No. 350.

JAN. 16, 1901. Vol. XXX.

CONTENTS.

More chapters of England's naval history. — A builder of Greater Britain. — Two books on the American Soldier. — Memories of the Tennysons. "The Individual, a Study of Life and Death."-A philosophy of politics.-The treatment and training of children.- Mr. Garner's studies among apes and monkeys.-Reference book of Prehistoric Implements. Modern pen drawing and draughtsmen. — Methods of railway regulation.—A graphic picture of life in Confederate prisons.-The Venice of America. BRIEFER MENTION.

NOTES

LIST OF NEW BOOKS.

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THE NOVEL AND THE PLAY. The most aggravating of all critics is the critic who asserts and gives no reasons. A writer in a

recent number of THE DIAL tells us that the novel is a finer art-form than the play, and practically the only reason he offers to back his opinion is that the first form is contemporary and the second archaic. Archaic! What great art has not been archaic at the time of its production? Gray remarks, in one of his letters, that the language of poetry is never the language of the age or of common life. Shakespeare's speech was undoubtedly strange to the

Elizabethans. The "well-languaged Daniel" was the scholarly type of that day, and Daniel is as modern as Sir Edwin Arnold. The same is true of thought and character. If either is great, it cannot possibly conform to accepted conventions. What can we suppose that even the Athenians made of the Prometheus or the Agamemnon or the Persian ghost of Eschylus? As we can see in Aristophanes, these were rather musty fables to them. The display of the Panathenaic festival, or the riot of the Eleusinian mysteries, were much more to their minds. Alleyne, the theatrical manager of Shakespeare's time, has left it on record that he made the greater part of his fortune by showing bears. The Spaniards tolerated Calderon as an appanage of the Inquisition, but their real joy was in the burning of heretics. The auto da fe was doubtless to them a sweet contemporary thing. Goethe and Schiller, by the expenditure of infinite labor, built up a theatre in Weimar. They forced great tragedy and comedy, the use of verse and the right reading of it, down the German throat. But was their patient grateful to them? Not a bit. Goethe was forced to resign the directorship of the theatre by a performing dog.

I hope the writer referred to will pardon me if I offer him some reasons why the novel might be a finer art than the play. In the first place, it has a larger canvas. The average novel has from five to ten times more words in it than the average play. If there is anything in big battalions, Xerxes ought always to overwhelm Leonidas. In the second place, the novel, though a hybrid, may possibly inherit the qualities of its various ancestors. It may have the pure emotional gush of the lyric, the orbicular sweep of the epic, the intensity of the drama. In the third place, it is gifted with omniscience, a power which the epic shares with it, but which is denied to other art forms. In the fourth place, it can perform the offices of the scene-painter, the actor, the gas-man, the usher in the body of the theatre, and the critic in the next day's print. And lastly, it requires no such attention on the part of the reader as does the more abstract form of the play, which, especially if written in verse, is the most concentrated work of the human mind. In reading a novel, we sit at feast like a Persian King, and have one servant to cut our food, another to put it in our mouths, and a third to work our jaws for us.

I am not mocking. These advantages the novel possesses, and they in great part account for its popularity. But for the final result of greatness they are fallacious and break down. The immense expenditure of words in a novel is a solution of continuity and defeats the purpose of an art-work to grasp and body forth a definite conception. Each

tidal wave of words washes out the record of its predecessor. And the mixture of forms in the novel is an element of weakness rather than of strength. An olla podrida is neither as good for the digestion nor as tempting to the palate as a course dinner where the flavor of every dish is conserved. And the all-embracing view of the novelist carries with it a quality of vagueness, so much so that the epistolary and biographical forms of the novel, in which this power is resigned, are perhaps the most vivid and intense. And the combination of services which the novelist offers to perform for us tends to distraction; it is ruinous to total effect. The actors get in the way of the plot, the scenepainting interferes with the dialogue, and the lyrical or didactic effusions of the author in person spoil the illusion. Most serious of all, the ease with which a novel can be read weakens the mind. A good play, though so much shorter than a novel, demands a far greater amount of attention, and so tends to fasten itself upon the brain.

In general, the question between the play and the novel is a question of law or liberty, discipline or license. I like to image the play as a troop of Spanish cabelleros or conquestadores, mounted on the steeds of inspiration, armored with verse, armed with thought, and moving in instinctive obedience to one will; while the novel is a vast, lawless, disorganized mass of Mexican or Inca barbarians, howling and hurling itself on the compact body of iron-clad men. The mob may submerge the few for a time, but it must eventually be beaten back and reduced to submission and slavery.

We learn from the article already cited that the play tends to base itself on the novel. Certainly. It has always done so. The plays of the Greek tragedians were based on the cyclic poems which were the novels of antiquity, and which have perished. Shakespeare and his circle based their art on Italian novella, many of which were as good fiction as is written to-day. The order of life is for the soul to ascend from the body. The instinct of mankind is not satisfied until the pure kernel of an art-work is disengaged from its mixed and impure mass of wrappings and enfoldments.

Though the writer I am considering regards the novel as a finer art-form than the play, he does not assert that his greatest typical novelist is superior to the typical dramatist. He only insists on a certain equality between the two. He is willing to concede that Shakespeare was a respectable sort of a person who did good in his day, though he is hardly up to our modern standards of democratic art. Personally, I feel disposed to light a hecatomb of expiation to Shakespeare for bringing him, even for defense, into competition with Balzac. But this is a wrong feeling. Shakespeare must stand his trial like any other author. Every generation summons the favorites of the past to the bar of its opinion, questions them as to their birth and condition and present means of livelihood, and judges and sentences them after its own sweet will,

judging itself at the same operation. And this is necessary and right. Literature in Mortmain, literature held in the dead hand, is as dangerous as literature of new-born bounce and bluster. So let us on to the comparison.

Those who have done me the honor to read my notes on literature published in THE DIAL will not suspect me of holding a brief for style. Not that I do not in my own mind worship style, but I hold it a result, not a means. I believe it follows the accumulation of thoughts, and the kindling conception of character. But when it so arrives, it is the final stamp of greatness. Now, as the previous writer practically admits, there is in this respect no possible parallel between Shakespeare and Balzac. Balzac in style is plebeian, is home-made, is humdrum. In a nation of graceful writers, he is the dancing bear of prose. Shakespeare, with a great many people, is mainly and above all the master, the magician of words. He may be slightly less clear and faultless than the Greeks, but he is infinitely more gorgeous in color and varied in carving, and there is more of him that is good than there is of all the Greek poets put together. This matter of wealth of expression in Shakespeare is very little realized. little realized. Because each

of our greater English poets has some distinctive quality of his own, we are apt to think of them as inferior indeed to Shakespeare, but still to some extent comparable. As far as expression is concerned, they could almost all of them be quarried out of Shakespeare. The peak of Teneriffe is a striking enough object in its isolation, but transport it to the Andes or the Himalayas and it would sink to a mole-hill lost in the vastnesses about it. The matter of expression, therefore, to many people the most important of all, is settled for Shakespeare against Balzac.

Most great poets are philosophers as well. They justify the ways of God to man, or defend the ways of man to God. Dante is the final expression of the Catholicism of the Fathers; Calderon of the Catholicism of the Inquisition; Milton of Calvinism. Goethe gave full literary form to the new scientific method and thought of Bacon and Franklin.

His philosophy is the philosophy of egotism and utility. It must be admitted that when we come to assess the philosophy of Shakespeare, it is difficult to put one's hand on his central thought. He unquestionably imbibed Pyrrhonism from Montaigne, and Pyrrhonism is not constructive. But he is always thinking of the mighty problems of the soul, of the destinies of humanity. He wanders around the walled chamber of the world like a mightier Hamlet stabbing the arras everywhere to find out what is beyond. As for Balzac, he can hardly be said to have any thought at all—except the ever-pressing one to get and spend as much money as possible. He wrote in "The Alchemist " about the research into the Absolute. But the Absolute has mighty little to do with the book, which is mainly concerned with the physiognomy

of an old house and the fate of a lot of old furniture. When Balzac was well through his "Human Comedy," he seemed to have felt that there was something wanting to it. He was like the architect who left the staircase out of his house and had to add it on the outside. Balzac wrote "Louis Lambert." An American editor of this book has read into it marvellous and immeasurable meanings. Any book can become a fetish if one gives one's mind up to it and shuts out all other sources of information. Wilkie Collins, in one of his novels, has an old butler who has made a Bible of "Robinson Crusoe," and finds in it the most amazing oracles for every event. To me "Louis Lambert " seems a vague rehash of Swedenborgian or Hindoo philosophy crammed for the occasion. It utterly lacks the value which hard, original thinking, in whatever method to whatever end, possesses for the human mind. "The Angels are white," says Lambert, and that is about his most valuable contribution to vision or thought. On the whole, then, Balzac as a thinker is of no class whatever; whereas Shakespeare wears the imperial purple.

It

There remains the presentation of reality by the two-the reproduction of the aspects of Nature and Art, and the creation of human figures. may be noted that Shakespeare is almost all out-ofdoors; whereas Balzac is ever confined to the rooms of mansion or cottage to the streets and alleys of towns. Pretty much the whole of Nature is in Shakespeare, but little of the art or handiwork of man. Balzac has a real point of superiority in his architecture and interiors, in which he surpasses everybody. As for the human crowds of the two, what shall I say? In making a comparison here, I can only do like the critic I have been criticising, offer assertions unbacked by reasons. For it is almost impossible to give reasons for the love or the affections which rise within us. If anyone thinks Eugenie Grandet superior to Juliet, or Modeste Mignon to Imogen; if he likes Cæsar Birrotteau better than Dogberry, and believes old Grandet a better drawn figure than Shylock, why, one can only avert one's eyes, turn down the first crossing, and let him go his misguided way alone. But I think I may assert that Balzac's people are all book folk. They never have had cut the umbilical cord which binds them to the printed page. They do not stray out into real life and become our friends and loves, as do the characters of even lesser men than Shakespeare - Scott and Dickens, for instance. One forgets them in their multitude until one takes the book up again, when the skill, the science, the power of the author bring them back. And another thing may be asserted: they are all small, figurines rather than statues. Balzac never created one of those typical human figures that sum up a race, or resume once for all some abstract quality of life. Moliére and Old Dumas are the most Shakespearean souls of France. Alceste and Tartuff are eternal, and D'Artagnan is the incarnation of the Gallic spirit.

He is as much the human symbol of France as Don Quixote is of Spain, Hamlet of Germany, or Robinson Crusoe of England. The typical figure of America is - What shall I say? - Mr. Barnes

of New York.

A writer may be greater than his age, but, even unconsciously, he is apt to render in his work the lineaments of his time. It is important, then, that the age has something of splendor or greatness to give him. Shakespeare came at the culminating period of the young manhood of the English race. His age was the age of new-born liberty, of revolutions in thought and discovery in the world. It was the age that beat back the Armada. Balzac's age was wearied with the excesses of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era; it was an age of galvanized monarchy and scarecrow empire. It was weak and futile and corrupt. It was the age which fell at Sedan.

Balzac's gift is the modern gift, the scientific gift, the gift of observation. Lord Bacon claimed that his method did away with the necessity of genius in philosophy, that it opened the paths of science to the average intelligence. The same can be said of the scientific method in literature. Anyone can sit down with a note book before a given quantity of life and record and report it. But the art so produced is open to the charge which Plato mistakenly brought against all poetry that it is an imitation of an imitation, reality at third remove. Only where the poet aereates the mass of material given him from without with the inspiration which comes to him within, where he glimpses the universal through the actual, do we get an art product which is valid and valuable for all time.

Perhaps the best way to get at the value of any large art-work is to estimate the sum-total of emotion it produces. What is our final impression of Balzac's work? Do we not feel, when we are done with it, as though we had wakened from an all-night debauch, with a headache and a bad taste in our mouths? Do we not feel as though we had been moving through some mighty marsh clothed with fantastic vegetation, with fetid exhalations rising from it as incense to expiring suns? Do we not say to ourselves, "What is the use? 'Tis a sick and a sordid and a sorry world. Let's cut our throats." On the other hand, what is our legacy of impression from Shakespeare? Is it not that we have been living in a land of sunlight and wooded shade, coequal heirs with men of mighty ardor and women of holy flame? That thunder-storms might come, indeed, and seem to wreck our world, but that everything would spring fresher from their passing; that our minds would leap to their shock, our muscles brace with their tension, until we would feel that we were seventeen feet high and of Achillean form and visage, until we would want to climb to the summits of the earth and shake our fists in the face of fate? Which is the mightier artist, which is the better gift to mankind?

CHARLES LEONARD MOORE.

COMMUNICATIONS.

MR. HOWARD PYLE AND THE AMERICAN

FARMER.

(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

In some brief comments on Mr. Howard Pyle's illustrations for the holiday volume of Mr. Markham's poems, a writer in your issue of Dec. 1 shows a fine appreciation of the artist's strong elemental treatment of the subjects ranged for his pencil, and a correct conception of art values. Noting this breadth of view upon one side, it is surprising to find what appears to be a somewhat narrow range of sympathy upon another. The critic assumes, apparently, that in the "pictorial allegory" which forms the frontispiece of the volume in question, the artist had in mind the American farmer, and that the effect was decidedly unflattering to this worthy citizen. To refute this idea seems an exegesis of the obvious. It is, at the outset, hardly reasonable to suppose that the poem, written avowedly in commentary upon Millet's picture of the same name, could refer to any American working-man, except in so far as he like any other had become a type of degraded labor. The Millet peasant is not even a type of the ordinary French laborer, but only of the toiler brutalized by excessive and unrelieved toil. He is a man who has had no inlet of joy, no outlet of delight, in his labor. As Mr. Markham himself has said, "The Man With the Hoe' is, in a large way, the type of any man who has forgotten to grow, who has forgotten that man does not live by bread alone." This overworked drudge, who will have to be born again many times to get out of the basement strata of life into the height of "the upper chamber opening toward the sky," does exist amongst us. He sweeps our streets; he bakes our bread; he digs our coal; he may even write our law briefs, or preach our sermons. Civilization will not be civilization till somehow he is made his best, whether by educating his grandfather in order that he, the descendant, may have a will to do and dare, or by educating the man himself, and giving him time, like Browning's hero, to get all the gain there is from having been a man.

Mr. Pyle, like Mr. Markham, sees in the Man with the Hoe, not the American farmer, though possibly a "farm hand," slaving from dawn till long past dark, might represent the type. He sees only the bended back that has borne the heat and burden of the day down through the ages; he sees that the Man with the Hoe is the type of industrial oppression in all lines of labor, -the man shapen (or misshapen) by the pitiless tendencies and injustices of our civilization.

MARY FARNSWORTH AMES. Brooklyn, N. Y., January 5, 1901.

LIBRARY PRIVILEGES FOR RURAL DISTRICTS. (To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

On the first of January, 1901, there occurred in the town of Van Wert, Ohio, county-seat of Van Wert county, an event whose significance the future alone will reveal: the dedication of America's first county library. Most of the cities and many of the larger towns and villages of our country have their public libraries; it remained for this Ohio county to inaugurate a movement that may eventually bring library privileges where they are most needed, viz., to the rural districts.

The library is named The Brumback Library, in

honor of its founder, the late J. S. Brumback, a prominent and wealthy citizen. A special law made possible by the Brumback heirs was passed by the Ohio legislature, providing for the maintenance of the library by the county, and this was almost unanimously favored and approved by the people throughout the county concerned. The library building is one of the most substantial and beautiful in the country. It has a capacity of 100,000 volumes, represents a value of $50,000, and under the new decennial appraisement will have an annual income of $8,000.

Under the stimulus already given, Cincinnati has extended its field of library work to all parts of Hamilton county, and several other counties have been discussing the advisability of imitating the example of Van Wert county. The movement was fully discussed and heartily endorsed at the recent annual meeting of the Ohio Library Association.

Two thoughts which were especially emphasized in the dedicatory exercises may be worth repeating here: First, we have in the bequest of a county library one of the few philanthropies that tend to benefit all the people,country as well as town. Our philanthropy has heretofore directed its efforts chiefly to the elevation of the city or town only. Second, the recent census, which shows how great during the past decade has been the migration from county to city, is an appeal to American citizenship to look in the future more to the welfare and enlightenment of our great rural population, the bone and sinew of our national life. E. I. ANTRIM.

Van Wert, Ohio, January 8, 1901.

TEN GREAT AUTHORS OF THE CENTURY.
(To the Editor of THE DIAL.)

One of the greatest authors of all time is Jeremy Bentham. He is the father of Utilitarianism, and to him more than to anyone else do we owe a rational system of jurisprudence. Bentham has furnished more ideas to legal writers than any other man of the century.

Arthur Schopenhauer is the greatest metaphysician that ever lived. His "World as Will and Representation" is the best solution of the World Riddle ever offered. He is the father of Wagner in music. He originated a system of philosophy - Pessimism. He was one of the greatest scholars of the century; the only man who ever made metaphysics popular.

Auguste Comte was one of the greatest men that ever lived. He originated the science of Sociology; and it is to his impetus that we owe the great social evolution now going on. His conception of Humanity

is the grandest ever originated; his conception of the destiny of man the truest. He knew more about Religion than any man in the nineteenth century. He is one of the least appreciated men of his age. He did for Sociology what Darwin did for Biology.

Charles Darwin's was the most argumentative mind of the century. He discovered the most useful law ever known to science, and he proved it to an opposing public. The race will remember him as one of her great men for all time. He revolutionized the science of Biology-all science. It is to him that the true theory of things is possible in the twentieth century.

What Darwin did for Biology, Herbert Spencer did for Psychology. Besides, he has systematized all science in his Synthetic Philosophy. He is the greatest Individualist of the race, and the last great one. Karl Marx is one of the master-minds of man. He

is the father of Socialism,

the making of the race into one class, with equal rights, equal opportunities, the realization of that better life hoped for by all and sought after by so few. His conception of the iniquities of modern society will be used as an indictment by reformers from now on till the millennium. Of all men, he is the common man's best friend. He was one of the greatest scholars that ever lived.

Lester F. Ward is the most practical philosopher the

century has produced. His Dynamic Sociology completed the science Comte began. His psychic factor in civilization shows wherein Darwin's great law does not hold good in society. But Ward came so late that his real influence will be in the twentieth century.

The great trouble with light literature in the last century is that it is almost without exception timeserving, not serving all time. George Eliot is the only writer of light literature who has any claim to real greatness. She has attempted to apply the great concepts of Bentham and Comte and Spencer to every-day life. She has been called, not inappropriately, a female Shakespeare. She will be better appreciated in the new century.

Guy de Maupassant is the most artistic story-teller the world has ever produced; Count Leo Tolstoi the most artistic novelist. Both are masters. Maupassant cared nothing for philosophy or morality. His one object was to tell his story. Tolstoi is so intent on giving his art its highest moral motive that he overlooks the intellectual, the chief merit of George Eliot. It will take the twentieth century to appreciate Tolstoi's high art.

These are the preeminent authors of the nineteenth century. JACKSON BOYD.

Greencastle, Ind., January 2, 1901.

The New Books.

COVENTRY PATMORE, HIS RELATIVES AND FRIENDS.*

66

The multifarious interest of the two thick volumes containing Mr. Basil Champneys's Memoirs of Coventry Patmore goes far to make up for their somewhat disproportionate size. The work forms a readable though rather rambling account of Patmore, his relatives, his three household " Angels," his literary friends, which one may open at random with the assurance of finding something at least mildly interesting; but we should have preferred a closeknit, comparatively concise biography, showing the figure of its hero clearly and in the due perspective though of course Mr. Champneys has adhered to his own view of Patmore's proportional importance.

Outwardly Patmore's career was uneventful, and its main features may be briefly sketched. He was not a University man, and indeed the

*MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE OF COVENTRY PATMORE. By Basil Champneys. Two volumes, illustrated in photogravure, etc. New York: The Macmillan Co.

two years he spent at the Collège de France, St. Germains, formed the only period of his life during which he was under regular tuition. As a boy he showed great precocity and a marked literary bent which his father, who was at once his companion and preceptor, industriously fostered. Authors were the heroes of his boyhood, and he used to tell later of his pilgrimage at sixteen to the house of Leigh Hunt, whose devoted admirer he then was.

"... After I had waited in the little parlor at least two hours the door was opened and a most picturesque gentleman, with hair flowing nearly or quite to his shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat and a Vandyck collar of lace about a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!' I was so struck by this remark that it has eclipsed all memory of what occurred during the remainder of my visit.”

"This is the life into which the slime of the Keatses (sic) and Shelleys of former times has fecundated. The result was predicted a quarter of a century ago in this magazine-nothing is so tenacious of life as the spawn of frogs-the fry must become extinct in him. His poetry (thank Heaven) cannot corrupt into anything worse than itself."

On the other hand, as we have said, Patmore's initial volume was warmly praised in some of the reviews, and it was, as may now be noted, even rapturously received by a band of young men, themselves convention-breakers, who were then springing into prominence the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Possibly these young painters recognized a certain similarity of aim in their own productions and the verses of the new poet. At all events they used to carry the little volume about with them, and