of thinking, "L'Aiglon " is not a tragedy at all, but a pathetic spectacle, like "Hannele " done on a gorgeous scale, wherein, by means of a series of rather loosely connected scenes, we see the spirit of a lovable child bruised and crushed by the relentless forces of life. There is nothing worth calling a struggle; he does not, as the slang phrase goes, "put up any fight at all."

It seems, then, as though the mystery-theory involved us in confusion as to what "seeing why" really means. But perhaps the trouble is caused by a failure to distinguish between the argument of a play and the play itself. Professor Hale has two minds about "Hamlet," one when he thinks of the story, another when he thinks of the play: when thinking of the first he "cannot see why it should have happened at all," when thinking of the second he "does not deny a single step." Note that it is the second mood which is induced by the play itself, the mood, not of querulous mystification but of compelled understanding, which accompanies our sense of the tragic. It is not while we follow the play that we "do not see why," it is only when we repeat, in barren and meaningless formula, the story of the play. This argument rather makes against its own cause, indicating that our feeling of the tragic and our understanding of its inevitable processes are at least concomitants. In discussing "A Doll's House," Professor Hale again mistakes the material of the tragedy for the tragedy itself. It cannot, he argues, be the conflict between husband and wife that makes it tragic, because "a brawling house is not tragic." Not when thus formulated, certainly, but it has been made the basis of more great tragedies than any other one subject. He adds that this particular brawl" was an extraordinary case, or perhaps it only seemed so because of the skill in putting the case.' Exactly. In other words, it was the writer's skill which made it to some extent into a tragedy. Curiously enough, all great tragedians have this skill: Lear's was a brawling house, too; so was Agamemnon's, and Antigone's, and Beatrice Cenci's.

In Professor Hale's discussion of "Hamlet" there is a further confusion of terms: "Granted that Hamlet was too weak of will, how did he get so? By too much thinking? Is not thinking the great faculty of man, the thing that raises him above the beasts? Why should too much thought put the thinker in the power of the circumstances around him? We do not understand these things." But the difficulty here is that Professor Hale is using the word "thinking" in two senses, as a general term for human reason, of which we cannot have too much, and as a special name for a special kind of activity which we all know does, speaking popularly, interfere with effective action. And we all know, too, in a general way, the reasons why it does thus interfere. Take a real instance: An old professor was sitting in a street car with his legs crossed, reading, when he suddenly realized that he had passed his corner. He arose hastily and tried to leave the car, but having neglected to uncross his legs he found it difficult, almost impossible. What was his trouble? Too much thinking; which thus actually had "put him in the power of the circumstances around him." Thinking may do this at any time, and no mystery about it; it all depends on the circumstances, and on how and what one thinks. In this case the lowest of the "beasts," even a hen, would have done better than the professor. The mystery-theory, then, does not appear to me as a satisfactory solution of the problem. I rather believe that the reverse of it is the truer, and that it is in so

far as we do, in the only way possible, understand the course of evil, so that it becomes a part of the great world-order to which we belong, that it appeals to our tragic sense. So long as it appears unaccountable, arbitrary, so long shall we feel impatience and rebellion, so long shall we be withheld from experiencing with regard to it the "pity and fear" which, whatever is meant by them, are admitted to be the essentials of the tragic attitude. Caliban's notion of Setebos " just choosing so" admits of suffering and of conflict, but not of tragedy, and the arbitrary postulate, as it seems to us moderns, in the "Edipus," is its weakness, not its strength.

It is this understanding of evil, this seeing through it, seeing how, which it is preeminently the tragedian's business to endow us with; if he fails of this, he has not written a tragedy, but a melodrama, or something else. Thus, Professor Hale holds that while "Hamlet" is a tragedy, the death of a young man in battle is not. Granted, but why? Not because we understand the evil involved; I do not think we do, the Providence that governs battlefields seems quite as inscrutable as the Providence that governs royal murders; — but because such a death, glorious or pathetic according to one's point of view, is what we call accidental: the bullet happened to come his way. An artist may arise who will take such a story and make it seem to us inevitable, but no one has yet done so. Perhaps the nearest approach to it is in "Romeo and Juliet," where the catastrophe is the outcome of a series of unfortunate accidents, any one of which might have turned out differently and saved the game. But I think the play only helps to prove the point, for it has never seemed to me a great tragedy, when compared with the greatest; it seems a sweet and pathetic love-story, like that of "Paul and Virginia,” and I have never been able to see anything very shocking in the German acting version which arrested the poison and the dagger, and allowed the lovers to live happily ever after. Moreover, it is significant that a class of college girls, when I referred to the play casually as a tragedy, almost unanimously protested. Everything, they argued, was going well, the plan of escape, though a stupidly complicated one, might easily have succeeded, and they refused to consider a play tragic which held within itself even up to the last moment the possibility of a happy solution. When asked about "Lear," and the happy solution which used occasionally to be substituted at its close by our German (and, alas! English too) play-managers, they held that the case was different; that here the tragedy lay not in the death of Lear but in his life, and that even if he had ended his days in comfortable senility, tended by Cordelia, his life would have been none the less a tragic failure, and inevitably a failure.

It is, then, not "strange unexplainableness" that makes tragedy, nor is it conflict alone. Tragedy gives us something different from the one and something more than the other. It shows us great suffering, mortal conflict, great natures, and as it shows us these it makes us feel that they, and we, are in the grasp of eternal, unalterable law. The suffering and the struggle, when apparently outside the dominion of law, arouse in us only extreme rebellion or sullen non-resistance; when manifestly within its realm, they stir in us those feelings of "pity and fear" which are our response to what we call great tragedy.)

ELIZABETH WOODBRIDGE. New Haven, Conn., April 18, 1901.

The New Books.

AUGUSTUS HARE- TO DATE.*

"What fun!" cheerily ejaculates Mr. Augustus Hare, of guide-book fame, in a letter to a friend, after telling how the Reviews had been abusing him for what they thought the twaddle, conceit, toadyism, inordinate length, and so forth, of the first instalment (in two volumes) of his autobiography. Even the staid "Athenæum" for once lost its temper, and called Mr. Hare a "literary valet," the "British Review went so far as to think him "an absolute beast," a critic out in India voted him and his "chatter" a "prodigious nuisance," an American paper politely hinted that so erratic a Hare must surely be one of the March variety, and, in fine, Mr. Hare must have felt as if the good old days of Jeffrey and Lockhart were come again for his express entertainment.

Bent on having more "fun" of this unusual sort, Mr. Hare now puts forth a second brace

of much thicker volumes on the same seductive theme, and gleefully awaits the result. We are sorry to disappoint him of our small contribution to the treat he has promised himself, but we must in candor say that his book, though long and of no great substance, strikes us nevertheless as a really entertaining one in its way, and even as an almost ideal book to pick about in and dawdle over in the dozy Summer days, when one is content to keep cool and drift along idly on the stream of almost any body's talk. It is, furthermore, to our notion, a book that reflects, not "an absolute beast (how the "British Review" could speak or think thus of the winsome and accomplished Augustus passes our comprehension), but an amiable, talkative gentleman, who, if he somewhat too manifestly has a high opinion of himself, has at all events come by it honestly. For Mr. Hare has long been a very popular writer with that large class of occasional readers who, when they like a man's books, like them without stint or qualification, and are eager to tell him so, rapturously, when they meet him in the flesh. Numerous admirers of Mr. Hare, as we gather from his pages, have praised him to his face, and gratefully told him how their steps had been led and their minds uplifted by his incomparable guide-books and pious family

*THE STORY OF MY LIFE. By Augustus J. C. Hare. Volumes III. and IV., completing the work. Illustrated. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.

memorials, and how much, how very much, the name of Augustus Hare meant to them. Few men's natural modesty, however great, could have withstood that sort of thing very long; and it is no wonder if Mr. Hare, living thus daily within earshot of his own praises and basking in the sun of his great social popularity, has come at last to "take himself pretty seriously," and even to feel it incumbent on him to climb to the general view on a pedestal of autobiography four volumes high.

We deplore as much as anybody what Mr. Gosse calls the "big-biography habit," and we think that a writer who has contracted it ought to be suppressed and kept out of print until time and abstention have effected a radical cure. The practice of exhibiting one-volume men in two-volume and even three-volume books has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished, even if an example has to be made of a contumacious biographer or two. But in Mr. Hare's seemingly aggravated case of making much ado about comparatively nothing, it ought in fairness to be observed that what he calls the story of his life is in point of fact so largely made up of stories about and by others, and of impersonal descriptions of places he has visited in his capacity of quasiprofessional tourist and guide-book maker, that it may be read with interest even by those who care least about Mr. Hare himself. Mr. Hare's

habit of Boswellizing even his chance and unimportant acquaintances, of jotting down their talk and especially their stories, is largely responsible for the length of his book. Telling in his journal, for instance, how he breakfasted with a Mr. Richmond he relates how his host"Talked of Carlyle - - of how his peculiarities began in affectation, but that now he was simply lost in the mazes of his own vocabulary. One night, he said, he met a man at Albert Gate at 12 P. M., who asked for a light for his cigar. He did not see who it was till, as he was turning away, he recognized Carlyle, who gave a laugh which could be heard all down Piccadilly as he exclaimed, I thought it was just any son of Adam, and I find a friend.""

Carlyle was tormented by street noises. He said to Mr. Hare:

"That which the warld torments me in most is the awful confusion of noise. It is the devil's own infernal din all the blessed day long, confounding God's warks and His creatures-a truly hell-like combination, and the warst of it a' is a railway whistle, like the screech of ten thousand cats and ivery cat of them as big as a cathedral." In his diary Mr. Hare tells amusingly of a dinner at the Grotes'.

"After dinner, she (Mrs. Grote) would leave 'the historian,' as she called him, in his study, and come up to the drawing-room, where she would talk to her

guests and be most entertaining. At nine o'clock, tea would be brought up—such a tea as one never sees now, with tablecloth, muffins, cakes, etc. Then she would say to the servant, Bring up the historian'. and the historian was brought up.' He was vastly civil, of the old school, and wore a great deal of frill. He would take his place opposite the table, and immediately taking a large clean pocket-handkerchief from his pocket, spread it very deliberately over his knees, after which a dog jumped up and sat on it. Then he would say, as to a perfect stranger, And now, Mrs. Grote, will you kindly favor us with a sonata?' and Mrs. Grote, who was an admirable musician, would play a very long sonata indeed; after which he would say, Thank you, Mrs. Grote. I am sure Lady Lyvedon joins with me in being very much obliged to you for your beautiful sonata.""

Mr. Hare's impressions of Tennyson, as recorded in his diary, will not please the poet's admirers who would have no spots on their sun. ". . . This afternoon I have been with Mrs. Gre ville to Mr. Tennyson at Haselmere . Tennyson is older looking than I expected, so that his unkempt appearance signifies less. He has an abrupt, bearish manner, and seems thoroughly hard and unpoetical: one would think of him as a man in whom the direst prose of life was absolutely ingrained. Mrs. Greville kissed his hand as he came in, which he received without any protest. He asked if I would like to go out, and we walked round the gardens. By way of breaking the silence I said, 'How fine your arbutus is.''Well, I would say arbutus,' he answered, otherwise you are as bad as the gardeners, who say Clematis For the poet's bearish manners the Tennyson family are to blame, in making him think himself a demigod. One day, on arriving at Mrs. Greville's, he said at once, 'Give me a pipe, I want to smoke.' She at once went off by herself down the village to the shop, and returning with two pipes, offered them to him with all becoming subservience. He never looked at her or thanked her, but, as he took them, growled out, "Where are the matches? I suppose now you've forgotten the matches!'... Dined at Lady Lyvedon's. Sat by Lady S., who was very pleasant. She talked of Tennyson, who had been to stay with her. He desired his sons to let her know that he should like to be asked to read some of his poems in the evening. Nevertheless, when she asked him, he made a piece of work about it, and said to the other guests, I do it, but I only do it because Lady S. absolutely insists upon it.' He read badly and with too much emotion: over 'Maud' he sobbed passionately."

Glad, no doubt, to have escaped the spectacle of a man "sobbing passionately" in public over his own poems, Mr. Hare was nevertheless compelled to hear Browning read at Lady Airlie's, and it was a sore trial to him.

"I never heard any one, even a child of ten, read so atrociously. It was two of his own pieces 'Good news to Ghent' and 'Ivan Ivanowitch,' the latter

always most horrible and unsuitable for reading aloud, but in this case rendered utterly unintelligible by the melodramatic vocal contortions of the reader."

The following passage from Mr. Hare's journal seems in general fairly characteristic,

and may serve to indicate a certain quality in his writing which is the one, we fancy, largely responsible for the irritation of his critics.

"I was afterwards at a breakfast at Lord Bute's. There were few people I knew there, and the grass was very wet, so I sat under the verandah with the Egertons. Presently an old lady was led out there, very old, and evidently unable to walk, but with a dear beautiful face, dressed in widow's weeds. She seemed to know no one, so gradually-I do not know how it came about. I gave her a rose, and sat down at her feet on the mat, and she talked of many beautiful things. She was evidently sitting in the most peaceful waiting upon the very threshold of the heavenly kingdom. When I was going away she said, 'I should like to know whom I have been talking to.' I said, 'My name is Augustus Hare.' She said, I divined that when you gave me the flower.' I have not a notion who she was.

THE SCIENCE OF MEANING.*

Etymology is a science, said Voltaire, in which vowels count for nothing and consonants for mighty little. Since then there has arisen a science of language at whose bar every slightest dialectical variation and shadow of a breathing is required to justify its existence, and the old gibe has lost its force. But the etymology of which Voltaire spoke was essentially the etymology of the ancients. It was a more or less ingenious and plausible playing of the fancy about the transitions of meaning by which one word arises out of another. At its worst, it was a refined form of punning. At its best, it was a convenient vehicle for the conveyance of ethical and aesthetical symbolism, as it appears in the etymologizing of Plato and Plutarch, or in Ruskin's interpretations of the proper names in Shakespeare. Plato derived hemera, day, from himeros, desire, because primitive man, reversing Shelley's practice, passed the night in terror-stricken longing for the dawn. Aristotle deduced dikaios, just, from dicha, in twain, because justice is a fair division. The Stoics, in Cicero's phrase, labored pitifully in enucleating the origins of words. And the moderns before this century were not *SEMANTICS: Studies in the Science of Meaning. By Michel Bréal; translated by Mrs. Henry Cust, with Preface by J. P. Postgate. New York: Henry Holt & Co.