From The Spectator.

A MEMOIR OF BEETHOVEN.*

THE centenary of Beethoven's birth has fallen on a troubled time, and has not been celebrated in the master's own land with the honour which was its due and which had been designed for it. There the din of arms well nigh drowns for a season the voices of those who spoke for all time, and to whom men will still listen after war is forgotten. But here, in the land where the arts of peace yet dwell in an undisturbed home, in the city whence a helping hand was put forth to Beethoven in his last days, at least some attempt has been made to redeem the promise his countrymen have been unable to fulfil. It has been shown that in England we are not unthankful for the noble gifts Beethoven has left us; and this chiefly by the use and enjoyment of those gifts, a sign surer than all words and forms of reverence. At many times during the past year the leaders of our musical taste have devoted the best of their several powers to the worthy interpretation of his works. Early in the summer the whole series of pianoforte sonatas was rendered in London by an artist second to no one. Only a few days before the war broke out, the Philharmonic Society, whose traditions justly entitle them to claim a special interest in Beethoven, gave a concert which led up through earlier compositions chosen in order of time to the culmination of his genius in the Choral Symphony. It was a strange contrast between the harmonies within that swept through, indeed, all the changes of passion and tumult, but only to swallow up discord in an all-embracing unity, and the rumours of war already rife without. One could not but feel the truth of Mr. Browning's splendidly arrogant verse, "The rest may reason and welcome: 'tis we musicians know," and think that if we all sat at the feet of the musicians more than we do the day of peace on earth might perhaps be hastened. Later in the year, again, the materials of the Monday Popular Concerts were wholly furnished from the same ample stores. How Beethoven's music has been expounded by the good and true company there gathered together to minister to the highest art is so well known, that it is enough to say that the servants were worthy of the mas

* Beethoven: a Memoir. By Elliott Graeme. With an Essay (Quasi Fantasia) on the Hundredth Anniversary of his Birth. By Dr. Ferdinand Hiller, of Cologne. London: Charles Griffin and Co.

1870.

Iter, and the hearers showed themselves not unworthy to receive the gifts of such a master at the hands of such disciples. But one could hardly dwell on this, even if it were to be desired; words may describe the mechanism and the instruments of music, but they cannot overtake its spirit or search out its influence, for they must ever be far behind the language of the future which music foreshadows. Yet one word may be allowed in praise of an artist who has been among us a shorter time than his fellow-workers. The songs at these concerts had, as a rule, been little more than interludes between the instrumental pieces. Herr Stockhausen has caused them to be looked forward to and remembered for their own sake. And we have only to regret our parting from him, at the same time that we welcome the return of Herr Joachim, the most consummate interpreter whom Beethoven has found. Not only the year has been thus observed, but the very day of the master's birth was fitly marked by the presentation on the stage of the only work he ever gave to it; and here the character of his heroic Leonora was sustained by the only singer and tragedian who is now in a position to do full justice to it. We have mentioned not by way of preference, but almost at random, these few instances of the zeal that has been shown for Beethoven in this country, omitting perforce many that were in themselves no less important and no less deserving of note.

It is natural that the special attention thus given to Beethoven's works in the past year should arouse an interest in the events of his life, and make English readers wish to have some account of him less meagre than is to be found in biographical dictionaries, and yet not so elaborate as to require special knowledge. The little book now before us is well fitted to supply this want; it is clear, unpretentious, and pleasantly written. Dr. Hiller's essay on the genius of Beethoven prefixed to the memoir does not contain any very strong thought, but it has an enthusiasm that makes it welcome. We are glad to find the name of "a prophet in the noblest sense of the word" claimed for Beethoven, even if we are a little jealous when the patriotic musician of Cologne seeks to appropriate the symphonies as national poems. The sketch of Beethoven's life which forms the body of the volume will not fail to be read with interest. The writer has told the story with a simplicity that commends itself, and has wisely given considerable space to setting down the

now such

savings and writings of the master in his | the Concordat with the Pope own words. Those who worship Goethe a sonata!" This half-angry, half-playful as well as Beethoven will doubtless mark protest was a premonitory symptom of the notice of Goethe's acknowledged influ- the indignation which afterwards led him ence on Beethoven's later compositions; to cancel the intended dedication to Napoand their satisfaction will be the greater leon of the Sinfonia Eroica. We reach if they go so far as to accept the parallel the end of the memoir with regret for the between those works and the second part gloom that overshadowed the great masof Faust, not through wanting faith in ter's last days, not unmingled with pride the later music, but by having faith in at the thought that the friendly help of the later poem. Not that it is necessary his admirers in this country was able in either to assert, as the present writer has some measure to lighten them. And so seen asserted in print, that the first part we bid farewell to a gracious and pleasof Faust is quite unintelligible without the ant memorial of Beethoven's centenary. second, or to profess a comparative indifference towards all compositions of Beethoven earlier than his so-called third man

Der.

The greater part of a chapter is occupied by anecdotes relating to the time of Beethoven's residence with Prince Lichnowski, the happiest part of his life, when be had the command of a band of young players who were proud to obey him. We select one incident which well illustrates the extraordinary degree in which the special faculty of music may become developed:

From The Saturday Review.

THE STUDY OF ROMAN LAW.

THE sudden revival of the study of Roman law in England is rather a curious phenomenon. A whole crop of books, displaying, it is true, varying ratios of zeal to knowledge, has appeared upon the subject within the last few years. Gaius is glibly talked about, and occasionally read; there are persons who have turned over the pages of the Digest itself, and a general "On one occasion, a new pianoforte quartet impression seems to be gaining ground by Forster, a well-known composer of the day, that an intelligent young lawyer ought to was in progress of rehearsal. The violoncellist know something of the Civil Law. There was suddenly called out, when Beethoven, who was at the pianoforte, instantly began to sing in dress, but we are inclined to believe are of course fashions in study, as well as the missing part, in addition to going on with his own, which he read for the first time. The that these facts indicate a change which is Prince asked him how he could sing music with likely to be permanent. A critical epoch which he was not acquainted. Beethoven smiled has undoubtedly been reached in the histoand replied, "The bass must have been so, other-ry of English law. Blackstone's eulogies of Wise the author could have known nothing what-the law and all the details of its administraever of composition. On the Prince remarking tion as the perfection of human reason find further that Beethoven had taken the Presto so so little acceptance just now that Commisquickly that it was impossible for him to have seen sions are sitting at the present moment the notes, he answered, That is not at all neces-upon almost every one of its institutions. Bary. A multitude of faults in the printing do The long-standing opposition between don't see them or pay any heed to them."" bot signify. If you only know the language, you Law and Equity, and the very names and

powers of the various Courts of Justice, Thus a feat which even to the greater part are marked for a sweeping destruction. of skilled musicians would be impossible, The fees of barristers and the costs of ator all but impossible, was to a mind of torneys; javelin men and Judges of AsBeethoven's range and power so much a size; the Inns of Court and their dinners matter of course as to be performed with- in Hall; the Statutes at large and the auout effort and almost unconsciously. thorized Reports in 1,230 volumes - one Another of the most amusing and charac- and all have been thrown into the crucible teristic incidents in this book is Beethoven's of criticism, whence they may or may not refusal in 1802 to compose a revolutionary emerge into their former shapes to find a you riding to the Devil in place in the legal system of the future. Unsatisfactory as is the position of the

Sonata.

"Are

a body, gentlemen," he wrote to his pub-| lishers, "that you propose to me to write lawyer of to-day while so much of his scisuch a sonata? At the time of the revo-ence and of the apparatus by which it is lutionary fever it might have done, but administered is upon the point of being now, when everything is once more in the transmuted into something of which he

his consciousness that he has, and can thor of the Holy Roman Empire, and as have, no sufficient knowledge of his science one of the very few Englishmen who have even as it now stands. Such a knowledge studied the subject where it can be studied is impossible for him, in the first place, be--in the country of Savigny, Puchta and cause the system has grown to so huge and Vangerow. The lecture was upon the so ill-ordered a mass as to baffle all the " Study of Roman Law"; and should the efforts of a short human life to learn it Professor print it, as is customary, we bethoroughly; and, in the second place, be- lieve it will be found to contain a complete cause his own training has merely stored and at the same time a perfectly fair, his memory with a number of isolated statement of the advantages derivable facts connected with his subject, without from an acquaintance with the Civil Law. supplying him with any theory upon which The study must stand or fall by its own to string his facts together. It is not un- merits. It is not long ago that the Colnatural, and it is by a happy instinct, that lege at Doctors' Commons, and through it in the midst of his perplexities the English the right of practising at the Bar of the lawyer should feel attracted towards the Admiralty and Ecclesiastical Courts, was study of Roman law, as a system which open only to those who had studied, or at has the reputation of containing in a com- least had taken a Doctor's degree, in the pact form the essential ideas of jurispru- Law faculty of one of the old Universities. dence. Hence he may hope for help to But this monopoly was swept away when distinguish the permanent phenomena of the State took into its own hands the delaw from the transitory; and here he may cision of matrimonial and testamentary expect to find a series of leading concep- causes. Nor can the civil law be said to tions which will enable him to reduce to have in England the direct practical imcomparative simplicity the endless detail portance which it possesses upon the Conof his own system. tinent. There the Codes of the Latin races are little more than adaptations to modern society of the rules of the Roman law; which throughout Germany, besides its all-powerful influence upon the large class of scientific jurists, underlies and supplements, as the common law, all the various positive systems which prevail in different parts of the country. To study the Roman law is, therefore, on the Continent, to study the law under which one lives; but this is not the case in England." This great system has doubtless exerted at different times, through the Chancellors, through the Church, and through the early judges, a vast influence upon our own law. But so thoroughly has our insular independence of character assimilated this influence that its traces are hardly to be recognized. Nor has any binding authority ever been attributed to the Civil Law in our ordinary courts of justice.

Whatever have been the motives at work, a very prominent place has been assigned to Roman law in all the efforts which have been made of late years to improve the quality of legal education in England. In the newly-founded examinations at the Inns of Court and in the London University it is treated with due honour; while, in conjunction with English law and modern history, it has for some time formed a course leading to the B. A. degree of the older Universities. The difficulties in the way of the prosecution of the study have hitherto been want of books for most of the good books upon the subject happen to be written in German and want of teachers. We have already referred to the attempts which are being made to supply the former want, but the latter has as yet been very meagrely provided for. The Reader upon the Civil Law to the four Inns of Court is bound to lecture also upon Jurisprudence and upon the Law of Nations. Public lectures upon the subject are indeed delivered at Cambridge, but at Oxford, the University of Vaccarius and the home of the Civil Law degree, the Chair of Roman Law has for many years been treated by the eminent men who have occupied it as being practically a dignified sinecure. The new Regius Professor, Mr. Bryce, has however taken a new view of the possibilities of his office; and upon Saturday week he delivered an inaugural lecture in every way worthy of his reputation as the au

The utility of a knowledge of Roman law, though it is indirect, is however indisputable. Mr. Bryce the other day asserted that if, of two men of equal ability who were commencing their legal studies at the same time, the one were to grapple at once with English law, while the other devoted his first six months to Roman law, the latter would be found at the end of three years to know, besides his Roman law, as much English law as the former. We believe that he would know more. Such a congeries of cases and statutes as constitutes the English system cannot be

satisfactorily acquired without the help of though it professes to pursue what is just those more general ideas which can be de- and fair, really comes to very much the rived only from the science of jurispru- same conclusions as were arrived at by dence or from Roman law; and Roman Bentham in his pursuit of utility. It poslaw, besides exhibiting most of the princi- sesses, however, this element of superiples of jurisprudence in an easily intellig- ority over the philosophy of Bentham, ible form, also presents us with instances that instead of being elaborated by the of their application to daily life in a man- genius of one man, it is the product of ver the most in accordance alike with five centuries of the patient labour of the logic and with common sense. Again, as ablest intellects of the world. the meaning of an idea is most clearly teen when one is acquainted with the terms by which it is expressed in several languages, so is the precise character of a legal institution best understood by comparing it with the analogous institutions in another system; nor is any body of law 50 well adapted for this purpose by the clearness and definiteness of its structure as the Roman, where we may find "written in large characters," as Plato would say, those principles which in our own books are only here and there falteringly and imperfectly enunciated. The knowledge of such a foreign system serves not Daly to illstrate, but also to define our own. It is good not only for comparison, but also for contrast. If however, it is to be serviceable in this way, it must be thoroughly mastered. Such inklings of Roman law as have hitherto been usual have often led to mere confusion of the boundaries of our own law; while the haphazard references to the Digest which ccasionally diversify the foot-notes of an English text-book are wholly superfluous and contemptible.

Besides, however, what may be called the domestic uses of the civil law, its study has a wider though less indispensalle application. It was, we believe, Mr. Maine who, in an Essay published a good many years ago, pointed out how the termnology of Roman law is the lingua franca ot only of the jurists, but also of the diplomatists of the Continent. Till we quire this it is hardly possible for us to appreciate either the laws or the State papers of the other nations of Europe; and we must also find great difficulty in really nderstanding a system of international law which is the creation of men whose minds were imbued with the jurisprudence of Rome. The same writer, if we are not mistaken, has also pointed out how the Roman system is the system of the future; to which we, though more slowly than other nations, are yet surely approximatag, as we get rid one by one of the often irrational local customs which grew up after the fall of the Empire. It is, in fact, in its full development a system which,

It is of the utmost importance that the advantages derivable from the study of the Civil Law should be well understood at the present moment, when the whole question of the training of lawyers, both professional and academical, has been opened up, and must speedily be solved; especially as it so happens that the academical curriculum generally is also under revision, and may therefore be to some extent modified so as to meet the needs of the lawyer. The question of legal education is in fact two-faced. On one side it is related to initiation into actual professional practice; on the other side to the general culture which is necessary for every highly educated man. The final preparation of the lawyer for his work will doubtless before long be confided to the proposed Law University, or Law Faculty, of London. His earlier literary and philosophical training will, it may be hoped, still take place at the older Universities; but there are intermediate subjects of study which would appropriately come after Thucydides and Aristotle, but before Roscoe, Archbold, and Chitty. These subjects should be taught both in the London Faculty and at the Universities, and a man should have his choice of learning them where it might be most convenient to him. We mean Jurisprudence and Roman Law; and we may quote, in favour of the position which we would assign to them, the practice of the University of London, which obliges all its candidates for a Law degree to pass an examination in these subjects two full years before they are allowed to present themselves for examination in the laws of England.

When, in the University of Heidelberg for instance, there are fourteen simultaneous courses of lectures in Roman Law, it is high time that more provision should be made for its teaching by the Inns of Court than is afforded by the time which can be devoted to it by one reader, who is also reader in Jurisprudence and in International Law. This will probably be a question for the new Institution which is to supersede the Committee of the Inns

From The Spectator.

TALES OF OLD JAPAN.*

of Court in superintending the education pled the moon, or the stars, or impossible of barristers. In the meantime there has countries, or islands floating in the air, been much stir in the Law faculties of with a peculiar race of beings, have not Oxford and Cambridge, the latest instance | created anything really new, but have of which is the admirable appointment to varied their own experience. In like manthe Regius Professorship at Oxford to ner, the nations which bear the smallest which we have already referred. Roman resemblance to us are human beings like law only needs to be efficiently taught in ourselves, have the same wants and the England in order to be acknowledged to same passions, and perhaps an agreement be as useful to the practitioner as it is in essentials even where there is the greatinteresting to the jurist. est apparent difference. Yet these Tales of Old Japan almost seem to pass the boundary. It is not only that so much is difficult to understand, but that when things are understood they cannot be reconciled with any conceivable principle. If we take the manner in which justice is adWHETHER regarded from the outside or ministered, or the system of government, from the inside, from an artistic or from a or the relations of classes, we are at a loss literary point of view, this book must be to see what is the foundation on which considered one of the most remarkable they rest. In one story, for instance, we productions ever submitted to the English have a noble sentenced to death for inreader. Our first glance shows us a tea- sulting another within the precincts of the kettle which has developed the head, tail palace. His retainers resolve to take venand limbs of a badger, and is dancing on a geance on the man who caused his death, tight-rope while it holds up an umbrella. and carry their design into execution after We open the first volume, and meet with a long delay and the most careful preparapicture of a man who seems to have had tion. Their act is also punished with an ink-bottle broken upon him, and to be death, but everybody admires them, they much distressed because the black streams are protected and feasted on their way are coursing down his legs. Turning to home, and their tombs are even now kept the text for an explanation of the mystery, in honour. Another story tells us of a we are overwhelmed with unpronounce- great lord who, wishing to be revenged on able names, and before we have conquered a man who had insulted him, invited his this first difficulty, the strangeness of the contents shows us that we are in a new world. What can this place be where murder is an hourly occurrence and only varied by suicide, where the owners of land have more than feudal power, where foxes and badgers practise magic arts upon mankind, and where families keep the centenary of a cat's death? The mixture of legend, history, and modern experience makes it difficult to class all these oddities under one single head, and the fact that Japan has so long been closed to Europeans, that previous writers on the country have been contented with a superficial view, necessarily adds to our perplexity. We may safely assume that the habits of an Eastern nation are diametrically opposed to European ideas, but there is in general some point of contact. Some one, we forget who, has remarked that the wildest exercise of the imagination cannot enable us to conceive anything which is not in some sense a modification of what exists on earth. Writers who have peo

• Tales of Old Japan. By A. B. Mitford, Second Secretary to the British Legation in Japan. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. 1871.

enemy to his castle, and had him murdered in a bath. Nothing seems to have been done to the great lord, and we are almost led to infer that murder, if done in your own house, is legitimate, while, if done in another man's house, it is a capital offence, and if it is done in the street degradation is added to the penalty. Mr. Mitford certainly says that "in the old days if a noble was murdered and died outside his own house, he was disgraced and his es tates were forfeited," which may be a part of the same theory. But the impunity which attends an act at one time, and at another gives way to extreme severity, is a remarkable feature of most of the stories. It is even stated in the rules laid down on the subject of capital punishment that more regard is to be paid to a deliberate murderer than to one who has given way to a sudden impulse. "When a man has murdered another, having made up his mind to abide by the consequences, then that man's execution should be carried through with all honour. When a man kills another on the spot, in a fit of ungov ernable passion, and then is bewildered and dazed by his own act, the same pains