TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXI, Issue 83, 7 April 1900, Page 10 (Supplement)

TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

THE BEGINNING OF THE CENTURY

CONTROVERSY.

Most people have heard something within the last few months of the controversy us to whether the twentieth century began on Monday, January 1, 1000, or will begin on January 1, 1901. Most of those interested in the discussion seem to have overlooked the circumstance that, whether the world is now in the nineteenth century or in the twentieth, it certainly is not in the first or second, and that any possible doubt as to the century to which l(.)U0 belongs is likely to have been periodical in the course of the era.

Jf the newspapers of a hundred years ago had been anything like those of today, it might have been possible to find voluminous records of a seventeentheighteenth century controversy In letters to their editors. But the newspapers and their readers were very different, even if tiles of that age were not so difficult to get at. It is less difficult to lotfc into bound volumes of the "Gentleman's Magazine," an English periodical old enough to have supplied from its cover ihe motto "E Pluribus Unutn" of the American .Republic, and of the "London Annual Register." In both of these works the century dispute is to be found In the year 1S0O; and, what is more, there is some indication that substantially the same problom had presented itself in the year 1700.

The bound volume of the "Annual Register" for-1800 begins with a preface written in 1801, when the volume was completed. This preface opens with the proud boast: "We close the century without being one volume in arrears," showing plainly which side of the century controversy the editor takes, ifthere be any such controversy. A history of Europe follows, in which facts in European history, as the "Annual Register" saw them, are noted and commented on at large and at length. A learned discourse upon centuries In general is thus approached:—

"The never-ceasing lapse of time has, in all ages, been divided into different periods, not only of day and night, the most obvious, but other divisions." And this leads to the century question:—

"There is a question not a little agitated, whether the century was completed at the beginning, or not till the end of, the year 1S00; that is. whether in reckoning lime from the birth of Christ, a year of the century is supposed to have passed at the Nativity,, or only to have begun. We are of those who incline to lh? last opinion. But the decision of that question is of no manner of importance on the present subject; we leave it wholly to the priests and the poet-laureates on whom it is, no doubt, incumbent to fix with a,a much precision as possible the true period of the Jubilee and the Carmen Secuiare."

In the last period here quoted there Is an allusion, to the Papal Jubilee, which began in 1800, just as a Papal Jubilee began last week: but "poet-laureatey" and

"Carmen Seculare" are special allusions for the explanation of which posterity must search. This explanation is to be found in the "Gentleman's Magaalne," Vol. LXXXVIL, where there is a review of "Carmen Seculare" for the year Ifiid, "by Henry James Pye. P.L." No orn? who has read much of what was written in Mr Pye's time need have it explained that this title is only one instance of the classical tendencies then prevalent following- the fashion of Horace, who wrote the "Carmen Seculare" for the great "Se- ! cular," or Century, Games of Romo. in the reign of Augustus. But few poople, oven of those who have read much of the writings of that day, are aware that Mr Pye was the "Poet-Laureate" of the year 1800, Though Mr Pye was not one of the most distinguished of the English laureates. Dryden was, until he was deposed at the revolution in 168S, and he had written "A Secular Masque," which was performed at Drury Lane Theatre in the year 170ft—a still closer following of the Augustans, Mat Prior wrote a "Secular Ode" for the same year. Mr Pye supposed that he was following the example?, of Dryden and Prior in putting the beginning of the new century at the beginning of the year ISOO. He also alleged the authority of the Book of Common Prayer, quoting from it, "For tha next century, that is, from the year ISOO to the year 1599, inclusive," and clinched his contention with a quotation from the French Encyclopaedia, then regarded as the criterion of universal enlightenment.

The reviewer in the "Gentleman's "Magazine" devotes more space to Mr Pye's chronological arguments than to his ode, and, avoiding the maze of mathematics and historical reference, ironically remarks: "The worthy Laureate has certainly got into a scrape, and we wish him woll out of it," which cannot have been comfortable reading for Mr Pye. When the volume came, to be. bound the editor, in his preface, evidently agrees with "the worthy Laureate's" reviewer rather than with the poet, himself. The following utterances are oracular in style, but their bias on the century question is beyond doubt:—

The occurrences through the greater part of the last century may be deemed only a succession, of events that .are. common to every similar period. ... in short, events, great and small, proceeded

in the general course of succession for 90 years out of the hundred, while we have as linn a persuasion go to the constitution of a century, strictly so called, as 20/ to a pound or 21/ to a guinea. This editor, it must be confessed, does not meet Mr Pye's argument fairly; he is guilty of palpable "ignoratio elenchi." Editorially, he goes under the name of

"Sylvanus Urban," and in the course of the year 1800, before he wrote this preface, his magazine had .published a letter to "Mr Urban" from one "R.C." in which the writer cites against Pye the sentence from Holt: "The very last clay of the sixteenth century gave birth and form to the present East India Company, a charter being granted December 31, 1600." "R.C." also doubts whether Dryden ever regarded the seventeenth century as beginning with the year 1700. Here was probably the "scrape" at which the reviewer had darkly hinted. Dryden was a Romanist in both the religious and the literary sense, and he knew how the church celebrates "First Vespers" of a great feast on the day before the feast itself, and also how the ancient "lustrations" of pagan Rome ended, not began, the period called a "lustrum," as well as he understood the exact signification of "Carmen Seculare."

These and other arguments—including learned recitals of the history of the Abbot Dionyslus Exigmis, who In the sixth century after Christ is said to have been the first Christian to suggest substituting

"The Year of Christ" for "The Year of the City Founded," were bandied about in England. As the French had tried, only 10 years before, to introduce on their own account "Thy Year of the Republic, One and Indivisible," it. might have been supposed that they would have cared nothing about this wrangle of Christian centuries. But the following- "Foreign Intelligence" appears in "The Gentleman's Magazine" of the disputed year:—

In France, as in England, there have been disputes about the commencement of the nineteenth century. The astronomer Lalande thus determines the question, which we say was equally agitated at the end of the last century; he having in his library a pamphlet published on the subject. "Many persons," says he, "imagine that because, after having counted 17, they commence IS, that the century must be changed, but this is a mistake ; for when 100 years are to be counted we must pass from 99, and we arrive at 100. We have changed the 10 before we have finished the 100." . . . Thus, he concludes, the year ISOO incontestably belongs to the eighteenth, or old, century.

It is noteworthy that Lalande, mathematician as he was, not psychologist, is the only participant in the discussion who appears to have reached down to the psychological root of the matter —the natural tendency, namely, of the mind to the belief that a new second figure of the date, where the second figure remains constant for a century, must necessarily imply a new century. Without this, the wonder of it would be how so many people who can understand that in counting $2 —one cent at a time —the one hundredth cent belongs to the first dollar, cannot understand that the nineteenth hundredth year of the era belongs to the era's nineteenth century, not to its twentieth. Yet so it is, and the controversy of 1800 and 1700 will very likely be up again in 2000.— "N.Y. Tribune."