interrupt the natural causality in which each human individual finds himself. Nature does not make literature nor sculpture. In fact, the human form is not worth sculpturing until it has been trained in accordance with ideas of freedom. Beauty does not come into the faces of human beings until they are civilized. The Greek sculptor had to take for his models the youth who gained victories at the Olympian games and not the bodies of savages or of the people of Asia or Africa. So the revelation of the Divine is not through immediate nature, which is a scene of violence. Fate rather than freedom is realized in nature by itself. The Divine, which is absolute reason, does not realize itself in rocks and soils, in mountains and plains, in oceans and lakes. These are base elements not divine in themselves, though used by the Divine in the creation of a world. And the world is not for itself, but a cradle for the development of individuality through plant and animal. The divine purpose does not reach its end until it produces man, who is an immortal individuality, free and responsible, in the image of his Creator.

The beautiful is distinguished from the useful in the fact that the latter is wholly for another, while the beautiful is for itself. We give in sculpture and architecture, painting and music, and poetry the semblance of being for itself or independence to material objects. But nature is not able to do this except in a small degree.

Hence the beauty of art transcends the beauty of nature as much as man with his institutions excels nature with its inorganic and organic realms in the function of realizing the Divine.

III.

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF THE TRAGIC AS COMPARED WITH THE COMIC IN LITERATURE AND ART.'

It passes for a commonplace observation to say that the proper study of mankind is man. From the version of the Delphic oracle, "know thyself." down to the sententious maxim in Pope's essay, the dictum has passed with the ready acceptance given to a proverb or axiom.

The poet Tennyson believed that if we once thoroughly knew "the flower in the crannied wall" we should know all that man is and all that God is. If this be so, surely to know all that man is will be to know all that nature is. Indeed, man as an immortal being stands on the highest round of the ladder of nature and connects nature with the divine spirit. He therefore contains in himself the explanation of the purpose of the chain of beings rising from the senseless clod through the plant and animal as far as the first stage of human history. But this purpose originates in the divine purpose. Hence human nature is a revelation of the will of the Highest, if we take it in the comprehensive sense suggested by Tennyson's poem.

Doubtless the knowledge of human nature once fully reached will explain the inorganic as well as the organic phases of nature; the external process of cansality as well as the internal process of motives and deeds. Then mathematics will be read in the light of psychology; so will geology and botany.

At present, however, we lay more stress on the difference between human nature and material nature than upon their identity. Sometimes, too, we restrict the use of our term human nature to the aims and aspirations, the emotions and convictions of man, and exclude the common rational elements of his mind such as we find treated in logic and psychology. In this restricted sense we not only sep

1 Read before the department of superintendence of the National Educational Association, at Chattanooga, February, 1898.

arate the humanities from the nature studies, but we take a special province of the humanities, namely, literature and art, and consider only its content as revealing springs of action.

In the course of study we place on one side all the studies that belong to mathematics, physics, biology, and astronomy, and we add to these the studies of language and history. We then place on the other side the single branch of study known as literature. We speak of the numerous studies in the first group as relating to nature and mind in general, but we contrast all these with literature, and assert that the branch of study set by itself over against that group, namely, the gems of poetry and belles lettres, is the one that does more to give us a knowledge of human nature than all the others combined.

Thus in old age a man is apt to say of his studies in the elementary school: "What I learned of arithmetic, geography, grammar, and history has been useful to me, but it has not proved to be so thoroughly practical as the selections from literature which I read in the school readers; for in them I learned to observe and express the feelings and emotions of the heart. I learned to trace these mere feelings in their growth into convictions and clear ideas. They became principles of policy, and finally inspired and guided the acts and deeds of my life. In conning our reading lesson we learned how a blind instinct becomes an emotion, then a well-reasoned thought; later on, a conviction, and then an action; and last of all, a habit. We noted all this in the lives of others and also in ourselves. We came to know human nature in this important respect."

No matter how well equipped we might be as mathematicians or scientific experts of any kind, if we lacked the power of seeing this genesis of actions out of feeling in our fellow-men and in ourselves, our lives would become a chaos of misdirected endeavor. We never could adjust ourselves to our human environment; we should take offense where none was intended and make collisions with our associates, for we should first misunderstand their motives, next seize on the wrong means of persuasion and conciliation; finally end in misanthropy. With regard to ourselves, we should be equally powerless to control our passions and desires, not knowing whither they tended nor where they were to be repressed. The narrow life can be lived through without much knowledge of literature. Intuitive practice in reading the feelings of one's fellows and in noting their effect on their actions which follow fits the individual for his narrow sphere. But there is as much difference between the knowledge of human nature that rests entirely on individual observation of the people of one's environment and that founded on an acquaintance with the best literature as there is between an Indian doctor's acquaintance with plants and the lore of a skilled botanist.

Let us make this plain by inquiring into the essential characteristics of the literary mode of portraying human nature.

First, we will note that there are two currents or courses of feeling and action; that of the particular individual, and that of the social whole of the community in which he lives. There may be harmony or there may be discord between these; it depends upon the individual.

When at harmony with the social environment the individual does not reveal the limits of his individuality nor the all-conquering might of the institutions of society. It is only in the collisions between the individual and the social order in which he exists that the whole of human nature is revealed in both of its phases, as individual and as social whole.

Thus we have tragedy and comedy as the two educative forms in which human life is served up for us in literature; for the collision of the individual with the social idea takes one of two forms.

Comedy shows us the individual arrayed against some settled way of acting or thinking, some ideal of society, and the discomfiture of his plans through self

contradiction, but without destruction to the individual himself. The social organism in which man lives is of such a character that it converts his negative deeds into self-refuting or self-annihilating deeds. This occasions amusement to his fellows when they see that he is not seriously injured by his irrational deed. The comic character has mistaken the limits of himself. He has not noticed how the institutions of the social whole reenforce him, and render effective his individual deeds, if they are rational ones. To be rational a man's deeds must not only tend to his own interest, but to the interest of the family, the civil community, the nation of which he is a part. His smaller self must reenforce his greater self or else his greater self will reduce his efforts to zero.

But this comic side needs further discrimination from the tragic. Tragedy arises from a serious attack on the social whole and the recoil of the deed on the doer, so that he perishes through the return of his deed. This is not all. There must be the justification of the individual's deed by the adoption of a principle from a social order different from that of the social whole which crushes him. He must act in the name of a greater self, or else his action will not be dignified enough to be called a tragedy. The death of the bandit, Karl Moor, in Schiller's Robbers is a tragedy, because it is not mere personal gain, mere selfish interest that causes the collision, but a revolt caused by a tyrannous social whole, whose rulers have done real or imagined injustice. We do not respect the mere thief or the mere highwayman. But we respect the patriotic remnant who struggle against a usurping social whole, even though we may feel satisfaction in their defeat by a more reasonable world order. The Children of the Mist are described by Walter Scott in the Legend of Montrose and in the Heart of Midlothian as the remnant of a once powerful people among the western highlands of Scotland, never tamed by their many defeats at the hand of the encroaching Anglo-Saxons who had obtained the rich and fertile lowlands. They fiercely defended themselves to the last, like the famous chieftan Kocheeis of the Indian tribe (Apaches) in Arizona a few years ago. We respect the Children of the Mist, but we feel the necessity of their subjugation by a more rational civilization. But we do not respect the burglars that hide in the slums of our great cities. The tragic character makes a collision with his social order in the name of another social order, it may be of a less advanced world order or of a more advanced one. Antigone defies the law of the king and offends against the state. But she obeys an older world order which requires the burial of a dead relative by the living member of the family. This collision is made stronger by the art of Sophocles. He interests us in the noble unselfishness of Antigone, while he casts suspicion of selfish ambition on the character of Creon the king.

So, too, we are excited to pity and terror by the events which bring Oedipus into dreadful crimes through ignorance. He, too, attacks the existing world order by

a newer one.

There is the tragedy of the life of Socrates, also, who holds up a new world order to the Athenians, the first teacher in the world of the right of private conscience as against the established church of his time. Before Socrates there was no individual moral right-everyone was expected to obey implicitly the social custom without questioning it. This tragedy, however, is called by Hegel the tragedy of Athens rather than of Socrates. He drank the hemlock, it is true, but it was a triumphant death; for his was the entire future of the world history. Since his time there has been unceasing growth of the right of individual conscience among nations.

The tragic, we repeat, must have this collision of the individual against the social whole in which he lives, but he must be backed by the principle of another social whole, either a perishing world principle or one of the future just beginning its career.

A mere attack against the state from motives purely selfish is criminal, but not tragic.

The commission of crime, and the capture, conviction, and punishment of the criminal make a story that interests us. But if we do not discover a moral principle in the mind of the criminal we are liable to injury in dwelling on the details of the story. The Police Gazette is justly excluded from the family, because it educates toward crime rather than away from it. The story of Jack Shepard, as told by Ainsworth, and the other stories of like character idealize the mere selfish revolt against the civil order. They are written from the standpoint of mere selfish individualism. The individualism that Socrates initiated was that of a moral individualism. Spend your life in the inquiry for what is right, and do not refuse the hemlock if it is your reward for preaching the right.

The death of Socrates was the tragedy of Athens; the death on Calvary was the world tragedy. But the world learned and learns its deepest lesson from that tragedy; not merely the right of individual conscience is taught by that, but the worship of sorrow; the sacrifice of the self as mere selfishness for the emancipation of other selves; the principle of divine charity; the missionary spirit.

Tragedy reveals the depths of human nature, while crime does not, because it shows us the struggle between two social ideals, an older and newer, an earlier and a later. These are revealed in their fullness in the struggle.

As tragedy demands that the tragic character must be the bearer of a diverse principle of social order, so, too, does comedy require something more than mere capricious difference from prevailing custom, and something more than mere selfseeking at the expense of the social whole.

Spanish Cervantes has depicted for us the attempts of Don Quixote at resuscitating knight-errantry. Knight-errantry had been a few centuries before a very serious affair for all Europe. Chivalry was an essential epoch in the history of Europe, and there is no epoch in the evolution of modern civilization more important than it, for it was the desertion of the classic ideal for the Christian ideal; it was the celebration of this abandonment of the old ideal and the adoption of the new. The ideas of love, honor, and fidelity were consciously set up as the expression of the new freedom that dawned on the mind of Europe as a result of the world view of Christianity. Each soul has an infinite destiny beyond the grave. All that is secular is secondary to this religious principle. There were three crusades made as a result of this new consciousness: First, the conquest of the land containing the holy sepulcher. This was the outward crusade against Islam. Secondly, the inner crusade, the refutation of the Arabian interpretation of the Aristotelian philosophy by the great thinkers. marshaled by such scholars as Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas of Aquino. This was the scholastic crusade. After these outer and inner crusades came a little later the discovery of America, the third crusade, against the darkness of outlying heathenism. Queen Isabella contributed her jewe's to fit out the fleet of Columbus in the name of the holy church.

Knight-errantry was a passing phase of one of the most serious of spiritual movements. And when we laugh at Don Quixote's adventures we do not laugh at him as a madman or lunatic, but at the ineptness of the Old World form seriously set up in the midst of a comparatively modern world. Its mediations seem absurd when deprived of the principle of chivalry and its social order on which they had been established.

Just so in Walter Scott's story of Woodstock, and especially in that of Old Mortality the excesses of Protestant individualism, both of Independents and Presbyterians, are found in comic situations because brought against a more advanced or matured theologic view. They furnish comic and not tragic situations, because they do not involve the characters portrayed in destruction for their views, but only in futile acts and endeavors; endless self-contradictions.

Aristophanes ridicules not the older world views, striving for reestablishment in his time, so much as the products of the new movements put forward by the sophists and the freethinkers of that time. He took Socrates as his type and model of a sophist. He ridiculed anything and everything that was offered as a substitute for the old customs, the Greek morality that had come down from the good old times. Nothing could stand up against the inextinguishable laughter kindled in the Clouds, the Wasps, the Frogs, and his other comedies. The bad went down altogether, and the good went down temporarily in the person of Socrates. But Aristophanes did not save Athens from "the newness," after all. Alexander the Great, the pupil of Aristotle, the pupil of Plato, the pupil of Socrates, had to save Athens from the good old times incarnated in Spartan conservatism. The great, grand pupil of Socrates, in the person of Alexander, marshaled Grecian youth to war on Persia, and his conquests extended to India and Bactria, and Greek kingdoms took the place of Persian satrapies. We see how serious were the elements entering the most comic of all comedies, those of Aristophanes. He had serious intentions, but he did not show the deeds of the individual returning upon him to destroy him. His dramas showed only the futility of plan and purpose undermined by inherent self-contradiction.

We have in later comic writers, say, Swift and Sterne, the production of comic situations by means of importing one nation's customs into another nation. Seen through the eyes of one land or native country the daily habits of another land or country seem absurd. The French word outré expresses it. Swift is an Englishman who goes to Ireland and acquires a habit of looking critically on the ordinary manners and customs about him. He does not ridicule the Irish, however, but his own countrymen, the English, and writes the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdinguag, everywhere showing up the inconsistencies and absurdities in the social and political life of England in the first part of the eighteenth century. Sterne shows French and Belgian life through English spectacles.

Our own Mark Twain shows us border-land life through the eyes of the urban life of the Atlantic. slope, and in turn he makes his most comic situations by showing us the border-land traveler, with his local prejudices and ignorance of the history of culture, making his journey through the museums and art galleries of Europe.

But in all these examples we have one serions national order against another, the French against the English, or the American against the European, or the earnest pioneer life against the life of culture.

A definition of comic and tragic situations may be made as follows, using the distinctions of content and form, content standing first for the temporary or transient, the local or individual interest, the less substantial side. When it is placed under the form of the permanent, the ethical or universal or the substantial interest, it is seen at once as ridiculous. The form is a world too large for the shrunken importance of the content to fill. The special interest is given the dignity of the general interest, the local and provincial puts on the airs of the world culture, and we can not help but laugh at it. We have within us the psychologic reaction of making up our minds for a serious and universal interest and then suddenly encountering the local and insignificant. We collapse with laughter, for laughter is the physical counterpart to the inner collapse of our ideas descending from the great to the small.

On the other hand, the content may be a serious matter, a collision of world ideas; the person bearing the new or old ideal, and with all seriousness setting it up against the established usage, proposes a content for which the existing form has no place. It would shiver that form to admit it. The established form must destroy it and its bearer. We may act against the new content and kill the messenger that brings it, but we do it in pity and terror, for it is a tragedy. The new substance is too ample for the old form. The new idea and its bearer can