The Nation 1908-02-06: Vol 86 Iss 2223
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~The Natig VOL. LXXXVI—NO. 2223 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1908 THE NEW YORK EDITION OF THE NOVELS AND TALES OF “These prefaces will form a Bio- graphia Literaria of uncommon in- terest and signifh- cance.” —The Nation. “To these books he has prefaced essays of very con- siderable length which are really chapters in auto- biography. These introductions are likely to form a HENRY JAMES This is the first collected edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James, an undertaking upon which both author and publishers have been long engaged and which will be the de- finitive edition of the fiction of the first of American novelists. Mr. James has devoted many months to the most careful revision of all the novels and tales. . A novel feature is the set of Spectal Prefaces which Mr. James has prepared, interpreting each book and narrating the circumstances in which it was written. Nothing of the kind has ever been provided by an author to accompany his works, The I//ustrations of the Edition have been treated on.a unique and particularly successful plan. They consist of a frontispiece for each volume: a portrait of some scene, situa- “If his pref- aces keep up as they have begun each will be worth as much as the book to which it is pre- fixed.” —The Sun. — “Prefaces are in themselves as noteworthy lit- erary criticism very interesting | | : { 7s ’ contribution to | tion, view, edifice, or monument actually existing, the particular | asanyMr. James American literary | London street, the Paris facade, Roman square, etc. has done. history.” é : —Chicago Even- —The Outlook. For fuller information address the Publishers ing Post. PAGE—PLANTATION EDITION STEVENSON—THISTLE EDITION TOLSTOI—INTERNATIONAL EDITION Other Sets in Scribner's Library of Modern Authors: TURGENIEFF—INTERNATIONAL EDITION KIPLING—OUTWARD BOUND EDITION ROOSEVELT—ELKHORN EDITION CARLYLE—EDINBURGH EDITION DICKENS—COMPLETE EDITION al STOCKTON—SHENANDOAH EDITION RILEY—HOMESTEAD EDITION Nation. F. HOPKINSON SMITH—BEACON EDITION BARRIE—THISTLE EDITION James— THACKERAY—KENSINGTON EDITION FIELD—SABINE EDITION Mitchell— MITCHELL (Ik Marvel—EDGEWOOD EDITION. siaicaaal Fiela— For information in regard to the important and very attractive = Stockton special offer in connection with these Sets, address the pub- Sermons Messrs. Chas. Scribuer’s Sons: Please send information in ref- lishers. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 153 Fifth Avenue, New York —_——- >
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“The ‘Nation, A WEEKLY JOURNAL, FOUNDED IN 1865. {Entered at the New York City Post Office as second-class mail matter.] The Nation is published and owned by the New York Evening Post Co. Oswald Garrison Villard, President; Philip Loring Allen Treasurer; Ham- mond Lamont, Editor; Paal Elmer More, Asso- ciate Editor. Three dollars per year in advance, postpaid, in any part of the United States or Mexico; to Can- ada $3.50. and to foreign countries comprised in the Poatal Union 84.00. Address THE NATION, Bow 7934, Publication Office, 20 Vesey Street. New York. CONTENTS OF THIS NUMBER. THB WERK occ ccccccccccccccccccccccscccece 115 EDITORIAL ARTICLES: The Murder of King Carlos ......... 118 Mr. Cortelyou’s Defence ...........+++ 118 Railway Accidents and the Unions.. 119 The Latin Worm Turns .............. 120 The Short Story as Literature ........ 120 SPECIAL ARTICLES: Paris Book Notes .......sseccccceeees 121 News for Bibliophiles .................. 122 CORRESPONDENCE: A Word for Ouida ........cccccccccccee 1233 po fs a ee | Ethics of Editorship| vebiecaseusenadane 124 FUOTTD ccccccocccccccccccccccsccccescccccees 124 Book RSVIEWS: Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden actiestsiotgieece Se GRORVED cdecsccczessvosccctccsecccoesesss 128 Je a ee 129 When Kings Go Forth to Battle ...... 129 SOMO G6 ERO DUGD co ceccccecctcescces 129 The Cambridge History of English BARSTRAUIO cccvccccccecccccccesesosecee 129 Die Sumerischen und Akkadischen Koénigsinschriften ..........cceeeeeees 136 The Odes and Epodes of Horace .... 131 In the Footprints of Dante ........... 131 My Memoirs . . - 1231 SCIENCE: The Prolongation of Life ............. 132 DRAMA: fe GE: Saxedécsteacnstns som ememetes 133 Music: Music Club Programs from All Na- tlons.—The Opera ....cscccccccccses i34 ART: The Architectural League ............. 134 FINANCE: The Recent Bank Suspensions ...... » 136 BOOKS OF THE WEEK ......sscccccces 137 *** Copies of The Nation may be procured in Paris at Brentano's, 17 Avenue de l'Opéra; in london of B. F. Stevens & Brown, Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 JOHN WILEY & SONS’ Scientific Publications Experimental Electrical Engineering and Manual for Electrical Testing For Engineers and for Students in En- gineering Laboratories. By V. KARA- PETOFF. 8vo, xxxiv+790 pages, 538 fig- ures. Cloth, $6.00 net. Modern Pigments and Their Vehicles Their Properties and Uses, Considered Mainly from the Practical Side, and How to Make Tints from Them. By FRED- ERICK MAIRE, Ex-editor of Painting and Decorating. 12mo, xi+266 pages. Cloth, $2.00. Modera Baths and Bath Houses By WM. PAUL GERHARD, C.E. 8vo, xvi +311 pages, 130 figures. Cloth, $3.00 net. Analysis of Mixed Paints, Color Pig- ments, and Varnishes By CLIFFORD DYER HOLLEY, M.S., Ph.D., Professor of Industrial Chemistry, North Dakota Agricultural College, and E. F. LADD, B.S., Professor of Chemistry, North Dakota Agricultural College. Large 12mo, xi+235 pages. Illustrated. Cloth, $2.50. . AText-Book of Physiological Chemistry By OLOF HAMMARSTEN, late Professor of Medical and Physiological Chemistry in the University of Upsala. Authorized Translation from the Author’s Enlarged and Revised Sixth German Edition, by JOHN A. MANDEL, Professor of Chem- istry in the New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College. 8vo, viii+845 pages. Cloth, $4.00. A Laboratory Guide for Students in Physical Sciences By H. SCHAPPER, Associate Professor in Charge of the Department of Physics, University of Arkansas.. 12me, v+6l pages, $1.00. The Gas Engine A Treatise on the _ Internal-combustion Engine using Gas, Gasolene, Kerosene, Alcohol, or other Hydrocarbon as Source of Energy. By FREDERICK REMSON HUTTON, Emeritus Professor of Me- chanical Engineering of Columbia Uni- versity. Third Edition Thoroughly Re- vised. S8vo, xx+562 pages, 241 figures. Cloth, $5.00. Machine Design By ALBERT W. SMITH, Director of Sibley College, Cornell University, and GUIDO H. 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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. iii NEW BOOKS Ancient Italy. Historical and Geographical Investigations in Central Italy, Magna Graecia, Sicily, and Sardinia By ETTORE PAIS. Translated from the Italian by C. DENSMORE CURTIS Dr. Pais is well known to classicalscholars. The articles in the present volume are the results of his studies in the ancient history of the Italian tribes. Every available source of information is drawn upon, and their breadth of view is masterly. They embrace the relations of these peoples with the surrounding nations, and incidentally throw light on the history of Greece. Their publication at this time will be welcomed by scholars, to whom they have hever been generally accessible. Many of them were printed as detached papers with a limited circulation, and all were, of course, in Italian. 460 pages, 8vo, cloth; net $5.00, postpaid $5.24. The Tragedies of Seneca Translated by FRANK JUSTUS MILLER This is a new translation of the ten tragedies which have come down under the name of Seneca, rendered into English blank verse, with appropriate lyric metres for the choruses. The work is enriched and its value greatly enhanced for both classical and English students, as well as for the general reader, by an introduction on the influence of the tragedies of Seneca upon early English drama, contributed to the volume by Professor John M. Manly; also by a review of the Roman historical drama in connection with the Octavia, by comparative analyses of Seneca’s tragedies and the corresponding Greek dramas, and by a comprehensive mythological index and glossary. 548 pages, 8vo, cloth; net $3.00, postpaid $3.20. Ancient Chronology Volume L.: from 3400 to 1050 B. C. By OLAF A. 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The work is fully equipped with summaries, pedigrees,and maps. 162 pages, 12mo, cloth; net 75 cents, postpaid 83 cents. | The English Reformation and Puritanism Wt Other Lectures “nay ERI B, HULBERT The late Dean Hulbert was a unique and striking character. Those who knew him and who enjoyed the flavor of his keen, incisive talk will be glad to know that a number of his lectures have been collected and published. Many also who did not know him personally will enjoy the book, and will be impressed as never before with the appalling cost of the civil and religious liberty that we now take as a matter of course. 352 pages, 8vo, cloth; net $2.50, postpaid $2.71. The True Nature of Value By RUFUS F. SPRAGUE The purpose of this study is to ascertain the true principles regulating exchange value, as they work in the market of to-day. In some respects the presentation of the case is quite different from that found in most modern treatises. A list of chapter-headings will give an idea of the field covered: Introduction; Definitions; Production; Utility of the Service Dis- tinguished from Utility of the Product; The Subjective and Objective Elements in Production; Cost a Double Variable; Utility of Service Directly Affected by Variations in Hindrance; Free Competition and Personal Cost; Law of Exchange Value; In- fluence of Capital; Rent; Money; Metallic and Paper Money. 192 pages, 12mo, cloth; net $1.00, postpaid $1.10. ADDRESS DEPT. 21 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO and NEW YORK
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iv The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 The author confesses, among other matters, that he has looked with long- ing on the titles of two of his old book; —Gower’s Confessio Amantis aod the more generally read Religio Medici by Important New Macmillan Books READY THIS DAY _Confessio Medici By the writer of “The Young People” Confession is not always of sin; it may be of faith or of | love. It is not vanity but the natural human sympathy of a | wise and kindly personality which expresses itself in this book in a quaint. genial welcome of friendliness, free from the self-con- Sir Thomas Browne. ence thé title CONFESSIO MEDICI. has 'earned H. Fielding Hall’s The Inward Light | ** It is in no sense argument, it is simply a superb ex- | pression of . . . what even the most skeptical cannot but admit to be a rational and beautiful outlook on life."” Cloth, cr. 8vo, $1.75 net; by mail, $1.86 ' | The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson in the new Eversley edition Annotated by Himself. Edited by his Son | To be complete in six volumes. Volume I. now ready, $1.50 net; by mail, $1-6g. Volume II. in press Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading By Professor Edmund B. Huey With a review of the history of reading and writing, and of methods, texts and hygiene in reading. Cloth, 400 pages, 12mo, $1.40 net NOTABLE BOOKS IN PRESS By Agnes and Egerton Castle Flower o’ the Orange Charm of atmosphere and a spirit of romance both wholesome and alluring are characteristic of the Castles’ tales of bygone days. Ready Feb. 20 By Jack London The Iron Heel Mr. Lon !on has described the primitive past ‘‘ Before Adam’; the bitter lot of ‘‘ The People of the Abyss’’ to-day; and here gives us the fair future and the dra- ma of its attainment. Ready February 19 By H. G. Wells New Worlds for Old Mr. Wells claims the name of socialist without blind- | ly subscribing to the program of any present form of socialistic theory. He aims in this book (which is not a novel) to set forth the principles upon which social- ism rests. Ready early in March The Cambridge Bourbons A new volume of Volume V. Modern Egypt In two volumes By the Earl of Cromer The author's remarkable personality, his abilities as a modern political administrator, and his peculiar position as for so long the most influential official in Egypt, unite to place the book among the most nota- ble of the year. Ready early in March sciousness of either teaching or learning, confessing only what he | Cloth, 12mo, bound tn dark red, with git title and gilt tops, $1.25 net; by mail, $1.35 ‘*The most full, comprehensive and scientific history of modern times in the English Language.''—The Nation of life. It is the gift of gifts for a young doctor. Dr. Henry C. Lea’s The Inquisition of the Spanish Dependencies A notable work which is attracting attention the | world over is completed with the issue of this volume which supplements The Inquisition of the Middle Ages (in three volumes) and The Inquisition of Spain (in four volumes). Cloth, 8vo, 564 pazes, $2.50; by mail, $2.70 | Prof. Hutton Webster’s interesting work on | Primitive Secret Societies A great deal of interesting material has been collected during recent years touching the rites, ceremonies, conditions of mtmbership, etc., in the curious secret societies of savage peoples. Prof. Webster’s book is an attempt to arrive as near as may be at its signifi- cance. Cloth, 8vo0, $2.00 net; by mail, $2.24 Prof. John A. Fairlie, Usiversity of Michigan in Essays in Municipal Administration | The knowledge of actualities displayed in his books on **Municipal Administration’’ and ‘‘National Admin- istration’’ vouches for the value of these suggestive papers. Cloth, 8vo, $2.50 net; by mail, $2.68 Roscoe and Schorlemmer’s revised edit.on of Treatise on Chemistry is now complete with the issue of Vol. II. on Metals, and ranks as the most recent, most complete, and pre- eminently authoritative book on its subject, an indis- pensable work of reference. : Vol. Il. justready. Cloth, 1404 pages + index, $7.50 met Practical Physics A Laboratory Manual By W.S. FRANKLIN, C. M. CRAWFORD, and BARRY MACNUTT. Vol. I, Precise Measure- | ments, Mechanics, and Heat. Vol. II, Electricity | and Magnetism. Each, 8vo, cloth, $1.25 net | Modern History Ready next week | and Stuarts Cloth, royal 8vo, $4.00 net England In two volumes By A. Lawrence Lowell A comprehensive survey of the English political system, comparable in vatue only to the Hon. James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, and likely to | become equally indispensable in the study of popular government. Probably ready in March Published by ‘ THE MACMILLAN COMPANY = “£¢Fith Ave
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——_ $$ The Nation. NEW YORK, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 1908. The Week. No one who is familiar with Gov. Hughes’s utterances could have expect- ed anything sensational in his speech on national issues last Friday night. What he said was of a piece with his known character and his previous record. He confronts national questions just as he deals with State questions. He is frank- ly a Republican, but a progressive one, independent also, and firmly of the mind that administrative vigor is of the essence of good government. He is a States’ rights man, desiring the high- est efficiency of local government; but is just as decidedly for resolute Federal action where that is unavoidable. In a word, Mr. Hughes, the Presidential can- didate, is precisely the same man we have come to know as Governor of New York. That he should either seek to put. himself at variance with President Roosevelt, or toady to him, was un- thinkable. His speech was in no sense a great one; perhaps inevitably it was general and rather non-committal in tone; but it was sound and steady. We believe also that it was politically saga- cious. It will go well with Republi- cans of the sort who must furnish his chief support, With what the Governor had to say about a protective tariff, the Nation will not be expected to agree. Had Mr. Hughes had occasion to apply to this subject those keen powers of analysis which he has devoted, for ex- ample, to taxation of corporations and to franchises, he would not have dropped into the conventional but fallacious phrases about high duties making high Wages possible, and so on. Still, even in the tariff question, Gov. Hughes pro- fesses himself open-minded. To any duty in the existing law that was plain- ly “exorbitant” or granted a “special privilege,” he would be opposed; and he is for a general and scientific revision as soon as possible. It is now certain that no competitor of his in the Chicago convention will go further than that. The drift toward tariff reduction in this country is unmistakable. A recent dispatch to the New York Sun tells us: Thirty or more of the leading members of the National Asssociation of Manufac- turers, representing billions of capital and upward of two million votes, according to their own statements, are in Washington prepared to deliver a knock-out blow to the present tariff schedules. The enlistment of this great organiza- tion in the cause of tariff reform is one of the notable events of recent tariff history. The Dingley Act was drawn not only for, but, in many instances, vir- tualiy by the manufacturers. If they are not satisfied with it, no one can be. The Manufacturers’ Association wants a commission appointed at once to pro- cure the data for a revision. This is not an abandonment of the protective theory. The indications of discontent agnong protectionists themselves only increase our regret that Gov. Hughes did not at least ally himself aggressive- ly with those of his party who feel that their beliefs are travestied in the Ding- ley law. President Roosevelt’s message of last week urging an employers’ liability bill reiterates his well-known views in re- gard to corporations and the criminal rich. The document is long, rambling, and repetitious. More serious, however, are the faults of temper. In conception and in style it falls far below the dig- nity of a state paper. Mr. Roosevelt has plainly been made furious by the attacks on him and his Administration and by the accusation that he is respon- sible for the panic. His return upon his assailants has not, we feel, materially helped his case. Men and politicians being what they are, it is inevitable that the Administration in power shall get the credit for every lucky event and the blame for every misfortune. Mr. Cleve- land and the Democrats suffered; and now Mr. Roosevelt and the Republicans are having their turn. In such cases nothing but time and the calm judg- ment of posterity can properly distrib- ute praise and censure; and Mr. Roose- velt must wait for that verdict upon his failures and achievements. Peyond doubt, two recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States are severe blows to the methods of or- ganized labor. Last week our highest tribunal declared unconstitutional the Erdman law, enacted by Congress in 1898, which forbade railroads or other carriers engaged in interstate com- merce to discriminate against or dis- charge employees because of their mem- bership in labor unions. On Monday the court decided that the favorite weapon of the unions, the boycott, is illegal when it is used to restrain or to injure the free movement of merchandise from one State into another. As there are few large enterprises which do not en- gage in interstate trade, the favorite weapon of the boycott thus loses much of its potency. Granting—as the Na- tion does—the many benefits which the unions have secured for their members, the desire of the unions to place them- Selves as a class above and beyond the law, has often made them hostile to American theories of personal liberty. The unfair advantages which certain forms of capital enjoy under our laws have furnished a demoralizing example to the laboring men. The Republican policy of protection has given employers special privileges, and the employed have naturally wanted similar favors for themselves. When courts have is- sued injunctions, organized labor has attempted to tie the hands of the ju- diciary. When legislators like Congress- man Littlefield have asserted their right to oppose such proposals, the unions have engaged in a vindictive warfare against them. But now the supremacy of the union over the laws seems nearly at an end. And this change must work to the advantage of the unions them- selves, in forcing them to rely more upon their legitimate strength, namely, the intelligence and the efficiency of the individual members. The union which can supply the most skilful and con- scientious laborers can command the la- bor market without resort to illegal force. Speaker Cannon’s withdrawal of his opposition to the Appalachian and the White Mountain forest reserves is a happy event, for these projects are of high importance to the future of both New England and the South. “The list of organizations which in one way or another are aiding in the movement is too long to mention,” says Forestry and Immigration in its last number. The passage of this bill would mean that the Government would take control, before it is too late, of the country’s main sup- ply of hard-wood timber, and also of the growths which chiefly regulate the flow of rivers supplying water-power to some of the great manufacturing States. The bill would make, at the same time, our forest reserve policy national in ex- tent, instead of merely Western. If Speaker Cannon’s belated support gains him some popularity at a time when popularity is uncommonly useful to a Presidential aspirant, he is welcome to it. “He who plants a tree,” says the poet, “plants a hope.” ‘We know of no reason why political hopes should be ex- cluded. “More than a million dollars a day for military purposes”—this is not an estimate of the autocratic Russian gov- ernment’s expenditure to keey itself in power, nor of the bill paid by Germany to maintain a great fleet and keep up a standing army of 600,000 men. It is merely a conservative guess at what our peace-loving United States is to be asked to pay during the next fiscal year.
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116 The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 Congressman Tawney has pointed out that the estimates already received call for the enormous amount of $406,011,216, at a moment when our balance sheet may show a deficit of one hundred mil- lions in the year 1908-1909. This total includes, of course, pensions; but, as Mr. Tawney pointed out: This stupendous sum of $406,011,216 is asked for simply for the military side of the government, and is larger than appro- priations for the entire expenses of the gov- ernment for any fiscal year since the civil war down to 1890, and not appreciably less than appropriations for any fiscal year prior to 1897, for the Spanish-American war. But, as the Washington Times points out, this is not all, for it does not in- clude the twenty-one millions paid out for the maintenance of the War and Navy Departments, or the forty millions asked for new battleships. If Mr. Roose- velt’s military mania were to be allowed full sway, we should expend $467,0v0,- 000 in 1908-1909 for war purposes, past, present, and future, or one and one-third millions for every day in the year. There never was a more stupid spec- tacle than that of this country’s assum- ing all the burdens of that Old-World militarism which annually drives to our shores thousands of immigrants. Explanations of the panic have been almost as numerous as projects for cur- rency reform. Senator Foraker, in ap- proaching the subject before the dinner of the Ohio Society in this city Satur- day night, was too shrewd to stake his judgment on a single cause. He admit- ted “many causes; for example, over- trading, over-expansion of credit, over- capitalization of new organizations, high prices of stocks, of labor, and of materials.” But the Senator neverthe- less had his own particular theory: All these had a share, but the chiefest of the causes may be summed up in the one word, “muck-raking’’; chiefest because it was the fruitful, precipitating, first cause of all the mischief that followed. Nobody, we suppose, will deny that “muck-raking” did have an effect in ag- gravating, if not in creating, the men- tal conditions which made possible the panic. But the investigator should go a little further, and inquire just why these published articles on the wrong- doing of individuals and institutions should have made so deep an impression. Our own answer would be that many of the accusations were true. We cer- tainly had abundance of muck to rake in the life-insurance investigation, in the Union Pacific inquiry, and in the Public Service Commission’s overhaul- ing of the New York Street Railway’s books. The long and short of it is that the muck was there. We do not ob- serve, in the reports of Senator For- aker’s speech, any reference to these scandalous evils, or to the necessity of restraining them hereafter. On the con- trary, the Senator’s main ground of con- gratulation is that, since the panic, “muck-raking articles have been at a discount,” and that “a more wholesome sentiment prevails.”” Wholesome, no doubt, so far as regards the abandon- ment of such crude and hasty legisla- tion as that of numerous States on rail- way rates. But if Mr, Foraker means that recent events have relaxed our ef- forts to hunt down financial rascality, expose its practices, and put a stop to it for the future, then, the result is not “wholesome.” At Berlin last Thursday President Hadley of Yale lectured on “American University Life.” According to the As- sociated Press dispatch, He compared student life in Germany with that in America, summing up in favor of the latter, which, he said, while provid- ing the highest degree of mental develop- ment and discipline, also encouraged a healthy love of sport, thus supplying a tendency to the physical improvement of the students, which was lacking in Euro- pean universities. The lecturer, we take it for granted, did not fail to explain the difference be- tween the abstract ideal of physical ex- ercise for all the students and the actual effect of our system of intercollegiate athletics in confining the benefits of out- door sports to a small minority. Presi- dent Hadley must also have told his hearers that America’s far-reaching re- form in higher educational methods— the substitution of physical for mental training—was not proposed and urged by educational experts. On the con- trary, it has been carried in the teeth of conservative educators. Our oldest and most accomplished teachers, college presidents like Eliot of Harvard, and serious-minded fathers, have united in protesting that the college author- ities should not virtually excuse mem- bers of the football team from academic exercises for the first two or three months.of the autumn term; and that the whole interest of the undergraduates should not be centred in these gladia- tors, to the neglect of study. But our undergraduates and our young grad- uates have been the ones to insist that athletics is the interest chiefly to be cultivated. They have publicly and privately denounced as fogies those members of the faculty who suppose that studies come first; they have made it plain that the sentiment of the “stu- dent body” and of “influential alumni” favors the sacrifice of everything to the success of the teams. In this effort our irresponsible youths have been ably seconded by the press. With the newspapers shrieking through all our streets and with the undergrad- uates and young graduates howling on the campus, our college authorities have seen on which side the weight of argu- ment lies. Under such pressure, harried by such ardent reformers, our teachers of the classics, of philosophy, and of mathematics have humbly acknowledged the error of their ancient way and have let the athletes determine more or less completely the amount of study and the kind of study that shall—for themselves at least—be required for a degree. Thus the present system of intercollegiate athletics has been forced upon our col- leges by persons who know and care no- thing about education. President Hadley’s efforts to persuade the Germans that our method is su- perior will not be wholly successful with those who may chance to read the re- cent report of a committee of the trus- tees of Williams, who have voted to al- low fewer intercollegiate contests. Ac- cording to this document, the number of participants in the games “has been in- significant in comparison with the num- ber of students in attendance.” The re- port continues: From the primary and proclaimed pur- pose of a college, there has been such a diversion to a secondary and subordinate incident of collegiate association, as to in- duce the student belief that the true col- lege spirit is to »e evoked not through the curriculum or in interchange of ideas, but most potently in the arena of athletic sport. Such in effect has been the formal ceclaration of the students’ publications. What is true of Williams is_ true, mutatis mutandis, of most of our East- ern colleges. Conditions are not unfair- ly described in the Revue des Deur Mondes for January 1, in which M. le Vicomte Georges d’Avenel gives the third instalment of his impressions of America. After speaking of the well- known industry of the French student, he adds: For young Americans, the thing which is most important in college is the sports. These sports change a little in the different grades, or classes, but maintain always the principal place in education. The glory of every university is not (like our lycées in their recent general competition) to win more prizes than other institutions for the dissertation or the Latin version, but to have the best rowers or the ablest players of baseball. The American succeeds in college by physical skill (@ la force du poignet); he learns little, and is neglectful of diplomas—of little value and easily ob- tained. This statement is, of course, not true of all colleges at all times. But there are few colleges in this part of the country which do not furnish many facts in support of the Frenchman's cruel generalization. Prizes offered to artists who contrib- ute to annual exhibitions are likely to reflect some particular hobby of the donor. A collector of landscapes or mar-
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 117 ines will give a prize for the “best” American landscape or marine. Or an- other amateur perceives that figure work is neglected, and so founds a wel- come prize for that genre. The result is encouragement for art in a _ limited range. But a prize offered for the first time this year at the Architectural League indicates a broader view. This competition was for plans for a Pavil- ion and Open-Air Swimming Pool. Three or four arts are called upon— architecture for the pavilion, wings, trel- lises, pool, and landscape; sculpture for that end of the pool where the water flows in; mural painting for the loggia, which is to be the main feature of the pavilion. In order to enter for this prize, architects have had to associate with themselves sculptors and “mur- als.” Since the new prize is not so large that it could be shared with two others, the Architectural “Teague has ap- plied the old prize for sculpture (the Henry O. Avery prize) and that for mural painting to this combined design. Our architects so rarely enjoy a chance to employ painters and sculptors in the original designing of their buildings that a competition of the kind, if con- tinued year after year, ought to prove highly instructive to laymen as well as the profession, and hasten the time when no building of any pretence to beauty, private or public, will be under- taken without this kind of collaboration. One phase of the Portuguese troubles that reaches beyond the limits of the Iberian Peninsula is the reported disaf- fection in Portugal’s East African col- ony, stimulated by the news of events at Lisbon. Disorders in Delagoa Bay or in Angola, the colony on the West African coast, would be so serious as to arouse international anxiety. Eng- iand has been spoken of as the histori- eal friend of the Lusitanian kingdom, but it is in Africa almost more than at home that the present upheaval is like- ly to call for British attention. Should some form of civil warfare break out among the Portuguese on either coast, South and Central Africa would look forward with fear to the chances of na- tive outbreaks, a possibility which is never entirely absent from the white man’s consciousness in that continent. Zululand, for instance, where native un- rest is again reported, is at no great distance from the Portuguese East Afri- can frontier. But Anglo-German rivalry might also come into play, in case con- ditions in Portugal—and what these are to be for some time to come we can- not tell—should suggest the possibility of a separation of the mother country from her colonies. Portuguese East Africa is bounded on the north by Ger- man East Africa, and on every other land frontier by British territory. Por- tuguese West Africa is bounded on the south by German Southwest Africa, and on the east partly by British Rhodesia. Chance of friction, therefore, exists. The reasons why the Campbell-Ban- nerman Ministry should have decided not to reintroduce the Irish Council Bill in the present session of Parlia- ment are not hard to find. A measure as tame as the one rejected by the Irish party in convention last year would, of course, have no reason for being. A bill strong enough to please the Nation- alists would stand no chance in the House of Lords; and the battle with the upper house, for which plenty of am- munition already exists, has been post- poned, as we have already been told, to some future session. Yet it is unfortu- nate that the Liberal party should be showing, in spite of much brave talk, evicences of last year’s disposition to conciliate and modify, instead of forc- ing through a comprehensive pro- gramme of legislation by means of the still large majority. After all, it is work that counts with the mass of the people. The Russification of Finland is now advocated in influential circles, though as yet the Emperor is reported to have arrived at no decision. Almost exactly three years after the dramatic opening of the Russian revolution with Father Gapon’s march on the Winter Palace, and a little over two years since the Czar, under the stress of the great up- heaval of October, 1905, gave to Finland at one stroke her ancient liberties, and more, the old reactionary pack is once more in full cry against the Grand Duchy, The present proposal is not only to remove the liberal Governor of Fin- land and to appoint a former subordi- nate of the notorious Bobrikoff, but ac- tually to dismember the Grand Duchy by annexing the Viborg district to Rus- sia. History can show few parallels to this swinging round so enormous a cir- cle in so short time—from absolutism through reform, complete constitution- alism and the imminence of a social revolution back to where the champions of absolutism feel themselves securely in the saddle once more. Grumblings against Finland, $500,000,000 for a new navy, the same old game of border poli- tics in Central Asia—the Czar’s empire seems back at its old moorings. The death of Cardinal Richard, Arch- bishop of Paris, will not help to im- prove relations between the government and the Church. The Vatican’s irrecon- cilable attitude on the separation ques- tion makes it certain that Cardinal Richard’s successor will be a man pledg- ed to a continuance of the policy of non- accommodation on the important prob- lems arising from the Separation law that stili await adjustment. The new archbishop will probably be Monsignor Amiette, coadjutor to Cardinal Richard. He has been the virtual head of the see of Paris during the conflicts of the last two years. That circumstance, too, tended to soften somewhat the relations between the late archbishop and the government. The Ministry, for instance, hesitated to employ forcible means for removing the venerable prelate from his episcopal palace when the Separa- tion law went into effect, and a delay was granted until the cardinal left his residence of his own accord. A young: er and more energetic bishop, holding his appointment from a_ reactionary Curia, is apt neither to give nor to re- ceive much favor in the struggle with the Jacobins—as the situation is re- garded at Rome. While present tenden- cies prevail at the Vatican, it is rather unfortunate that old members of the French episcopate whose moderation of views has been repeatedly shown, should disappear and make way for militant successors. Sis Oliver Lodge, if we may believe the dispatches, is convinced that he has received communications from three men who in their lifetime were inter- ested in psychical research, but who are now dead: Edmund Gurney, Rich- ard Hodgson, and F. W. H. Myers. In an address at the meeting of the Society for Psychical Research last week Sir Oliver declared: On the question of the life hereafter the excavators are engaged in boring a tunnel from the opposite ends. Amid the roar of the water and the other noises, we are be- ginning to hear the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side. We have received what an investigation has proved to be messages from the dead through the mediums, Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Verrall. This eloquence will, we doubt not, af- fect some of our younger readers; but it will leave those whose memories run back ten or twenty years rather cold. We should hesitate to say how many times within the last two decades com- munications with the dead have been definitely established by eminent 4d1- vines, college professors, and distin- guished scientists; and how many times these communications have been expos- ed as gross fraud or pathetic self-decep- tion. The list of the misled is a long one and no less a name than that of Sir William Crookes is in it. The detailed evidence on which Sir Oliver rests his conviction has not been published; and until it is before us in fairly complete form we cannot analyze it. But one thing is sure: in such research the chances for trickery and error are in- numerable; and proof far more cogent than has yet been produced is necessary in order to make it clear that Sir Oliver has not unconsciously translated his hopes into beliefs.
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118 The Nation. | Vol. 86, No. 2223 THE MURDER OF KING CARLOS. Who the men were that shot down the Portuguese monarch and his elder son in Lisbon on Saturday is not yet clear- ly known. That the murder was a po- litical act, there can be little doubt. The first impulse to throw the responsibil- ity on aliens, or anarchists, is compre- hensible enough in the state of public mind induced by so horrible a tragedy. But the latest news, the resignation of the Premier-Dictator Franco and the for- mation of a new shows that events of Saturday have been accepted as a political protest that must not pass unheeded. Fear alone may not have induced Senhor Franco to resign. To the new boy-King and his mother, the chief minister could only be the man who, more or less directly, had brought about the and therefore operation between him and the young cabinet, disaster; co- morarch would have been rendered dif- ficult. Franco’s successor, Admiral Fetr- reira do Amaral, was spoken of soon after the assassination, as the probable Among the oth- d’Alpoim, head of a new cabinet. José-Maria Progressive er members is chief of the Dissidents, whom rumor connects with the assas- sinations. If this report is founded on fact, the change would indeed be surren- der on the part of the government. The situation in Portugal has been puzzling. Not the least incomprehensi- ble feature was the late King’s seeming disregard of the danger that threatened. Was it merely exceptional courage that made him appear in public, practically without protection, at a time when ex- citement was at fever heat and the po lice were discovering daily plots against the government? Or did the King really underestimate the force of popular re- sentment aroused by his anti-constitu- tional policy? That foreign observers should not have understood how earnest the Portuguese parties were in their controversy with the King, is conceiva- ble. But that the King himself should have failed to gauge the feelings of his people or the strength of the opposition with which he had to contend, is aston- ishing. Yet that would appear to have been the case, to judge from the light- hearted tone of a statement he made to the representative of the Paris Temps, last November: Senhor Franco is the man I have want- ed. For a long time I had my eye on him. At the moment I called him. His merit consists in his faith in himself, in his star; and in the hours of crisis such confidence is a precious aid. We are completely in accord. He has my entire confidence. We shall hold the elections when it suits our own purpose. We are sure of a majority. The country will ap- prove Senhor Franco’s policy. We shall reéstablish financial equilibrium and wipe out the deficit I know my country. Portugal needs quiet. I can see that opportune wherever I go my people are with me. But evidently the Portuguese people were not with their King. In the protracted struggle between Carlos I. and the parliamentary parties, opinion has in general sided with the King. The conflict has been usually described, and on the whole truthfully, as arising from the unmeas- ured corruption that characterized the two great political parties, the Regen- eradores, or Conservatives, and the Pro- gressives, or Liberals, with their off- shoot, the Progressive Dissidents. The system of rotation was in force, a work- ing azreement by which the two parties tool: turns at the public trough. Under such a régime, and with a court not averse to extravagance, the finances of the country fell into a deplorable condi- tion. In 1906 the public debt of Portu- gal, a country with some 5,5(0,000 in- habitants, amounted to nearly $800,000,- 000. Sweden, with a population almost the same, had in that year a _ public debt of $90,000,000. In 1891 Senhor Franco organized the party of Libera!- Regenerators, pledged to a policy of re- form. In 1906 King Carlos made him premier, and when all attempts at re- form were blocked by the parliamentary opposition of the two great parties, the King resorted, in May, 1907, to a disso- lution of Parliament and a dictatorship. That such drastic action was necessary to save the country from ruin, has been the defence of Franco’s adherents, a de- fence which has been received with ap- proval abroad, including this country, where we like strenuous executives. Yet the tragedy at Lisbon has shown that suspensions of Constitutional forms and dictatorships are not easily to be play- ed with. If the Portuguese politicians, in defence of an evil cause, were able to provoke resentment to the point where assassination becomes a_ possi- bility, it must mean that the people of Portugal value Constitutional rights above financial well-being. Benevolent despotism has its attractive side: but it is growing more and more difficult to justify suppression of liberty by the argument from expediency. Democratic institutions demand that the people, through their representatives, be allow- ed to work out their own fortunes. It matters little that oligarchic influence or party interests often assume the mask of popular liberty, as the case may be in Portugal. The principle is strong enough to bear such exceptions. The people prefer to stew in their own juice. A coup d'état, they feel, is not govern- ment: it is reversion to elementary strife, of which no one can foresee the consequences. fere'gn MR. CORTELYOU'S DEFENCE. In his reply to the Senate’s inquiries, the Secretary of the Treasury has made the best defence of which his govern- ment bond and note issues of Novem- ber are susceptible. Since the govern- ment itself, by stopping sales when only $24,631,980 2 per cent. bonds and $15,- 436,500 3 per cent. notes had been allot- ted, instead of the $50,000,000 and $100,- 000,000, respectively, offered on Novem- ber 17, has confessed its misjudgment of the situation, we should have been glad to pass the matter over without further comment. No one has impugn- ed the motives of Mr. Cortelyou. There is, however, an historical aspect of the government’s intervention which cannot be dismissed so easily. Efforts have been made by some bankers—and efforts are naturally made in the Secre- tary’s document—to argue that the ac- tion of the government stopped the pan- ic. To this argument the fact that the condition of the banks did improve pro- gressively after the Treasury's an- nouncement, gives some apparent force. Mr. Cortelyou’s statement is: While the pressure on the banks was not allayed at once by the measure, con- fidence was so far restored that the premium on currency fell immediately, and bids were received in such volume for both classes of issues that it was not considered necessary to allot even half of the total amount of the two issues. Were this view to pass unchallenged, it is easy to imagine what use might be made of the precedent in a future crisis. Secretary Richardson similarly defend- ed, in 1873, his illegal reissue of gov- ernment notes retired by law, by assert- ing officially that the currency paid out “did much to strengthen many savings banks and to prevent a panic among their numerous depositors,” and that it “fortified other banks, and checked the general alarm to some extent.” Had financial and economic critics accepted this defence, and ignored the fact that the action of the Treasury not only en- couraged loose views of legal restraints, but gave instant aid and comfort to the fiat-money school, it is highly probable that the affair would have been cited, in the panics of both 1893 and 1907, as an argument for arbitrary recourse to illegal paper issues. The truth about last November’s ac- tion, as the banking community now recognizes, is that the emergency was not such as to call for government in- terference. When the Treasury an- nounced its note and bond issues, the fina:.cial strain, severe though it still remained on the day before the an- nouncement, was showing distinct signs of relaxation; the bank returns, and the fall in the currency premium from 4 per cent. on November 12 to 1% in the week before the Treasury moved, were indeed proof sufficient of ameliorating conditions. With what seems a partial recogni- tion of this fact, Mr. Cortelyou rests his defence of the recourse to a 3 per cent. note issue, when the Treasury’s surplus was unusually large, on the plea that al?
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Feb. 6; 1908] The Nation. 119 but $5,000,000 of this surplus was on deposit with the banks. For public pur- poses, this was too small a working bal- ance, yet the Treasury might “invoke a financial disaster by attempting to with- draw funds on deposit with national banks, at a time when they were subject to severe strain in meeting the busi- ness requirements of the country.” But this plausible argument overlooks rather oddly the point that all the cash which the Treasury obtained from banks, in exchange for the new 3 per cents., would equally have to be withdrawn from bank reserves. If the whole cash thus receiv- ed had been re-deposited in the sub- scribing banks, the Treasury’s own case wou'd have been precisely what it was befcre; and if part of it had not been re- deposited—which was the actual case— thea the Treasury to that extent drew on the bank supply of cash, exactly as if it had called in the same amount from its bank deposits. The whole November transaction, it may as well be admitted, was due part- ly, like the course of the Treasury in 1873, to a yielding to unreasoning pres- sure from panic-stricken business inter- ests, and partiy to misjudgment of the situation. It is an open secret that in certain important banking quarters it wes expected that the government would connive at the grossly illegal use of these 3 per cent. certificates as ac- tual reserve money, and there is reason to telieve that even the Treasury had some idea of attracting hoarded money into subscriptions. To his lasting credit, Secretary Cortelyou gave an unhesitat- ing veto to the first of these expecta- tions; and the second was quickly dis- posed of by the course of events. It was soon discovered that, where individ- uals were tendering subscriptions to the government issues, they were plan- ning to take the cash for payment, not from private strongboxes, but from the reserves of banks. All things consider- ed, Mr. Cortelyou deserves credit chiefly for the readiness with which he recog- nized the mistake of policy, and the courage with which he abandoned it. Not every public officer would have done so much. The main consideration, from the point of view of financial history and precedent, is that a time of financial panic is a time for the government, after using promptly its legitimate resources for relief, as Mr. Cortelyou did in his October deposits of public funds, to keep its hands off. RAILWAY ACCIDENTS AND THE UNIONS. We commented in our issue of Janu- ary 16 upon the killing of 5,000 persons and the injuring of 76,286 upon our railways during 1907. Upon the vexed question of the relationship of labor unions to these appalling casualties, light has now been shed by J. O. Fagan’s “Confessions of a Railway Signalman,” in the current Atlantic, the second of two valuable papers. Speaking of Pres- ident Mellen’s recent statement that, so far as his roads are concerned, increase of pay is invariably followed by de- creased efficiency, Mr. Fagan declares that “increase of pay and decrease of effic‘ency are both indications of loss of grip by the management,” and adds that, “hidden away in this simple state- ment there is a whole world of signifi- cance.” The power or pressure which induced Mr. Mellen to increase wages is the same influence which makes for de- creased efficiency. This power is, Mr. Fagan declares, the “Railroad Labor Or- ganization.” Mr. Fagan is himself a labor-union man who is not blind to the benefits that have been derived from organization. The unions have established a fraternal feeling, aroused a spirit of mutual help- fulness; they have beyond doubt con- tributed to the comfort and prosperity of almost every man in the service, and have done excellent work in obtaining protective legislation for railway work- ers. If this were all, they would, of course, deserve high praise. But there is another side. Mr. Fagan declares em- phatically: For a great many years the influence of the railroad labor organizations has been consistently exerted, not only to raise wages and to improve conditions, which, of course, is perfectly proper and justi- fiable, but also to nullify discipline, to de- stroy personal management and authority, and to obliterate from all schedules and working agreements any reference to or consideration for the paramount interests of the travelling public. This result, Mr. Fagan insists, is not only due to the indirect effect of union victories, but is directly achieved by agreements which “for the most part are secret documents.” - This frank statement is alarming sub- stantiation of what has long been more or less vaguely alleged. Additional con- firmation of Mr. Fagan’s view is also found in the open letter on railway ac- cidents from W. H. Boardman in last week’s issue of the Railway Gazette. Mr. Boardman, who is the editor of the Gazette, bluntly says that railway officers are in the main doing their best to prevent casualties, but that they “cannot be successful until they are al- lowed to control their employees.” It is of his knowledge that, in the employ- ment and discharge of enginemen and train crews, the unions have more au- thority than the employers, except on the Reading and the Chicago, Burling- ton and Quincy, “which have paid mil- lions for the privilege’ of controlling their own men. Actually, therefore, on nearly the whole of our American rail- way system the final responsibility for everything affecting the efficiency of the employees and their discipline rests, not with the officers elected by the owners, but with the leaders of the employees. The only wonder is that conditions are not worse. Mr. Fagan does not think that inter- ference with discipline is part of a formulated policy. Yet his specific cases in which guilty men have been forced back into their positions, makes it hard to share this view. While Mr. Board- man admits that railway officers are often legally and morally guilty of neg- ligence, Mr. Fagan pays a high tribute to the division superintendents, who are, he declares, “among the hardest worked, most thoroughly capable and conscientious men in the United States.” He quotes one of them as saying: “With a free hand, we could put a stop to this killing in a week.” It is impossible, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that upon the labor unions rests a grave responsibility for the slaughter which not only makes our railways the most deadly in the world, but weakens our country by a shocking waste of men, and the annual addition of thousands to the army of the maimed. To be absolutely fair, it is necessary to show, as in fact Mr. Boardman does, that of the 5,000 passengers and em- ployees killed last year, only 776 died in collisions, while 1,873 laborers were killed on the right of way. But at least 1,000 lives can be saved, he thinks, by better discipline and inspection, and fully fifteen times that number of in- juries may be prevented. Most startling of all is Mr. Boardman’s proof that, be- sides the 5,000 passengers and em- ployees killed, 6,330 other persons, main- ly trespassers on the right of way, were also killed, making a total of nearly one thousand lives a month, or of fully thirty a day. The trespassers numbered 5,381, but it is net to be assumed that all were tramps, and therefore—from the economic point of view—lives of lit- tle value. In the West, the railways are often the directest, best maintained, and most interesting highways; hence the stream of walkers includes often the well-to-do and the efficient. The fright- ful death list might be much reduced by fencing and patrolling the tracks. Indeed, on this point of patrolling Mr. Boardman does not lay sufficient stress. The American railways use only 49,961 persons to guard crossings and watch the lines; but if they employed as many proportionately as the Prussian rail- ways, this number would be 636,000. Even if only 200,000 more track-walk- ers were hired, there would be a great saving in lives, and many accidents due to defective rails, floods, dropping of loads from freight trains, and the like would be prevented. Finally, Mr. Boardman contends that conditions would be bettered if the courts were to hold the general mana- gers criminally responsible for prevent-
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120 The Nation. [ Vol. 86, No. 2223 able accidents. This would lead, we be- lieve, to a speedy shaking off of at least a part of the union thraldom. THE LATIN WORM TURNS. It is almost exactly ten years since a Frenchman’s book on “Anglo-Saxon Superiority” made a great flutter. Ed- mond Demolins, in writing “A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” no doubt thought of himself as perform- ing a patriotic service. His aim was to warn his countrymen of certain dangers, and to bid them study the sources of strength of other nations. But a storm of denunciation at once broke over him in France. He was a recreant son, ex- posing the weakness of his mother. Abroad, however, particularly in Anglo- Saxon lands, he was praised at once for his frankness and his philosophic judg- ment. A Latin had never looked so brave and wise as when confessing his inferiority to the Saxon. It soon be- came a commonplace that the peoples of Southern Europe admitted themselves to be decadent; and Demolins’s book had perhaps something to do in prompt- ing Lord Salisbury’s characteristically indiscreet remark about “the dying na- tions.” Of late, however, the Latin worm has turned. The races of meri- dional Europe may be dying, but are like the Irishman who said, after the accident, that, if he was dead, he was not conscious of it. Many vigorous pro- tests have been made by Spaniards, Ital- jans, and the children of the Midi against being despised or even ignored. ‘We may mention Ferrero’s lectures in praise of Latin civilization, delivered in Brazil and in Argentina and Uruguay— utterances which were warmly applaud- ed. Summing up in the Paris Figaro his experiences as lecturer-errant, Sig- nor Ferrero admits sadly that the im- pulse of Latin origin is growing feebler in Latin America, where “Roosevelt in- terests them more than Augustus, and Japan more than Gaul in Cesar's time.” Nevertheless, Ferrero asserts with em- phasis his old thesis that “the Latin spirit” was never more powerful than to-day, and that it could be made most fruitful in its influence upon Anglo-Sax- on, German, or Slav civilization. More directly to the point is a recent Italian book, “Latini e Anglo-Sassoni.” Its author, Napoleone Colaianni, contro- verts stoutly the prevalent assumption that the future is entirely in the hands of the Northern races. He reproaches his fellow-Latins for ever having ad- mitted this idea, and then proceeds to carry the war vigorously into the en- emy’s country. He contests the whole idea of anything like a fixed hierarchy of nations. Leadership is always chang- ing. England at various periods has been so corrupt and contemptible that it is ridiculous for her to plume herself over Spain, for example. Spain held the hegemony of Europe in the six- teenth century, but who can say that her fall was any more calamitous than that of England may yet be? And Co- laianni asserts that Italy, which once led the world in government, as in letters and art, is to-day gradually regaining eminence in all those directions. His book is, throughout, a piece of valiant national and racial self-assertion. It is naturally strongest when it deals with the graces and refinements of civ- ilization. If international epithets are to be flung about, certainly Florence and Paris have as good a right as Lon- don or New York to apply the term “barbarians.” And even in the matter of moral soundness, Signor Colaianni puts up a stiff defence. He quotes Ger- man authorities to prove that Paris is less immoral than Berlin, London, or New York. Conceding that the higher classes in France and Italy are more lax in morals than those of Northern coun- tries, he affirms the contrary of the great bulk of the people. Nowhere are they more chaste than in Italy. And in the matter of infanticide, the Italian record is twice as good as the German. To this Italian writer, the slaughter of the innocents in other countries is more repulsive and more disgraceful than the crimes passionels of his native land. Even in the matter of bodily train- ing and athletics this audacious Latin challenges the lasting superiority of An- glo-Saxons. Italy is awaking to her needs in these respects. She indulges in no blind dependence upon physical prowess, for she remembers the ex’ treme importance given to athletics by the Greeks and Romans, who neverthe- less fell before tribes that had never seen a stadium or a bath. Colaianni is confident of the ability of his country- men to adopt whatever regimen may be necessary to keep abreast with the fore- most, for “the Latin intelligence is more lively, more prompt, and assimilates knowledge better than any other.” How it would have delighted him to know that the most athletic of Anglo-Saxon Presidents, in urging Congress to pro- vide an army of athletes, could find no better reinforcement for his argument than pictures of Italian officers per- forming daring feats of horsemanship! Such a book is not to be taken too lit- erally. It is, in essence, merely a sharp reminder that no nation likes to be either patronized or snuffed out; and that a certain arrogance of Anglo-Sax- ons, in the presence of Latin races, is as ill-founded as it is ungracious. By both parties to the dispute about superiority, it would be well to cultivate tolerance and, above all, an effort to understand each other. The time is past when a nation or a race can complacently classi- fy those who are not altogether as it- self as inferior and barbarian. THE SHORT STORY AS LITERA- TURE. The short story has arrived at the dignity of elaborate treatment by no less a critic than Prof. Brander Mat- thews in his latest book, “The Short- story: Specimens Illustrating Its De- velopment,” edited with introduction and notes. Let us say at the outset that Professor Matthews’s work is adequate in its kind; nor can there be any ob- jection to the kind itself. These studies of literary types—the epic, the lyric, the essay, the novel, the short story, and so on—may serve a useful purpose. Doubt- less, scholars will soon present us with solid tomes on the origin and develop- ment of the ten-line anecdote and the joke of commerce. When those precious contributions to knowledge appear, we hope to welcome them suitably. To-day we merely take the publication of Pro- fessor Matthews’s book as an occasion to remind our readers that the short story is not one of the highest forms of lite- rary art. That common delusion is fostered, in the first place, by our periodicals. All the popular magazines and newspapers print short stories; some of them print mothing else. Worthy people whose read- ing is confined to these tales—and be- yond the stock-tables and the news dis- patches, many persons apparently read nothing else—talk quite innocently of their fondness for literature, and imag- ine they are sustaining their minds on the best writing of our best writers. We have all met unsophisticated souls who speak of Richard Harding Davis, for example, as if he were Thackeray or Thomas Hardy. But the mistake is not confined to persons who are relatively illiterate. The enormous demand for stories containing between two thousand and ten thousand words has its effect on the minds of our professional au- thors. They see that a carefully com- posed novel may have but a small sale; that essays and poetry hardly pay their way; but that any literary craftsman can write with his left hand a short story that some magazine will buy. That is the wide gate that leadeth to fame, and many there be which go in thereat. Thus the fact that millions of people, incapable of sustained attention to a book, want literature in homeopathic doses, has robbed us of the power to judge this kind of hack-work on its merits. Successful manufacturers of short stories gravely talk to the news- paper interviewer about their “methods of composition,” and allow their pictures to be displayed in the literary maga- zines, apparently under the impression that they belong to the hierarchy of great novelists and poets. And some of our college teachers, we regret to say, have done their share in encouraging this folly. The theme-read- er is always in danger of regarding his
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 121 geese as swans; and when, after plough- ing through thousands of pages of rub- bish, he comes upon a theme which al- fost shows intelligence, he is likely to think it better than it really is. Now the short story is the kind of thing which bright freshmen and sophomores can produce; it requires less thinking than good exposition and argumenta- tion; but it is often more entertaining. Hence we have the spectacle of under- graduates allowed, even instigated, to make their electives in composition courses in short-story writing. For the exceptional man the discipline may be profitable; but the majority of boys who indulge in this academic dissipation and of instructors who aid and abet them are the victims of self-deception. If the matter ended with college, little damage would be done. But aspiring youths, on the strength of their facility in carving cherry stones, sally forth to lead the literary life. To all these misguided mortals—gen- eral readers, authors, teachers, and pu- pils—we commend Professor Matthews’s book as a corrective. In spite of his own enthusiasm and his belief that this form of writing is “worthy of careful study,” his admirably chosen specimens and his analytical introduction make it clear that with comparatively few exceptions the short story is milk for babes. He gives us, to be sure, some short stories which exhibit intellectual power and artistic skill. He shows that to observe all the limitations of this style is no small achievement. But, then, the num- ber of flawless short stories, which may fairly rank high in literature, can al- most be counted on the fingers. Boc- caccio, for instance, is often held up as a great exemplar of the art of writing short stories; and yet, as Professor Matthews notes, Prof. C. S. Baldwin of Yale, after analyzing the hundred tales in the “Decameron,” reaches the con- clusion that over half are little more than anecdotes, and most of the re- mainder are but naked plots “ingeni- ously set forth, but existing only in scenario, so to speak.” But three of Boccaccio’s tales approximate the “true type of short story” and only two “ac- tualiy attain to it.” The difficulty with Boccaccio, Professor Matthews thinks, is that he had in mind “no definite stan- dard” a; to type and technique. Evi- dently, our learned professors have set up a norm as rigid as the three unities of classic drama. Be that as it may, many modern prac- titioners are all technique. They have nothing to say, but they say it very well. They write short stories because —as Professor Matthews quotes from Prof. Bliss Perry—the short story does not require sustained imagination; it does not demand “essential sanity, breadth, and tolerance of view,” or con- sistency, or ability to “think things through.” In fine, though Professor Matthews would probably not go so far, the short story is the lowest type of imaginative literature. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it is nothing more than whipped syllabub—a pretty confection for young ladies who want to kill time. The next step down from the short story is into the depths of journalismi—news stories, special arti- cles for Sunday papers, reports of col- lege lectures, and so on to the abyss of advertisements and editorials. PARIS BOOK NOTES. PaRIs, January 24. René Boylesve has been a rising novelist in France for some years. Perhaps he has not yet reached his final standing, which may be among the highest. For mere French, for language, and style, in the ade- quateness of words to thought for the reader’s easy intelligence and pleasure, he is already one of the best. ‘Mon amour,” his new novel, deals, of course, with the everlasting feminine. Louis Bertrand, a late comer, has done work that also makes one wonder if he is not the promised great romancer. His new book, “L’Invasion,” has something in it beside the present uni- versal obsession of sex, since it portrays the curious life of the Italians who are “invading” and all but transforming the great French seaport of Marseilles. For a best seller, Marcel Prévost still holds the first place. His new “Lettres A Fran- coise mariée”’ continue to the young wife the spiritual direction which began with the volume of letters to the same young lady, when unmarried—a volume now in its nine- ty-sixth edition. With the old upbringing, the average French mother would scarcely allow her daughter to read these samples of utmost worldly wisdom; and it is prob- able they are even now read mostly after marriage. It would be curious to know how many men in France read these books written by a man for women, just as it would be to know how many English and American men read the novels written for them by women. It is certain that this re- turn of Marcel Prévost to his earlier field follows on the diminished sales of his later, more manly novels. Abel Hermant, the somewhat cynical, but sparkling novelist of the decadent and cos- mopolitan rich in European fashionable re- sorts, publishes the text of his successful play of 1907, “Monsieur de Courpiére.” Like most French plays, it is as interest- ing read as heard. This is also the case with the volume in which the veteran Cat- ulle Mendés has gathered together all his prose plays, “Théatre en prose,” including the favorite ‘“‘Femme de Tabarin.” In history good as a play, we have a final “Camille Desmoulins’” by another veteran, Jules Claretie, who is not only di- rector of the Comédie Francaise, but for fifty years has been pouring out literary pages inexhaustible. The French Revolu- tion is a specialty of his; there was never anything more dramatic than Camille’s starting off the Palais Royal crowd to storm the Bastille, more idyllic than his love for Lucille, more tragic than the death of both at the hands of leaders he had helped to create. M. Claretie is not only a popular writer and an Academician; he is one of the active founders of the working Society of the History of the French Revolution. A little book on a lighter side of those dark years, ‘“‘Les Fétes et les chants de la Révolution Francaise,” by Jules Tiersot, is worthy of mention. So is a new volume, “Souvenirs du Baron de Frenilly, pair de France (1768-1828),’’ letting in contemporary light on a period whose every day is still a subject of passionate dispute; the intro- duction and notes are by the competent his- torian, Arthur Chuquet. I recently nar- rated Frédéric Masson’s attempt to uproot the perhaps ineradicable story of Napoleon crowning himself in presence of a sup- posedly amazed Pope. M. Masson, who seems to have studied his idol hour by hour of his career, now publishes an entire vol- ume on “Le Sacre et le couronnement de Napoléon.”” L. de Lanzac de Laborie gives us the fourth volume of his “Paris sous Napoléon”’ devoted entirely to _ religion. This work has received the highest distinc- tion awarded to works of history in France —the Grand Prix Gobert of the French Academy and the Prix Berger of the Académie des Sciences Moraleset Politiques. A handbook of more restricted interest, but perhaps more real importance to the his- torical students, is the ‘“‘Précis élémentaire d@’histoire du droit francais’ during the Revolution, Consulate, and Empire—the pe- riod when French, and Continental law in general, took on its present complexion. The author is the chief living authority in this legal field, A. Esmein, professor of the Paris Faculty. ‘‘La Chute de la République de Venise (1789-1797)”" is an original and painstaking study of the fate of Old Venice as a “neutral state under the Revolution,” by André Bonnefons. Three volumes -of strictly military history of the final blow to Napoleon’s Empire and the European enterprises of Revolutionary France are published by F. De Bas of the historic sec- tion of the General Staff of Holland and Count J. de T’serclaes de Woomersom, col- onel of the Belgian General Staff—‘‘La Campagne de 1815 aux Pays-Bas’’ from offi- cial documents and reports in the archives of the Netherlands. The first volume deals with Quatre Bras; the second with Water- leo; the third contains ‘‘annexes’’ and plans. A military study of that other fatal bat- tle for France, fifty-five years later, leads to the wonderful cavalry charge which drew from the Prussian King at his post of ob- servation the admiring cry: “Oh! the brave fellows!” “Les Régiments de la Di- vision Margueritte et les charges & Sedan” is the work of Gen. Rozat de Mandres. The step is easy to he new imperialisms, which have all at once and simultaneously started up in our civilization. Paul Adam gives one of his general surveys to the mat- ter in “Les Impérialismes et la morale des peuples’—nineteen chapters aimed at all and sundry, from Kaiser Wilhelm and President Roosevelt to the “evolution of the Chinese.’”” The fourth volume of Er- nest Seilliére’s formidable ‘‘La Philosophie et l’impérialisme”’ is entirely given up to what the author calls the “irrational” vari- ety, especially in that literary, play-actor- ing phase which gives its name to the vol- ume, “Le Mal romantique.”’ Like all this author’s work, it is a mixture of lofty philosophical speculation, such as we might expect from his writings on Niet-
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122 An found doctor of laws, zsche and Gobineau appendix to such speculations 5 in a very legal little book by a Paris insulaires”’; it J. Laferriér “Les Cas treats of the most practical thing in Imper- jalism—the customs tariffs between the United States and their “extra-continental” possessions 4 work of considerable im- portance on the archetypal Imperialist is brought to an end in the third volume (1870-1898) of Paul Matter’s “Bismarck et son temp This is the period of “‘tri- umph, splendor, decline’; the first volume dealt with the “preparation” (1815-1862); the second with “action” (1862-1870). The author is both a doctor of laws and a Paris magistrate, and made himself known in this field of history by a book on Prussia and the Revolution of 1848 In French history which is all but arche- ology, we have “Les Arénes de Lutéce” the ancient past, the modern exhumation end the present of that Roman amphi- theatre which has been almost too com- pletely restored in the Rue Monge of pres- cnt-day Paris. The author is the intelli- gent compiler F. Bournon A complete work, which was waiting to be done, is “Le Chateau historique de Vincennes a travers les Ages” by F. de Fossa, captain of artil- lery. This chAteau, occupied as it is by the Paris garrison, is little inferior in general interest to the Tower of London, and is still quite as castle-like in appearance The first volume of the work goes through all its royal history, from Blanche of Cas- tille and St. Louis, Isabeau of Bavaria, Henry the Fifth of England (who died there) down to Mazarin and the last of the great days, to the sad time when Napoleon had the Duc d’Enghien shot beneath the walls The second volume, which will appear in March, will contain monographs on the art and architecture of the Donjon; the build- ings of the towers and walls encircling the chateau; and the chapel with its stain- ed glass Alfred Franklin, chief of the historians of Parisian life, after advancing anecdotic well into his second score of volumes on the past, now contemplates the present city from a safe standpoint—‘‘Les Ruines de Paris en 4908"—official and unpublished documents the series “Monumentos Arquitecténi- de Espafia,” 21 fascicles have already appeared on Toledo and on Granada. Each fascicle has 16 large pages with illus- trations in the text and 3 inset plates, often French text is given along with the Spanish. The Italian Arts, Corrado Ricci, moderately expensive work (100 francs), “La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri nell’ Arte del Cinquecento,” with 288 illus- in the text and 67 inset plates, after Michelangelo, Raphael, Zuccari, Va- Paul Eudel, than whom no man living has more multiple experience of the tricks of imitation in art, has a quite new In cos one in colors director of Fine is responsible for a trations sari, et volume (distinct from his former “Tru- quage"’) on “Trucs et Truqueurs” in an- tiquities, armor, autographs, jewels and gold work, banknotes, bronzes, terra cottas, marbles, chasing and _ gilding, drawings, illuminations, miniatures, mili- ceramics, tary equipments, engravings, stuffs, tapes- try, laces, ex-libris, ivories. books, medals, coins—and postage stamps S. D. [Vol. 86, No 2223 The Nation. NEWS FOR BIBLIOPHILES. At the sale of George M. Williamson’s books by the Anderson Auction Company ‘ast Thursday the prices showed that desir- able rare books in excellent condition have not depreciated in value on account of the business depression. The first editions of the books by Bronté sisters, with one exception having interesting autograph let- ters inserted, sold as follows: ‘“‘Wuthering Heights” and “Agnes Grey,” 1847, cloth, un- the cut, $155; “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” 184", boards, uncut, with paper labels $125; “Jane Eyre” (Mary Howitt’s copy but without inserted matter), $90; “Shir- ley,” 1849, cloth, uncut, $80; “Villette,” 1853, cloth, uncut, $45; “The Professor,” 1857, cloth, uncut, $27; the “Poems” of 1846, with the correct Aylott and Jones ti- Among the other sales are: Bryant’s “Embargo,’ edition, 1809, uncut, original paper wrapper, $55; the copy of “The Fountain and Other Poems,” to Charles Dickens, tle-page, $101. , second 1842, given by Bryant with autograph inscription, $110; John Bur- roughs’s first book, “‘Notes on Walt Whit- man,’ 1867, with Burroughs’s signature, $30; Lewis Carroll’s “‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” 1865, the correct first edition $315; Daniel's “Civile Wares,” 1609, red mo- by Lortic, $175; “Pickwick Pa- pers,”’ an unusually fine set in the originai parts, $755; and the first one volume edition of “Sketches by Boz,” in parts, with orig- rocco, inal pink wrappers, $380. The prices paid for Mr. Williamson's first editions of Robert Louis Stevenson show that the interest in this author is still keen Letters laid in several of the books greatly enhanced their value. “The Pentland Rising,”’ Stevenson’s first book, “‘printed by a fond parent,”’ with an interesting letter inserted, brought $177.50. Not than twenty copies were sold by order of the executors of Stevenson and his mother in April, 1899, bringing prices vary- ing from £6 6d. to £9 10s. each. The thin pamphlet, “An Appeal to the clergy of the Church of Scotland,” 1875, which had a presentation inscription, brought $80; the two early scientific pamphlets, “‘Notice of a New Form of Intermittent Light for Light- 1871, and “On the Thermal In- fluence of Forests,’”’ 1873, $35 and $31, respectively. Of the little leaflets print- ed by Stevenson and his step-son, Lloyd Os- bourne, for amusement, in 1880, 1881, and 1882, the earliest known, Vol. I., No. 3, of The Surprise, San Francisco, 1880, went for $225. When sold in 1899 as the property of Stevenson’s mother the price was £21 5s. The first of “Moral Emblems,” printed at Davos-Platz, brought $51; the second, $18; the two advertisements, $22 and $26; “Not I and Other Poems,” the identical copy which was sold in 1899 for £22, $51; a printed sheet—a poem “To F. J. S.""—sixteen lines, $81. A similar copy among collectors. ” less 2s. houses,”’ series brought £7 in 1899. “To M. I. Stevenson [R. L. Stevenson's mother], Feb. 11, 1882, from R. L. Stevenson and S. L. Osbourne,” a four-page leaflet about two inches square, having on page 2 a rude woodcut of a man admiring a daisy, and on page 3 “The Marguerite. Lawks! what a beautiful flow- er! T. S.,"" was bid up to $45. Several copies belonging to Stevenson’s mother sold in 1899 at prices ranging from £1 18s. to £8. Several special, or imperfect, issues, got up for the purpose of securing copyright, went for good prices: “The Silverado Squatters,”” some leaves from the Century, with a specially printed cover, $65; ‘‘Ma- caire,” an octavo pamphlet, with Heine- mann’s imprint, $25; “Kidnapped,” with “Published for the Auther” on title, $115; “The Master of Ballantre,”’ presented by Charles Scribner to Mr. Foote, $100; ‘“‘The South Seas,” 1890, one of twenty-two cop- ies printed and mostly cut up for distribu- tion among a syndicate of newspapers, $150; and “Weir of Hermiston,” 1896, one of six printed, $90. Presentation copies of first editions sold as follows: “An Inland Voy- age,”’ 1878, $155; “Edinburgh,” 1889, $31; “New Arabian Nights,” 1882, $32; “A Child’s Garden of Verses,”’ 1885, $71; and “Underwoods,”’ 1887, $55. While the auction sale of Crispi’s library, of which mention was made in the Nation of November 21, cannot have proved alto- gether disappointing to the impecunious Crispi heirs, it certainly was a unique op- portunity for the libraries which figured among the principal purchasers, the Na- tional Victor Emanuel Library of Rome, the Library of the Italian Ministry of For- the New York Public Library, cign Affairs, the Library of Princeton University, and ihe private Risorgimento library of an American resident in Rome. The total sales, which covered a period of fou weeks and comprised 3,500 numbers, netted only 15,200 lire, a very inconsiderable sum, in- dicative of the utter want of enterprise and organization which characterizes the sec- ond-hand book trade in Italy to-day. The sale was conducted by Nardecchia, who is perhaps the best of Italy’s second-hand booksellers; and had it not been for his personal purchases and the discreet bidding of the few American libraries represented, total receipts would have been much in fact, the sale would hardly have been possible. Rare works for dilettante bibliophiles were few, for the collection had been made for the practical use of a student statesman; but the discriminating librarian found innumerable bargains in works of history, diplomacy, jurisprudence, and statistics, at a fourth or a fifth of the prices ordinarily paid by the American li- brary to its German or French agent. The most interesting sale was that of a set of secret documents upon Italy’s African af- fairs; they had been printed for the private use of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in an edition of only twenty copies, one of which had been inadvertently left in Crispi’s library. Among the documents were some which in the changed attitude of Italy’s present foreign policy, would give umbrage to a friendly Power—Russia. By good luck the embassies in Rome were ignorant of the sale of the documents, and they were bid in excitedly by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs at 1,150 lire. A copy of the privately printed edition of the works of Felice Cavallotti in six vol- umes, with the autograph dedication, “A Francesco Crispi con Affetto vivissimo perenne, Felice Cavallotti.”” was bought by tne Victor Emanuel Library for 80 lire; it is of peculiar interest in view of Caval- lotti’s later implacable enmity for Crispi. Unpublished autograph letters of Guer- razzi, in part hostile to Crispi, were bid in for the private library of an American resi- Gent in Rome, as were practically all the pamphlets of the sale—say 20,000—and an invaluable manuscript volume of biographi- the lower;
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 123 cal notices of the Sicilian patriots who suf- fered for the national Italian cause from 1848 to 1860, a volume prepared for the Italian pension commission of 1883. Between the pages of many pamphlets were found documents and notes of Crispi, while the pamphlets themselves form a unique collection. An almost complete set ot the Atti del Parlamento Italiano, which ordinarily brings from 3,000 to 5,000 lire, was withdrawn from the sale by the heirs, as bidding upon it reached only 300 lire. The purchases of sections of the library not included in the sale, made by the Italian government and by a benefac- tor of the Palermo Library, amounted to 22.000 lire, so that the entire Crispi library, for which 60,000 lire had been asked pri- manuscript private vately, brought only 37,200 lire. Crispi’s papers, valued at 200,000 lire, remain to be sold, but will probably be disposed of pri- vately to the Italian government. On February 13 and 14 the Anderson Auction Co. sells the collection of Charles Beldon Van Nostrand, with some additions. Among first editions are “Paradise Re- gained,”” 1671; Bacon’s “Henry Seventh,” 1622; ‘“‘“Mémoires de la vie privée de Ben- jamin Franklin,” 1791, the first edition of the “Autobiography”; Browning's ‘‘Para- celsus,”’ 1835, with corrections by the au- thor; Mrs. Browning’s “Seraphim and Oth- er Poems,” 1838, presentation copy; Byron's “Heurs of Idleness,”’ 1807; Coleridge’s first publication, “The Fall of Robespierre,”’ 1794; Gray’s “‘Odes,” Strawberry Hill, 1757; Rossetti’s The Germ, 1850, in the orig- inal numbers; Shelley's “St. Irvyne,” 1811; and Thackeray’s ‘‘Book of Snobs,” 1848. Of American authors there are first editions of Emerson, Holmes, Hawthorne, Longfel- low, and Whittier. A fine and complete set of that great collection of voyages, ‘“‘Hak- luytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pil- grimes,”’ 1625-26, 5 vols., folio, is prob- ably the most valuable lot. The catalogue includes also a remarkable series of books and letters relating to Christian Science and Mrs. Eddy; publications of the Grolier Club and various private presses, and books illustrated by Cruikshank. Correspondence. A WORD FOR OUIDA. To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: May I express through your col- umns a word of regret for Ouida? I do not mean for the poor woman who is said to have died in loneliness, but for the writer of one great story, and for the creator of one great character. Most people of “cul- ture,”” I imagine, indiscriminately lump Ouida with Marie Corelli, Edna Lyall, Hall Caine, and the Duchess. Or else, if they have read her at all, their only recollec- tion is of her snobbery, of her vulgarity, and of her beautiful, impossible guards- men, with their “infinitely weary eyes,” their “courtly grace,” and of their “bows that are known in throne rooms.” They may recall, too, her absurd belief in the power of Race, which works arbitrarily, making it impossible for one brother to do anything dishonorable, even if he should wish to, while the story hangs on the other brother’s dishonor, notwithstanding his “Order”! SIR: The great character is, of course, Cigar- ette, in “Under Two Flags.” In her way she is as much of a creation as Sairey Gamp or Mr. Dooley. She is immensely vitalized—a living, breathing creature. She blows like a breeze through the absurd artificiality of the book. The very night before I read of Ouida’s death I chanced upon the volume in a country hotel, and, I protest, that when I read of Cigarette’s dy- ing in the arms of Cecil, pierced by the bullets which were meant for him, I shed tears, as I have shed them twenty times before. The great story is, of course, “Wanda.” I: is melodrama, but then all our great writers have written melodrama at the time when the blood has run reddest through their books. When Roy Richmond poses as an equestrian statue, deceiving the prince’s court until he is startled into life by the appearance of his little boy, George Meredith is writing melodrama, if it is not farce. When Newman, in “The American,” stops the old Marquise and her son in a Paris garden and hisses into her ear: “You killed your husband,’ while the Marquis’s eyes scintillate like “‘little globules of ice’’—I wonder how it was done! —dear Henry James is giving us rattling good melodrama. Ouida’s melodrama is often cheap and meretricious—almost as meretricious as her virginat simplicity in “Two Little Wooden Shoes’—but in “Wanda” the melodrama rings true to the best traditions. Of course, she introduces you to the best society; in fact, it is al- most as good as Mrs. Humphry Ward's. Wanda is the feudal ehatelaine of an Aus- trian domain which even the Emperor can- not enter without permission. Her lover appears on the scene masquerading as the Marquis de Sabran, though he is actually only the bastard son of a Russian prince and a Russian peasant. But, gracious! what an accomplished man! His scientific work on Mexico is the despair of the scholars of Europe; he can paint like Meissonier; he can play with the best of them (‘‘We never have such music,”’ mur- murs Wanda in her private salon, “save when Liszt passes this way’’); he can make an oration as good as Pericles’. Of course, these fine people never travel except by special train, and subsist mainly on truf- fles and tokay. But in combination with others, they appear in magnificent situa- tions, splendidly conceived, and splendidly worked out. Ouida has no humor but plen- ty of epigram. ‘“‘He betrayed me; how, matters nothing,” says Wanda to her old aunt when she has discovered her husband’s deception. We use it as a family phrase. Psychologically, too, the story is satisfac- tory. Sabran’s love for Wanda is genuine, even though he marries her under false pretences, and in the end this love works out his regeneration. The dominant note of Wanda’s character is pride of race, which makes it impossible for her to con- sider the many extenuating circumstances, and postpones her forgiveness until a reconciliation is worked out through the medium of their little son, whose life the father saves at the cost of his own. There are a dozen novels that abundantly reconcile me to growing older. It is a joy suddenly to remember that one has not read “David Copperfield” for five years; or “Henry Esmond” or “Richard Feverel.” Among this dozen I put “Wanda,” and if unexpected my taste be questioned, my answer is that I glory in my shame. Some years ago there came out in Lippin- cott’s a study called “The Truth About Ouida,”’ which seemed to me to hit the nail on the head. I hope it may be republished, for I fear that otherwise this interesting writer will not be accorded critical con- sideration. FREDERICK JONES BLISS. Clifton Springs, N. Y., January 30. To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Sir: Your editorial of this week upon Ouida’s work brings up again a _ point which, in my opinion, has been far too much neglected. Notwithstanding the pre- valent hankering among novel readers for racy stories of pornographic savour, I am surprised that only one side of Ouida’s work is recognized; because critics are supposed not to follow the herd in their notions about books. There is. I under- stand, a certain American writer of prom- inence who, in his capacity of despotic ad- viser to the public library of his city, has for years refused to have a single one of Ouida’s volumes bought. His practice, which I believe is the result of ignorance on his part, keeps from a large body of readers some of the best stories for chil- dren in our tongue, as well as four novels which offer the best extant account of the Tuscan and Roman peasant, and of the re- gion of central Italy. With the exception of Renato Fucini’s classics and of a few masterly descriptive pages in such of Crawford's Italian novels, as ‘“‘Whosoever Shall Offend,” I cannot recall anything so minutely accurate, anything that shows so truly an inner understanding of a complex temperament as QOuida’s descriptions of peasant life. As a landscapist, too, she excels in well nigh perfect visualizations of those magic, bell-towered distances. The four books that deal with this are ‘The Tower of Taddeo,”’ “In Maremma,” “Signa,” and “Pascarel.’”’ Of these the last is prob- ably the best known; but not one in two hundred of those who have read Ouida ever heard of these novels, which, by the firm but sympathetic use of excision, might justly be termed masterpieces. The reason for this excellence is not far to seek. Whatever may be brought against Ouida—and there is much—no one can as- sert that her knowledge of the Tuscan peasants at home, a knowledge gained by long intimacy and a love for all the count- less details of their lives, their joys and sorrows and strivings, in that setting of beauty which has made poets out of all who come to know—that this knowledge is not complete. Certainly ‘t far outweigys her fancied understanding of fast society life in London. Furthermore, she hated the one and loved the other. All her vices of lurid phrasing and tortuous mouthings— later carried to a logical extreme in the work of that archdecadent and esthete D’Annunzio—are found in greatest excess in her “society” tales. But in the four novels just cited we find less pyrotechnic revelry in verbiage. The melodrama which taints so many of her pages is largely ab- sent from these Italian chapters. Let us, then, give her credit for what is her just due, rather than heap abuse upon what she herself knew was a mass of “‘pot-boil- ers.”” It is probable that Ouida’s descrip- tions of her beloved Tuscany and its Tus-
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124 The Nation. [ Vol. 86, No. 2223 cans will persist far beyond “Syrlin” or the other works of bathos, by which the pres- class of readers know ent “six-women” her. = oo Ithaca, N. Y¥., January 31. YELLOW CRITICISM. To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Srr: There is a popular old definition ofa critic as an unsuccessful poet or novel- ist who is anxious to punish his rivals for their success. Assuming that this is true, we should expect the prevailing color of criticism to be a sort of robin’s egg green, in some lights bordering on blue. Any one approaching current American criticism with such an expectation would be disap- p-inted. The blue has been completely washed out by the rising tide of our nation- al “optimism,” or self-complacency, leav- ing, as might be expected, a vivid and flar- ing yellow. The popular modern critic will condescend to no degree below the superla- tive. If he writes a sketch of a French artist, he will entitle it “The Greatest F-rce in French Painting To-day”; if of a composer, the headline will read “The Most Versatile Musician of Our Time,” or “One of the Music Monarchs of All Time.” Browning cannot be mentioned without be- ing branded as “of all British poets the most truly original.” If our critic wishes to speak of the Elizabethan era, he will call it “the greatest period of the great- est literature on the planet.” After all, this is qualified and grudging praise. Why nor say “in the Galaxy’’? Victor Hugo, I suppose, is the originator of this method of superlatives in criticism, and his book on Shakespeare is still the masterpiece of the superlative school. It should immediately be added that Mr. Swin- burne runs Hugo a close second, some- times galling his kibe. But of course our yellow critics can never hope to rival Mr. Swinburne. He has this decisive advantage over them: the utmost that their imagina- tion can compass is only a double or triple superlative, whereas to him these things are matters of everyday commonplace. When he wishes to give genuine praise, he can raise the superlative, apparently with- out effort, to the nth power. Imagine his restricting the supremacy of Elizabeth- an literature to this paltry planet! Heav ens! has our criticism not outgrown the Ptolemaic astronomy? The method of superlatives is by no means the sole resource of our critics. It may strike the reader with admiration, but after all it requires no particular in genuity or skill. Other more intellectual methods are often used in connection with it. Notable among these is what I shall call the method of poetical calculus. Through this our critics arrive with sur- prising certainty at the solution of appar- ently insoluble literary problems. Through this they can tell what would have been the accomplishment of Chatterton, if he had lived, say, to the age of ninety. Through this invaluable method a critic whom I have quoted is enabled to sav of Keats: “Had he lived one-half as long as the great Scotchman (Carlyle), he might have surpassed all other British poets ex- cept Shakespeare.” This gentleman, as I have remarked, is unusually cautious. We have seen that he limits the sovereignty of Elizabethan literature to this planet. You will note that here he excepts Shake- speare. He also spoils the beauty of his calculation by introducing that timid word might. This unfortunate hesitancy almost reduces his dictum to the uncertaintv of a doctor’s thesis not long since accepted by a great university; a thesis which show- ed that Chaucer might have read an old French story on which he might have based his Squire’s Tale, that “‘story of Cambus- can bold”; and showed further how the tale might have ended, if Chaucer had finish- ed it. These methods are highly effective; yet even a well-trained public will weary of them in time. The more advanced yel- low critic therefore borrows from the ar- mory of his cousin, the yellow reporter. If he can uncover no literary scandal, he creates one by magnifying some literary indiscretion. If an English critic in an unguarded moment admits that he thinks Adam Bede “mighty dull,” you will find his skit reviewed under the title “George Eliot’s Fame Imperilled.” If poor Tolstoy in his old age unwarily confesses that he doesn’t like Shakespeare, and is childish enough to try to justify his dislike in a pamphlet, the yellow critic will discuss the affair in one issue of his magazine under the title, “A Critical Onslaught on Shake- speare,” and in the next issue you will be relieved to find under the heading “Shake- speare Universally Vindicated” that the tottering reputation of the Bard of Avon has been saved by the timely props of a horde of criticasters. Several recent books on Shakespeare by scholars of recognized authority will be represented as answers to Tolstoy, whereas not one of their au- thors has thought Tolstoy’s “onslaught” worth mentioning. To enliven and heighten his style, our critic will employ various devices; some old, such as alliteration and mixed meta- phor, some more modern, such as allusion to the “New Thought” and the “New Psy- chology.”” He will tell of an author’s “pro- tracted plunges into the dark pools of his subliminal self.” He will gracefully al- lude to “love episodes in diaphanous keys.” Consider the alliteration and the light- ning changes of metaphor displayed here: “Vanished the velvety rhetoric, the mu- sical phrase, the nervous prose of many facets.”” In a sentence like the following, the imagination almost shakes off the fet- ters of prose: In his fugue-like flights down the corri- dors of his metaphysics he never neglects to drop some poetic rose, some precious pearl of sentiment. It is clear that the line between criticism and lyric poetry can no longer be drawn with definiteness. At last criticism has risen to the rank of a fine art. Yet here and there will be found some old-fashioned heads that are bewildered by this new yellow brilliance; that are inclined to echo the exclamation of Doug- las Jerrold when he tried to read “Sor- dello,”” “Good God! am I losing my mind?” Out of the depths of their confusion such may even cry out: “Give us men who mean something and can say it; give us Dr. Johnson or Jeffrey: give us even Gifford!” HoMER E. WOODBRIDGE. Colorado Springs, January 23. ETHICS OF EDITORSHIP. To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: Str: Discussion of the relative rights of author and editor seems to be in the air just now. The following case is respectfully presented: A man who has never written for the magazines, but has some reputation among scholars in a special line, comes across a matter in his field which has wide pub- lic interest. He spends several weeks in collecting facts, condenses material enough for a volume into a carefully con- sidered magazine article, makes a set of accurately drawn maps to illustrate it, and sends it to a first-class periodical. The ed- itors offer him a sum which they admit is ridiculous for the work involved, but is all the magazine can afford. He accepts be- cause he prefers that medium to a cheapey magazine which can pay more. He is told that the article will appear in a certain number, that he will be consulted during the making of the plates for the maps, and of course, he expects to read the proof. As the time approaches for publication, hear- ing nothing from the editors he goes to see what has happened, and finds that the pages are already stereotyped, that the maps con- tain some inaccuracies, that the titles giv- en them are misleading, and, finally, that the whole article has been cut down to a mere commentary on the maps, which any srace writer could have produced, giving no hint of the processes by which the somewhat striking results have been ob- tained. The sub-editor with whom he deals says that Mr. Jorkins, the editor-in-chief, would allow only a certain number of pag- es, and that after the maps were engraved there was no room for any more text. AS the article appears, it does not represent the author fairly, either as a writer or @ scholar, and yet, with his name printed at the head, he must be judged by this publi- cation as it appears. A parallel case would be that of an art- ist who has painted an historical ensemble with a group of girls in the foreground, showing by look and attitude the impor- tance of events which are represented else- where in smaller perspective. He sells it to a dealer who has a handsome frame too small for it, on account of which he cuts out the group, puts it in the frame, gives it a fancy name, and exhibits it for sale. Of course, neither the artist nor the au- thor has any legal redress, but botn can justly appeal indignantly to their fellow- craftsmen, and perhaps even the public can see the injustice to which they have been subjected. HEZEKIAH BEERS. New York, January 31. Notes. Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia, has a book “Concerning Lafcadio Hearn” soon to be published by George W. Jacobs & Co. Dr. Gould was an intimate friend of Hearn’s, and in recent magazine articles has attempted to attribute most of that writer’s peculiarities of temperament to his abnormal eyesight. Longmans, Green & Co. announce that volumes III. and IV. of the late Sir Spencer Walpole’s “History of Twenty-five Years”
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 125 is now in the press. These volumes com- plete the work, bringing it down to the year 1881. A. C. McClurg & Co. have the follow- ing titles on their spring list: ‘‘Men Who Sell Things,”” a book for travelling sales- men, by Walter D. Moody; “My Day and Generation,” by Clark E. Carr; “An Amer- ican Student in France,” by Abbé Félix Klein; and “The Art of Retouching Sys- tematized,”” by Ida Lynch Hower. Miss Elfrida Everhart, reference libra- rian of the Carnegie Library of Atlanta, and instructor in the Southern Library School, has completed the manuscript of what should prove to be an exceptionally useful and valuable library tool—a ‘‘Hand- book to United States Public Documents.” The Handbook will probably appear some time in the spring. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have issued a re- vised and enlarged edition of “Tabular Views of Universal History,” originally compiled by George Palmer Putnam, aad continued to the year 1907 by Lynds E. Jones and Simeon Strunsky successively. The volume presents a chronological ar- rangement of contemporaneous events in a double page of four to eight parallel col- umns, and is well adapted for ready ref- erence. So far as we have tested the dates for various periods we find no reason t» doubt the general accuracy of the book. In the matter of proportion, the last fifty years receive possibly more space than they deserve. Overemphasis of the present, however, has its use, and can always he remedied in future editions. The John Lane Company sends us two books on Napoleon: “Napoleon and the In- vasion of England, the Story of the Great Terror,” by H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley, two volumes, with numerous il- lustrations; and ““Napoleon at the Boulogne Camp,” based on hitherto unpublished documents, by Fernand Nicolay. The his- torical incident dealt with possesses this distinctive character, that it was not so much an event as a projected event. The interest lies not in battles, treaties, and conquests, but in plans, in popular emo- tions, in what-might-have-beens. Was Na- poleon to repeat the great achievement of William the Conqueror?—This was really the question that haunted the imaginations of the people of France and England for nearly ten years. And so, when dealing with these years, the historian of neces- sity turns less to military and diplomatic passages that all came to nothing, and more to the evidence that shows how the public of France and England thought, felt, end acted while under such an impression. The great value of Messrs. Wheeler and Broadley’s handsome volumes is that they bring together a great deal of miscellan- eous material, caricatures, broadsides, pro- clamations, private letters, important his- torical manuscripts, popular ballads, that paint, as nothing else does, the national psychology of England at this moment of pressing danger. They fill a gap in Eng- lish historical literature and may be heartily recommended. At the same time it must be said that the authors are more collectors than historians, enthusiasts than stylists; their own share of the book is occasionally slipshod and is not marked by the historical sense. Far less important and interesting is M. Nicolay’s book, which gives us, in part, the other side of the pic- ture. The anecdotes he has strung together relating to Napoleon’s sojourn at the camp of Boulogne are not always entertaining, or vital, or even plausible. The effect, on the whole, is somewhat local, and patchy, and, moreover, suffers from translation. A placing together of the two books, how- ever, serves to emphasize in striking man- ner the contrast presented by the two sides of the Channel at this moment; on one side a truly national movement, as strong in individual initiative, and in pa- triotic emotion, as it was weak in organi- zation and executive power; on the other, ene man, playing on dramatic and mili- tary instincts, with little public opinion to support him, yet creating a great machine wherewith to divert the stream of history from its natural courses. England had Gillray and Rowlandson; while France had to put up with a muzzled press and dis- tributions of the Legion of Honor. We had occasion to call attention to the stuff offered the public by the Hindu who calls himself Mahatma A. Guru Parama- hamsa, when he published his Brahma Dhara in 1905. He has now written another pretentious little book, adorned like the former with a portrait of the author (can it be that these vagrant wiseacres are still troubled with worldly vanity?), and called “The Land of Eternity.”” The volume may please those who like to think they are Leing indoctrinated into occult mysteries while they take afternoon tea (London: A. C. Fifield). “A Personally Conducted Tour in the Holy Land’’ would be an appropriate sub- title for ‘“‘To-day in Palestine’ (New York: James Pott & Co.). It is substantially a reproduction in print of the information which the author, H. W. Dunning, gives to the parties whom he takes through the country, together with descriptions of the scenery and the present condition of the places visited. As the result of observa- tions of ten journeys during the last fifteen years, he has a high opinion of the char- acter and capabilities of the people. Drunk- enness and idleness and “real immorality” in the villages “are almost unknown.” Of their ruler, the phlegmatic Turk, he is fair- ly enthusiastic in his commendation. There is a brief summary of the history of Pales- tine, and the closing chapter contains some practical advice to intending travellers. In this and in the numerous similar hints scattered through the book its chief value lies. The want of an index detracts much from its usefulness as a book of reference. Notwithstanding the fact that twenty years have elapsed since the appearance of the first numbers of the Cambridge Bible for Schools, the series is the best com- pact and practical commentary in English on the major portion of the Bible. The Rev. A. W. Streane, fellow of Corpus Chris- ti College, Cambridge, is the author of the latest volume, “The Book of Esther” (G. P. Putnam’s Sons). Dr. Streane has con- siderable difficulty in making Esther a Christian saint, and in defending the ca- nonical authority of the book which bears her name, although he exhibits earnest de- sire to perform both these feats. He rec- ognizes the “many heathen improprieties” which Luther declared the book contains, and which Jed both Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzen to exclude it from the canon. He succeeds, however, in finding “a point of view whence profitably to regard a Book which, differing though it does in more than one striking respect from what we might a priori expect to find as a constituent part of Holy Writ, is yet, upon thoughtful and sympathetic consideration of its Jewish authorship, far from deserving to be ex- cluded.” This decision is to be regretted. With its bitter racial hatred, its substitu- tion of political exclusiveness for religious. enthusiasm, its glorification of direst vengeance, Esther is unworthy a place beside the nobler products of Hebrew genius. The eagerness of Dr. Streane to. demonstrate the value of the book has be- trayed him into mistaken praise of its “masterly sketches of character,” as well as into exaggeration of the worth of its “vivid picture of life in the Persian court and royal harem.” There are very serious difficulties in the way of the admission of Esther’s description of Persian customs as true to fact. Dr. Streane attempts to main- tain an intermediate view as to the his- torical trustworthiness of the book, that it is neither “in the fullest sense historic- al” nor “wholly fictitious,” but contains “an element of romance,” resting upon a “veritable historical basis.”” Yet in his consideration of details one finds very little of the material apportioned to “romance,” and much more ascribed to history than is supported by sufficient authority. Attention should be called to the fifth number of the series entitled Old-Latin Biblical Texts, in which the eminent Vulgate scholars, the Bishop of Salisbury, Canon Sanday, and Dr. White are engaged. This number consists of ‘“‘an exact print, line for line and column for column,” of the whole Codex Corbeiensis, a gospel codex to which the date 375-425 a. Db. is here assigned; and of “fragments of the Catholic Epistles, of the Acts, and of the Apocalypse from the Fleury Palimpsest.” The editor is E. S. Buchanan, and the pub- lisher The Clarendon Press. (New York: Henry Frowde.) One who turns to the latest volume of Dr. A. S. Crapsey, ‘“‘The Re-birth of Religion” (New York: John Lane Co.), with the idea of finding an exposition and defence of the doctrines for which he suffered expulsion from the Episcopal Church, will be some- what disappointed. The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Jesus are not consid- ered at any length, but the attempt is made to show that the conceptions underlying current dogma in all the churches have passed away, leaving the way open for spir- itual religion of greater beauty and power. One might call the treatise a popular essay on the history of dogma and a discussion of the present outlook for faith. It is per- haps safe to say that if Dr. Crapsey had confined himself to addresses of this sort, he would not have lost his surplice. Very little is found in these pages which is not often heard, in somewhat less piquant style, from the more liberal pulpits of the ortho- dox churches. ‘ “Was ist Christentum?” is the title of a collection of investigations of leadiag problems of Christianity in its relation to. modern thought, prepared by a dozen rep- resentatives of conservative theology, mos*- ly university men, and edited by Pastor Cremer of Rehme. The publisher is C. Bertelsmann, Giitersloh.
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126 Nation. ‘The [ Vol. 86, No. 2223 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Géttingen, an- nounce as forthcoming “‘Hauptprobleme ier Gnosis,” by Prof. W. Bousset of the University of Géttingen. This will be the tenth volume of the series known as For- schungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, edited by Bouss in conjunction with Prof. H. Gun- kel of Giessen Another work from the same publisher will be the first instalment i ptuaginta-Grammatik” by Prof of Se R. Helbing of Karlsruhe The twenty-sixth volume of that standard bibliography, Theologische Jahresbericht, covering the year 1906, is now appearing un- der the litorial management of *-rof and Walther Kohler of Heinsius Nachfolger) Gustav Kriiger Giessen (Leipzig: M. sub- each division or hands lt appears in parts, ision being in the of one or more additions are on und Old sp iliists The recent Vord biblische ausser- Testa- Literat rasiatische Religionsgeschichte, New Testament ment and The Hague Association for the Defence _of Christianity, which annually offers a prize for essays on current problems, has an- nounced as the leading theme for the pres- ‘The Scientific Examination of the Uniqueness ent year Significance of Light of the History of 100 guiden. Schol- e Details and the Christianity in the teligions.”” Th ars of all nat may be prize 1s ms may comp obtained from Prof. T nt. Cannegieter in Utrec English Languages,” by Dictionary of the and Dano- Norwegian John Brynild- Danisms Johannes the sen, the supervised by Magnussen English pronunciation by rsen (2 and 1,150 ssued by the Gyldendal Publish- Chicago This years in Otte Jespe volumes, 727 pages), 1 ing Co., Copenhagen and work, which bas been about ten preparation (the first volume was published in 1902), The author, who is a professor of the English language in the Naval Academy of Norway, author of an has been completed just excellent Norwegian-English dictionary, and as edi- the “English-Norwegian is known as of Geelmuyden’'s " Profes- sor Brynildsen has had particularly in view tor of second edition Dictionary modern English interests, technical words he has treated quite exhaustively; and he gives some attention to earlier authors like Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. He has also defined some colloquial words. Take, for instance, “‘yegg,"’ which is now common in even the better American You will search in vain Webster's or the “Century” or the “‘Stand- for it Brynildsen’s has it, with the information that according to Everybody's the columns of howspapers ard’ Magazine, September, 1904, the word is de- rived from the name of John Yegg, a Swed- ish safe-breaker. The addenda are largely The work may be thoroughly recommended to anybody in- terested in the study of Danish and Nor- wegian Dr. D on Polynesian made up of Americanisms Macdonald, who has written much languages, gives the final his investigations in ‘The Languages: Their Grammatical Structure, Vocabulary, and Origin” (Henry Frowde). The main part of the volume is a dictionary of the language of Efate, a results of Oceanic member of the New Hebrides group—a wel- companion come volume to Tregear’s Maori-Polynesian dictionary; to this is pre- fixed a comparative grammar of the Mel- and Polynesian dialects, with what of their a unique enesian the author evidence origin. It is, he adds, unveiling of the mental, relig- ious, and moral life of these peoples. He bases his theory of the Semitic character of the Polynesian tongues on alleged lexico- structural identities. The classes of resemblances striking similarities regards as Arabian linguistic, graphical and these amounts to nothing; in words may be discovered in any groups of Structural agreements are more Macdonald undertakes languages have first of languages and Dr that important to show the Oceanic triliteral stems, indicate modifications of meaning by internal vowel-changes, and employ common Semitic prefixes with The facts, however, do not sustain his hypothesis. The Polynesian tongues are polysyllabic, but not triliteral there internal these do Semitic meanings. Semitic sense; are vowel differences, but different shades of meaning in the manner of the Semitic languages; prefixes, such as in the not carry ma, ta, are used to form derivatives from verbal stems, but this usage does not in itself prove Semitic relationship. What the linguistic facts warrant us in saying is that the Polynesian tongues employ struc- material which is also employed in languages; the differences pronouns, nu- merals, and of verb-stems forbid the The Polynesian languages deserve a more thor- tural the Semitic but the groups in inflection two the supposition of between identity. ough grammatical study than has yet been given them. For the edition of Bossuet’s ‘“‘Oraisons funébres” in Putnam's dainty Classiques Francais, René Doumic has provided a pre- face in which he gracefully and briefly why these funeral orations are still read while so others are forgotten. The chief reason, he thinks, is that, in a genre where flattery and concealment rule is not afraid of shows many by convention, Bossuet the facts. This is true, no doubt, but it is also true that the sheer eloquence and reverberation of Bossuet’s language has much to do with the preservation of his work. To some it may seem that the co- quettish green and gold covers of this edi- tion are not so suitable to such eloquence as to Beaumarchais’s sprightly dramas which preceded in the series. But we shall not subscribe to so captious a taste. The editors of the promised Collected Cor- respondence of Giosue Carducci have shown little wisdom in putting out as a fore- taste, loudly heralded, the volume, “Da un ecarteggio inedito di Giosue Carducci.” It is a flagrant case of bookmaking, hardly to be expected from a publishing house which, although absorbed trust, still bears the name and professes to maintain the policy of Zanichelli, for many years the devoted publisher of Carducci. It contains but eighteen brief letters of the poet, writ- ten between July 18, 1897, and April 11, 1906, all addressed to the closest friend of his last years, Countess Silvia Baroni Se- mitecolo Pasolini By means of large, widely leaded type, many blank pages, a few reproductions of photographs, and a mediocre preface upon Carducci and the Romagna by Antonio Messeri, these eigh- teen letters, of less than two hundred words each, are made to fill a volume of one hun- in a dred and eighty-one pages, which is placed on sale at three lire. Nor are the letters of great importance; written during a dec- ade of rapidly declining health, the greater number dictated, they but faintly reflect the vast culture, the lofty ideality, or the polemical vigor of him whom his country- men love to characterize, and justly, as the immortal poet of the Third Italy. The first letters relate to the restoration of the church at Polenta, where tradition would have it that Dante and Francesca once wor- shipped, and upon which Carducci wrote a classic Another letter, the best of the eighteen, professes to give the writer’s no new ode. religious creed; in reality it makes Carducci explains that he had frequently been led to declaim against Christ from hatred of the priests, then he simply reiterates his denial of Christ’s di- vinity, at the time “reverently in- clining before great martyr of hu- manity.” confession; same the The National Society for the History of the Italian Risorgimento has issued a circu- lar giving the regulations which are to govern its prize competition for popular biographies of Victor Emmanuel II., Gari- baldi, Cavour, and Mazzini. The bi- ographies, which may be written in any must not exceed one hundred and fifty pages octavo, and must be sent in before June 30 of the current year to the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere, Palazzo Brera, Milan. The prize for the biography of each of these four na- tional characters is five hundred lire. The society will publish in Italian the volumes of the four successful competitors. The University of Liverpool, which is al- ways to the fore in the archeological field, has decided to add to its already consid- undertakings no less a task than the systematic survey and excavation of the whole of Wales and the Marches. The arrangements are to be carried out by a special committee, including not only well- known scholars such as Dr. Arthur J. Evans and Sir John Rhfs, but influential Welsh- men representative of every class and every shade of opinion both from Liverpool and the Principality. They expect to receive valuable aid from the University of Wales, the Cambrian Archeological Association, and other district or county societies. The actual operations will be directed by the heads of the Liverpool archzological de- partment, Profs. Robert C. Bosanquet, G. Garstang, J. L. Myres, and P. E. Newberry, and Prof. Francis J. Haverfield of Oxford. On the importance of the work we need hardly lay stress. The historian will be disappointed, indeed, if this systematic ex- ploration does not shed considerable light on the Pre-Celtic inhabitants, on the re- lation of the Silures to the Roman invaders, on the early British church, and other sub- jects still enveloped in obscurity. The ex- pense will be heavy; the cost of digging out the ten Roman sites, for example, is esti- mated at £10,000. The committee hopes, bowever, to receive assistance from Welsh- men on both sides of the Atlantic. An il- lustrated report of the work done will be presented yearly to annual subscribers of £2 2s. and upwards. Cheques should be paid to the treasurer, T. Rowland Hughes (North and South Wales Bank, Liverpool), and requests for information addressed to the organization secretary, Capt. A. O. language, best erable
Page 17
Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 127 Vaughan (Owen Rhoscomy), No. 38 Bedford Street, North, Liverpool. Definite announcement is made that the next annual conference of the American Library Association will be held at Lake Minnetonka, Minn., during the week begin- ning June 26, with headquarters at the Tonka Bay House. The place chosen is twenty miles from Minneapolis, and thirty miles from St. Paul. Topics to receive spe- cial attention on the programme are: ‘‘Loss- es of Books from Open Shelves’”’ and “‘Book. of the Year.” In the discussion of the former of these, says the executive commit- tee, an interesting debate is promised, and “advocates of the open-shelf system, which has been the object of so much reactionary criticism during the past year or two, will undoubtedly be put on their defence.” As the result of a resolution passed last autumn at the annual meeting of the Bel- gian Association of Librarians and Archi- vists, arrangements are now making for an international meeting at Brussels in 1910 in connection with the proposed inter- national exposition. Gustaf E. Karsten, head of the depart- ment of modern languages at the Uni- versity of Illinois, died at Urbana, January 29. He was born in Germany in 1859, and studied at Leipzig, Kénigsberg, Heidelberg Tiibingen, and Freiburg. After teaching at the University of Geneva, he became pro- the Germanic languages at the University of Indiana in 1886. Leaving the University of Indiana in 1904, he was con- nected successively with Cornell and North- western University. In 1906 he was called to the University of Illinois. In 1896 he established the Journal of Germanic Phi- lology; in 1903 it became the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, jointly edited by Professor Karsten and Prof. A. S. Cook of Yale. Professor Karsten was author of “‘Zu den altfranzésischen Konson- antenverbindungen,” 1885. Daniel C. Heath, head of the publishing house of D. C. Heath & Co., died at New- tonville, Mass., January 28: He was born in Salem, Me., sixty-four years ago, was graduated from Amherst, and was for a number of years junior member of the firm Ginn & Heath. In 1886 he established an independent business. fessor of Ernst Hasse, professor of statistics and colonial policy in the University of Leip- zig, director of the bureau of statistics in the same city, has just died, in his sixty- second year. Besides his activity as teach- er and author he played an efficient réle in politics and for a number of years repre- sented the National Liberal party in the Reichstag. Among his books are “Die Stadt-Leipzig und ihre Umgebung,” “Ge- schichte der Leipziger Messen,” “‘Die Woh- nungsverhialtnisse der armeren Volksklass- en in Leipzig,” “Deutsche Weltpolitik,” and ‘“‘Kolonien und Kolonialpolitik.” The death, at the age of fifty-six, is an- nounced of Felix O. Stoerk, professor of law in the University of Greifswald. Among his works are “Das Staats- und Verwalt- ungsrecht,” ‘“‘Vélkerrecht,” ‘“‘Das interna- tionale Privat- und Strafrecht,” ‘“‘Methodik des Offentlichen Rechts,” and ‘Archiv fiir O6ffentliches Recht.” A STATESMAN OF THE OLD SCHOOL. Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, United States Senator from Maine. By his son, Gen. Francis Fessen- den. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mif- flin & Co. $5 net. After William H. Seward resigned his seat as Senator to become Secretary of State in Lincoln’s Cabinet, the leadership of the Senate resided chiefly in the hands of Fessenden of Maine, although Trumbull of Illinois was a possible competitor. The one became chairman of the Committee on Finance, and the other that of the Ju- diciary, places which they held as long as they remained Senators. Fessenden was born in New Hampshire in 1806. It is recorded that Daniel Web- ster, a friend of his father (Gen. Samuel Fessenden), travelled twenty miles through a snow-storm in order to be present at his christening. He was baptized William Pitt, and in this instance the historic name never overweighted the bearer; for the American was like the Englishman in Statesmanlike qualities, as well as in the stormy times that called for their exer- cise. Gen. Samuel Fessenden, a lawyer, was a Whig, who early became an Aboli- tionist. His son, who also followed the law, became a Whig, but he adhered to his par- ty until Gen. Scott was nominated for President and defeated. Then came the Nebraska bill to repeal the Missouri Com- promise, whereupon, in 1854, the anti-Ne- braska Democrats in the Legislature of Maine joined the Whigs in electing him Senator of the United States. In that year the Republican party was born, and Fes- senden was one of its leaders through the anti-slavery struggle, the civil war, and reconstruction. The records of these events are found only in part in the volumes be- fore us, but what is lacking in the way of history is more than made good by pri- vate letters and memoranda of the Sen- ator, giving us his inmost thoughts at crit- ical periods and portraying his personal- ity as no other hand could do. Gen. Fran- cis Fessenden busied himself during the last ten years of his own life in bringing together the material for this biography; but, dying before the book was put into shape, he left the manuscript and data to his brother, James D. Fessenden, to whom we are indebted for the finishing touches. The arrangement of the matter is defective, but the matter itself is of the first class. Fessenden entered the Senate just be- fore the Nebraska bill passed. Modesty held him back from the debate until the night of the final vote. Then his Republi- can colleagues urged him to speak. He took the floor at one o'clock in the morn- ing of March 4, 1854, “‘without prepara- tion or memo. of any kind”; with what ef- fect Charles Sumner testified in one of his private letters, saying: Fessenden’s arrival in the Senate was like a reinforcement on a field of battle. Those who stood for freedom were no long- er fourteen, but fifteen. He did not wait, but entered into the debate with all those resources which afterwards became so fa- mous. Douglas, Cass, and Butler inter- rupted, only to be worsted by one who had just ridden into the lists. It could be found in the Globe, but the Globe could not picture the exciting scene, the Senator from Maine erect, firm, immovable as a jutting promontory against which the waves of the ocean tossed in a dissolving spray, there he stood. Not a Senator loving free- dom who did not feel that on that day a champion had come. The testimony of Douglas was even more emphatic. In a conversation with Senaior Browning of Illinois on the characteristics of the leading statesmen whom he had known he said: Henry Clay was the most fascinating and Daniel Webster the most powerful orator, John C. Calhoun was the logician of the Senate, but William Pitt Fessenden is the readiest and abiest debater I have ever known. This quotation is cited without reference to authority. Doubtless it is authentic, but ene defect of the book is that letters are frequently quoted without mentioning the sources of the originals. Some are takea from J. S. Pike’s “First Blows of the Civil War” without acknowledgement. The fight on the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas was the great event in the Sen- ate in 1858, and its most notable features were the speeches of Douglas and Fessea- den. That of Douglas attracted most at- tention because he then turned against the Buchanan Administration. That of Fessenden was the greatest of his life and the greatest made on the Republican sidz of the chamber in that session, although Seward’s was justly celebrated. To this supreme forensic effort the biographer gives too little praise; but the Senator knew that he had made a mark, for he was answered by the foremost Southern leader, Jefferson Davis. Early in Fessenden’s service he con- ceived a prejudice against Seward. The first expression of it is in a letter dated February 7, 1856. Speaking of the debare on the relations between the United States and Great Britain on the Nicaraguan ques- tion he says: “Everybody believes that Seward’s speech was insincere.’’ From that time he was ready to construe all doubtful points to Seward’s disadvantage; and on one occasion he was only prevent- ed from charging him in public debate with betrayal of Republican principles by the circumstance that Mason of Virginia got the floor away from him (I., p. 122). Af- terwards he was glad that Mason had in- terfered. His suspicions of Seward were not allayed, but rather intensified by the course of the latter as a member of the Cabinet at the beginning of the civil war. At first Seward was light hearted and opposed to war before the strife came to blows. He mancuvred in an underhand way to procure the evacuation of Fort Sumter, and in consequence gained for him- self a deal of unpopularity at the North; but there is no evidence that he hung back or was unfaithful to his chief after the fighting began. The suspicions that attached to him in the public mind were, however, shared by all the Republican Senators except the two from his own State. After the battle of Fredericksburg the leaders of the Senate came to the conclu- sion that Seward was the man with the evil eye, whose presence in the Cabinet made everything go wrong. They attributed to him an influence over Lincoln which he did not possess, and held ‘that success could never be attained by a government domi- nated by a man who was only half in ear- nest. This was true as a general princi- ple, but until it was shown that Seward was that man, it lacked particular appli-
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128 The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 cation. The Senatorial caucus, the ap- pointment of a committee to wait upon the President and virtually to demand the res- ignation of Seward, have been told by Nico- lay and Hay and elsewhere, but nowhere in so great detail as in this biography. Fessenden was a member of the committee. but not chairman of it, nor was he the originator of the movement. At the time, however, he wrote a complete account with his own hand, and the manuscript. printed verbatim, fills twenty-two pages of the book—largely new matter. Preston King, Senator from New York, told Seward what was brewing, and ‘the latter sent his resignation to Lincoln before the commit- tee reached the White House. Fessenden was convinced that the resignation would have been accepted, though reluctantly, by the President, had not Secretary Chase of- fered his resignation also. Chase did this because he had entered the Cabinet in the first place as an offset to Seward, to make a balance in politics, and he believed that if Seward were engineered out of the Cabi- net the effect on the party as a whole would be bad, and that he (Chase) would be suspected as one of the engineers. Chase was regarded by the President, by the Sen- ators, and by the public as indispensable, and when it became known that if Seward went, he would go also, nobody desired a change. Lincoln said that now, “as he had @ pumpkin in both ends of his bag, he could ride easy.”” So he declined to accept either resignation, and he heard no more Sena- torial grumbling about Seward’s evil eye. Fessenden’s manuscript, however, leaves the impression that Chase, Stanton, and Caleb Smith had been largely responsible for stirring up the bad feeling in the Sen- ate toward Seward, and that when con- fronted by the committee in Lincoln’s pres- ence they failed to make good their state- ments. This view is confirmed, as regards Chase, by Nicolay and Hay. When Fessenden became chairman of the Committee on Finance he was put at the laboring oar of the Senate. Not only the tax and tariff bills, but the loan and cur- rency measures fell to his care. This was virtually new legislation, without precedent on this side of the water, requiring study from the ground up. But that was not the most trying task. The appropriation bills passed under his ken also—the separate Committee on Appropriations did not then exist. With the war and the enormous at- tendant expenditure, an eagle eye was needed to detect fraud and a resolute will to cut down expenses. All these duties were discharged by Fessenden with unfal- tering industry, although he was never ro- bust, and, as his letters to his family show, was frequently in feeble health. He opposed the legal tender bill by speech and vote, using the same arguments that Chase, as Chief Justice, afterwards used in de- claring it unconstitutional. And when Chase resigned the Treasury portfolio, at the must critical and distressing period, Fessenden was constrained reluctantly to take it. He resisted the solicitations of the President and his colleagues in the Senate until it was plain that financial disaster would result from his refusal. He held the office with success from July, 1864, to March, 1865. In the meantime, he had been elected as Senator for a third term, and as the Treasury crisis was past, he re- sumed his old seat and his chairmanship of the Committee on Finance. Graver tasks were before him, however, for he was made chairman of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction; and it fell to him to reconcile the conflicting views of President Johnson with those of the vic- torious Republican party, or, failing that, to frame and carry out a policy of re- construction over Johnson’s head. This part of the story is well told. The irony of fate has no more cruel chapter than the sequel to the narrative, which shows how the unselfish labors of a great man ended in estranging him from the party he had so long and faithfully served, and in lacerating his heartstrings by the rup- ture of cherished friendships. Andrew John- son proved irreconcilable. Fessenden wrote the report of the Joint Committee on Re- construction, and it was adopted. Then came the quarrel which resulted in im- peachment by the House, a step which Fes- senden strongly deprecated. As a member of the Senate, he voted not guilty; thus it came to pass that this preéminent pa- triot, who had spent himself in his coun- try’s service, and given three of his four sons to the Union army—one killed and another maimed for life—was classed by an infuriated majority of his own party as a traitor to the cause of freedom. Stan- ton, for whom he had fought successfully in stormy scenes in executive session, never spoke to him after the impeachment trial. Neal Dow wrote that it was a duty which he owed to his constituents to vote guilty anyhow, and Neal Dow was only one of thousands of ordinarily sane men who held that view. Fessenden replied scorchingly. A little later, seventy-two leading Republicans of Boston imvited him to a public dinner, expressly to testify their appreciation of his courage and con- scientiousness under circumstances of pe- culiar difficulty. He had always been averse to such demonstrations where he was the chief object of attention, and he declined this one, but he wrote a letter reviewing the impeachment trial, which is the best brief vindication of the “seven traitors” that has ever been printed. Probably no- body now living would dispute a single paragraph in this admirable paper. Notwithstanding the fury with which he had been assailed by the press and politi- cians of his own State, Fessenden entered into the Grant-Seymour campaign of 1868 with his wonted vigor. He was needed. The Democrats had adopted a platform for paying off government bonds with green- backs. The plausible arguments by which this scheme was supported needed the at- tention of a master of financial science and of forensic sarcasm. So complete was Fessenden’s victory over the greenback orators that he drew the largest audiences that could be accommodated in the pub- lic halls of the State. His reconcilement to his people at the end of this campaign was so complete that he would probably have been reélected to the Senate on the expiration of his term in 1871, if his life had been spared. But the incessant labors of fourteen years had told upon a consti- tution by no means strong. He succumb- ed to an illness apparently slight, and died August 31, 1869. In this book some attention is paid to the mutual dislikes of Fessenden and Sum- ner. A newspaper interview with Sumner, of which Fessenden was the subject, was published in the Boston Advertiser of Au- gust 30, 1867. This was one of the earliest examples of that mode of communicating one’s opinions to the public. Among other things Sumner said: “For several years he [Fessenden] has been very unkind to me, unaccountably so. I cannot comprehend it. Sometimes it seemed to me akin to insan- ity.” Any failure to agree with Sumner was a sign of brain trouble. His biograe pher, E. L. Pierce, accused Fessenden of talking audibly in the Senate while Sumner was speaking, this charge being put for- ward as a mark of rudeness, and as some- thing quite unusual among Senators. Gen. Francis Fessenden sought the testimony of contemporaries, and obtained from Sen- ators Sherman, Trumbull, and Morrill strong testimony on the other side. Sher- man went a little farther than the inter- rogatory required, and added that “Sumner was a profound egotist and expected every one to defer to his opinion.” Morrill said that Fessenden never wrote letters or read newspapers in the Senate chamber, “but talking to near associates aloud was then, as it is now [1893], a common practice.” Sumner and Fessenden were reconciled late er, and the former pronounced a eulogy on the latter when his death was announced to the Senate. It would be invidious to point out minor defects in this work, such as printing Fes- senden’s speech on the legal-tender bill at vol. I., page 295, immediately after Chase’s resignation, June, 1864. The proper place is at the beginning of 1862. The portrait- ure of the subject of the narrative is suc- cessfully accomplished. It shows us a highly gifted man, of unfailing courage, dignity, and courtesy, of princely form and feature, and of spotless character, who was a light to the age in which he lived, and who should be accounted one of the immortals of his country’s history. CURRENT FICTION. Xheaves. By E. F. Benson. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. The most mundane of Archbishop Ben- son’s sons has written nothing better than this. By the temper rather than the meth- od of his treatment he has given new life to an old story. The outcome of a marriage between the well-preserved woman and the man in his first youth is a famous crux of fiction. Mr. Benson’s heroine has given her youth and beauty to a hopeless sot, with whom she drags out a dozen weary years, before his death releases her. She has en- dured the experience with a fortitude so deep-rooted that she appears to have come out of it almost unscathed. She wakes from it as from a long nightmare, her mind haunted with the horror of it, but her body unimpaired. Childless, she takes up her waking life alone, having attained the se- renity of one who has consciously put youth behind. But youth will not “stay put”; it assails her in the person of a man seventeen years her junior. Their marriage, however, lacks nothing but parity of years, and except as her consciousness of the actual disparity obtrudes itself, they are absolutely hap- py. A son is born, and for a time the mother’s cup runs over. But after the first wonder of it is past, she wakes to the fact
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. ~ 129 that her triumphant joy finds but a faint echo in the father’s heart. The sense of his youthfulness begins really to oppress her. At this point Mr. Benson proceeds, in a way, to beg the question by killing off the woman. For the question is not whether a man of twenty-four can be happy with a woman of forty-two, but what is going to happen later on. All along the road to seventy will they be lovers, a wedded pair, or simply an old woman with a more or less dutiful spouse? This is the knot which Mr. Benson cuts, in effect, if not by intention. But one is rather grateful to him for it. His way of taking off the wife is not so summary but that it tests ade- quately not only the husband’s patience and devotion, but the depth of his love. Their relation is made perfect by suffering, and there is no tragedy in its earthly surcease. Mr. Benson’s treatment of this sober theme is without a touch of sombreness. The tone of the book is cheerful, and even merry. The boy-husband is of the class called “artistic,” over whose total sel- fishness and irresponsibility lady novel- ists are prone to yearn. Yet he succeeds in being charming without being either a brute or a popinjay. His career as a Lo- hengrin who captures Belgravia, and a Tris- tan who causes a popular riot in Munich reminds one, to be sure, of the achieve- ments of various other paper heroes of re- cent date. But one ought to be willing to forgive him, as one forgives the heroine for being the most successful dramatist of her day. These two persons are credible and admirable in more essential matters. There is not in either of them a trace of morbid self-consciousness. The man gives his voice to the world because the woman thinks it his duty; and is glad of his strength and buoyancy for her sake, as the woman is glad of her beauty and serenity for his. The thought of her death does not make them frantic, does not even rob them of laugh- ter. Her sister, Lady Peggy, is a creation worthy of the author of “Dodo,” a delight- fully intense, humorous, Puck-like spirit, wresting joy from the most diverse activi- ties, an ardent politician and mother’s- club woman, a patroness of balls and soup- kitchens. A certain rural canon and his circle give scope for those broader ‘“‘char- acter” studies which your English novel- ist seems still bound to add, like a pinch of coarse salt, to the more delicate ingre- dients of his composition. John o’ Jamestown. By Vaughan Kester. New York: The McClure Co. An excellent little book of the half-his- toric and adventurous, half love-story sort, good reading from cover to cover, properly enwrapped in local atmosphere, yet without inflated parade of seventeenth-century lan- guage or manners. It tells of the love of Richard Farraday for a young girl with royal blood in her veins, of the jealousies and conspiracies that send him off, a kid- napped prisoner, on the Susan Constant, with John Smith, destined as it turns out, to found Jamestown. The portrait of Smith is vividly painted by the hand of an enthu- siast. As Christian soldier, as self-confident leader, as strong-willed, resourceful colon- ist, exposing none to hardships that he did nut share, smiting the foes of the settlers and sparing his own, he appears in a he- roic yet wholly human light. The history of the Jamestown colony comes at a timely moment. The year’s pil- grims to the lonely, grassy little island will find it of pleasurable and painful interest to fit into its setting the story of the land- ing, the fort-building, the crop-raising; of mutinies, treacheries, famine, and suffer- ings; of thewilesof Powhattan, the friendli- ness of Pocahontas, the hopes and despairs, and the final peace and prosperity that settled on the plantations. There, in 1645, Farraday writes the story, sitting on his own porch, smoking his own tobacco, and proudly relating that in the previous winter there had lain in their harbors at one time “twelve ships from England, a like num- ber from Holland, and seven from New England.” When Kings Go Forth to Battle. By Wil- liam Wallace Whitelock. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. This fanciful tale contains a king or two, but no battles or rumors of battles. There is some waving of swords, and now and then the report of a pistol is heard, but the casualties are few. The action takes place in a small German principality which may as well be nameless—it is not called Zenda. There are, curiously enough, rival claimants to the throne, the person who for the nonce wears the crown being the less worthy of the two. The other has disap- peared, with a price upon his head. He re mains, in fact, in the capital, in the dis- guise of a common soldier. Enter from dif- ferent quarters two young Americans, male and female, who penetrate the prince’s dis- guise, espouse his cause, and proceed at once to adjust the affairs of the realm. When we say that it falls to our hero to chastise king the first, and to deprive king the second of the object of his affections, the reader will not be at a loss to classify him. The lady who prefers a citizen to a king is really a sort of compatriot of both, being by descent a full-blooded countess. There seems to be an insatiable demand for this sort of literary confectionery, and we may cheerfully admit that the present commodity is palatable in its kind. Janet of the Dunes. By Harriet T. Com- stock. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. “Quinton” is sup~osed to be a village on (or off?) the easterly shore of Long Isl- and. Some years before the story opens its dunes have been discovered and made famous by a painter, with the usual result of invasion by the small fry of “art” and by the summer boarder who follows in their train. Janet has lived her seventeen years in the little settlement surrounding the life-saving station “‘across the bay.’’ She passes as the daughter of Cap’n Billy of the life savers; but is really the fruit of an irregular connection between a native girl and a city man. The girl has strayed back home, and been married by the magnani- mous Cap’n Billy, who is presently left with a girl-child to take care of. The story deals with her dangerous and concealed in- timacy with a young painter, and its happy issue. The affair is capably, if a little stiff- ly, managed by the author. The innocent maid and her sophisticated lover are hard- ly conceived with sufficient vividness to lift them above the over-familiar types. But if we are to believe the preface, it was the writer’s chief aim to give the flavor of na- tive life and character upon that part of the coast. There is enough true sea charm in her descriptions to make one wish she had had the courage to celebrate her shore and her shore worthies without recourse to the form of fiction. But. no doubt the dif- ficulty would then have been to find a pub- lisher. The Cambridge History of English Litera- ture. Edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. Vol. I.: From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $2.50 net. It has, of course, long been recognized that any history of English literature which is to set forth satisfactorily the whole development from the earliest be- ginnings to the present must be codper- ative. Indeed, even in the treatment of a special period, such as the Elizabethan or the Romantic, codperation is a great help. The advantages are particularly evi- dent in the era covered by the present vol- ume, viz., the Middle Ages, when so large a share of the intellectual production found expression in Latin—that is, in a foreign language, with powerful traditions of its own and with literary forms alien to those of the vernacular. We may conceive of a literary historian who combines first-hand knowledge of the vast mass of theological and philosophical writings (to say nothing of the chronicles) of mediwval England, practically all in Latin, with the requisite grasp on the vernacular literature, but no such person has yet arisen; and we may doubt the value of a second-hand treat- ment of this, as of any other subject, where the writer is unable to verify state- ments of his authorities, as he can always do in the beaten road of the vernacular, even where he may not be a specialist in the particular genre. The codperative history of which we now have the first volume, fulfils, to a respect- able degree, our expectations. It is a pity, however, that for so many chapters the ed- itors have been unable to secure contribu- tors of vuthority. As to this defect, the reader may convince himself by compar- ing, for instance, Henry Bradley’s discus- sion of the changes in the language or Prof. W. P. Ker’s chapter on the metrical romances with the work of less known contributors. On the other hand, actual errors of statement are few, and the criti- cal literature, including that which has ap- peared in Germany and America, has gen- erally been utilized. Another shortcom- ing, which reveals itself in consecutive reading, is the amount of overlapping. En- counters with “Sir Gawayne and _ the Grene Knight,”’ for example, are too fre- quent. Furthermore, in successive chap- ters Prof. J. W. H. Atkins and Prof. W. Lewis Jones offer separate discussions of Layamon’s “Brut,” marked by material dif- ferences in conception—differences evi- dently due to the fact tuat Professor At- kins, one of the best-informed of all the contributors, is acquainted with Imel- mann’s essay (which proves that Laya- mon’s original was by no means identical with the printed Wace), while Professor Jones is not. We may add that Professor Jones’s chapter on the Arthurian Legend, though in point of style one of the most agreeable, shows serious weaknesses in dealing with the French romances, especi-
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The Nation. [ Vol. 86, No. 2223 ally those in prose. The Vulgate “‘Queste,” of course, does not belong to the “Early History” versions of the Grail story, and Robert de Boron’s ‘Merlin’ in its metri- cal as well as prose form, so far from be- ing one of the “chief” of has practically nothing to do with the le- gend of the Holy Grail. In the legend, Professor Jones seems unaware of the agreement among the prin- to the effect that all the back to one a French poem of the early these versions, his account of Tristan cipal authorities, extant Tristan romances go lost original twelfth century. Of the chapters Prof not already mentioned, Israel Gollancz’s on the works of the author of “The Pearl’ is among the most successful He rightly upholds the auto- biographical character of this poem. The chapters on the literature of the Anglo-Sax- on period are sound, though und’stinguished by originality. Prof. H. M. Chadwick’s dis- cussion of the Christian coloring of the “Beowulf” will be read, however, with in- terest. In the Middle English period, the division of the metrical romances between two contributors, destroys unity of view Three chapters are devoted to Latin, from Gildas to Richard of Bury. In conclusion, mention should be made of the excellent bibliography. We notice, however, several omissions: Prof. Lorenz Morsbach’'s discussion of the date of the “Beowulf” in the Nachrichten (1906) of the Géttingen the most Academy of Science 8, that Ernst Brug- Arthurian mat- appearing at inter- past in the Zeit- schrift fiir franzisische Sprache und Litera- tur. full perhaps solid contribution has been made io this subject: and gers important articles on ters, which have been vals for several years But on the whole, the bibliography is and exact. Die Sumerischen und Akkadischen Kénigsin- schriften. Von F. Thureau-Dangin. Pp. 275. Leipzig: Hinrichs. 9 marks. Behind the Semitic period of Babylo- which can now be traced back c., lies the so-called “Su- rian history, to about 3000 B merian” or ‘“Sumero-Akkadian” culture, which probably flourished as early as 4000 B. c. Although material is now at our disposal for the study of this considerable ecrlier substratum, it is unfortunately not ef the kind reach a definite solution of such fundamental prob- lems as the ethnic character of the Sumero- Akkadians and the language spoken by them. Recently, through the distinguished Prof. Eduard Meyer of the University of Berlin, some progress has been made to- wards a sharper differentiation between Sumerians and Semites in the Euphrates Valley. By a careful and most ingenious study of types and costumes depicted on the sculptured remains of ancient Baby- lonia—embodied in a monograph, ‘‘Semiten und Sumerier in Babylonien” (Berlin,1906)— Professor Meyer has given us what appears to be a safe criterion for distinguishing not only between Sumerians and Semites, but, among the Semitic settlers, also between various types, as, e. g., such as shave off the moustache and such as wear a full beard. The non-Semitic character of the hat can enable us to Sumerian type may now be regarded as definitely established; and while the Su- merian problem which has engaged the at- tention of Assyriologists during the past quarter of a century cannot be regarded as fully solved until we also know much more asx to the origin of the Su- merians, the purely archzxological investi- gation of Professor Meyer has cleared the way for the linguistic puzzle. This latter is brought home to us by M. Thureau-Dan- represents the first at- a translation of all the at present known to possible gin’s work, which tempt to furnish historical inscriptions us that either belong to the Sumerian pe- riod or are couched in Sumerian. The Ger- man translation is itself a translation of a French version published by Thureau- Dangin in 1906; but it supersedes the French as representing a new revision, be- containing a most useful index of proper names, prepared by a promising American Assyriologist, Dr. Stephen Lang- don (a graduate of Columbia University and of the Union Theological Seminary), who has also embodied in this index a list of the chief votive objects and utensils men- tioned in the inscriptions. M. Thureau-Dangin is a leading author- ity in all that pertains to the inscriptions of the most ancient period of Babylonia. To him, next to the lamented Professor Amiaud of Paris, and to Prof. Peter Jensen of the University of Marburg, the prog- ress made in the interpretation of this most difficult material is chiefly due, though it is only proper to add that other scholars, like Fritz Hommel, Zimmern, Hugo Winckler, and J. Dyneley Prince of Columbia University, have also con- tributed their share in clearing up diffi- What Thureau-Dangin, therefore, the best that is at it may be said at once that all reasonable doubts as to the real character of the Sumerian language have now been set at rest. As long as were dependent for our knowledge of Sumerian upon late syllabaries prepared by the Semitic scribes of Babylonia and Assyria, and upon bilinguals that were likewise the work of late scribes, it was really a question whether the Sumerian Was a genuine language or merely an ideo- graphic and archaic method of writing Semitic Babylonian, since in these late and sides culties. gives present available, us represents and we doctored texts, artificial devices of all kinds were introduced by the scribes to whom Sumerian had become aé_e sacred script, intended largely for the eye, rather than for the ear. This artificiality it is the merit of the distinguished Prof. Joseph Halévy of Paris to have demonstrated in the face of the opposition of almost all Assy- riologists; but the further contention of Halévy that all Sumerian is merely an archaic method of writing Babylonian, pre- served in order to give to the literature a mysterious character, can no longer be upheld with the testimony of original and ancient texts before us in pure Sumerian. These texts offer such evidence of a real language as (a) the “phonetic” separation of syllables, as, e. g., nu-um-mal for nu- mal; (b) the interchange of signs in thz writing of a word having the same pho- netic value; and (c) the interchange of ba, bi, ib, ab, and ba-ab. Such phenomena can only occur in a real language, and not in an artificially devised script, though, on the other hand, it must be admitted that, from being a real language, Sumerian de- generated in the course of long ages—as a sacred and only partly understood speech —into a mere script. The genuine Sumerian is represented by the texts in Thureau- Dangin’s volume and by the numerous business records—largely dealing with the affairs of temples—of the Ur and other early dynasties. This question, however, cf the character of the Sumerian language is still unsolved. All that can safely be said is that it is non-Semitic, and ap- pears to have some affinities with Turkish —not sufficient, however, for warranting us in classing Sumerian with the Altaic group of languages. Scholars are now in a much better position, thanks to this new work of Thureau-Dangin, to study the peculiarities of the language, and it is a reasonable hope that the next decade will see the definite solution of this extremely complicated linguistic problem. The material in this volume comes chiefly from Tello, where excavations were carried on by the Frenchman de Sarzec, from 1877 to his death, in 1900, and since then by Capt. Croz. The excavations conducted by Messrs. Peters and Haynes (1889-1900) at Nippur, under the auspices of the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania, have also furnished some of the material, as have the French excavations at Susa under De Morgan and the excavations of the German Orient So- ciety at Babylon and elsewhere. Of the two terms, Sumerian and Akkadian, the former is derived from the designation of Sumer, for the northern section of the Euphrates valley, while the latter is de- rived from Akkad, the designation of the southern section; and since Sumer is spoken of as “the land” par excellence, it may rea- sonably be concluded that the northern sec- tion is the home of the inventors of the cuneiform script. Sumer and Akkad did not at all times form a political unit. For a long time the Euphrates valley was di- vided up into a number of little principali- ties, each with a capital and its own tutelary deity. In the south, the chief centres were Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Uruk, and Nippur; in the north, Sippar, Cuthah, and Kish. Of these early principalities we can at present follow the history of one only, namely, Lagash (or Shirpurla)—on the site of the mound Tello. We have the names of no less than twenty-two of its rulers, beginning with Lugal-shag-engur and end- ing with Arad-Nannar, covering roughly the period of circa 3000 to 2,600 B. c. Under Sargon practically all of Sumer and Akkad had to yield to the Semitic invasion. The steady advance of the Semites naturally provoked as the most striking historical feature a prolonged conflict between thetwo races. After various ebbs and flows of for- tune, the Semites finally succeeded, under Hammurabi (circa 1900 B. c.), in making themselves masters of the Euphrates valley. Henceforth till the downfall of Babylon in 538 B. c., through Cyrus, we have a strong centralized empire, with Babylon as its capital. For centuries pre- vious to Hammurabi, the process of the assimilation of the older Sumerian culture by the Semites had been going on. The Semites, however, put their peculiar stamp upon this civilization, so that outside of the language the Sumerian elements in the Euphratean civilization were to all prac- tical purposes effaced. From this rapid survey it will be seen what ‘a wealth of historical material is em-
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Feb. 6, 1908 | The Nation. 181 todied in the pages of Thureau-Dangin’s work. The texts are given in chronologi- cal groups (so far as this has been fixed), beginning with the rulers of Lagash and ending with those of Uruk. On one page is the transliteration of the texts and on the adjacent one the translation, with co- pious foot-notes to justify the renderings given and to discuss obscure signs and combinations. The study of the Sumerian texts (as with few exceptions all in this volume are) has now advanced sufficiently to enable scholars to interpret short texts with absolute certainty in all but minor points. When it comes, however, to long texts in Sumerian, such as those on two large cylinders of Gudea and on some of the statues of this king, there are many passages which remain obscure and will re- main so until through additional material we obtain a clearer insight into the syntax of Sumerian—for it is here that the chief difficulties lie. Thureau-Dangin is obliged to confess his inability to give a satisfac- tory meaning to hundreds of passages, but his self-restraint in resisting the attempt to guess where certain knowledge for the present comes to an end, leads us to havo all the greater confidence in the renderings proposed by him for an equally large num- ber of passages that had hitherto baffled scholars. The immediate result of Thureau-Dangin’s admirable volume will be to stimulate Sumerian researches among the two or three dozen Assyriologists in this country and Europe. To be sure, the field of Assyriology is now so large that it is impossible for one specialist to covel the entire domain, but all Assyriologists are brought into contact at some point in their studies with Sumerian. It is difficult for the outsider to form an adequate idea of the learning and patient labor involved in such an undertaking as Thureau-Dangin has carried to a success- ful issue. It definitely establishes his posi- tion as the leading Sumerian scholar of the day; and his volume may be said to mark an epoch in the development of Sumerian studies. Thureau-Dangin is still a young man, and much is to be expected from him in the years to come. It is only proper to record and emphasize here the indebted- ness of all students of ancient culture to him. The Odes and Epodes of Horace. Translat- ed into English Verse corresponding with the Original Metres by John Marshall. [The Temple Greek and Latin Classics.] New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1 net. To the present translator of Horace one might begin by quoting his own version of the Jlli robur: Him, heart of oak and brass thrice-knit The breast encased, who ‘gainst the cruel deep His fragile bark first dared to pit,— which is good «ounsel in doubtful gram- mar. So many venturers, from retired prime ministers to Grub Street hacks, have gone down in that sea, that we watch each newcomer with trepidation. The fact is simply that Horace—more perhaps than oth- er poets—cannot be translated. His virtue lies in his language, in the inimitable feli- city which gives to commonplace sentiment the beauty of something rare and final. Into what English will you change Spes animi credula mutui? “Nor credulous dream of heart’s exchange,”’ is well enough, but it could never have run in the minds of men for two thousand years. Or, into what English will you transmit that Now erat et celo fulgebat luna serena, which Schopen- hauer used as a text for his discussion of the imagination? The absolute propriety of language was never better exemplified than in scores of these phrases and verses. So much must be said. We may add that Dr. Marshall, who is rector of the Royal High School, Edinburgh, has made this translation the business of forty years’ study, and that in many of the poems he has come nearer to the impossible than any other translator with whom we are famil- iar. In one thing he has been particularly fortunate—in suggesting the rhythm of the original stanzas, while using forms thor- oughly English. As an illustration of his cunning treatment of the Alcaic, the fol- lowing may be selected: Spare and infrequent pietist was I While, skilled in the philosophy of fools, I strayed. Now back from all the schools Reversed my course I try Towards whence I came. To show with what feeling for rhythm he distinguishes between metres nearly akin this Aleaic may be compared with the Asclepiadean ode on which Milton laid so heavy a hand: What slender youth, with wealth of roses sheen And with sweet essences besprent, pursues thee, In cool grot, Pyrrha, woos thee? For whom thy yellow hair dost preen, S'mple, yet exquisite? How oft, ah me! Vows broken he'll deplore and gods that change; And, to thy whimsies strange, Shall gaze where glooms a wind-swept sea; Whe credulous now dotes on thy tinsel gold, And dreams thee ever willing, ever kind, To thy fair falseuess blind! O hapless, who untried behold Thy glitter! Lo, my dripping weeds I place, With picture vowed, on Neptune’s temple wall, My saving to recall From shipwreck by thy siren face. That is Dr. Marshall at his best, and it is good work. He is, as a rule, less success- ful in the graver poems than in the nuge@ canore, but he is sefdom quite flat, and his version as a whole may be heartily recom- mended to those who are shut out from the original. We hope that Dr. Marshall will add the Satires and Epistles in a separate volume. The book, like all the volumes of the ser- ies, gives the original and the translation on opposite pages. In this case the type is comfortably large and clear, which cannot be said of one or two of the earlier issues. In the Footprints of Dante: A Treasury of Verse and Prose from the Works of Dante. Compiled by Paget Toynbee. Pp. xi., 398. London: Methuen & Co. 4s. 6d. Mr. Toynbee’s latest book is a natural result of the work he did, not long ago, in cataloguing more than two hundred and sixty English and American translators of Dante, from about 1380 (Chaucer) to 1906 A. DT. It is a bilingual chrestomathy of many famous or beautiful passages, most- ly brief, and chosen not only from the “Vita Nuova” and the “Divina Commedia,” but from Dante’s Latin works. Every translation is accompanied by the Italian or Latin text, and over each fragment the compiler has set some indicative title, such as “Envy,” “Flakes of fire falling like snow,” “‘A baffled falcon,” ‘Florence in the olden time,” ‘“‘Love as a pilgrim,” “To Guido Cavalcanti” (in Shelley’s lovely translation). There follow various great passages from the ‘“Convivio,” “De Mon- archia,”’ and the Epistole, admirably trans- lated by the compiler himself. To search every English translation of Dante for the “best” rendering of those passages which have won the widest ad- miration would be a prodigious task, and would probably result in convincing who- ever undertook it that at least nine-tenths of Dante’s translators must now be aton- ing in Giudecca. Fortunately, a few glances are usually enough, and one re- turns with an easy conscience to well- known names, leaving the rest to their dust and silence. Mr. Toynbee has apparently not undertaken a_ uni- versal exploration, but has looked for his gems in a dozen of the likeliest places. His earliest translator is just- ly Chaucer; others are Cary, Byron, Shel- ley, Wright, Hayley, Shadwell, Tennyson; he might have found fine bits in Charles Eliot Norton’s “Vita Nuova,” and in T. W. Parsons, but neither is included. All the prose passages are translated, and excel- lently translated, by Mr. Toynbee himself. Perhaps because they were too long, some of the most beautiful scenes in the “‘Com- media” are absent: Francesca da Rimini, Pier delle Vigne, Ugolino; in general, the compiler has omitted almost every scene wherein Dante has shown his power to de- pict the basest passions, violence, and hor- ror. Here Dante is presented in his gen- tlest moods, whether in poetry or philos- ophy. To one important fact, at least, this book is another convincing witness: the English language is capable of expressing adequate- ly what Dante wrote, but in five centuries and more no one translator has done twen- ty consecutive verses so well as to justi- fy any one in saying, This is not Dante, for English is not Italian, but it is true to his thought and beautiful in itself. A Byron, a Shelley, or a John Payne, might indeed have made Dante as great in English as he is in German; but that was not to be. By Alexandre Dumas; trans- Vols I. and II. $1.75 each. My Memoirs. lated by E. M. Waller. New York: The Macmillan Co. The first two volumes of the translation by E. M. Waller of Alexandre Dumas’s “Memoirs” bring the hero and the reader to 1825. A thousand pages devoted to the eareer of a youth before his twenty-third summer might seem an undue allotment, even taking into account Dumas’s tumid imagination, were not the histories of all the incidental characters expounded with the minuteness of the old episodic ro- mances. Through many chapters the chief person is the novelist’s mulatto father, Gen. Alexandre Dumas, soldier of the Republic, son of the aristocrat, Davy de la Pailleterie, and the West Indian negress, Marie-Cessette Dumas. The author takes as much time in reaching his own birth as Sterne did in getting to that of Tristram Shandy, Esq. Dumas treats his father in superla- tives, and makes him perform feats to daunt even Porthos or d’Artagnan. He gives him a giant’s strength and one is
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132 The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 reminded of nothing so much as the career of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Friar John in reading how that officer helped his regi- ment to escalade a fortification by taking each man by the seat of his trousers and the collar of his coat and throwing him over the palisades; or how he could clutch a beam with both hands and lift from the ground by his legs the horse on which he was mounted. Gen. Dumas was, however, no match in appetite for a certain Boudoux of whom we are told: They put the whole calf in the oven, and when it was cooked, Boudoux ate it all. When he had picked the last bone, my father complimented him on his perform- ance. “I hope your hunger Boudoux?” he said. “Put the mother on the spit, general,” replied Boudoux, “and you will see.” My father drew back, for he was fond of this cow, and Boudoux was likely to leave nothing of her but the horns. is satisfied now, Many pages are devoted to the heroic, but unappreciated, deeds of Gen. Dumas, the “Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol,” in the service of Napoleon, who was clearly less impressed by them than were the general and his sen. Then, after much information on the writer's own youth and interests, ranging from trapping larks to a chapter on Charlemagne’s clothes, we at last reach Dumas’s first contact with literature through the drama, and are promised “the development of art in France during one- half of the nineteenth century.” The ful- filment of this promise is initiated at the rate of three chapters devoted to one per- formance of Nodier’s “‘Vampire,”’ at which Dumas was present. No wonder that the “Memoirs” were never finished. Obviously, these chronicles are not to be taken as history. A writer of such career- ing imagination could not be confined to mere facts. But it is an amusing pastime to put one’s self in his frame of mind and read the ‘“‘“Memoirs”’ as a Dumas romance. The characters, though they bear historical names, are doubtlessly as untrue to life as the persons in the Valois stories, the ad- ventures of the three musketeers, or those in the Cagliostro group. Nevertheless, it was J. J. Weiss who said of Dumas that he had le don de mentir dans le sens de la wérité. The first volume is preceded by an in- teresting essay by the lover of Dumas, Andrew Lang. m8 Science. The Prolongation of Life. By FElie Metchnikoff. New York: G. P. Put- $2.50 net. In this entertaining volume of 340 pages, Professor Metchnikoff of the Pasteur In- stitute in Paris, writes as one imbued with a deep sense of the overpowering strength of those unknown physical forces which condemn mankind to the ravages of dis- ease, old age, and death; he writes, too, with the spirit of a seeker after truth. His book, while highly suggestive, is intended to be neither exhaustive nor conclusive. Its pur- nam’s Sons. pose is rather to point out the problems of somatic limitations, and the principles involved in attempting their ultimate solu- tion. As to disease, the first member of the destructive triad, scientific inquiry has long ago revealed the fact that many maladies are preventable through a proper under- standing of causation and communicabil- ity, especially where the causative agent is some microscopic organism. It is there- fore to the student of zodlogy and bac- teriology that we must look for knowledge of the origin, growth, and destruction of disease-producing germs. Reasoning thus, Professor Metchnikoff has come to the be- lief that old age and death are probably due to infectious organisms which have taken up a permanent abode in the diges- tive tract, but which, through various ac- tivities, affect the entire system. If this view be sound, then mankind is theoreti- eally in sight of perennial youth, and an eternity of earthly existence. Metchnikoff, of course, makes no such extravagant claim, but he believes that if we were in command of absolute knowledge regarding the causes of old age and death, human life could be greatly prolonged. This is certainly a wholly sane opinion. Professor Metchnikoff blames the large intestine for human decay and death, be- cause he thinks it useless and merely a culture tube for hosts of dangerous bac- teria. He goes on to say that since lactic acid, produced when milk sours, is capable of diminishing the activity of intestinal bacteria, therefore the logical prevention of old age is the proper use of lactic acid as an intestinal medicament. But with all due respect to the author's professional does not seem to make enough of other modes of body in- vasion by specific organisms. Moreover, he fails to emphasize the fact that disease is not an entity in itself, but that it is really the product of two factors: vis., bacteria and their toxins, and diminished resistance of the human body to _ these enemies. If we could defend ourselves ab- solutely against bacteria by killing them off or by manufacturing some anti-body to render them inert, then diseases which are a product of bacterial activity would cease to exist, and old age, in so far as it is a re- sult of such disease, would cease to exist also. To quote a high authority, Prof. C. A. Herter, in his “Bacterial Infections of the Digestive Tract,” reviewing Metchni- koff’s thesis, notes that the latter has singled out no definite group of bacteria, but accuses all of them equally. More- over, Metchnikoff does not point out the differing reactions of different individuals to the presence of the hostile organism, and the varying degrees of pathogenicity inherent in varying races of bacteria. These, however, are mere technical differ- ences; and Herter believes with Metchni- koff that “‘there is certainly much to recom- mend the view that putrefactive intestinal processes are favorably influenced by fer- mented milk containing an abundance of lactic acid, and lactic acid organisms.”’ But “whether the lactic acid bacilli in a thor- oughly fermented milk will go on produc- ing lactic acid in the digestive tract is uncertain, and probably depends on the presence of fermentable carbohydrates.” As a matter of clinical knowledge, lactic acid in considerable quantities is present in, cancer of the stomach, and yet it ex- ercises but little effect on the processes of fermentation and putrefaction In the in- testines. attainments, he The book contains, among other matters, chapters on “Morality and Human Na- ture” and “Pessimism, Health, and Age.” The author tells us: Young people, who are inclined to pessi- mism, ought to be informed that their condition of mind is only temporary, and that according to the laws of human nature ir will later on be replaced by optimism. In the final chapter, Professor Metchnikoff declares that one’s ideal should not be that of Herbert Spencer, a simple prolongation of life, but a development that may pass through a “long period of old age in active and vigorous health leading to the final period in which there shail be present a sense of satiety of life, and a wish for death.” A third and final volume of the ‘“‘Meta- bolism and Practical Medicine,” of Carl von Noorden (Chicago: W. T. Keener & Co.), has appeared at a short interval after the completion of the second volume of the German original. Both volumes contain a discussion of the metabolic processes in a large number of diseased conditions, and also in relation to therapeutic measures. These questions are considered monographi- eally by fourteen writers, the whole work forming a greatly extended revision of Von Noorden’s single volume of 1893. There are marked differences of opinion among medi- cal men as to the utility of this line of study, but all will be glad to have the enor- mous material in a fairly convenient and accessible form; and many of the discus- sions will be found to be inspiring quite apart from the validity of some of the con- clusions. Most of the matter has a strictly professional interest, but the non-medical reader will find abundant profit in the part by A. Magnus-Levy on the “Physiology of Metabolism” (being the first volume of the translation) and possibly in the chapters on mineral waters and baths. The English version in three volumes, the first two hav- ing appeared last summer, is made by twenty-one different translators, who, with few exceptions, are British teachers of medicine. Prof. L. Walker Hall of Univer- sity College, Bristol, is the general editor. The translation is fresh and often rather free. but appears to be adequate as judged by a dozen comparisons quite at random. Some effort has been made to revise the later chapters, and to extend the bibliog- raphy. An appendix, especially prepared for the English edition, and containing a tabulation of food values, is marred by fre- quent slips of the pen or types, such that the proper correction is not always obvious. Prof. P. Stroobant of the Brussels Ob- servatory has just published statistics of the existing astronomical observatories, and states that there are in the world 47% such establishments, public and private. In Europe alone there are 305, distributed as follows: Great Britain and Ireland, 97; Germany, 51; France, 39; Austro-Hungary, 28; Italy, 21; Russia, 19; Holland, 10; Spain, 8; Switzerland, 8; Belgium, 6; Por- tugal, 4; Sweden, 4; Denmark, 4; Norway, 3; Greece, 2; Bulgaria, Servia, and Ru- mania, each 1. In America there are 145, the United States reporting 105. Asia has 18 and Africa 11. The University of Cambridge (England) Low offers a diploma in anthropology. It
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 138 will be given for research work only, in- stead of by examination as at Oxford. The death, in his eighty-first year, is announced of Lieut.-Col. R. L. J. Ellery, late director of the Melbourne Observatory. He was the first government astronomer in Victoria, and also director of the geodetic survey of the colony, 1856-74. In 1873 he organized the Victorian Torpedo Corps. Amidst his other occupations, he found time for writing several volumes on astro- nomical and meteorological subjects. Since 1895 he had retired from active employment. Drama. La Nave. Per Gabriele D’Annunzio. Milan: Treves. On January 11, after weeks of prelim- ary chatter, “The Ship’ (“La Nave”) was played at Rome. The seats were bought at staggering prices. A noble and distinguish- ed audience received the tragedy with en- thusiasm, readily cheering down the few hisses that arose during the more scabrous scenes. The King invited the author to the royal box, inquired eagerly as to the sources of the piece, and thanked Signor D’Annunzio for his glorification of the Ro- man tradition of sea power. Your review- er congratulates himself on his remote- ness from all this adventitious glamour. With the handsome quarto of the publish- er Treves on one’s desk, the materials for a literary judgment of the tragedy are complete, and since it is unlikely that ‘“‘The Ship”’ will ever be played in America, that is all that your readers will reasonably require. After a thrilling invocation of Sea Pow- er—a most interesting Italian companion piece for Kipling’s “The Seven Seas”— which ends: Make of all oceans our [Italian] sea (Fa di tutti gli Océani il Mare Nostro) the curtain rises upon the prologue. It is Venice of the year 552, a busy place trying to raise itself above the mud of the lagoon. There is a population watch- ful of the waters, whence comes news of the conquering Byzantines in the neighbor- ing fens, and of new sandbars thrust across the path of the ships. It is also a moment of political expectancy. Venice stands in doubt whether to attach herself to Byzan- tium or to do for herself. The pitiful, eye- less figures of the ex-Tribune Orso Fale- dro, and his three sons, extortioners and partisans of Justinian, show that for a moment the issue has been decided in fa- vor of independence. It is doubly a mo- ment of expectancy; for word is due of the success or failure of the expedition which Marco Gratico, head of the Venetian party, has led to the mainland to recover the relics of the tutelar saint of the once Aquileian colony. While waiting, men dis- cuss the hard fate of Faledro, and, natur- ally, the rumor that his daughter Basiliola has become a great courtesan in the By- zantine camp. Soon she herself appears from the sea in a beauty and splendor of attire that make the water folk hail her as a siren, while her fascination visibly moves them all. She lands to meet the shattering sight of her mutilated father and brothers. The affecting scene is in- terrupted by the arrival of Marco GrAatico bearing the relics. He is:hailed by the refu- gees as their Tribune; and at the same time his brother, Sergio Gratico, is named as Bishop. The scene throughout is full of voices from unseen choristers. These rep- resent the Latin Church asserting itself, and one, a kind of embodiment of Venice herself, bids the city establish itself on the new ship Tuttilmondo, which is build- ing by the Rialto. The first episode shows Basiliola in moral and corporeal possession of the new Tri- bune. For her he has cast her maligners and her father’s torturers into the filthy trench, Fossa Fuia, and she has come to mark their agony as they bawl for bread. As they see her in her harlot’s splendor, by turns they rave lustfully for her—the usual attitude of crowds towards Basiliola —or insult her grievously in the hope that she will end their torture. At last, stung by an intolerable affront, she grasps a bow from a guard, and slays the chief spokes- man of the prisoners. Then, intoxicated by the sight of blood, she shoots slowly and voluptuously prisoner by prisoner un- til the trench—naturally not seen on the stage—is full of dying groans in which de- sire and hatred mingle inextricably. Upon this scene comes the zealot Traba to re- buke the murderess. Her answer is to dis- robe herself in part, and when his bitter words ignore this allurement, she moves to slay him too, but is stopped by her lover, Marco Gratico. There follows a re- markable contest in which the Tribune’s horror and distrust yield to her blandish- ments, and as he kneels to recover her fallen tunic she fires his imagination with visions of winning through her aid the imperial crown of Byzantium. For Byzantium, as the second episode shows, Basiliola has also claimed the Bishop Sergio. We see him in the new ba- silica engaged in an orgy. In memory of the Last Supper effeminate priests mutter awful heresies, while Basiliola maddens them all as she dances lasciviously with her seven slaves, the guardians of the seven candlesticks. From without is heard occa- sionally the austere psalmody of the Latin zealots, who at last led by the presbyter Teodoro, burst in upon the godless revel and begin to drive the feasters from the temple. An extraordinary choral debate en- sues between the factions, with Basiliola in defiant possession of the altar. At last the matter is referred to judicial combat between the brothers, the Bishop and the Tribune; and Marco wins in the fratricidal duel. The third episode is practically an epi- logue. The great ship Tuttilmondo is ready for launching. Upon it Marco Gratico will take the sea in explation of the slaying of his brother. He will clear the sea of pi- rates and will cut his way to Alexandria in the hope of recovering the body of St. Mark. Behind the ship flares the fire upon the altar the sailors maintain to a pagan Victory. Latin Christianity is reéstablished; all is finished except the punishment of Ba- siliola. In prophetic words she announces the naval destiny of the city and offers herself as helpmate on the ship. As Marco Gratico promises to nail the temptress to the prow in the guise of a figurehead, she casts herself upon the fire of the heathen altar, as an offering to the goddess of naval victory, and the ship is launched amidst the benedictions of the throng and choristers. : So ends what ‘the author call “An Adri- atic Tragedy.”’ It is the first time that D'Annunzio has essayed a public theme, though the sgsu- preme value of the Latin spirit is cele- brated in many of his works. Into his new matter he has carried over the spectacular, or panoramic, methods, that were both the strength and the weakness of “Paolo and Francesca.”’ In a subject that fairly chal- lenges comparison with “Julius Cesar’ and “Antony and Cleopatra,’”’ he reveals rather little dramatic resourcefulness. The real conflict lies not between the main charac- ters, but between the Latin and Byzantine factions speaking through the choruses; and real suspense there is none, for the victory of Rome is foregone. Only Basiliola has real existence. On the other hand, her baleful power to enthrall is asserted by highly arbitrary devices. The lust which crowds always feel for her seems based on a false psychology. It is doubtful if stern preoccupation with public affairs, which is always present, admits of such ready con- version into private concupiscence. Still Basiliola is an extraordinary, and eminently characteristic creation. She is more than an avenger, more than a seductress, more than a tool of Byzantium. She is Byzan- tium, conceived solely in the light of its monstrous depravity and soulless might. The play could have been called “Byzantium Repulsed.” It is a defect of the tragedy that nobody embodies with equal clearness the Roman spirit. Surely not the Deaconess Ema, the champion of the Latin Church in Venice, who barely appears; surely not her son Marco Gratico, a waverer who follows the last temptation or the last command. The ideas that are comprised in a Cesar, Antony, Brutus, Cassius, are singularly vague in this tragedy, and one will hardly accept the battling hemistichs and strophes of the choruses as a substitute for real drama. As represented on the stage, the shooting of the prisoners is said to be both disgust- ing and tedious, and the self-immolation of Basiliola ineffective. We can readily be- lieve it. Even D’Annunzio’s diseased im- agination has never asserted itself more revoltingly than in the first episode, and one should recall that this pleasing con- fection of blood and lust is after all hors d’euvre serving merely to underline what is elsewhere perceived in Basiliola. A gra- tuitous experiment in obscenity, none the less real because scenically veiled, a sacri- fice of a character to the symbolism of Byzantium, whatever the reason, the scene of the Fossa Fuia should never have been written. Again the orgy is chiefly an ex- hibition of Basiliola, serving no dramatic end. At the close of an act almost as re- volting for lust as its predecessor for | blood, the heretical bishop is slain in a quite casual duel. Unless we are to give full credit to a symbolism imperfectly realized, unless we yield our enthusiasm unreservedly to what may be regarded as a great naval tract, we shall feel that D’Annunzio’s “The Ship” merely reveals once more his highly tropi- cal talent in a familiar phase. If Byzan- tism is as he depicts it a blend of lechery, bloodthirstiness, and unintellectualized power, Byzantine is the epithet that suits
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184 , The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 much of D’Annunzio’s only literary achieve- ment. The play is gorgeous as description and notable as poetry. Like “Paolo and Francesca,” it gives most vivid pictures of a civilization. It is perhaps worth noticing that the voluminous stage directions are, as usual, quite as elaborately wrought as the verse itself. He claims for the drama all the discussive advantages of the romance. And this suggests that the capacity for dra- matic inference is possibly as feeble in the author as he believes it to be in his readers. As a literary drama the work has re- markable merit. The poetry conceals many of the weaknesses of construction. A mist of passion seems to enwrap the action. For such illusion the poet must have praise. At bottom the piece shares many of the qualities and defects of Flaubert’s “Salammbé.”’ An awful theme is coldly im- agined, the fancy is deliberately flogged to the verge of insane hallucination, and a magnificent rhetoric offers itself'as a sub- stitute for the more spontaneous and dur- able traits of genuine invention. Of the “Shakespeare’s England” section of The Shakespeare Library (Duffield & Co.), under the general editorship of I. Gol- lancz, we have before us three volumes con- taining “Robert Laneham’s Letter,” edit- ed by F. J. Furnivall; “The Rogues and Vagabonds of Shakespeare’s Youth” (Awde- ley’s “‘Fraternitye of Vacabondes” and Har- man’s “Caveat’’), edited by Edward Viles and F. J. Furnivall; and ‘“Shakespeare’s Holinshed,” by W. G. Bosweil-Stone. All three of these books have done good ser- vice in Shakespearean study, but it seems hardly fair to the public that neither the prospectus nor the volumes themselves, ex- cept the first, should contain any intIma- tion that we have here merely unchanged reprints of works that were published many years ago—the earliest of them nearly forty years ago. A couple of pages of random notes by R. B. McKerrow have been pre- fixed to “Robert Laneham’s Letter,” but otherwise the volumes appear in their original forms without addition or altera- tion, either in text or editorial comment. The works in question are, of course, ren- dered more accessible now through these reprints; it is a pity, however, that no at. tempt has been made to bring the new editions up to date. Edward Vroom, the American actor and playwright, who was for several seasons a member of the Booth-Barrett and Booth- Mcdjeska crganizations, and who later tour- ed the country in his own versions of “Don Cesar de Bazan,” Victor Hugo’s “Ruy Blas,” and other plays, will soon return to the New York stage. This will be Mr. Vroom’s first appearance here as an actor since his admirable production of Francois Coppée’s “For the Crown” at Wallack’s Theatre, ten years ago. Since that time he has been in England, where he has won success as an author and as leading actor in Drury Lane Theatre, London, and in the provinces. Mr. Vroom i« a romantic actor of notable skill, grace, and power, as well 4s a thoroughly capable stage manager. The new comedy which Henry James has written for Forbes Robertson will be pro- duced in Edinburgh in March. Music. Club Programs from All Nations. Boston: Oliver Ditson Music By Arthur Elson. Co. $1.25. The Opera. By R. A. Streatfeild. Phila- delphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.25 net. Mr. Elson’s latest book subserves a prac- tical purpose, being described on the title- page as “an historic outline of each nation- al school of music, with questions for study, and a series of programs for the use of clubs and other organizations.” Such a book, undoubtedly, has been a desideratum. This country contains a large number of women’s clubs which arrange concerts every winter. A favorite plan is to have eve- nings devoted to one composer or a particu- lar school of music. Mr. Elson has evidently noted this disposition. and his book gives just what those who plan and carry out such entertainments need. The first chapter, for instance, devoted to Classical Germany, gives brief sketches of Handel, Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. These are followed by specimen pro- grammes for each composer, samples be- ing offered of three grades: easy, medium, and difficult. Then come similar chapters on Romantic and Modern Germany, France, Italy, England, The Netherlands, Norway. Sweden and Finland, Denmark and Switzer- land, Bohemia, Hungary and Poland, Rus- sia, America. Excellent judgment is shown in the choice of pieces. Mr. Elson’s book might also be used as a brief sketch of the history of concert music, beginning with the eighteenth century, which, with the nineteenth, produced nearly everything that has survived in concert halls. Mr. El- son would perform a useful service if he issued as a sequel a volume devoted to the history of concerts, doing for Europe and America what Hanslick did for Vienna in his “Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien.” While Mr. Elson confines himself to con- cert music. Mr. Streatfeild’s book is en- titled ‘“‘a sketch of the development of op- era, with full descriptions of all works in the modern repertory.” The first edition of this serviceable work appeared in 1897; the present, the third, is carefully revised, and enlarged from 336 to 359 pages. In the first edition the reader will look in vain for accounts of some operas now much in vogue, such as Puccini's “Tosca” and ‘“‘Ma- dama Butterfly,"” Charpentier’s “Louise,” Strauss’s “‘Salome,’’ Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”’; these and other novelties are now fully described. The author, unfor- tunately, omitted a résumé of the inter- polations, thus missing a chance for an in- teresting glimpse of the operatic history of a decade. D’Albert’s successful ‘‘Tiefland”’ escaped his vision. Mr. Streatfeild’s volume is prefaced by a long and interesting introduction from the pen of Fuller Maitland, who pays the au- thor the deserved compliment of saying that he has written the book “with a rare and delightful absence of prejudice.” This is exemplified in the remarks on “Pelléas et Mélisande.” While granting that Debus- sy has wilfully abjured melody of any ac- cepted kind and harmony conforming to any established tradition, Mr. Streatfeild maintains that the effect of the music is “singularly striking and persuasive,” and that the composer “deserves the credit of striking a note entirely new to the his- tory of music.’"’ The most laudable thing about this volume, however, is the com- bination of clearness and conciseness in the telling of operatic plots—not an easy feat to perform in view of the extraordi- nary obscurity of many of these stories, especially in the older Italian operas. Even “Il Trovatore” has no terrors for Mr. Streatfeild. Partly because of the lack of competent opera singers, it has become customary in many of our cities at the spring music fes- tivals to give such operas as “Carmen,” “Faust,” and Lohengrin” in concert form, without scenery, costumes, and action. Both Seidl and Damrosch produced Wagner's “Parsifal” in concert form before Conried bad the temerity to horrify Bayreuth by staging it. London is soon to hear Strauss’s “Salome” in a concert hall, because as an opera it is not permitted. Somewhat dif- ferent is the case of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” which Walter Damrosch has just produced at Carnegie Hall. As an opera it has failed everywhere, except in Russia, where it is very popular; yet there is much beautiful music in it, which the audi- ence was glad to hear in the concert hall, since our opera houses have persistently ignored it. It was well sung and played, too; yet one could not but feel that it would have been wiser for Mr. Damrosch to select only the best numbers, and not to try to follow the plot. There are many other operas, some of them favorites of our fathers, but now obsolete, which contain several numbers each that might be re- vived to the delight of concert-gcers. The New York Symphony Society will produce a new work by an American com- poser at the twelfth Sunday afternoon con- cert, February 9, at Carnegie Hall. This composition is Ernest Schelling’s “‘Fantas- tic Suite’ for piano and orchestra, which he composed in 1905-1906. Mr. Schelling will perform the piano part of his suite. Art. * THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE. The twenty-third exhibition of the Ar- chitectural League of New York is well worth seeing, as a record of what is being done in architecture, decorative painting, sculpture, and landscape work. With the painter or the sculptor, the presentation of his subject is a comparatively simple mat- ter, for what he shows is virtually, if not actually, his finished product; but for the architect, as for the landscapist, the exhibit must necessarily be conventionalized to be brought indoors. Now, since the public understands the architect better when his design is shown in color, with the acces- sories of topography, vegetation, and ani- mal life, which add interest and are an index of scale, and since it is chiefly for the lay public that these exhibitions are held, each successive year shows a greater va- riety and skill in method of expression. The drawings are no longer rendered in simple black and white, with here and there a touch of color, but many are specially pre- pared by skilled artists. Interspersed are PA TT
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a Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 135 numerous photographs of completed build- ings or of interesting details, supplemented by models in plaster, and panels in stone. In one respect the Exhibition Committee has displayed questionable judgment. At the northerly end of the entrance corridor are the three largest rooms, the two fur- ther rooms communicating by short flights of steps. In the centre of the middle room is a fountain around which the Committee has placed eight Ionic columns, coupled in pairs by an interrupted architrave. If the pergola were a novelty, or if this one were of remarkable beauty, the congestion of the thoroughfare of the smallest room might be justifiable; but, aside from these objec- tions, the columns interfere with the com- plete view of the principal exhibit of the Vanderbilt gallery. This is a canvas, 8 by 14 feet. The Attributes of the Arts, by Albert Herter—an artist of unquestioned ability. Pegasus stands on the left with Genius and Experience; in the centre kneels Inspiration, a youth holding aloft a torch; on the right are Truth, Beauty, Strength, and Abundance; the background fs an Ital- ian landscape of cliff and castle, sea and sky, the entire conception classic. But the charm of color—a perfect riot of color—the elaboration of the figured draperies, the poetic imagery, are seriously impaired by the suggestion of semi-conscious nakedness of the undraped figures, a suggestion em- phasized by the beautiful clothing of the others. In the surroundings of this canvas the committee has shown much consideration; for framed in by garlands, it is capped with a sculptured pediment of some importance by Karl Bitter, and all other color has been relegated to the east, south, and west walls of that gallery. The corners are punctuated with sculpture in low relief; the memorial tablet of Dr. Thurston, for Cornell Uni- versity, by H. A. McNeil, being worthy of more than passing notice. Near the op- posite corner is a group of photographs in brown, and among them one of a pic- turesque and delightful half-timbered coun- try house at Locust Valley, by Grosvenor Atterbury, and another at Ridgefield, Conn. Each design—especially the former—sug- gests a homely hospitality and a fitness to the surroundings that should delight both owner and architect. . At the opposite end of this gallery are several large drawings of those enigmas of American architecture—skyscrapers. But however ingenious, forcible, or impressive many of them may be; however picturesque, when seen from bridge or ferry, in their grouping or their isolation, at sunset with their myriad of twinkling lights; however successful as money-getters some of them undoubtedly are, we may yet ask how many individual skyscrapers there are in New York, or anywhere in America, which give genuine or permanent pleasure. Test any of them by the grateful memories of Pisa, Venice, or some of the hill towns of Italy, or the Gothic towns of France, and with little regret we can forget the skyscraper. One of the designs shows “the highest building in the world.” The drawing does not, however, convey the impression that this claim should be taken seriously; for, not accidentally, but purposely, the upper end of this huge shaft has been enlarged (not diminished) by convex curves in al- most every conceivable direction. The rendering of some of these drawings by Birch Burdett Long and Carlton T, Chap- man is so admirable, however, that the ex- hibition does not suffer so keenly as does the city of New York. Of recent years the New York Chapter of Architects has voted a medal to be awarded annually for the best building erected within the previous five years; and this year the Maryland In- stitute, at Baltimore, designed by Pell & Corbett, received that honor. This is a building suggestive of the Florentine pal- aces of the Strozzi, Riccardi, Rucellai. It is barely three stories in height (for the upper one is only an attic), dignified in its simplicity. This award would indicate that both designer and eritic are agreed that the architect has not yet solved the problem of the skyscraper except from the con- structive or commercial point of view, and that the artist has little genuine sympathy with megalomania. Among the more gratifying and encourag- ing exhibits may be mentioned the classic ” design of Carrére & Hastings for the Bor- den tomb in Woodlawn Cemetery; the in- teresting historical memorial indicated as the “Improvements on the Lincoln Farm, Hodgensville, Ky.,’’ by John Russell Pope; and the Orphan Asylum at Wallingford, Pa., by Delano & Aldrich. The last men- tioned does not advertise its cost, but ra- ther the excellent sense of proportion of some English work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the class of monumental and civic work there are Mr. Post’s design for the Wisconsin State Capitol, which shows an ingenious and clever plan, with entrances not only in each facade of a Greek cross, but within the reéntrant angles, the whole edifice crowned with an unusually success- ful dome; a public bath for the city of New York, big in scale and simple in de- sign; the Brooklyn Municipal building, also a fire house and amusement hall, by Lord & Hewlett; and a group of police stations, by S. B. Colt, Hunt & Hunt, and others. Of the designs for, and photographs of, churches and ecclesiastical edifices, the most serious are those presented by Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson; and the most impor- tant are their designs for St. Thomas's Church, which promise a notable example of modern Gothic work. In these studies in- spiration has been drawn from both Eng- lish and French sources; and notwithstand- ing the heaviness of the lowest section of the buttresses (which seem to resist a non- existent excess of thrust), the crowding of the facade by the largeness of the tower and the bigness of the main portal, the erection of such a churchly building will be a great gain to American ecclesiastical architecture. : This exhibition is exceptional in the num- ber of examples of good draughtsmanship. The crayon studies for a decoration in the College of the City of New York, by Blash- field, are worthy of many visits; for there is probably no living American artist whose productions are marked by greater refine- ment, conscientiousness, and sincere. sym- pathy with his work. The pencil sketches of Vernon Howe Bailey amply justify de- tailed examination. Among the studies for decorations are two photographs of figure groups by La Farge, though not the best work of that great colorist; and another of a small portion of Siddons Mowbray’s suc- Hals_ look cessful decoration of the library of the Uni- versity Club. Of plastic art there are many examples: statues, busts, reliefs, fountains, gro- tesques, vases, are everywhere. Of these the two groups, Jurisprudence and Com- merce, by French, are decidedly the most interesting. Though perhaps they are in- ferior in design to his Four Quarters of the World in front of the New York Custom House, they have great charm. In the single statues for the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, modelled by Herbert Adams, Kenyon Cox, John Gelert, Charles Kech, and others, with the general codper- ation and direction of French, far greater barmony and dignity has been attained than with similar sculpture in the Appellate Court or the Custom House. Two statues by Augustus Lukeman, for the Royal Bank at Montreal, and the modelled relief of the socle of the Thomas Memorial for Nash- ville, Tenn., by Enid Yandell, possess con- siderable merit. In the annual competitions inaugurated by the league, the gold medal was not awarded this year, but the silver medal for architecture was given to Herman Kahle, a student at Columbia University; the President’s prize, a bronze medal for mural painting, went to Hugo Ballin of New York City, with special mention to Anna T. Lang—heors concours because of her residence out of this city and non- membership in the league; the Henry O. Avery -prize of $50 to Charles Cary Ramsey of New York city. A special prize of $300 was awarded for the first time to Evelyn B. Longman, sculptor, Milton H. Bancroft, painter, and Henry Bacon, architect, for work in collaboration; the trio of Gertrude V. Whitney, sculptor, Hugo Ballin, painter, and Grovenor Atterbury, architect, were placed hors concours, for one of them is on the Committee of Award. WILLIAM MARTIN AIKEN. There is no department of “Art in Amer- ica” in the January Burlington Magazine, for the reason, apparently, that the matter that should have gone into that department has nearly filled the main part of the num- ber. This is an illustrated account of pic- tures and art treasures acquired by Mrs. Cc. P. Huntington and Archer M. Hunting- ton from the Kahn Collection. The five pictures acquired by Mrs. Huntington are all Flemish or Dutch: a Virgin and Child ascribed to Roger de la Pasture; a Scholar with a Bust of Homer, and a Hendrickje Stoffils by Rembrandt; and two portraits by Hals. Mr. Huntington's acquisitions are all Spanish; the Velasquez Portrait of a Lit- tle Girl, illustrated in the Burlington for last October; Cardinal Don Fernando Nino de Guerva, by Il Greco; and the bull-fighter Pedro Romero by Goya. The photogravure frontispiece after Rembrandt’s Scholar is the only reproduction of the seven that gives much notion of the quality claimed for the pictures, which are said to be of first rate importance. It is plainly superb, but the Hendrickje, as here presented, looks formless, while the two pictures by toneless. The Greco seems strange as to both drawing and values, but is a vivid piece of characterization. The Bull Fighter shows Goya at his sanest and best. Besides the pictures, there are ten pages of illustrations of furniture, vases,
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136 The Nation. [Vol. 86, No. 2223 etc., which are also a part of Mrs. Hunting- ton’s acquisition from the same collection. In the same number Dr. A. Koester writes of two recently discovered Greek statues: an ancient copy of Myron’s Discobolus, much finer than any copy previously known and a nearly uninjured Niobid of the fifth cent:ry B. c. The other illustrations are from Raeburn’s portrait of Mrs. Murchison, in the Museum of Budapest, and Lawrence's much cleverer but less genuinely attractive portrait of Mrs. Alnutt. Of the series known as Klassiker der Kunst in Gesamtausgaben, edited by G. Gronau, and published by the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart and Leipzig, the tenth volume has appeared, entitled “‘Cor- reggio, des Meisters Gemiilde in 196 Ab- bildungen”; and the eleventh volume, con- taining 277 reproductions of the works of Donatello. The “Dictionnaire du costume,” by Mau- rice Maindron and Maurice Leloir, is an expensive publication in numbers, making five volumes of 600 quarto pages each, with 5,000 engravings in the text and 300 inset plates, of which 200 are in colors. The Paris price is 500 francs, or 10 francs a number. It is the outcome of twenty-five years’ work on the part of the authors, and comprises clothes, armor, jewels, portable utensils, and fabrication and history. An effort has been made to reproduce unpub- lished objects existing in private collec- tions. Maindron’s historical romances, in which he shows himself an archwological Dumas, and his writings on armor guar- antee the text, while Leloir’s artistic re- productions are quite as favorably known. No photographer of paintings exceeds in skill Dominic Anderson of Rome, and none has ministered more intelligently to the needs of students. Accordingly we wel- come heartily the new alphabetical cata- logue of all his photographs—‘Catalogue général des reproductions photographiques publiées par D. Anderson” (Rome, 1907). The pamphlet runs to nearly three hundred pages. Paintings are listed alphabetically by authors; sculpture, architecture, and views alphabetically by places. The fre- quent difficulty of conflicting attributions is meét by a double entry, and—a convenient feature—the name of the critic responsible for the ascription is added in parenthesis. This sensible method may be studied in such debatable lists as Masaccio and Maso- lino. Space fails us to characterize this catalogue in detail. Suffice it to say that it includes the Prado virtually complete, while an examination of such items as Lorenzo Lotto, Pintoricchio, Tintoretto, will give an idea of its scope. Apart from its obvious uses it will serve as a finding list of first resort. We learn that Mr. Ander- son will soon publish paintings of the Na- tional Gallery, of the Cook Collection, Richmond, and drawings in the British Mu- seum. There is in progress also an édition de luxe of phototype reproductians af drawings by Goya in the Prado. The question of making breaches in the walls of Rome, to which allusion was made in the Nation of January 23, has taken a new development. The Syndic has been induced to inspect the walls and decide definitely on the advisability of any fur- ther demolition. As a result of this visit of inspection it has been settled that no more openings shall be made in the wall between the Porta Pinciana and the Porta Salaria; that the three arches in the Via Piemonte shall be left as they were; and that a new archway shall be made in place of the breach near the Porta Pinciana. The National Arts Club is holding an exhibition of work by contemporary paint- ers, to close February 15. Among the ex- hibitions at the dealers’ galleries in this city are paintings by Gari Melchers at Cottier & Co.'s, till February 21. David Johnson, the landscape painter, died January 31 at Walden, N. Y. He was born in 1827, and was one of the last sur- vivers of the “Hudson River School.” He was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1861, and in 1863 a member. He was winner of a medal at the Centennial Exposition in 1876. Finance. THE RECENT BANK SUSPENSIONS. At the close of last December, the comp- troller of the currency said: From October 20 to December 30, 1907, there have been but sixteen suspensions or failures of national banks. Of these, two have resumed, and several more should do so in the very near future. Contrast this with the panic of 1893, when 160 national banks failed and of these fifty-four were never reopened. This was encouraging. But in New York city, where practically no bank failure occurred in 1893 as a result of panic, the suspensions in October of one national bank, four trust companies, and six State banks, has within a few days been supple- mented by the failure of two national and two State banks. The National Bank of North America, which closed its doors last week Monday; the National Bank of New Amsterdam and the Mechanics and Traders’ Bank, which failed to reopen Thursday; and the Oriental Bank, which was closed by the State banking superin- tendent Friday, were not important insti- tutions. The four of them had only $5,750,- 000 capital; their joint deposit fund, even before the October panic, was only $35,- 700,000, and was barely half of that sum when they suspended. Nevertheless, the fact of the suspension remains, and em- phasizes the contrast between 1893 and 1907, in the banking mortality of New York city and the rest of the country. What is the meaning of it? In recent years, many New York banks have fallen under the control of an auda- cious coterie of speculating capitalists, one of whom, a few years ago, practically owned five national and four State banks of this city. The modus operandi was to buy shares in one bank, pledge them with another bank for a loan, use the proceeds to buy shares in yet another bank, and so on. It was a remarkably inexpensive operation at the outset; and it was used, as might be supposed, to obtain access to funds for the personal ventures of the ingenious promoters. In October, eight banks and at least two trust companies were dominated by this group. But when the loan account of moderate-sized banking institutions was crowded with the collater- al of these speculators, the managers of the banks found a great difference between breasting the waves on the crest of a fin- ancial and industrial “‘boom,” and keeping afloat in a time of panic. It was connec- tions of this sort, direct or indirect, in the past, which brought about the latest fail- ures. The reason why the banks survived the panics, was that the other banks of the Clearing House kept them afloat by loan certificates; and that so long as re- striction of cash payments to depositors prevailed, no “run” could bring the crisis. But resumption of cash payments furnish- ed the test The banks could notstand alone, and the Clearing House Committee reason- ed that, continuing assistance, when the panic and hoarding mania no longer ex- isted, would simply encourage new deposi- tors to entrust their money to shaking con- cerns. These four bank suspensions throw a. singular light on the plea for the guaran- tee of bank deposits, by the government or by all the other banks combined. It is not difficult to imagine the enormous advan- tage which such a law would have confer- red on the “chain bankers.’”’ The one ser- ious obstacle in their way, which ended in their overthrow as an influence in the New York banking community, Was the distrust of their schemes by depositors. Had these depositors been guaranteed against any possible loss, the “chain bankers” would quite possibly have been in the saddle to- day, pursuing their personal schemes with depositors’ money. “The Finances of Cleveland,” by Charles C. Williamson (Columbia University Press, The Macmillan Company, agents), is a care- ful study in municipal finance. After con- sidering the organization of the govern- ment and the methods of financial adminis- tration, Mr. Williamson treats in ample de- tail the revenues, expenditures, industries, Financial. Better Than Real Estate Mortgages 5% to 72% NET INCOME Can be realized on well secured Short- Time Bonds and Notes of Railroad and Industrial Corporations. We also recommend New York City Bonds. Send for lists of these Bonds quoted daily by this office for the New York Evening Post. JUDSON G. WALL 10 Wall Street, New York Letters Buy and sell bills of exchange and make ca- ble transfers of money on all foreign points ; also make collections, and issue Commercial and Travellers’ Credits available in all parts of Credit = s.s: International Cheques. Deposit. . BROWN BROTHERS & CO. No. 5° Wall Street, New York Certificates of
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Feb. 6, 1908] The Nation. 137 and debt of the city. The story is not dif- ferent from that of the majority of our larger cities. Expenditures and debts have steadily increased, rapidly at some times— as between 1865 and 1875—and more slowly at others; industries have been conducted in unbusinesslike fashion, but with marked improvement in recent years; and, in gen- eral, the city has clung to imperfect and antiquated methods which would have bank- rupted any business corporation in short order. The chief defect in the monograph is that the author nowhere undertakes comprehensive discussion and criticigm of the entire financial policy pursued in each period of the city’s history. We learn in one chapter that expenses have increased; in another we find an account of the rev- enue system; in still another we come to the history of the city’s debt. But we are left to discover for ourselves the natural divisions in the financial history of Cleve- land, and to piece out, as best we can, our own account of the financial policies of each period. The author has devoted much labor to the details of a problem, but has nowhere grasped the problem itself in its entirety. BOOKS OF THE WEEK. American Waterways. Philadelphia: Acad- emy of Political and Social Science. Brown, Horatio. Studies in the History of Venice. 2 vols. Dutton. $6 net. Butterfield, Kenyon L. Chapters in Rural Progress. University of Chicago Press. $1 net. Cecil, Mrs. Evelyn. London Parks and Gardens. Dutton. $6 net. Cody, Grace Ethelwyn. Jacquette, A. Soro- rity Girl. Duffield & Co. $1.25 Denison, T. S. Nauatl or Mexican in Aryan Phonology. Chicago: published by the au- thor. Dick Donovan. (J. E. Preston Pages from an Adventurous Life. ell Kennerley. $5. Dodd, William E. Jefferson Davis. Phila- delphia: Jacobs & C. $1.25 net. Doran, Beverley. The Breath of the Moun- Muddock). Mitch- tains. Boston: Badger. Doughty, Charles M. Wanderings in Arabia. 2 vols. London: Duckworth & Co. Fogazzaro, Antonio. The Politician. Bos- ton: Luce & Co. Gardner, Edmund G. Saint Catherine of Siena. Dutton. $4 net. Guyot, Yves. La Démocratie Individualiste. Paris: Giard & Briére. Hay, Alfred. Continuous Current Engi- neering. I). Van Nostrand Co. $2.50 net. Hauptmann, Gerhart. Kaiser Karls Geisel. Lemcke & Buechner. Hinds, William Alfred. munities and Coéperative Colonies. cago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. Houston, Edwin J. The Boy Geologist. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Co. $1. Jewish Historical Society, Publications of the American. No. 16. Published by the Society. Johnson, Henry. Joseph Wiggins. Jones, Francis Arthur. American Com- Chi- The Life and Voyages of Dutton. $5 net. Thomas Alva Edi- e Mencken, Henry L. The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Boston: Luce & Co. ‘National Civic Federation; Proceedings of the National Conference on Trusts and Combinations, 1907. Published by the Federaticn. Neihardt, John G. A Bundle of Myrrh. Outing Publishing Co. Osborn, Henry Fairfield. Evolution of Mammalian Molar Teeth. Macmillan. Oldmeadow, Ernest. Virginie. The Mc- Clure Co. Orchard, Harry, The Confessions and Autobiography of. The McClure Co. Padon, Ella F. In Charge of the Consul. Boston: Badger. Paget, Francis. Introduction to the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Treatise of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Henry Frowde. Percy, Frances Percy. An Illuminated Way. Boston: Badger. Preuss, Arthur. Fundamental Fallacy of Socialism. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1. Ramsay, W. M. The Cities of St. Paul. A. C. Armstrong & Son. $3 net. Ricker, N. Clifford. A Study of Roof Trusses. Urbana: University of Illinois. Roscoe, H. E. and C. Schorlemmer. A Treatise -on Chemistry. Vol. II.: The Metals. Macmillan. $7.50 net. Rosenkrantz, Palle. The Magistrate’s Own Case. McClure Co. Sainsbury, Ethel Bruce. Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1635-1639. Hen- ry Frowde. $4.15. Scott, E. F. The Apologetic of the New Testament. Putnams. $1.50 net. Smith, Robinson. English Quotations. Dutton. $2.50 net. Toffteen, Olaf A. Researches in Assyrian and Babylonian Geography. Part I. Uni- versity of Chicago Press. Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor. Dr. Ellen. Ba- Ball, Margaret. Sir Walter Scott. Mac- son. Crowell. $2 net. ker & Taylor Co. $1.50. millan. $1 net. Keane, A. H. The World’s Peoples. Put- | Vaughan, Carrie B. Out of the Depths. Bleackley, Horace. The Story of a Beau- nams. $2 net. Boston: Badger.. tiful Duchess. Dutton. $5 net. Lake, Kirsopp. The Historical Evidence | Waterfield, Margaret. Flower Grouping in Bohannan, William J. H. Nephilim. Reeve for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. English, Scotch, and Irish Gardens. Dut- A. Silk. Putnams. $1.50 net. ton. $6 net. Bossuet’s Oraisons Funébres. Les Classiques | Loshe, Lillie Deming. The Early American | Williams, R. H. With the Border Ruf- Francais. Putnams. $1 net. Novel. Macmillan. $1 net. fians. Dutton. $4 net. | . A NEW DE MORGAN NOVEL mC ) NOW READY ~The King Over the Water Somehow Good By the author of “Joseph Vance”’ and “Alice-for-Short”’ The hero, during a complete suspen- sion of memory and loss of identity, accidentally finds a strange shelter. This situation, when met, seems” very simple, but the developments are far from simple, and form a story of com- plicated motives and experiences which holds the reader closely. An almost grown-up daughter, igno- rant of the situation, heightens the ten- sion of th: plot, and furnishes her share of two charming stories of young love. ‘Somehow Good" is, in the un ni- mous opinion of the publishers’ readers, an advance upon anything of Mr. De Morgan's yet published. 565 pp. $1.75. 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