial development of this small country renders them uneasy. They would like to shut the doors of Russia against the little merchandise that enters therein. For it is most remarkable that even Finland, poor as she is, imports from Russia the food which is taken from the mouth of the Russian peasant, and exports thither man. ufactured ware; since 1882 it has begun "Is union possible on such conditions?" Such is the question which the Russian reactionists are more and more impressing on the minds of even the most "loyal" Finnish subjects; and nobody can tell whither this blind policy may lead. Only one thing is certain: that the ardor of Finnish patriots for awakening among their people national feeling and the longing for a complete independence will be redoubled by the attempts, recently renewed, against Finland's autonomy. The map of Europe has already undergone many changes, and it is not improbable that the social and political complications which accumulate on old Europe's head may result, among other things, in the restoration of Finland to the Finns. P. KROPOTKIN. From The Spectator. ACADEMIC BELLES-LETTRES.• WITHIN the compass of a short article we cannot lay claim to present our readers with an exhaustive survey of all that falls The Shotover Papers. Oxford, 1874-1875.-Waifs and Strays. Oxford, 1879-1882. Love in Idleness. Cambridge Tatler, 1871-1872. The Cambridge ReLondon, 1883.- The Light Green. Cambridge. The view, 1879-1883 - Kottabos. Dublin, 1869-1881. thrilled me, under this heading. We have confined | Sweet-dropping whispers of a voice that ourselves, therefore, to the three universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin; and if we shall appear to do scant justice to the second, it is because her best representative, the late Mr. Calverley, is so well known to the public that any criticism from us would be gratuitous, while the successful jeux d'esprit of Mr. Trevelyan do not belong to the period to which we have limited ourselves the last thirteen or fourteen years. A careful perusal of the contributions of Oxford to this domain of letters during the last decade can hardly fail to awaken, as its most striking result, a sense of surprise at the dreariness which, as a rule, seems to brood over her young singers. We except from this category those buoy ant spirits who gave birth, in 1874 and 1875, to the Shotover Papers, a magazine which, if it evinced a somewhat rebellious spirit towards the authorities, at least exhibits the redeeming feature of a hearty love of fun. With this exception, however, the prevailing tone of Oxford poetry is one of gloom. "Hardly anywhere, indeed, have we encountered a more remarkable support for the conventional foreign view of the seriousness of our national temperament than in the verses written during the last four or five years, by young men presumably in the prime of life and health, who are supposed to lead the most delightful of lives, with every variety of recreation within their reach. Is it the Oxford climate that is at fault, wherein, as a don once put it, you never feel your bodily spirits at more than half pressure, but are clogged by the mist and damp in which, from surrounding heights, that fair city may be generally seen weltering? Or is it the discontent begotten of much learning and study of philosophy at Balliol, the chief nest of recent Oxonian song-birds? Anyhow, the fact remains, explain it as we may, that their singing, as a rule, is in the minor key. Happily, we have abundant grounds for declining to believe that they are invaria bly as unhappy as they make themselves out to be, grounds resting on individual observation supplemented by the foliow ing passage from the Cambridge Tatler. The writer describes how he received from a friend a poem beginning as follows: Once on the border-land of sleep and waking, After a day of tears; Just as the morning in the east was breaking, A sweet sound filled my ears; Like a sharp beam of light, etc. "After the receipt of this, I went in the evening to visit my poor friend, and found him entertaining a somewhat noisy sup per party. . . . I took a seat near him and accepted his hospitable proffers of oysters and porter, and by-and-by I took an opportunity of laying a 'soft velvet touch on his arm, and saying, in ‘a sweet dropping whisper,' that I was glad this was not a day of tears' also. He gave me a look of mingled reproach and anguish, and swallowed two oysters without speak. ing." We have hopes, at any rate, that this may be true of Oxford as well; and we are further borne out in our surmises by the fact that the authors of some of these funereal strains were simultaneously capable of concocting the most diverting of epigrams upon university celebrities. Yet, strangely enough, these same wits, if ever they do indulge in a smile in the pages before us, do so in the grimmest fashion, and with "alien jaws," to borrow a phrase from the poet they love so truly and so well. Turning back to the Shotover Papers, we find that verse is hardly their strong point, although they contain some ingen. ious parodies; and in the lines "Vance v. Shakespeare," a telling protest against the preposterous régime then prevailing, under which the theatre, closed in termtime to all dramatic representations proper, was open to performances of a type described by a parodist as "most musichall, most melancholy." But there is considerable humor in many of the prose pieces, notably the really delightful travesties of Professor Ruskin's discursive style, the autobiography of Colenso compiled from the examples in his arithmetic, and beginning, "I owe £3,746 17s. 3d. for whiskey-his own words" - and in the "Fables of Fantasticus," from which we will quote the following: — THE OLD BIRD AND THE ROLLING STONE. An old bird one day perched itself upon a rolling stone, which was resting, after a long and fruitless search for moss. The poor stone was fretfully lamenting its want of success. "I have some chaff with which they tried to catch me this morning," said the kindly old bird, "if that will do as well." "I've tried it, but it won't stick," sobbed the stone. will, by gum!" cried the eager old biped. "It Don't contradict!" said the stone, rolling over and crushing to death the venerable bird. Moral. - Never use vulgar expressions to a stone unless it is firmly imbedded in a wall. "How I was Ploughed in Mods" is a proach to humor we have discovered in ludicrous paper, and illustrates admirably this magazine as well as from the genthe habit of mind of those who, endeavor- uine feeling that inspires them. He, at ing to prove that they have been unfairly least, does not spend his time crooning treated, succeed only too completely in over a creedless lot, like some of his convincing their hearers of the reverse. brothers. Sometimes, however, they conIn our own day there was a good story trive to be diverting in spite of themselves, current of a young nobleman who de- as when one tells us, scribed how in a divinity paper the exam iners had tried to catch him with the word 'Papaio, and make him translate it "Romans; ""but I wasn't such a fool, so I put it Pomaeans!" And the story add. ed that he could not conceive why they had ploughed him. With the last number of the Shotover Papers all fun faded out of the life of the undergraduate, that is, if we are to judge by his literature, for he can say, with great truth, “I am saddest when ́Ï sing." An unproductive gap of four years occurred, and towards the close of 1879 some undergraduates, hailing for the most part from Balliol, put forth Waifs and Strays, a terminal magazine of Oxford verse. In the early numbers there were some faint sounds of mirth,-ghost-like mockeries of Praed, but with the entrance, in the fourth number, on an epoch of hand-made paper and rough edges, all such unseemly laughter was finally hushed. We have already attempted to explain this phenomenon, and will only add that the æsthetic movement was then exerting considerable influence upon undergraduate society, and may to some extent have been answerable for it. Winter and death, wrecks, ruined castles, and unrequited love, these are the favorite themes; and it must be admitted that they are treated in a strain of the most approved melancholy. Witness this extract: Even like Æneas in these days must we Steer a doomed course in heaviness of soul,- Beneath, the hunger of the moaning sea; fore? From among all the contributions, those signed with the initials "J. W. M." and "H. C. B." seem to us to stand out by their conspicuous merit. The former writer, whether in his sonnets, Latin or English, or in such a tour de force as the piece entitled "Santa Cruz," displays a sense of form often exquisite, always noticeable; an easy mastery of rhythm, and abundant evidences of refined scholarship. The latter's verses are grateful from their quaint whimsicality - the nearest ap On Oxford's towers the tranquil stars look down, The sleeping city sighs with gentle breath; Closed are the eyes, relaxed the careful frown, This wearied brain of England slumbereth. How refreshing is this assurance that our young barbarians are not all at play! And yet this sense of Importance reflects, though in a rather ludicrous way, that strong affection for their Alma Mater which is one of the most agreeable features of Oxford and Cambridge men. When Mr. Keeley Halswelle's clever pictures of the Thames were exhibited in London some months back, the rooms used to be crowded with university men, delighted amid the gloom of London to How true it is that Oxford men or Oxford get a glimpse of their beloved river again. undergraduates are always thinking about Oxford, may be gathered from the story of the three visitors to Schaffhausen, we think it was, who inscribed the following quatrain in the hotel book: Three Oxford men came here to see These celebrated falls; And one had not passed Smalls. |