almost alone has
preserved for us the very form and pressure,
we are immeasurably in his debt. There are
few things that we know as well as what it was
to be a boy in a Missouri country town, a futile
skirmisher in the early days of the Civil War,
and a traveller on the lower Mississippi, few


306
[May 1,
THE DIAI,
bygone types that are as real to us as the miners
and stage-coach drivers and politicians and bar-
room loaf era of the untutored West of the mid-
century. The writings in which these things have
been preserved for us are Mark Twain's best, be-
cause they are his raciest and least self-conscious.
The next best group of his books is provided
by "The Innocents Abroad," "A Tramp
Abroad," and "Following the Equator," the
three extensive records of unconventional travel.
Yet in these the touch of sophistication is seen,
and becomes progressively pronounced with each
succeeding narrative. The second is not as
good as the first, and the third is distinctly
weaker than the second, more artificial in its
conception and more forced in its humor. When
the author transplanted himself to the East for
permanent residence in the seventies, he aban-
doned the primal sources of his inspiration, and
never developed others of comparable import-
ance. Going farther and farther afield in search
of fresh material, he illustrated anew the myth
of Antaeus, and displayed a pitiable weakness.
Over some of his later flounderings in the alien
elements of literary criticism, history, and met-
aphysics, it were best discreetly to draw a veil.
There was in him a streak of the Philistine
which might have remained undetected had he
"kept to his last," but which was sharply
revealed when he infringed upon the domain of
intellectual and scholarly concerns.
The present is not, however, the best occasion
for dwelling upon Mark Twain's limitations, or
for emphasizing the ephemeral character of a
considerable part of his work. A fair share of
that work, at least, stands upon a level so high
as to be in no danger of passing out of sight.
Up to an advanced point in his career, he grew
steadily in power and wisdom; his sympathies
became ever broader and deeper, and his expres-
sive faculty kept pace with the larger demands
that were made upon it. From the exuberant
journalist who gave us entertainment in his
earlier days he developed into something like a
sage to whom we came to look no less for counsel
than for amusement. We learned to detect in
his homely speech the movings of a fine spirit,
instinct with the nobler promptings of democ-
racy, hating shams and ostentatious vulgarity,
gentle and gracious in its quieter moods, but
fanned to burning indignation when facing some
monstrous wickedness, such as the corruption
of our political life, or the dastardly act of the
American soldier in the Philippines who be-
trayed his rescuer and shamelessly boasted of
the shameful deed, or the infamy of the royal
libertine who distilled a fortune from the blood
of the miserable natives of the Congo. Even
more than by his strictly literary work, he
earned our gratitude for the brave words which
he spoke upon such themes as these, words that
cleared the moral atmosphere and made us see
things in the light of naked truth.
Nor should we, in our tribute to the man,
forget the silent heroism with which he endured
loss of fortune in his advancing years, and
shouldered the burden of a debt incurred by the
rascality of his associates, a debt for which he
was only indirectly responsible, and which he
might have evaded without serious impairment
of his reputation. The strenuous labors of the
years of lecturing and writing which enabled
him to discharge in full the shadowy obligations
which he then assumed took their toll of his
vitality, but won for him an esteem higher than
is ever the reward of the artist alone. This
action ranks with the similar examples set by
Scott and Curtis; it is one of those shining
deeds that reveal the man himself, in contradis-
tinction to the works by which most men of
creative genius are contented to be known.
The attitude of criticism toward Mark Twain
as a writer has undergone a slow but complete
change during the past thirty years. From
being thought of simply as a "funny man," of
the kin of Josh Billings and Artemus Ward, he
has gradually come to be recognized as one of
our foremost men of letters. This is a pro-
foundly significant transformation of opinion,
and to account for it fully would require a more
careful analysis than we here have space to
undertake. The recognition has been unduly
delayed, partly because so much of his output
has been utterly unworthy of his best self, and
partly because his work in its totality is of so
nondescript a character. The conventional way
to distinction in literature is by the fourfold
path of the poem, the play, the novel, and the
essay. Occasionally, also, an historian compels
literary recognition. But Mark Twain was
neither a poet nor a playwright nor an historian.
He was hardly a novelist, either, for his share
in " The Gilded Age " does not seriously count,
and his work in the form of fiction is not
remarkable as story-telling pure and simple. If
we are to group him at all, it must be with the
essayists, using that term elastically enough to
include with him our own Irving, and such
Englishmen as Swift and Carlyle. We must
either do this, or fall back upon the sui generis
solution of the problem. Again, if we make a
subdivision of the essayist class forthe humor-


1910.]
307
THE DIA1,
ists alone, we encounter the difficulty offered by
our obstinate association of that terra with mere
fun-making and the appeal to the lighter inter-
ests of human nature. Obviously, our subdi-
vision must take yet another step, and admit
that, on the one hand, there are humorists who
make us laugh and have hardly any other
influence over us, and humorists who are also
creative artists, and critics of life in the deeper
sense, and social philosophers whose judgments
are of weight and import. If we are to classify
Mark Twain at all, it must be with the latter
distinguished company ; and his title to kinship
with the three English writers above mentioned,
and even with such alien prototypes as Aristo-
phanes and Rabelais and Cervantes, is at least
not scornfully to be put aside.
BJORNSTJERNE BJORNSON.
The survivor of the Norwegian Dioscuri — if a
classical similitude he permissible in the case of two
such sturdy Goths as Ibsen and BjOrnson— closed
his eyes in Paris on the 26th of April. His death-
bed was surrounded by the members of his family,
and he passed peacefully away after an illness of
many months. A less vigorous frame would not
have gone through the crisis of last February,
when his death was hourly expected. At that time,
the critical journals of the world (The Dial
included) paid their respects to his tame, and he
had the unusual experience of living to read (if he
cared for such entertainment) an extensive collection
of what were, to all intents and purposes, his obitu-
ary tributes. His life was continued well along into
his seventy-eighth year; and few lives have been
so worthily lived, or made so helpful to human
kind. His nation ( become a nation largely through
his efforts) mourns him as it mourned Ibsen, but
with a difference; for he inspired love in no less
measure than respect, and was a national figure in
a deeper and more intimate sense than was ever his
famous compeer. And the world mourns with
Norway, for he has been a figure of cosmopolitan
significance since that time in the seventies when
his outlook became broadened, and he plunged into
the main current of the stream of modern thought.
Politics, sociology, science, education, and religion,
have all been enriched by his activities and his
intuitions. Yet it is probably as the singer of the
people's songs, and as the artist who portrayed their
simple lives and vivified their heroic and legendary
past, that his fame will chiefly endure. Other ages
will have new problems to face, and new prophets
will arise to give guidance for their solution; but
the poet of "Ja, vi elsker" and "Over de Hoje
Fjelde," the creator of "SynnOve Solbakken" and
"Arne," the restorer of Sigurd Slembe and Olaf
the Holy, is reasonably sure of immortality.
THE INTERREGNUM IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE.
"Authors, do not read your contemporaries," was
the sage advice of Matthew Arnold. Authors, do
not write about your contemporaries, is perhaps a
better counsel, and one which I have tried to follow.
I used to read my contemporaries religiously, — and
I ought to have had a pension for my efforts in this
line. But I did not think I could serve them or the
public by criticising them, and for a good while I
have busied myself with the things which I know
are abiding.
But even to one who sports his oak to the present,
a great silence outside may become audible, a great
vacancy may make itself felt. I suppose everyone
is agreed that we have in literature no recognized
kings or princes of the blood, no glittering court
which fixes all eyes. And that we had such regali-
ties in the past, powers that were potent in their own
day, is also recognized. What has come over us?
The late Thomas Bailey Aldrich, master of a
magic flute, said, in a letter dated in 1891, that for
the next twenty years poetry was going to have a
hard time in America. Never was there a truer
prophecy. But why?
The commonly received explanation is the materi-
alism of the age, which in turn is due to the great
advances in the physical sciences and to the enormous
increase in wealth. Such explanation leaves me
unconvinced. Mankind is always, in the main,
material—is chiefly concerned with getting a living
and having a good time. And other ages have
equalled ours in scientific discovery, and, propor-
tionally, in wealth. No recent material discovery is
on the same plane with the finding of America and
the establishment of the rotundity of the earth. No
late scientific hypothesis equals the Copernican
theory or the law of gravitation. No modern inven-
tion is so far-reaching in consequences as the inven-
tions of printing, of the mariner's compass, or of
gunpowder. And in the ages which saw these marvel-
lous developments of science and discovery, religion
and imagination, literature and art creation, walked
abreast of the other activities of man. People did
not stop going to church, or singing love or festal
songs, or recounting the heroic legends of their race,
because of Columbus or Galileo or Guttenberg, or
Newton. If anything, the achievements of these
men stimulated the mind of the world.
There is perhaps more plausibility in the wealth
theory. Wealth, really, only respects wealth; and
intellect, really, only respects intellect. The person-
ages of the two camps do not come together very well.
And of late the masses, dazzled by money and its
uses, have weakened in fealty to intellect and turned
their whole worship to the Golden Calf. But rich
men have often stood by literature and art. The
traditions of the English aristocracy, for instance,
have always been to foster these—to the extent, at
least, of buying books and objects of art. And rich
nations have often gone art mad. The Athenians


308
[May 1,
did not become an art people until they acquired
the spoils of the Persian War — until they won the
gardens of the Cyclades, the commerce of the
Mediterranean. No,—nations like individuals must
be born with certain faculties or tendencies. "What
is the best way to become beautiful?" asked a young
girl of her doctor. "Well, my dear, the best way
I know is to be born pretty." Perhaps America
was behind the door when the fatal gift of beauty
was given out.
But these are large considerations, and may be
tossed about in a good many ways. It is better to
come down to the actually appraisable tendencies
and influences that have made for what at least
seems to be a period of comparative dulness and
poverty in American literature.
The preaching and practice of the dogmas of
realism may account for some part of our weakness.
I have never been able to attach much importance
to the fanciful labels of classic, romantic, realistic,
symbolic, and the like, which writers give them-
selves and fight for. There is a real distinction
between the different forms of literature, between
tragedy and comedy, the novel and the play, narra-
tive and lyric poetry. But all literature is based on
human nature, on the spectacle of the world, on the
thoughts and dreams of men. The reports of these
things differ according to the talents of the authors,
but not by any set formulas. The Agamemnon is
just as real as the last novel founded on the same
theme of the unfaithful wife. So while our doctri-
naires have filled our ears with the fury of their
words, I do not believe they have done much harm
beyond withdrawing writers too much from what
Rossetti called " fundamental brain-work " and mak-
ing them trust too much to observation. Miss Ellen
Terry, in her Autobiography, says that when she
first played Ophelia she went to the madhouse for
models. But she found that she had to imagine first
and observe afterwards. That, I judge, is really the
law of all art. You must know what you want to do,
and then take from nature the materials for doing it.
A more important cause for our comparative
failure in pure literature is the American appetite
for the didactic. Other and perhaps sounder nations
are content to take part of their instruction in life
from art, to absorb it from the examples in great
literature. But with us nothing will do but the
direct hortatory word. Dean Swift left his money
to the Irish people to found a madhouse,—
"To prove by one satirio touch
No nation needed it so much."
Possibly American authors have expended the
exchequer of their intellects on the didactic, for a
similar reason. Everyone preaches in America —
our Presidents, the presidents of our colleges, maga-
zine editors, and so on down the line. No wonder
the clergy are overslaughed. They don't get half
a chance. The word is taken from their mouths.
Now the critic would be a fool indeed who would
decry the province and power of the didactic in
literature, or deny the nobility and usefulness of
the works it has brought forth. Two poets so
important and opposed as Pope and Wordsworth
are liege subjects of the Lord of Didacticism. And
our own Emerson holds his titles from the same
hand. To me it seems, however, that all these men
are takers of second prizes. In pure literature,
didacticism should be the sauce, not the piece de
resistance. The business of literature of the central
type is to depict life — life real, great, grotesque,
charming, ridiculous; life ideal, noble, and beautiful.
And an overplus of moralizing spoils both the truth
and beauty of the picture. Men of letters can afford
to leave the direct preaching and enforcement of
morals to the clergy, who are trained and paid to do
such work.
If Beauty is the beginning of literature, tragedy
is its culmination. It is certain that we do not love
tragedy to-day in America. We put it aside as
something black and unpleasant and intruding, like
cockroaches or the cimex lectutarius. That we had
the feeling for it, the stern joy in it, in the past, is
also sure. We read and applauded our great writers
who explored the heights and abysses of human
nature, who faced all the horrors and deaths of
spirit and body, and rose above them, winged, ex-
alted, victorious. As long as we refuse to deal with
such losses and gains of life, we doom our literature
to mediocrity.
Some of our critics explain our deficiency in great-
ness by the irreverence of our minds, by the lowness
and vulgarity of our humor. Now I do not think
our humor is irreverent enough or low enough or
vulgar enough for that. Perhaps our humorists have
not got it in them; but more probably they, like Dr.
Holmes, do not dare to be as funny as they can.
Public opinion compels them to be decent- Wit
can be as genteel as it pleases; but great humor —
the world-upsetting kind — can hardly exist with-
out grossness. It is the foil to the noble side of
life, and what is the use of a foil which tries to
look as much as possible like its principal. Matthew
Arnold, Puritan and precisian as he really was, has
some coarse though not gross scenes in his Friend-
ship's Garland — and his whole heart went out in
critical approval of Burns's " Jolly Beggars " and the
bestialities of Faust and Aristophanes. He knew
what literature was, and always declined to accept
dishwater or weak tea as efficient substitutes. Of our
own men, Irving in the past was not afraid to be low.
Of course all the great humorists of the world—Aris-
tophanes, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Rabelais, Moliere,
Shakespeare, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, Burns,
Goethe, and Heine — have been utterly contemptuous
of decency and the proprieties when they wanted to
give the reality of the animal side of human life.
The magazines, — taking them in full — have
done a good deal to depress the vitality and destroy
the originality of our recent literature. A novel
writer has his direct appeal to the public, but for
the poet, essayist, or short-story writer, the maga-
zine has been the only path of access. This has
placed a great power and responsibility in the edi-


THE DIAL.
309
tor's hands. But for the most part these miscellanies
are commercial undertakings. To pay, they must
appeal to a wide public; and to reach this public
they must give it what it understands and can appre-
ciate. There must therefore be an inevitable level-
ling down that there may be some uplift. I have no
doubt that the editors do their best to reconcile lit-
erature with an appeal to the masses. But their
best, a little way off, does not loom large. I remem-
ber once being shut up alone in a house with a com-
plete set of one of our oldest and most respected
magazines. It was in a little inn on the top of Mount
Mansfield; and for several days the fog hung over
the mountain, so that I could not get about. Never
mind, I thought, there is solace within! But as I
turned over volume after volume of the magazine,
and realized the mediocrity of the verses, the dul-
ness of the essays, the tameness of the domesticated
variety of the short-story, my soul grew dark within
me, and I took my chances in the fog outside.
The late Charles A. Dana is reported to have said
that he edited the New York "Sun" for an audi-
ence which was thirteen years old. Now my last
indictment of our lateliterature is that it has been
edited for women, who have been its main readers.
Women, like the pretty realism which reproduces
the everyday facts of their lives. With their practical
instincts and craving for authority, they approve of
didacticism, which seems to them plain good-sense.
Although playful and witty, they have no great turn
for humor, and coarseness disgusts them. They are in
themselves the best exponents of Beauty, but they are
by no manner of means the Beauty worshippers that
men are. Their plastic sense is naturally weak, and
hardly extends beyond an appreciation of pretty gew-
gaws; so that the form, color, picture, music of verse
makes little appeal to them. What they demand in
poetry is sentiment and emotion. Tragedy hurts
them; it was the women who fainted when the
Eumenides of vEschylus rushed upon the stage. They
do not see the good of the crimes, horrors, and vio-
lence necessary in tragic work. Of course these are
sweeping charges, and they are open to many excep-
tions; but in the large they are true. And certainly
men do not want any general reformation in feminine
nature in these respects. We are fairly content with
women as they are. But if we are going to relegate
altogether to them the reading of books, literature
will of course follow the lines suited to their tastes
and instincts.
Mr. Aldrich's period of probation is nearly past.
After its twenty years wandering in the desert,
Poetry may at last be coming to the Promised Land.
In prose there are signs of a leavening and lighten-
ing of the vast soggy mass of realism, didacticism,
and sentiment. Real creative imagination, real
humor, real wit, begin to be apparent. But Poetry,
with its balanced wings of sense and spirit, is the
true angel that must move the waters. Until we
believe in Poetry again, we shall not be saved.
Charles Leonard Moore.
CASUAL COMMENT.
The public library's vast accumulation of
trash — for such, in sober truth, much of our cur-
rent literature will hereafter be adjudged to be —
may well give us pause. At the recent dedication
of the new building of the Pennsylvania Historical
Society, Mr. Charles Francis Adams took occasion
to utter a warning against the indiscriminate pres-
ervation of printed matter. "I venture a confident
opinion," he declared, "that the world of scholar-
ship would be in no wise appreciably poorer if one-
half, and that the larger half, of the printed matter
now accumulated in our public libraries could to-
morrow be obliterated — swept clean out of exist-
ence." With a book production yearly increasing,
it is no wonder that library buildings designed to
serve the needs of a century to come prove inade-
quate in a quarter of that time, or even in less. Yet
who can anticipate the verdict of posterity on our
present literary output, and so decide what ought to
be kept and what discarded? The now familiar
expedient (urged by Dr. Eliot) of providing a
storage room or building for at least the temporary
deposit of all likely candidates for oblivion, thus
relieving the groaning shelves of the book-stack, is
worth considering, even though the storage of inac-
tive books is far more expensive than their summary
destruction. The responsibility of deciding, peri-
odically, what portion of a library's possessions
should be committed to the flames is obviously
greater than most librarians would care to assume.
But to cull out, now and then, a few authors to be
sent to the morgue, there to await a more or less
remote posterity's mandate for their decent burial,
would be a less serious matter; and at any moment
a book thus provisionally offered as a prey to dumb
forgetfulness could, on second thought, be restored
to the warm precincts of the cheerful day and per-
haps put once more into lively circulation. The
whole problem, however, is so serious, so increas-
ingly serious, that no off-hand solution of it is pos-
sible. Happily, like so many other diseases, this
bibliothecal congestion will tend to work out its own
cure, and it will be some time yet before our library
book-stacks actually scrape the sky.
Over-capitalization in literature — in the
printed page — is a matter on which a few timely
words may be said; as also a few words on under-
capitalization. Capitals are a precious asset in the
printer's art, and not to be treated frivolously. The
reaction against the excessive and unmethodical
capitalization of two centuries ago has itself been
followed by something of a reaction in favor of the
initial capital letter; and most effective that upper-
case bit of type often proves as a mark of emphasis.
But familiarity breeds contempt, and the reader
ceases to be impressed as soon as the sprinkling of
capitals turns into a steady down-pour. There is one
use of the capital letter that has often seemed to us


310
[May 1,
THE DIAL
an abuse, though it has excited no general comment.
In quoting a German word, of the noun-class, why
should we feel obliged to conform invariably to the
German rule and distinguish the word with a capital?
It is well enough to write Kaiser and Konigreieh
and Vaterland with large initials if one chooses;
but when it comes to beirMeider and bleistift and
tintenfass, they deserve no such distinction at our
hands, whatever the practice of the Teuton. Con-
trariwise, merely • because the French (and the
library-school graduates) write their book-titles with
only an initial capital, unless proper names occur,
why should we discard the old and approved usage
of capitals for all nouns and other important words
in the title? Excessive economy — parsimony, in
fact — in the use of upper-case letters has long
marked the typography of a leading New England
newspaper whose reputation is national. There is
a story that when a new compositor on this paper
asked what rule to follow in the use of capitals, he
was instructed by a fellow-compositor to confine their
use to the founder of Christianity and the founder
of the paper. The journal in question indulges in
such eccentricities as "Bunker hill," "Connecticut
river," "New haven railroad company," "Standard
oil trust," and " the social democrat party," and in a
late issue made the surprising statement, "We have
crossed the rubicon." A small river, in truth, is
the Rubicon, but surely of sufficient importance in
Roman history to deserve a large initial letter. In
this matter, as in so many others, there is a reason-
able middle way between the extremes of excess
and abstinence which the trained taste should find
it not hard to follow.
"How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day"
is the effective title of a little book by Mr. Arnold
Bennett, written some years ago, but practically
discovered in America in the wake of the recent
popularity of "The Old Wives' Tale." Many of
the characters in Mr. Bennett's novels are of the
type that "muddle along " and call it living; and he
understands with peculiar completeness the common-
place person's attitude (or lack of attitude) toward
life, — the sleepy, unthinking acquiescence in its
conditions, dominated by a wish — not poignant
enough to operate as a motive, but too strong to make
real contentment possible — that he had "more
time " for the things that count. "More time," says
Mr. Bennett, is one of a very few things that
nobody can get. You can neither buy, beg, nor lose
your quota of time. No matter how shamefully you
misuse one hour, another undeviatingly follows. The
thing to do, then, is to cease wishing for the impos-
sible, and to realize that if you work, let us say, eight
hours, and sleep seven or eight, you still have eight
or nine hours a day in which to live, with mind as
well as body. In the little book above referred to,
and in a similar collection of articles on "The
Reasonable Life," Mr. Bennett makes trenchant
suggestions on the vitalizing of dull, purposeless
evenings, the utilizing of time spent in getting to
and from work, the application to the quickening
and development of the mind of the ideas that are
rife nowadays about physical culture. He proposes
no spectacular scheme of self-cultivation; "slow and
sure" is his motto. But most of his readers will be
perplexed indeed to know what becomes of those
extra eight or nine hours, and will be inclined to
try Borne of Mr. Bennett's simple expedients for
filling one or two of them.
Mr. Galsworthy's dramatic theme has always
been justice to the under dog. Recently he has used
"Justice " as the title of a play which, in grim sim-
plicity of motive and action and in utter absence of
stage conventions and dramatic "effects," is even
less theatrical, if possible, than his three plays that
have preceded it. The brief is strong just because
it makes no pretension to being unassailable. Its
unfolding has been followed with the tensest interest
at the Repertory Theatre in London, and it is said
that Mr. Winston Churchill, after listening atten-
tively through a performance, immediately instituted
several reforms in prison management suggested by
the experiences of the hero, FaJder, who is "sent
up " for three years for raising a cheque. He does
raise the check, his motive being a desire to free a
woman friend from the tyranny and abuse of a cruel
husband. Whether he was at the moment crazed
by love and worry, is the legal point at issue; the
vital one being whether the law is justified,—for the
boy's life is ruined, and incidentally the woman's,
before justice has run its course. A fussy old bar-
rister's clerk with a heart furnishes the humor, with-
out which this "slice of life" would be unbearably
grim. The very restrained style of the play is hard
on the reader — and on the actor too, at the same
time that it furnishes him with his great opportunity.
• • •
The power of the apt phrase can hardly be
overestimated. The late Professor Sumner of Yale
declared in his last book that "an educated man
ought to be beyond the reach of suggestion from
advertisements, newspapers, speeches, and stories."
Nevertheless, a live man must and will react on his
environment, and the seductions of clever adver-
tisements, adroit headlines, persuasive speeches,
and interesting stories must be resisted if they are
not yielded to; they cannot leave an intelligendy
alert person absolutely indifferent. Hence the pow-
erful influence exerted by men who can put thoughts
that breathe into words that burn. How many a
man and woman has been moved to the expression,
wise or unwise, of righteous indignation by that
little phrase of Burke's " a limit at which forbearance
ceases to be a virtue," or has been taught patience
by that other phrase of his, "Custom reconciles us
to everything"! "A wise and salutary neglect" has
been the salvation of many young persons wholly
ignorant of their debt to the coiner of the phrase.
Franklin's assertion that "there never was a good
war or a bad peace" has contributed, who knows
how much, to international harmony, as his equally


1910.]
311
THE
DIAL,
famous saying that "in this world nothing is certain
but death and taxes" has helped many of us to bear
philosophically the vicissitudes of our lot. That
there is a one best way, or supremely effective way,
to state an important truth, who that has picked up
a few of the immortal phrases of literature and of
proverbial philosophy can doubt?
• • •
The steady demand for the favorite old
books reveals an element of strength and perma-
nency that is in encouraging contrast with the
insatiate craving for the latest popular novelty in
literature. Recent investigation has proved that,
with the Bible and Shakespeare heading the list of
constant sellers, Scott (especially his "Ivanhoe "),
Hawthorne (" The Scarlet Letter" first and fore-
most), Thackeray ("Vanity Fair" particularly),
and Dickens (both in "Pickwick" and "David
Copperfield "), are in large and unflagging demand.
Lew Wallace's "Ben Hur" still appeals strongly to
book-buyers, and is said, perhaps with some exag-
geration, to bring in about forty thousand dollars a
year to the author's family. Strikingly inferior is
the popularity of both his earlier novel "The Fair
God" and his later effort "The Prince of India."
An encouraging symptom is the large public demand
for the leading poets, Longfellow outdistancing all
competitors in this country, with Whittier in second
place. Tennyson and Browning also have each' a
strong following, and the sale of FitzGerald's
"Omar," since the expiration of copyright twenty
years ago, has been such as would have struck the
modest translator (or adaptor, rather) dumb with
amazement.
• • •
The possibilities of the 'prentice pen are
delightfully unrestricted. What new and epoch-
making contribution the young writer shall make to
literature, it rests with himself to determine. A
striking proof of the young and unknown author's
power to command attention, and to win sure reward
for good work well done, was lately furnished in
London, where a publisher, Mr. Andrew Melrose,
had offered a handsome prize of two hundred and
fifty guineas for the best novel submitted in open
competition. One hundred and sixty manuscripts
were offered, and were passed upon by three com-
petent judges — Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, Miss Mary
Cholmondeley, and Mrs. Henry de la Pasture; and
the winning novel, " A Marriage under the Terror,"
is found to be a " first performance " as a novel, the
writer, "Patricia Wentworth," having produced
hitherto only short stories. Sanguine expectations
of a brilliant success for "A Marriage under the
Terror " are entertained.
The printer's art as a branch of liberal
culture, or at least of business education, is now
made a subject of university instruction at Harvard.
A course in the history of printing is offered in the
Fine Arts department, and a course on the technique
of printing is given in the recently established Busi-
ness School. The materials and processes — paper,
ink, type, printing machinery, and so on — are to be
studied under the tuition of experts. An advanced
course, including visits to various printing-houses,
and exercises in preparation of copy, proof-reading,
catalogue-making, and other details of printing and
publishing, is also in prospect. If the art of printing
can thus be restored to something like its dignity
and importance in the days of the Elzevirs and the
Aldines, possibly we may be consoled for the loss
sustained in the process by Virgil and Cicero,
Homer and Sophocles and Plato. Certainly it is a
far cry from the Greek, Latin, and mathematics of
the old-time college to the multitudinous and more or
less "practical" courses and schools of the modern
university.
Of interest to Stratford visitors this sum-
mer will be the forthcoming "Catalogue of the Books,
Manuscripts, Works of Art, Antiquities, and Relics,
at present exhibited in Shakespeare's Birthplace,"
issued by the trustees of said birthplace for the use
of that large fraction of the touring public which
yearly pays its tribute of curiosity and cash to the fa-
mous town on the Avon. The catalogue is described
as containing sixty-one illustrations of objects on
exhibition, among them being facsimiles of Shake-
speare signatures and of title-pages to early editions
of his works, with occasional literary and historical
annotations.
COMM UNICA TION.
PROFESSOR AGASSIZ AND THE CARNEGIE FUND.
(To the Editor of Tub Dial.)
I find on page 264 of your issue of April 16 a state-
ment in regard to my lifelong friend Dr. Alexander
Agassiz, which in justice to him and to the Carnegie
Scientific Institution of Washington needs to be cor-
rected. The statement is, in substance, that Agassiz
was offered $75,000 for conducting some deep-sea
soundings on condition that the enterprise should be
known as the Carnegie-Agassiz Expedition, and that he
declined the offer and found the money elsewhere.
Together with Dr. John Billings, I spent a night with
Mr. Agassiz and arranged that we should offer him
$50,000 from the Carnegie Fund to enable us to place
several men of science on his exploring vessel, who
would carry on researches somewhat different from
those in which he expected to be engaged. There was
no condition made as to the name of the expedition,
which was always mentioned in the papers of the Car-
negie Scientific Institution as the " Agassiz Expedition,"
and never had associated with its title even the name
Carnegie.
Some time before the expedition started, Mr. Agassiz
made up his mind that he preferred to carry on the
expedition without assistance; and as it was so arranged,
we of the Carnegie Institution took no part in his ven-
ture. It is therefore not true that he was offered
$75,000, and that he promptly declined; and untrue
that any condition as to a name for the enterprise was
attached to the offer of assistance. Weir Mitchell.
Philadelphia, April 21, 1910.


312
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
The "Hoosier Schoolmaster"
Revealed.*
Probably nearly every reader of " The Hoosier
Schoolmaster " — that pioneer in a school of fic-
tion that has had a numerous following, though
none of the zealous imitators has yet imperilled
the supremacy of the original model — has been
inclined to regard the Schoolmaster's experiences
as the more or less faithful autobiography of the
writer. It is therefore likely to surprise many
readers of Mr. George Cary Eggleston's " Recol-
lections of a Varied Life" to learn that not
Edward, but his younger brother George, the
author of these " Recollections," was the School-
master so well depicted in the novel. Edward
Eggleston's feebleness of health debarred him
from active pursuits and constrained him to turn,
not unwillingly, to his pen as a means of sup-
port; and it was his brother's pedagogic diffi-
culties and triumphs at Riker's Ridge, in
Indiana, that appealed to the novelist's fancy,
and at a critical moment rescued from failure
and bankruptcy that excellent old story-paper,
"Hearth and Home." Sundry homely details
characteristic of Hoosier life in the fifties, told
with the convincing force of actual experience,
are now added to the necessarily embroidered
account of that life as given in the story.
Mr. George Cary Eggleston calls himself,
near the close of his volume, "an extempora-
neous writer" — the sort of writer developed
by the stress and strain of metropolitan jour-
nalism; and his brisk narrative has all the
excellences, and not many of the defects, of the
trained journalist. The reader is spared all
introductory or genealogical matter, and all that
is of a family nature or of interest chiefly to
the writer himself. Plunging into the midst
of things, Mr. Eggleston tells us, rapidly and
effectively, what sort of a life he has led since
his birth at Vevay, Indiana, seventy years ago,
and what kind of persons, celebrated or obscure,
he has had intercourse with in his varied, and,
for a man of letters, rather eventful, course.
His family is of Virginia extraction, and in the
Old Dominion he himself passed a few of his
adolescent years and received the latter part of
his academic training. His enthusiasm for
things and persons Virginian, well known to
readers of his romances, finds additional warm
expression in these retrospections, wherein also
•Recollections of a Varied Life. By George Cary
Eggleston. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
he not unnaturally deplores the passing of the
old order, the displacement of the Southern
planter by the Yankee farmer, and the invasion
of the cotton-mill and all the unloveliness of
factory life where once were to be enjoyed the
courtliness and the leisure of the broad-acred
Virginia plantation.
So warmly did the young Eggleston espouse
the cause of his adopted State that when the
Civil War broke out there seems not to have
been the slightest hesitation on his part which
side of the quarrel to make his own. Enlisting
early and serving to the end, the young caval-
ryman evidently found his life in the field much
to his taste; at least he treats us to very little
of the horrors of war, but to not a few agree-
able pictures of the freedom and adventure he
enjoyed during those four years of campaigning.
Of his life in general in the South, and of the
peculiar virtues of Southerners, he has much to
say which, in its warmth of eulogy, taxes the
reader's credulity. But he earnestly protests
that he is not exaggerating, and it is certainly
far pleasanter to believe than to doubt him. He
must, however, have been placed in somewhat
exceptional surroundings if one may judge from
such passages as the following.
"Both the young men and the young women read
voluminously — the young men in part, perhaps, to equip
themselves for conversational intercourse with the young
women They both read polite literature, but they read
history also with a diligence that equipped them with
independent convictions of their own, with regard to
such matters as the conduct of Charlotte Corday, the
characters of Mirabeau, Dan ton, and Robespierre, the
ungentlemanly treatment given by John Knox to Mary
Queen of Scots, and all that sort of thing. Indeed,
among the Virginia women, young and old, the romantic
episodes of history, ancient, medueval, and modern,
completely took the place, as subjects of conversation,
of those gossipy personalities that make up the staple
of conversation among women generally."
Soon after the close of the war, young Mr.
Eggleston removed to Illinois, and thence to
Mississippi, where he began and ended his brief
and unstimulating experience of the law as a
profession. Forsaking this, "in the profoundest
disgust," for journalism, and for literature in a
wider sense, he betook himself, with wife and
child, to New York and secured work as a reporter
on the Brooklyn "Union," of which Theodore
Tilton was then editor, having recently left
"The Independent." The enterprise and what
he himself calls the "cheek" of the would-be
journalist are illustrated by his very first con-
tribution to his newspaper. While waiting for
his first assignment he wrote an article and sent
it in to Mr. Tilton, who liked it and printed it


1910.]
313
THE DIAL
as a "leader." Throughout Mr. Eggleston's
"varied life," he has manifestly had a happy
faculty for landing always on his feet and for
making a success of whatever he has undertaken.
He says of himself that he has always been
"intensely in earnest," and that may help to
explain his unfailing effectiveness in any activity
claiming his attention.
Among the many famous men, chiefly men of
letters, with whom Mr. Eggleston has had deal-
ings, professional or friendly, Bryant is one
whom we are glad to be made better acquainted
with from the personal anecdotes of the great
editor's assistant on the "Evening Post." Con-
troverting Lowell's commonly-accepted descrip-
tion of him in "A Fable for Critics," where he
appears as cold and unresponsive by nature,
Mr. Eggleston says:
"The lack of warmth usually attributed to Mr.
Bryant I found to be nothing more than the personal
reserve common to New Knglanders of culture and
refinement, plus an excessive personal modesty and a
shyness of self-revelation and self-intrusion which is
usually found only in young girls just budding into
womanhood. Mr. Bryant shrank from self-assertion
even of the most impersonal sort, as I never knew any
other human being to do. He cherished his own opin-
ions strongly, but he thrust them upon nobody. His
dignity was precious to him, but his only way of assert-
ing it was by withdrawal from any conversation or com-
pany that trespassed upon it. Above all, emotion was
a sacred thing, not to be exploited or even revealed. In
ordinary intercourse with his fellow-men he hid it away
as one instinctively hides the privacies of the toilet. He
could no more lay his feelings bare to common scrutiny
than he could have taken his bath in the presence of
company. In the intimate talks he and I had together
during the last half-dozen years of his life, he laid aside
his reserve, so far as it was possible for a man of his
sensitive nature to do, and I found him not only warm
in his human sympathies, but even passionate."
Mr. Eggleston's long experience as literary
editor gives weight to his opinion in matters
of literary ethics. His judgment concerning
anonymity in literary criticism is apparently
reflected in what he quotes from Bryant under
this head. "I regard an anonymous literary
criticism," said the poet on one occasion to Mr.
Eggleston, "as a thing quite as despicable,
unmanly, and cowardly as an anonymous letter.
It is something that no honorable man should
write, and no honorably conducted newspaper
should publish." It is true that most of the
reviews in the "Post" were unsigned in Bryant's
day (as now), but he maintained that in letting it
be generally known who was the literary editor
of that journal he had removed the stigma of
anonymity from them.
As Mr. Eggleston devotes most of his chap-
ters to those early days of young hope and
boundless possibilities with which he entered on
his life-work, there is no lack of stimulus and
freshness in his pages. In writing his first book,
a manual entitled " How to Educate Yourself,"
for "Putnam's Handy Book Series," he says
that he had the advantage of comparative youth
and of that self-confident omniscience which
only youth can have. "I knew everything
then," he continues, "better than I know any-
thing now, so much better, indeed, that for a
score of years past I have not dared open the
little book, lest it rebuke my present ignorance
beyond my capacity to endure." The account
of his early good-fortune in being solicited to
write "A Rebel's Recollections" for "The
Atlantic," and of the genesis of various other
works from his pen, with the record of his busy
life as a journalist in New York, is full of
interest. The chapters are short, and the
reader's attention is gladly given to their brisk
recital of incident and anecdote. The writer's
brief closing description of his working habits
is likely to be of help to young followers of lit-
erature or journalism. The " extemporaneous"
element in the book, while freeing it from any
evidence of labor, any smell of the lamp, betrays
itself less admirably in an occasional mark of
carelessness, as in the use of compte as the
French form of count, and in the neither French
nor English seigniors. There are no pictures
in the volume, not even a frontispiece portrait
of the author. Something of Bryant's " shyness
of self-revelation and self-intrusion " has indeed
been shown by Mr. Eggleston in this respect as
in others ; and who shall say his book is not all
the better for it? Percy F. Bicknell.
Some English Romantic Poets.*
Current essays in literary criticism are numer-
ous enough, but it is a rare volume which really
takes its readers further along than they were
before. It is therefore with pleasure that we
take account of Mr. Arthur Symons's sub-
stantial volume of criticism on certain British
poets who in their time contributed to the
modern development of natural feeling and the
feeling for nature in English poetry. It is a
book over which the discerning reader will
felicitate himself as he reads, and the literary
student — even though a critic — grow decor-
ously enthusiastic as he writes.
There are, of course, spots upon which criti-
* The Romantic Movement in English Poetbt. By
Arthur Symons. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.


314
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
cism may light. There is, first of all, a disap-
pointment in store for those who take the volume
in hand with expectations naturally aroused
by the title. The book is not a treatise upon
the Romantic Movement at all. In his preface
the author explains that he does not use the term
in its usual historical sense. There is, from his
point of view, nothing in this development of
English poetry so definite as a conscious " move-
ment." In the Tractarian Movement, for exam-
ple, there was a definite aim which set many
minds working together. "No such thing ever
happened in the creation of literature." These
romanticists among the poets were comrades, to
be sure, but not colleagues; they should there-
fore be studied as individuals. And so in the
bulk of the volume we find a collection of criti-
cal estimates in which some eighty or ninety
versifiers are considered in chronological order,
and in which a valuation is placed upon their
work. A brief Introduction, of less than twenty
pages, contains all that Mr. Symons cares to
say about what we usually term the Romantic
Movement; and here he defines the phrase as
meaning " simply the reawakening of the imag-
ination, a reawakening to a sense of beauty and
strangeness in natural things, and in all the im-
pulses of the mind and senses. That reawaken-
ing was not always a conscious one."
Nor will the plan of selection adopted by the
critic in his choice of poets for consideration com-
mend itself to everyone. No method of limitation
could be more arbitrary. The year 1800 is fixed
upon as a centre for Mr. Symons's chronological
compasses, and the sweep of his instrument in-
cludes all the romantic poets who, born previous
to that year, survived it. As fate arranged, there-
fore, it is John Home (1722-1808) who heads
the list of these romanticists, since he chanced to
be the oldest British versifier who survived the
century; and it is Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
who closes the list, because, apparently, no other
romantic poet claims the closing year of the
century as that of his birth.
However, it is for Mr. Symons to write of
whom he pleases, and it is hardly worth while to
quarrel with him for thus excluding from his
pages the earlier leaders in the movement —
Gray, Cowper, Thomson, and Burns. Of Burns,
to be sure, the author does have a few suggestive
words to say in his Introduction, but he gives no
adequate study of the Scotch poet.
Quibbling aside, there is abundance of inter-
esting material in these pages. It is worth while,
perhaps, just to have one's memory refreshed
regarding the significance of those half-forgotten
if not altogether unknown names. Who was
John Home, for example? Little of his work
has survived his own day, yet two lines in his
play of " Douglas " were familiar to us when we
were schoolboys:
"My name is Norval; on the Grampion Hills
My father feeds his flocks; a frugal swain."
And here appears Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-
1802), physician, natural philosopher,and didac-
tic poet, the distinguished grandsire of the more
distinguished Charles; with his "Loves of the
Plants " and his " Temple of Nature," in whom
Imagination mated with Science, producing
some strange results. Describing a statue of
Lot's wife in the salt-mines of Cracow, he notes:
"Cold dews condense upon her pearly hreast,
And the hig tear rolls lucid down her vest."
John Wolcott (1735-1803) follows, more
easily recognized under the pen-name of " Peter
Pindar " — with his
"desultory way of writing,
A hop and step and jump way of inditing."
William Combe (1741-1823) is another writer
whose name rests upon the memory with less
weight than that of "Dr. Syntax," the pseu-
donym under which he wrote. It now occurs
to us that in our youth we curiously studied
over two or three volumes of Dr. Syntax's
"Tours," but it is a surprise to learn that this
gentleman was the author of some eighty publi-
cations, of which none has really survived.
If the names already cited are unfamiliar,
those of a little group of women contemporary
with these men are still alive. Here are Mrs.
Barbauld and Joanna Baillie; and Hannah
More, of pious memory, whose sacred dramas,
we are assured, are "still readable on a dull
afternoon." It may well be that few now read
the verses which these ladies wrote; but this can
hardly be said of Carolina, Lady Nairne (1766-
1845), whose lilting songs — "The Laird of
Cockpen," "Caller Herrin'," and "The Land o'
the Leal" — make their appeal to-day as freshly
as when first written. It was Lady Nairne, by
the way, whose "admiration of Burns showed
itself in the desire to publish a ' purified' edition
of his songs"; but whose practical good sense
led her to see that some of the ploughman's best
poems "wouldn't be purified," and finally to
abandon the scheme. There is an interesting
note upon the two sisters, Ann and Jane Taylor,
joint authors of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little
Star," which contains the following comment.
It will strike an American ear oddly enough.
"The talents of Jane were more considerable than
those of Ann. She is something what Longfellow
would like to have been; but her art is far above his."


1910.]
315
THE DIAL,
There is not much space for personal history
in these severely condensed paragraphs of critical
comment, but Mr. Symons has found room here
and there for a few details. The reader is often
touched by their pathos. There was Robert
Bloomfield, a country boy, and afterward a tailor
in a London garret. There he wrote rural tales,
ballads, and nature poems; thirty thousand
copies of "The Farmer's Boy" were sold in
three years; he was lionized and patronized, and
then left to die in poverty. "Had he lived
longer he would probably have gone mad."
Robert Tannahill worked at a loom in Paisley
all his life, making his songs as he worked, bike
Hans Sachs on his cobbler's bench. He went
"melancholy-mad," burned his manuscripts, and
drowned himself in the river. George Beattie,
the crofter's son, who wrote much about" grisly
ghaists " and " whinnering goblins," shot himself
because of disappointment in love. On the
other hand, there was the experience of William
Nicholson, son of a Galloway carrier, who be-
came a peddler, printed his own poems and took
them about in his pack. "He went to fairs
as singer and piper; then took to drink, and a
new gospel which he wanted to preach to the
King; but, coming back unsatisfied, became a
drover." Most romantic of all, perhaps, was the
career of James Hogg, " the Ettrick Shepherd,"
who began at seven by herding cows on the hills
of Selkirk. At twenty he could not write the
alphabet; but at twenty-six he began to make
up verses in his head. Having heard "Tam
O'Shanter" recited by a half-daft person, he
resolved to be a poet and to fill Burns's place
in the world. And he did become a poet — a
poet of such pretensions that Mr. Symons de-
votes ten pages of comment to his work.
The general reader of this book will turn with
natural interest to those sections which deal with
the greater poets — Wordsworth, Scott, Cole-
ridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. And here Mr.
Symons's critical strength is most forcibly recog-
nized. His discussion of Wordsworth's poetical
quality is one of the best that has been written.
"Sincerity was at the root of all Wordsworth's merits
and defects; it gave him his unapproachable fidelity to
nature; and also his intolerable fidelity to his own
whims. Like Emerson, whom he so often resembled,
he respected all intuitions; but, unlike Emerson, did not
always distinguish between a whim and an intuition."
Such is the critic's point of view as indicated at
the beginning of the section. In his criticism
of individual poems, therefore, he consistently
deprecates the "Laodamia" as "an attempt to
be classic."
"Here Wordsworth would be Greek as the Greeks
were, or rather as they seem to us, at our distance from
them, to be; and it is only in single lines that he suc-
ceeds, all the rest of the poem showing an effort to be
something not himself. Thus this profoundly natural
poet becomes for once, as Matthew Arnold has noted,
'artificial' in a poem which has been classed among his
masterpieces."
It is interesting to find that Mr. Symons him-
self considers "The Leech-Gatherer " (0^'Reso-
lution and Independence ") to be Wordsworth's
"greatest, as it is certainly his most charac-
teristic," poem. This assertion, while perhaps
unconventional, is altogether consistent, and
to many a lover of that realistic, homely, yet
eloquent parable, it is exceedingly gratifying.
Ideally characteristic of the poet this composi-
tion surely is; among the compositions typical
of Wordsworth, which other is more admirable
than this?
Of Scott, the critic says: "The novelist died
. . . in 1825; but the poet committed suicide,
with Harold the Dauntless, in 1817." For Sir
Walter's poetry he has no admiration and scant
patience.
"Scott's verse [his long poems] is written for boys,
and boys, generation after generation, will love it with
the same freshness of response . . . Byron usually fol-
lows Scott in the boy's head, and drives out Scott, as that
infinitely greater, though imperfect, force may well do.
Shelley often completes the disillusion. But it is well,
perhaps, that there should be a poet for boys, and for
those grown-up people who are most like boys; for
those, that is, to whom poetry appeals by something in
it which is not the poetry."
Byron, he declares " has power without wisdom,
power which is sanity, and human at heart, but
without that vision which is wisdom." Byron's
ennui "was made up of many elements, but it
was partly of that most incurable kind which
comes from emptiness rather than over-fulness;
the ennui of one to whom thought was not sat-
isfying, without sustenance in itself, but itself a
cause of restlessness, like a heady wine drunk in
solitude." In writing of Shelley, Mr. Symons
says:
"There are two kinds of imagination, that which
embodies and that which disembodies. Shelley's is that
which disembodies, filling mortal things with unearthly
essences or veiling them with unearthly raiment. Words-
worth's imagination embodies, concentrating spirit into
man, and nature into a wild flower."
Keats is described as the artist "to whom art
is more than life, and who, if he realises that
'Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,' loves truth
for being beautiful and not beauty for its inner-
most soul of spiritual truth."
These passages are fairly illustrative of our
author's critical attitude. His comments are


316
[May 1,
THE DIAL
incisive, sound, and stimulating. Originality of
view and definiteness of judgment are stamped
on every dictum. It is not necessary to add that
Mr. Symons writes with the pen of a literary
artist, but it is proper to say that half the
pleasure derived from the book is due to this
fact. Felicitous phrases and terse epigrams
brighten the paragraphs and illuminate the
criticism.
"Thus, Setebos, storming because Mephistopheles
Gave him the lie,
Said he'd 'blacken his eye,'
And dashed in his face a whole cup of hot coffee-lees."
This illustrates what Mr. Symons terms the
"cascading of cadences" in "The Ingoldsby
Legends." In describing the songs of Tanna-
hill, he speaks of "that almost inarticulate
jingle and twinkle which goes with the genuine
gallop of the Scottish tongue." "Pope," he
says, " is the most finished artist in prose who
ever wrote in verse." Again: "Where other
poets use reality as a spring-board into space,
Blake uses it as a foothold on his return from
flight."
This is indeed a book which reflects the posi-
tive personality of a brilliant mind. It is not
without eccentricities of opinion, nor are its
judgments infallible; but it is a volume thor-
oughly worth while. It really takes its reader
further on. W- E. Simonds.
A Classic of Biological Literature.*
In 1900 appeared the introductory part of the
first volume of the original German edition of
Hugo De Vries's mutationstheorie. This work
has recently been translated into English with
the title, " The Mutation Theory: Experiments
and Observations on the Origin of Species in
the Vegetable Kingdom." Volume I., "The
Origin of Species by Mutation," has already
been issued. If not epoch-making, this work in
the original edition was at least epoch-marking.
In conjunction with the then recently rediscov-
ered work of the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel,
regarding the method by which characters are
inherited, the ideas of De Vries served to stimu-
late investigators all over the world to undertake
experimental studies of the basic problems of
organic evolution. No period of anything like
equal length in the history of biology has
* The Mutation Theory: Experiments and Observa-
tions on the Origin of Species in the Vegetable Kingdom.
By Hugo De Vries. In two volumes, translated by J. B.
Farmer and A. D. Darbishere. Volume I., Origin of Species
by Mutation. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Co.
approached the last decade in respect to the
quantity of reliable experimental data collected
regarding the factors of evolution and their
operation. The Darwinian and neo-Darwinian
schools of evolutionary thought, in the very na-
ture of the case, did not stimulate experimental
lines of investigation. Their teaching was that
the progressive changes of organic structure and
function which we call evolution are things which
proceed by the slow and gradual accumulation
of exceedingly minute variations by a process of
natural selection. But if it takes centuries to
make any definite progress in evolution, what
chance might a graduate student yearning for a
doctorate, or a university instructor struggling
for an increase in salary and rank, be supposed
to have of getting anywhere in an experimental
study of evolution? Vita brevis est; and one
was much surer of " results" by embarking upon
a speculative discussion of the relation of exist-
ing animals and plants to hypothetical primitive
forms, assumed to have been acted upon by a
hypothetical environment, or some similar sub-
ject.
To De Vries, perhaps more than to any other
man, is due the credit of having brought about
an entire change of the prevailing viewpoint in
regard to the study of evolution. He saw clearly
that the only way to get the investigation of
evolution out of the slough of metaphysical
despond in which it had so long floundered was
precisely by the application of the experimental
method to its problems. Through a long period
of years he carried on a most brilliant and thor-
ough experimental investigation aimed at the
determination of how new varieties and species
are as a matter of fact actually produced. The
results of this investigation are embodied in the
book under review. It is a substantial and
enduring work of reference, rather than a popu-
lar treatise. Its place in the library is beside
Darwin's "Origin" and " Variation of Animals
and Plants under Domestication."
The first volume of " The Mutation Theory"
is divided into two parts. The first part is occu-
pied with a critical review of current theories of
evolution, particularly those relating to the
effect of selection. This is followed by a pre-
sentation of the author's theory of the origin of
species by mutation. Part II. contains the
detailed account of De Vries's experiments and
observations regarding the production of new
elementary species in the evening primrose
(Oenothera). The general result of this work is
to demonstrate that new species have arisen in
this genius suddenly by the appearance of a new


1910.]
317
THE
DIAL
form which thereafter breeds true, and does not
revert to the parent form. This process is called
mutation, by the author. It is contended that
evolution in general has proceeded by such dis-
continuous steps, rather than by the gradual
accumulation of minute variations. De Vries
makes no denial of the importance of natural
selection, but believes that its chief function is
not to create, but rather to determine which
mutations shall survive in the struggle for exis-
tence. The limitations of the Mutation Theory
as a general theory of Evolution must be settled
by future investigation; but there can be no
doubt that this masterly work of De Vries's will
long rank as a classic of biological literature.
Raymond Pearl.
An American Soldier and Mystic*
A remarkable character is revealed in the
Diary of General Ethan Allen Hitchcock,
extracts from which have been edited by the
veteran author and journalist W. A. Croffut,
and published under the title " Fifty Years in
Camp and Field." The Diary covers almost
the whole of the active life of General Hitch-
cock. It was begun soon after his graduation
from West Point in 1817, and the last entry
was made more than fifty years later. It gives
information upon Hitchcock's life while in-
structor and commandant at West Point, where
he trained many of the prominent Civil War
generals; upon his services on the Western
frontier, in the Seminole Wars in Florida, and
in the Mexican and Civil Wars. The work is
not only a source of information about Hitch-
cock himself, but a side-light thrown upon the
public matters and policies of the time. The
editor tells us that the hundreds of volumes
of the Diary are filled mainly with Hitchcock's
notes on his reading and with his own philo-
sophical reflections, while only slight space is
given to the details of his army life. However,
somewhat more is said in the Diary about public
questions of the day. In selecting material for
publication the editor has omitted all except the
most striking of the philosophical reflections,
and has printed the more interesting personal
notes and the comments on public matters and
men.
The Diary discloses an interesting character—
a soldier well read in all the branches of litera-
• Fifty Years in Camp and Field. Diary of Major-
General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, U.S.A. Edited by W. A.
Croffut, Ph.D. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
ture, philosophy, and science; a scholar who was
an accomplished military organizer and execu-
tive; a philosopher of inquisitive mind, who,
while he sat in courts-martial, inspected armies,
or commanded districts," took more pleasure in
the infinite than in the finite, in metaphysics
than in physics, in the occult than in the obvious."
But it was chiefly as a soldier that the world
knew General Hitchcock. He tells us that he
went into the military profession, not because
he was attracted to it, but because his people
thought it to be the proper vocation for the
grandson of the hero of Ticonderoga. Yet he
was one of the most accomplished of American
soldiers, as the positions held by him indicate.
And probably no other good soldier was ever
quite so independent in speech and with pen, so
nearly insubordinate at times. The entries in
the Diary show that he was a frequent " protest-
ant" against the rulings or policies of command-
ing officers, of the War Department, and of the
President. And his protests were usually effec-
tive. At times he must have been very trouble-
some. The Diary mentions a dozen instances
of issues between Hitchcock and some superior
authority. He was sent by the West Point
authorities to protest against President Andrew
Jackson's interference with the discipline of
cadets, and he roundly scolded " Old Hickory."
He openly said that the Seminole Indians were
cruelly treated, defrauded, and lied to by the
government officials, and insisted that only a
policy of conciliation would succeed in pacifying
Florida, that he " never did believe in Harney's
method of dealing with Indians — to hang them
wherever they were found—but in friendly over-
tures." In Florida he was finally given leave
to try his plan; and it succeeded. In the West
he made much trouble for the politicians, but
saved the Winnebagoes and the Cherokees from
being defrauded and despoiled.
General Hitchcock read aright the signs of
American expansion in the Southwest. As
early as 1836 he predicted the annexation of
Texas, the war with Mexico, and a later disso-
lution of the Union. He condemned both the
Texan War and the Mexican War as being
caused by American greed for land. Stationed,
in 1836, on the Texan frontier, he came to the
conclusion that the Texan War for indepen-
dence was only a land-grabbing movement
inspired from Washington. His Diary relates
the story of the solitary individual who was
making his way with long strides across Ken-
tucky, with long rifle on shoulder and bullets
in his belt. Someone asked him, " Where are


318
[May 1,
THE
DIAL,
you going?" "To Texas." "What for?"
»'To fight for my rights." In Hitchcock's
opinion, most "rights" on the Texan frontier
were of this kind. In his note-books he
recorded:
"I am puzzled what to do. I regard the whole of
the proceedings in the Southwest as being wicked as
far as the United States are concerned. Our people
have provoked the war [1836] with Mexico, and are
prosecuting it not for 'liberty' but for land. And I
feel averse to being an instrument for these purposes.
"Our people ought to be damned for their impudent
arrogance and domineering presumption! It is enough
to make atheists of us all to see such wickedness in the
world, whether punished or unpunished.
"We have certain intelligence that J. K. Polk is
elected President over Henry Clay. ... I look upon
this as a step toward annexation of Texas first, and
then, in due time, the separation of the Union."
He criticized the government for the policy
leading up to the Mexican War, for claiming
the Bio Grande as the boundary, and for its
treatment of Scott and Taylor; but when the
war actually began he took a prominent part in
it, and became so interested that he quit read-
ing and writing philosophy — the first time and
the last time that such a thing happened in his
life.
As an historical document, the Diary is of
most value for the light it will give the future
historians of the Mexican War. It is a genuine
inside view. The comments and information
about Taylor, Scott, and other generals, about
the battles and the campaigns of the war, the
conditions in Mexico and the politics in the
army, will be worth much to the investigator in
this unpromising field. It is here, too, that the
Diary is fullest. For the Civil War period it
is less valuable. There are some good things
about the political methods of the War Depart-
ment, and some sharp criticism of the confused
military policies that were evolved at Washing-
ton by civilians. Of Secretary Stanton, Hitch-
cock recorded this opinion:
"He has no general principles of action. He decides
a point one way one day, and a week later, forgetting
his decision and having no definite principles to go by,
he decides the same point another way. He authorizes
a particular proceeding, and, within a week perhaps,
the circumstances being exactly the same, he flies into
a passion with someone for having followed his first
decision."
Here and there throughout the book we gain
glimpses of Hitchcock's peculiar personality.
He mentions "my abomination—a card-table";
when others were drinking, he retired to his
room "and thought about infinity"; at Fort
Jesup, when the officers had the choice of
attending a horse-race or going to a gander-
pulling, Hitchcock "took up the Meditations
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, that heathen of
Spinoza." He did not swear, he read much,
he was quiet; he liked music extravagantly, and
played on the flute. It is easy to see that with
the generally uncultured officers of the twenties
and thirties he could not be a favorite. Under
date of February 16,1835, he gives this glimpse
of life at an army outpost.
"I am in a peculiar situation here. I do not wish
to depreciate the merits of my brother officers, but it
is certain that their habits if not their tastes are differ-
ent from mine, and, while a majority of them congre-
gate and either play cards or smoke or drink or all
three together, I am left in solitude or compelled to
choose between those resorts and the company of the
few ladies there are at the Prairie. ... I am certainly
out of place here. My life is calculated to make me
an object of envy and hate to most of those around
men. In the first place, I do not join in any of the
vices of the garrison — not one. I neither drink, play
cards, nor even indulge in the smallest license of lan-
guage. Next, I am disposed to literature, and some-
times indicate that I read or think; and it is mostly in
a field unexplored by others. I visit the ladies, and am
almost the only officer who does visit the ladies; and
this is calculated to move to jealousy."
But as the quality of the army officers improved,
Hitchcock became more reconciled, and even
found a few congenial spirits who preferred
Plato and Spinoza to gambling and drinking.
Like his grandfather, Hitchcock was an inde-
pendent thinker about matters of religion. Soon
after finishing his West Point course, he began
his philosophical studies. He explained in his
Diary that, having begun to doubt the stories of
Jonah and Balaam's Ass, he endeavored to find
out "what a certain class of men called philo-
sophers thought of God and man and life."
Thenceforward philosophy was his religion,—
"a faith freed," he said, " from the gross super-
stitions which give so many religions of the
world a forbidding aspect." He kept standing
orders for works on philosophy with booksellers
in the United States and London, and he read
all that could be had on the subject. Wherever
he went he carried his books, until he reached
California, when he sold them to the City of San
Francisco to form the beginning of the present
Mercantile Library. A typical entry in his Diary
says: "My box of books has come — nearf 200
worth, including Behman, Cudworth, Napier,
Niebuhr's Rome, Scaliger, Bentham, Strauss,
and the Bhagavat Gita." In his old age he
became interested in the works of the alchemists
and in the hermetic philosophy which would
find hidden meanings in mediaeval writings.
During the Civil War he published several
books on the hermetic philosophy. Of all the
philosophers, he was most impressed by Spinoza,


1910.]
319
THE
DIAL
"that God-intoxicated man." Hitchcock him-
self was Spinoza-intoxicated. He had editions
of Spinoza's Ethics in French, German, and
Latin, in addition to five manuscript copies in
English, three of which he had made himself.
Yet he " still felt a want," and made another
translation. "I find myself more in harmony
with Spinoza," he wrote, "than with any other
man, dead or alive." And Philosophy was to
him "the first and foremost blessing in the
world." Walter L. Fleming.
Chicago Before the Fire.»
Chicagoans who have memories long enough
to be worth mentioning relate most of their
recollections to the year of the Great Fire.
The year 1871 is our A. U. C; local history
since that date has an orderly and documented
development, while the happenings of earlier
days have a legendary tinge and seem so im-
mensely remote that we almost wonder if they
ever could have been true. The city that we
know is a palimpsest, and the older record has
become so completely obliterated that its recon-
struction, even in imperfect form, involves toil-
some effort and difficult mental readjustment.
Yet the span is a brief one, as history reckons;
and even The Dial, with its thirty-year period
this day rounded out, covers it by more than
three-fourths. Holding to the past by this and
other bonds, we have to go back only a few years
further to penetrate the mists of the years which
antedate the Fire, and enter into the spirit of
the city's adolescent period. The retrospective
venture is now prompted by Mr. Frederick
Francis Cook's "Bygone Days in Chicago," a
book of compelling interest to those of us who
believe that we are citizens of no mean city, and
who receive these greetings from the past, rich in
their power to evoke long-slumbering memories,
with feelings that are quite beyond adequate
description.
Mr. Cook, now for many years a resident of
another city, came to Chicago in 1862, and was
an old-time newspaper reporter in the service of
our four leading dailies — "The Tribune,"
» The Times," » The Journal," and « The Post."
He was a well-equipped journalist, who was
brought close to the heart of many important
matters and interests, and has preserved an
extraordinarily vivid memory of his experiences.
•Bygone Days in Chicago. Recollections of the
"Garden City of the Sixties." By Frederick Francis Cook.
Illustrated. Chicago: A. C. McClnrg & Co.
He tells his story in a simple and straightfor-
ward manner, and supplements it by something
like a hundred reproductions of rare prints and
photographs, mostly found in the collections of
the Chicago Historical Society. His aim, stated
in his own words, has been
"To shed what light may be his on the psychology
of a staid yet surcharged period, now difficult for those
who were not of it to realize; rebuild for the mind's eye
a vanished city; restore to its streets their varied life;
rehabilitate past types in their proper setting; recall
with a due regard for values some of the moving events
of a memorable epoch; and so provide a faithful tran-
script for whomsoever may be interested in the 'Garden
City' of a classic past, or a somewhat unique social
integral, or feel moved to re-people it in fancy with the
offspring of his imagination."
The spirit which has animated him in this en-
deavor is thus finely expressed:
"Chicago is to the unthinking a synonyme for Ma-
terialism. Yet, of a truth, she is a very Mother of
Idealism. Unfortunately, she cannot yet hold all she
nurtures, nor always realize the visions she inspires.
For the present, therefore, she must needs content her-
self with the role of prolific matrix, whose issue on
occasion answers the beckoning of older centres, in the
hope of a fuller expression — not, however, always
realized."
Both in the letter of historical fact, and in the
spirit above set forth, Mr. Cook has accom-
plished his task with admirable success, and
deserved the gratitude of the younger genera-
tion for which he has chiefly written.
It is in its constant forcing of comparisons
between past and present that this book achieves
its most striking effects. These comparisons
are usually implied rather than expressed, but
they are soon present in the consciousness as we
read. What a suggestion there is in the very
name " Garden City"! For there was a time
when Chicago had more gardens than slums —
when Prairie Avenue really led straight to the
prairies, and when Cottage Grove (now how
fallen from its beautiful primitive estate I) was
in very truth an oak grove in which cottages
nestled, cottages that sheltered simple house-
holds that are hardly imaginable in the " flats"
that are now crowded and piled in those erst-
while liberal spaces. In those days, Kankakee
Avenue was the road to Kankakee, and not to
the South Park; Blue Island Avenue was the
road to Blue Island, and not to the Slavonic
quarter of our modern hive; and residents of the
North Side could start from their very doors to
journey upon the Green Bay Road. In those
days, Clark Street really recalled to those who
used it the heroic deeds of George Rogers Clark,
and Wells Street the little garrison that marched
from Fort Dearborn to its tragic fate among


320
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
the dunes along the lake shore, and Clinton
Street the creator of the Erie Canal that had
made early Chicago possible and was to make
Illinois one of the stanchest of the common-
wealths that defended the Union in the great
struggle against slavery. The descendants of the
men who then walked those streets now think
little of the names and their significance; is it
not something of a question whether the old
thoughts have been replaced by new ones as
worthy?
"Probably no event in Chicago's history up
to the time of the Fire was so much talked
about all over the West, and so variously com-
mented upon." The average older Chicagoan
would have to guess many times before hitting
upon the occurrence thus referred to; and for
the Chicagoan under sixty, guessing would be
useless. The reference is to the cleaning out of
the "North Side Sands" under the orders of
"Long John" Wentworth, then mayor of
Chicago.
"The scene of the episode was an isolated sand bar-
ren, on the bleak North Shore, with Michigan Street for
its centre. It was the fashion in the rough-and-ready
volunteer fire department days for the 'authorities' to
give the men that 'ran wid de masheen' and worked
the brakes, on one pretext or another, a 'time,' — by
making them instruments of 'moral regeneration.' . . .
Here was an assemblage of rookeries, none above two
stories in height, and very easily demolished. The brute
in the average man was far greater in those days than
now. There were no doubt many estimable citizens con-
nected with some of the fire companies, for they were of
many degrees, including one or two regarded as quite
'tony.' But others were mere 'fighting' organizations,
with small reference to fires; and sometimes one would
get so demoralized as to call for disbandment. Thus it
was men in many instances in no wise above the level
of their victims, who in a riotous enthusiasm drove these
bedraggled outcasts from their shelter, and forced them
to seek refuge where none was obtainable Yet this
exhibition of barbarism in the name of high morality
set 'Long John' apart in the estimation of 'good and
pious people,' as the defender of the home and an
apostle of purity; while to the 'men about town' it
furnished a theme to dramatize"
The result of this raid was to drive vice into
South Side quarters, where it became a greater
menace to decency than it had been before. But
some lessons are never learned, and the zeal of
our present-day " reformers" is misdirected in
much the same way.
A large section of this book is devoted to
war-time memories, and deals with such inter-
esting matters as the raising of troops, the
history of Camp Douglas, the closing of the
"Times " office by order of General Burnside,
the partisan alignment of the foreign popula-
tion, and the strife between copperheads and
loyalists. The following passage illustrates the
sectional sympathies of the city during the
course of the conflict.
"With the exception of a considerable Southern-born
admixture, the native population was in the main loyal
to the Union side, while the foreign-born population
was divided into opposite camps, with an appreciable
preponderance of numbers on the Irish side. Whereas
the North Division with its dominant German popula-
tion, and the Milwaukee Avenue region with its Scandi-
navian beginnings, were ever enthusiastic for the Union
and the abolition of slavery, all that region which lies
between Archer and Blue Island Avenues (excepting a
German cluster about Twelfth and Halsted Streets)
was never more than lukewarm, and on occasion dis-
tinctly hostile to the prosecution of the war. Whenever
there was a notable Union victory, the North Side would
burst spontaneously into a furor of enthusiasm, while
matters down in the densely populated southwest region
would be reduced to a mere simmer. But no sooner
was there a Rebel victory than it was the turn of Bridge-
port and its appanages to celebrate; and these demon-
strations generally took the form of hunting down any
poor colored brother who might have strayed inadvert-
ently within those delectable precincts."
"Old Abe," the famous war eagle of the Eighth
Wisconsin regiment, was on exhibition in Chi-
cago at the first Sanitary Fair. The eagle
"made it plain that he had but a poor opinion of his
surroundings — that he missed the bugle call and the
roar of battle. Then it happened one day that a noted
war orator in attendance was called on for a speech.
No sooner had he got well started than 'Old Abe' rose
on his perch, flapped his wings, and evidently mistaking
what he heard for the familiar, terror-inspiring ' Rebel
yell', screeched a wild defiance. This is probably the
only instance when an orator in very fact made the
American eagle scream."
The Copperheads come in for much comment,
illustrative quotation, and personal portraiture.
One of them is thus characterized:
"I am firmly persuaded that immovable Jacksouian
Democrat (and a very Old Hickory, too, in appearance),
dear old Dr. N. S. Davis, opposed the war on grounds
of constitutional construction and none other: for, being
a York State man, he had no controlling Southern
family affiliations. The good doctor lived long enough
to be well remembered by a later generation, and few
in Chicago have died in greater honor. But in his virile
manhood he was a chronic storm centre; and it was only
because he was so much besides a Copperhead that his
so frequently ill-timed 'constitutional' fulminations met
with toleration."
A few brief quotations will show to what lengths
the Copperhead orator was willing to go in those
days of high feeling.
"Abraham Lincoln has deluged the country with
blood, created a debt of four thousand million dollars,
and sacrificed two millions of human lives. At the
November election we will damn him with eternal
infamy."
"We want to try Lincoln as Charles I. of England
was tried, and if found guilty will carry out the law."
"If I am called upon to elect between the freedom


1910.]
321
THE
DIAL
of the nigger and disunion and separation, I shall choose
the latter. You might search hell over and find none
worse than Abraham Lincoln."
"We have patiently waited for a change, but for four
years have lived under a despotism, and the wonder is
that men carry out the orders of the gorilla tyrant who
has usurped the presidential chair."
"Still the monster usurper wants more victims for
his slaughter pens. I blush that such a felon should
occupy the highest gift of the people. Perjury and
larceny are written all over him."
These pleasant observations, made in a spirit
of such delicate amenity, make the campaign of
1864 seem a lively affair. We may think we
get excited in a modern presidential year, but
we do not work ourselves up to that pitch of
frenzy. Mr. Cook quotes Taine's saying, " Let
me once frame the true psychology of a Jacobin,
and my book is written." His own effort is to
frame the psychology of the Copperhead, and
his conclusion is "that among the Democratic
masses of the north, antipathy to the negro out-
weighed every other consideration."
Mr. Cook's portrait gallery of old Chicagoans
is so crowded with canvasses that we pass from
one to another of them in a state bordering
upon bewilderment, so many are the memories
evoked and so strong the temptation to linger
for a closer inspection. What he says about
the redoubtable Wilbur F. Storey is unusually
interesting, because he holds a brief for his old-
time employer, whom he thinks to have been
unjustly maligned in many ways.
"There was unquestionably a vein of vindictiveness
in Mr. Storey's make-up — as there was in most strong
characters in those days — but it was never shown ex-
cept against his equals. He was at bottom a just man,
far from over-exacting in his demands for service;
while every failure had its day in court, and was judged
on its merits. He was an incarnation of frankness
himself, and demanded this quality in his subordinates.
Mr. Storey's faults were largely the defects of his
qualities. He was through and through a newspaper
man. News for him, however, included the shady side
of life; and in exploiting this he gave perhaps too much
scope for individual license. I am certain that he never
gave an order that a scandal should be salacious or
made attractive to the prurient. ... I permit myself
to say that for more than a half-score of years most of
the local 'copy' passed through my hands . . . and
that during all that time not one line of 'imaginary' or
'fake' matter of any sort or description was either
published or so much as submitted for publication."
Storey's Copperhead proclivities were of course
against him, and were probably the underlying
cause of the animus that long directed the attack
upon his private life and character.
The chapter entitled "An Early Sociable"
shall provide our last glimpse of Mr. Cook's
somewhat haphazard chronicle, and at the same
time cast a pleasant light upon the chronicler.
One evening, in the summer of 1866, he had
just turned in his "copy "—an account of the
raiding of a vile resort — and was about to de-
part from the office, when the city editor asked
him if he could "spare the time to run down to
Mayor Rice's house." It seems that the eldest
Miss Rice was giving a party, and Storey had
made up his mind to take what was then a new
departure in Chicago journalism, and exploit
social functions in the columns of the " Times."
The young reporter was aghast, for such an as-
signment was an absolute novelty, and he could
hardly take the request seriously. Asking what
sort of story was desired, he was told: "Oh,
mention the decorations if there are any, de-
scribe some of the most picturesque toilettes, but
above all get a list of those present." At last
convinced that it was not all a joke, the dis-
mayed reporter started out, walked to the Rice
residence, and rang the bell. Miss Rice herself
came to the door, and asked his errand. He
timorously expressed a wish to report the party,
but the suggestion was received with constern-
ation, and the young woman pleaded so elo-
quently against this invasion of her privacy
that he promptly capitulated, and turned away
without any attempt to gather the desired in-
formation. The only story he turned in that
night was one about a mysterious baritone who
chanced to pass the house, singing "Marching
Through Georgia," just as the reporter had
taken his leave. His fear of the wrath to come
was not realized, and he was never made to suf-
fer for his lack of " enterprise." But he tells
us that a few months later he would not have
escaped so easily, for Storey's edict to have
"things of that sort written up for all they were
worth " had then gone into force, and the other
papers were prompt to follow the lead of the
"Times." Thus " society reporting " came into
existence as a function of journalism in Chicago.
William Morton Payne.
Briefs on New Books.
o™,nta«> Dr- Georg Witkowski's "German
literature in the Drama of the Nineteenth Century
19th century. (Holt), as issued in Professor L. E.
Homing's translation, no fewer than 532 dramas by
227 dramatists are mentioned, a very large majority
of which receive some discussion. Tet the book is
neither sketchy nor unbalanced. Written for the ini-
tiated layman, and aiming to throw light on the drama
of to-day from an historical standpoint, Dr.Witkowski
has, with nothing short of brilliancy, characterized
the main movements of the three chronological
divisions of the century, and analyzed, from the


322
[Mayl,
THE DIAL
triple standpoint of art, the actor, and the public,
the dramas that have given tone to the various
epochs. After a brief but convincing resum.6 of the
dramatic situation at the close of the eighteenth
century, in which he makes some striking assertions
as to the influence of Iff land and Kotzebue then and
even now, the author passes rapidly over the first
section (1800-1830) with the dramatic failures of
the romanticists, devoting a well-proportioned num-
ber of pages to Kleist (7), Grillparzer (9), Raimund
(2), and Grabbe (3). The portrayals of the faithful
wife by Kleist: the superiority of Fate, in Grillpar-
zer, in that he did not allow it to relieve from moral
responsibility; Raimund's genius in pleasing the
jolly Viennese, and Grabbe's picturing of battles,
receive just emphasis. In the second division (1830-
1885) he sets forth the polished but spiritless drama
of Young Germany in its relation to Hugo, Dumas
pkre, and Scribe; the idealizing drama of Halm,
Gottschall, Geibel, and Jordan; Hebbel, with his
cornerstone of modern dramatic art in " Maria Mag-
dalena," on whose shoulders Ibsen stands; Ludwig
with his excessive reflection and worship of Shake-
speare; the deplorable status of the German stage
around 1870; the years (1874-1890) of brilliant
service to the German theatre rendered by the
Meininger company; the unsurpassed and unsur-
passable greatness of Wagner, and Wildenbruch
with his themes from Prussian history. This forms
the best chapter of the book, because it treats of a
period old enough to allow the final word as to its
worth; and it is this final word that Dr. Witkowski
has spoken with constant certainty and unbroken
interest in his theme. The third section (1885-
1900) begins with a terse analysis of Naturalism,
at the head of which tendency stands Ibsen, "whose
influence no one who writes for the stage can escape,
let him yield ever so reluctantly." For three years
(1889-1891) the "Free Theatre" existed, and
widened the scope of the theatre by extending the
limits of permissibility. The movement as such died
of inanition. Sudermann is treated as a writer of
great talents, who often condescends to flatter the
likings of the public regardless of the infallible laws
of art . Of Hauptmann's twenty plays, Dr. Wit-
kowski thinks that scarcely a single one will hold a
lasting place on the stage, while all will live as
monuments of this confused and uncertain period.
The playwrights of the present, Fulda and all the
rest, are treated only tentatively, and skeptically at
that. The author seems to begrudge them their
popularity, taking this latter as an evidence that
they are living from dramatic art rather than for it.
As to the future, Dr. Witkowski is at once an opti-
mist and a pessimist. He sees hope in the fact that
Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, and Grillparzer are
more in demand than ever; he despairs at the low
grade of drama now being produced in the great
cities, in the highest intellectual centres. The book
contains a valuable table showing the number of
performances of the most popular dramas from 1899
to 1905, "Tell " leading the list with 412 in 1905.
Anyone who has read a thrilling tale
only to find in the last sentence that
Shaketpearet. J .
somebody s pink pills will cure pale
people, can realize the feelings of the reviewer who
goes through Mr. W. L. Stoddard's " Life of William
Shakespeare Expurgated" (W. A. Butterfield) and
discovers in the last paragraph that "in the only
document identifying William Shakespeare from
Stratford with the poet, the name of so illustrious
a contemporary [Lord Bacon] should be secretly
imbedded." This book, which is a compilation of
contemporary evidence relating to Shakespeare,
tries to show that when all inferential matter is
"expurgated " there is no evidence before his death
connecting the actor William Shakespeare of Strat-
ford with the dramatist William Shakespeare of
London. The connection, so Mr. Stoddard con-
tends, was not made till the publication of the First
Folio in 1623. Here we have references to the
"Sweet Swan of Avon," mention of the Stratford
monument, and Shakespeare's name heading the list
of the principal actors in the plays. In other words,
if it were not for these pieces of information in the
First Folio we should not know specifically why the
good folk of Stratford permitted a bust of their
fellow-townsman to be set up in the church, except
that they believed that, in the words beneath the
bust, he was a great genius. The First Folio showed
wherein his genius lay; and Mr. Stoddard holds
that it is the first bit of evidence that has survived
to identify the citizen of Stratford with the play-
wright. And it is this part of the Folio that con-
tains Mr. W. S. Booth's acrostic signature of Francis
Bacon! There is, however, a reference which Mr.
Stoddard quotes but does not satisfactorily get rid
of; it is a short poem by John Davies addressed
"To our English Terence, Mr. Will. Shake-speare"
(1611 ?). Here Shakespeare is the playwright; but
he also "played some kingly parts in sport," and
thereby fits in with tradition. Now it is admitted
that the Stratford William Shakespeare acted in the
dramatist's plays; therefore there either must have
been two William Shakespeares acting in plays, or
the dramatist and the actor are identical. Must we
"expurgate " the conclusion that the two were one?
It is interesting to note that in Professor Wallace's
article in the March "Harper's " there is contem-
porary reference to William Shakespeare of Strat-
ford, and to George Wilkins the dramatist, in the
Bellott-Mountjoy lawsuit. If what is generally
admitted is accepted here — that Shakespeare and
Wilkins collaborated in "Pericles " — we have a
similar identification; for it is unlikely that Wilkins
would be associated so closely with two separate
William Shakespeares. Further, as Professor Wal-
lace says, if Shakespeare was a " mere pen-name of
some one else, it would be difficult to explain how
he and Wilkins were both interested in the suit. . .
in behalf of young Bellott, and how the same he and
Wilkins also wrote two plays together." It seems,
therefore, that we may believe that Shakespeare is
Shakespeare still.


1910.]
323
THE DIAL.
Of all bibliographical data, that relat-
hV in8 10 atlaSeS i8 the m08t difficult to
obtain. Lowndes dismisses Thomas
Jefferys with the statement that he was geographer
to the King and published atlases " which now are
of little use "; and this is the almost universal atti-
tude toward the "out-of-date" atlas. Only very
slowly is it coming to be recognized as an indispensa-
ble historical source. A word should be said in
appreciation of the monumental "List of Geogra-
phical Atlases in the Library of Congress," compiled
by Mr. P. Lee Phillips, chief of the division of
maps and charts. Mr. Phillips gives nearly 3500
titles, with descriptive notes where needed, and lists
of the limps relating to America under each impor-
tant one. Of early atlases the Library of Congress
possesses all but three of the forty editions of
Ptolemy listed by Eames, twenty-two of the folio
and fifteen of the smaller editions of Ortelius, eleven
editions of Mercator's Atlas Major and eight of the
Atlas Minor; but the descriptions of these are less
important than those of the miscellaneous atlases of
more recent date, since they can be obtained else-
where. The classification would have been more
logical had the general atlases preceded the special
ones; parts of atlases would not then have come
before the whole, and reproductions before the
originals. The order of arrangement is, however,
comparatively unimportant, since there is an
exhaustive index of over forty thousand references.
We think the exact dimensions of volumes should
have been given, since the terms "folio," "quarto,"
and the like, as applied to atlases, are very indefinite.
There are necessarily some lacunae. Curiously, the
Library of Congress has no copy of the English
edition of the "American Gazeteer," although pos-
sessing the Italian translation. The supplementary
list, in which it is intended to describe current
accessions, will in time fill gaps of this sort. Most
people may think that this "List" appeals only to
special students; but any library can make a small
collection of atlases, which will possess a constantly
increasing value, by taking pains to acquire old edi-
tions which their owners will otherwise relegate first
to the attic and eventually to the ash-heap.
Mr. Richard Edgcumbe's "Byron:
"Ja»<pfta«' The Last Phase" (Scribner) is a
book which, both as a eulogy and a
polemic, challenges attention. Its author is well
known as the Secretary of the National Byron
Memorial Committee and its historian, and as a
biographer of Edward Trelawney. This book rec-
ords the impressions left in the mind of the writer
after a close study of Byron, persisted in for almost
forty years. It is divided into three parts—the first
part being a eulogy of the last phase of the poet's
career, 1821-1824, and the second and third parts
a defence of his memory against the most serious
indictment ever laid against the Byron of earlier
years. In Part I. we find the writer especially
emphasizing two points: that the closing scenes of
the poet's life have not been adequately depicted by
his biographers; and that his disposition and conduct
after leaving Ravenna in 1821 underwent a complete
transformation. In Part II. he advances the new and
astonishing claim that the underlying reason for the
separation of Lord and Lady Byron was a hitherto
unsuspected relationship existing between the poet
and Mary Chaworth Musters (1813-1816); that
Mrs. Musters was the mother of the child Medora;
that she was the Thyrza of the " Thyrza poems " and
the Astarte of "Manfred "; and that the endeavor
to shield her and keep their intimacy unsuspected
led to a self-restraint in the face of most degrading
accusations and a self-immolation on the part of
Augusta Leigh of which a human being seems hardly
capable. In Part III. we find statements, made by
Lord Lovelace in "Astarte," argued; we find Au-
gusta Leigh defended and Lord Lovelace attacked.
The best parts of the book are those in which the
writer is least controversial. We should welcome the
emphasis laid on the good side of the poet's char-
acter, as shown during his career in Greece; and the
record of his laborious days and nights spent in the
service of an alien people, without, according to
Byron's own statement and others' belief, desire for
personal aggrandisement. He had faults, to the end;
but the most careful examination of Byron's later
days shows him a hero. We should regard evidence
supporting a claim that Byron's life from 1813-1816
has never till now been adequately understood, as of
sufficient importance to demand publication. We
must, however, feel that some assertions on important
points are but too weakly supported; and we must
share the regret of the author that he is "unable more
precisely to indicate the source of information
embodied in the concluding portions of the work."
In his eulogy of Lord Byron's later years, we can
willingly follow Mr. Edgcumbe; in his attempt to
reconstruct our ideas of what happened earlier, we
can follow him only part way. We cannot, how-
ever, if we are students of Byron, afford to leave
the book unread.
A militant and triumphant tone
~„™X'.' 8°™d« throughout Dr. Woods Hutch-
inson's "The Conquest of Consump-
tion" (Houghton), and brings a convincing note of
the certainty of victory over this most common and
most justly dreaded foe of humanity. The book
contains exactly those things which anyone brought
face to face with consumption should know; and,
moreover, the facts are told in such simple language
that a child could understand them, and with so
much force that even disbelievers in disease germs
will feel called upon to follow the eminently sane and
sensible directions for the recovery of health. The
gospel here preached is that of out-of-doors, of fresh
air and sunlight, of abundant food and intelligent
idleness, and of social responsibility for the care of
the dependent sufferer from tuberculosis and for
the vigorous prosecution of efforts to stamp out this
plague from among men. Everyone interested in


324
[May 1,
THE DIAi
this fight will find encouragement, hope, and inspi-
ration in this spirited call to arms in the crusade
against consumption. A very sensible discussion is
given of what climate can and cannot do for the
sufferer, and of the importance of this factor in the
treatment of individual cases. Dr. Hutchinson is
an enthusiastic admirer of American possibilities in
this health-resort business, in spite of his insistence
upon the greater values of food and fresh air; and
one strongly suspects that he has summered and
wintered in Seattle and Los Angeles.
T^„M In his book entitled "Romance of
Leaaino evenu „
in the hutorv the American Wavy (Putnam), Mr.
of our if aw- Hill has written a popular and enter-
taining account of some thirty or forty of the most
interesting events in our naval history. A selection
from the chapter titles will give a notion of the con-
tents of the book: Commodore Joshua Barney, The
Lucky Little Enterprise, John Paul Jones, The
Chesapeake and the Shannon, The Battle of Lake
Erie, The Duel between the Monitor and the Mer-
rimac, The Capture of New Orleans by Farragut,
The Battle of Mobile Bay, and Dewey in Manila
Bay. One may see from this list that the author
follows the main travelled roads of our naval history.
Now and then, however, he departs from them, and
writes of such little-known events as the building of
the Red River Dam and the fighting of Ellet's steam
rams at Memphis. The most original part of his book
is that treating of the work of the navy in the Civil
War. Here he has drawn upon his own experiences
in that struggle, as an officer under Admirals Far-
ragut, Porter, and Lee. Mr. Hill, in common with
many other writers, greatly exaggerates the work of
the privateers during the Revolution and the War of
1812 (pages v.-vi.). The most trustworthy statistics
that we have on this subject show that our shipping
suffered as much as the British, if not more. The
book is well printed, and contains numerous illus-
trations of naval officers, ships, and battles, and a
fairly good index.
The people't political philosopher has little
ihare in our difficulty in pointing to "the people"
law-making. a s tne 80urce ancl fountain-head of
all law and governmental authority. But the hard-
headed man of fact perceives that only a limited
number of individuals participate in law-making,
and that the mass of men watch the process as mere
observers. The closer reconciliation of fact and
theory is receiving to-day the thoughtful considera-
tion of our political reformers. Under the some-
what misleading title of "The People's Law"
(Macmillan), Judge Lobingier, now of the Univer-
sity of Nebraska, has written of the actual partici-
pation of the people — or rather, of the electorate—
in the making of law. Brief chapters are devoted
to ancient and modern instances in countries other
than the United States, but the bulk of the work
deals with popular ratification in Colonial America
and the share of the electorate in the making of our
state constitutions. Eighteen pages suffice for the
consideration of popular participation in legislation
by means of initiative and referendum. The book
belongs to the field of history rather than of law,
and is a valuable study in the origins of our state
constitutions, showing to what extent in actual prac-
tice popular ratification is a source of our funda-
mental institutions of government . The work is to
be particularly commended as an introduction to a
wealth of original material inaccessible in any other
single volume.
BRIEFER MENTION.
The rapidly extending series of "American Crisis
Biographies" (Jacobs) must perforce include a life of
Henry Clay. The work of preparing this biography was
put into the hands of Mr. Thomas Hart Clay, grandson
of the statesman, who had long been collecting materials
for such a work. The writer's sudden death interrupted
the task, but it has been completed in harmony with his
plan by Mr. Oberholtzer, editor of the series. The work,
one of love and loyalty to the distinguished ancestor of
the author, shows no undue prejudice; the writer has
investigated carefully and tries to hold the balance
evenly. Of course he believes in his grandfather, but
he does not find him perfect. It is a good reference
book for details.
The student of mathematical history will find quite in-
valuable Professor David Eugene Smith's " Kara Arith-
metica" (Ginn & Co.), now made available, in a handsome
one-volume edition, to many for whom the two-volume
edition de luxe is quite out of reach. Professor Smith's
is by far the most elaborate bibliography of arithmetic
yet attempted. It consists of a chronological catalogue
of arithmetics printed before 1601, with a full descrip-
tion of those in the library of Mr. George Arthur
Plimpton of New York. Mr. Plimpton's collection of
such texts is the largest that has ever been brought
together, including over three hundred printed volumes
— practically every sixteenth-century work of any im-
portance— besides a number of valuable manuscripts on
arithmetic, of which a separate list follows that of the
printed works. The abundant illustrations are often
of much historical interest, but have in general been
selected with a view to bibliographical needs.
"The Rivers and Streams of England" (Macmillan)
have been admirably painted in color by Mr. Sutton
Palmer and described by Mr. A. G. Bradley, an enthu-
siastic angler and an inveterate rambler along English
hedge-rows. Author and artist have not felt con-
strained to keep too close company; each has exercised
his own taste in the matter of selection, the result
being, no doubt, better pictures and more spirited
essays than a more constrained method would have
produced. For example, the Thames figures largely
in the pictures; in the text, the Severn is more promi-
nent as being more beautiful and far less familiar both
to travellers and readers. Scenic description and his-
toric lore, with some hints to anglers, compose the text.
The pictures are confined strictly to the natural beauties
of the English streams, which afford ample material
for such exploitation.


1910.]
325
THE DIAL
THE DIAL'S THIRTIETH
ANNIVERSARY.
With this issue The Dial commemorates the
thirtieth anniversary of its founding. Thirty years
of continuous publication are behind it, during
which it has never missed an issue. It enters upon
its fourth decade in the same hands and the same
spirit in which its publication was begun, May 1,
1880. Few are the journals that have been con-
ducted by the same man for so long a period ; fewer
still are those which after thirty years remain in
the hands of their founder and first editor, who has
conducted it continuously throughout that period,
making the history of the journal in a peculiar sense
the history of an individual.
The Dial has not been given to self-glorification
or the exploitation of personality. If the letters
that are printed herewith are somewhat intimate in
tone and warm in appreciation, some explanation
may perhaps be found in the facts above indicated.
The letters derive an interest from the varied per-
sonalities and viewpoints of their writers, and it is
in them, rather than in any words of our own, that
we prefer to commemorate the occasion that has
called them forth.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
As I am the only one, except the editor and founder
of The Dial, left of those who contributed to its first
number thirty years ago, I perhaps may be entitled to
lead the chorus of congratulations on the completion of
its third decade. I greet my "fellow veteran," rejoic-
ing that he is still at the helm of the craft he has guided
so long and well, and glad that he is finding the rewards
of faithful service highly planned and highly wrought.
Few in these grasping, selfish, and avaricious days can
contemplate three decades of such honorable, uplifting,
and self-sacrificing effort, brought to such deserved
success. George P. Upton.
Chicago, A pril to.
I am glad to hear of your Anniversary celebration; to
which I can, however, contribute little, unless it be
conveyed in the following reminiscence. I am prob-
ably one of the few men living who habitually read
the original "Dial" on its quarterly appearance, and per-
haps the only person who had the honor of having some
verses of his own rejected in the last number of its early
existence (in April 1844) by its editor, Ralph Waldo
Emerson. The following was his delicious reply to my
"Sunset Thoughts," as they were modestly entitled:
"Perhaps I may not print your verses in ' The Dial.' They
hare truth and earnestness; and a happier hour may add that
external perfection which can neither be commanded nor
described."
To this he kindly added, as a P.S.: "Perhaps after fur-
ther reflection I may print these verses in 'The Dial.'"
But this he wisely abstained from doing; and more than
one younger writer than myself may have been consoled
in later years, when I have quoted to him this gentle
but resistless verdict of our most revered leader.
Thomas Wentworth Hiooinson.
Cambridge, Mats.. April 18.
Let me join with the rest to congratulate The Dial,
and to cougratulate yourself, who are The Dial that
we know. We recognize that The Dial has taken to
itself the function of criticism of current literature, un-
influenced by any other consideration. It has held this
function from the first, and without change of purpose
or policy. We know that whatever may be said in its
pages is the honest judgment of a competent authority.
We value the visits of The Dial as we value the speech
of a wise friend, and we hope that many generations of
scholars may enjoy the same high privilege.
David Starr Jordan.
Stanford UnivertUy, Calif.. April is.
Congratulations to The Dial on its thirtieth birth-
day. For us who are
"Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,"
it is uniquely valuable, both for authoritative uews of
the progress of the rise, and for wise comment on its
source and direction. Ferris Greenslet.
Boiton, April 16.
To those who cherish the interests of literature and
criticism in its shaping of the standards of living and
the ideals of life, the survival of The Dial for thirty
years is at once a consolation and a triumph. It may
be accepted as a welcome sign that the still small voice
is not wholly still, nor too insignificant to make an im-
pression in spite of the din of a noisier journalism. It
is through its acceptance conscientiously of the respon-
sibilities of leadership that The Dial has achieved a
success which must be weighed rather than counted to
express its numerical status. With no assumption of
superiority and no tendency to hold itself aloof from
popular interest, it combines the sympathy of a view
from the inside with the objective independence of a
critical and poised observer. It is natural that con-
tributors are willing to bring to such a purpose an ap-
preciative and disinterested cooperation. It is at once
a privilege and a pleasure to be enrolled in such a
group, and to extend to The Dial cordial good wishes
for further decades of prosperity.
Joseph Jastrow.
Univmilv of WUcontin, April IS.
I am delighted by the word from yau suggested by
the approaching Thirtieth Anniversary of The Dial.
Your recollection of the fact that a long time ago I was
a contributor is very gratifying. I only wish that I had
been more essentially associated with a paper that has
maintained such high standards. I see The Dial is
praised on all sides, apropos of its coming anniversary;
but it has long been recognized as holding an honored
place quite all its own. Franklin MacVeagh.
Waihinoton. D. C April IS.
Having been one of The Dial's "constant readers"
almost from the beginning, news of its approaching
Thirtieth Anniversary came to me with something of a
shock; for I had not appreciated that time had sped so
fast. To a public institution like The Dial, however,
age brings prestige rather than decay, so that it may
indeed be congratulated upon having attained so ripe
an experience. The Dial occupies a unique position;
it is not only the sole journal among us exclusively
devoted to literary criticism, but it is unsurpassed and
almost unrivalled in the quality, strength, and indepen-
dence of its reviews. Librarians with literary constitu-
encies find that nowhere else than in the pages of The
Dial can they obtain such a body of serious and trust-


326
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
worthy information concerning current books. Here is
all manner of good wishes to you, and profound thanks
for your thirty years of yeoman service in behalf of
American scholarship. Reuben G. Thwaites.
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. April li.
I offer my message of congratulation and good-will
on the occasion of the Thirtieth Anniversary of your
admirable journal of letters. In breath of view, in
sympathy, and in fairness, The Dial gives me keen
satisfaction. May it have a long and helpful career, to
instruct us all in sound canons of literary criticism and
their application to the publications of our time.
Nicholas Murray Bdtler.
Columbia University, New York, April 15.
Do yon, dear Editor of the The Dial, remember in
the long ago when a little band of heretics assembled in
the old Unitarian Church of the Messiah to consider the
possibilities of starting a new journal in the interest of
"Kingdom Come," and you were present, by invitation
of Robert Collyer, as a likely young fellow to take
editorial charge of the same? And how we balloted for
names — the only one which I remember being Robert
Collyer's suggestion that the paper be called "The
Head-Light" and that the title-page be illuminated
with a great locomotive in full steam and a flaming
head-light throwing its rays over the title? Fortunately
for you, the scheme was too embryonic, the dream too
chaotic and quixotic, to entangle you, and you were
providentially saved for a more fitting job. I, for better
or for worse, was entangled, and the dream was launched:
it was shortly before you pushed your canoe from shore.
You will pardon the presumption on my part, when I con-
fess that " Unity " and The Dial have been intimately
associated in my fancy as a sort of twin-venture. Tbey
were born out of the same impulse; I believe they have
been sustained by the same faiths in the receptive
power of common, plain, every-day human nature, and
that the wheels have been kept moving by the same con-
fidence that the Universe is favorable to excellence, and,
as Emerson says, "The dice of God are loaded " in the
interest of things beautiful and fair. You, steering the
Dial craft, have "made good." Your canoe has been
replaced by a skiff, and now you are running at least a
respectable yacht. Mine is still a crazy raft, and the most
that can be said to my credit is that I have kept the thing
afloat, and that I have not fallen overboard. But I
rejoice in your success. Indeed, I have rejoiced in it
continuously. I am sure no one can be prouder of
The Dial's Thirtieth Anniversary than the editor of
"Unity," its luckless twin that has never known enough
to know when it was beaten, and so lives on.
Jenkin Lloyd Jones.
Lincoln Centre, Chicago, April IS.
It is a pleasure to congratulate The Dial upon its
thirtieth birthday, and a comfort to know that its vigor
increases with age; for certainly a protest against
"smart" criticism was never more needed. I like The
Dial because it takes its work seriously. I admit that
I am most edified when, the subject permitting, its
sincerity expresses itself in a not too sombre mood. But
in a day when we learn flippancy before the ink of our
first typewriter ribbon is cleansed from our fingers, it is
more than a comfort — it is a blessing — that a journal
of serious criticism should be entering so auspiciously
upon a fourth decade. Henry S. Canby.
Yale University. April 18.
I have studied The Dial all the days of its life, since
it first came to my desk in London bringing welcome
news of literary doings in America; and it is with almost
a shock that I realize this was a generation ago! I
think that The Dial commended itself to English
readers from the beginning, perhaps because it had
more of a world-outlook, was less ephemeral in tone
and more dignified in character, than most American
literary journals at that time. In saying this I do not
of course forget my good old friend " The Nation," for
which I sometimes wrote in the Garrison days. In The
Dial we have for years found sound helpful criticism,
sane far-seeing views, and the best guidance to the
product of the world of thought, — not of its own day
alone, for in The Dial we have had some of the best
appraisements of the literary products of past times
also. The literary judgments of The Dial have rarely
erred; tbey command the respect of the world of letters
in two hemispheres; and the fact that they have done
so for one generation inspires the belief that The Dial
will continue wisely to record, not alone the years as
they pass, but the things we do in them, for generations
to come. Charles Welsh.
Scranton, Pa., April 17.
The motto of my sun-dial, / mark only sunny hours,
is ever to me the motto of my Chicago Dial. Hours of
brightest sunshine and cheer, with never a moment of
gloom or depression, have been mine in the many years
daring which I have had the pleasure and profit of
reading The Dial. May the light be seen for a century
on those clean clear pages. Alice Morse Earle.
Brooklyn, N. Y.. April tl.
May I extend my congratulations on occasion of the
Thirtieth Anniversary of the publication of The Dial?
The service rendered to our city by a paper conducted
in accordance with such ideals cannot be measured or
weighed, and cannot easily be put in words. I feel that
those who have so faithfully given their time to main-
tain such a force in our community are entitled to the
thanks and the congratulations of all.
Harry Pratt Judson.
University of Chicago. April tl.
No one who cares for the good fortune of letters in
America ought to neglect to wish The Dial many
happy returns of the day on its Thirtieth Anniversary.
In the midst of so much that is fleeting and futile in
our periodical literature, it is a great satisfaction and
encouragement to have anything so sober and sound as
The Dial. But it is more than that; for it is always
alive and open-minded, kindly without being indiserimi-
nating, and dignified without being dull. That is a
great deal to be proud of. May I offer my heartiest
congratulations on the happy occasion, with highest
hopes for the future? Bliss Carman.
New Canaan, Conn., April 19.
Let me congratulate you upon the position of respect
and usefulness you and your fellow-workers have gained
for The Dial among lovers and students of literature.
It stands alone in a calm liberating atmosphere of its
own. May you long go on with your suggestive criti-
cism and deep sincerity of aim, evoking as it will crea-
tive moods out of which will be born what we all long
to hail — a Literature worthy in its compass of thought
and feeling, beauty and charm, of a country so vast, so
great, and (I hope) to be so exalted for its righteous-
ness, as ours. Morris Schaff.
Boston, Mass., April ff.


1910.]
327
THE DIAL
1 send my cordial greetings on the Thirtieth Anni-
versary of The Dial. It is clear that you do measure
time, and a good deal of it; hence your title is well
chosen. But it is just as well to note the fact that you
do not merely "mark time"—you progress; and you
are doing fine work for the cause of literature in this
country. Long may you prosper. W. P. Trent.
Columbia University, New York, April 18.
The Dial has always been true to its name — it has
marked time by the sun. Truth, Beauty, Justice, and
Righteousness have been the quarters through which for
thirty vibrant years its gnomon has circled. Yet is its
circuit not a closed one, but, rather, by its precession
does it ever bring us forward iuto a larger and brighter
day. Happy are we all that he who for so many years
has steadfastly set its face open to the light of Heaven is
still there. In his reverent and dauntless spirit, his love
for everything that is true and good and holy, his sor-
row for everything that mars and defaces the fair face
of nature and of humanity, we read the secret of The
Dial. May he for years still to come be at the centre,
where the sun is always shining. John J. Halsey.
Lake ForesU University, III., April to.
Heartiest greeting to The Dial and its editor on
the Thirtieth Anniversary of its distinguished career in
American literary criticism. Its work is indispensable.
Robert Underwood Johnson.
New York. April t7.
To have The Dial measuring the sunny hours during
thirty years, is one of the wonders of the American lit-
erary world. My long experience with nations that set
value on longevity makes me take off my hat to The
Dial. I welcome the shadow-lines it casts according to
time's measurements, yet guided by eternal order and
principle. May The Dial measure many more sunny
hours, and aid me, as I strive with the editor — may I
not say the consecrated champion of literary justice and
critical truth-seeking ? — to add my beam to the kindly
light. William Elliot Griffis.
Ithaca, N. Y., April 18.
I congratulate The Dial upon its Thirtieth Anniver-
sary. Best wishes to yourself — who are, and always
have been, The Dial. Henry B. Fuller.
Chicago. April £6.
It was not a very exceptional thing to start a new
periodical thirty years ago, but to have done so and to
see it a living and influential element in the literary life
of to-day is a bit of success not granted to many adven-
turers in that field. And the success is all the more
praiseworthy when it is remembered that the whole
thirty years show no single moment of faltering in the
maintenance of the high ideals which gave The Dial
birth. Those of us who know something of the burden
which you have personally carried in this work appre-
ciate our indebtedness to your perseverance all the
more deeply on that account. W. II. Johnson.
Denison University. Ohio, April £0.
Most sincere congratulations on the occasion of the
Thirtieth Anniversary of the birth of The Dial. The
Dial has stood throughout for all that is best in the
evaluation of current literature. It has won a place of
its own as a fearless and absolutely impartial review;
and everyone who values these rare qualities must wish
The Dial many more years of usefulness.
Lawrence J. Burpee.
The Carnegie Library, Ottawa, Canada, April 15.
In offering The Dial, as I do, my hearty congratu-
lations on the completion of its thirtieth year, I am re-
minded of its steadiness and fidelity to high ideals and
the best traditions of literature; of its confidence in the
integrity of human nature — a confidence which asserts
that a man will still write the truth though he must sign
his name beneath; and of the respect with which its
verdicts are and have long been received throughout the
world. May it prosper as it deserves!
Clark S. Northup.
Cornell University, April 17.
It must be a satisfaction of no mean quality — as well
as size — to have kept a literary journal true to the
highest ideals of criticism for thirty years. The Dial
has been absolutely honest, fearless, and impartial. It
has never had pets —■ either among publishers or
authors. There has never been a whisper regarding
the absolute integrity of its criticisms. And, however
severely I might be handled, of one thing I felt sure, —
at least that the critio had read every vital page of the
book. That means a great deal to a writer.
Alice French (" Octave Thanet ").
Davenport, Iowa, April 18.
I most heartily congratulate you, as the soul of The
Dial, on the completion of its Thirtieth Anniversary.
The Dial has been a stimulus to all literary workers,
because of its high and noble ideals. You have made it
an indispensable helper to all of us.
Ira Maurice Price.
University of Chicago, April 18.
Thirty years of intelligent and honest criticism!
Good for The Dial, say I; and honor with long life to
the men who have made and kept it what it is.
Bradford Torrey.
Santa Barbara, Calif., April to.
I take much pleasure in adding my testimony to the
great service which The Dial has done for the devel-
opment of proper literary standards in this country. I
have always taken great pleasure and pride in calling
the attention of my friends in the East, and in Europe,
who asked about conditions of civilization in the Missis-
sippi Valley, to The Dial. We have all taken a per-
sonal interest in its prosperity, are proud of its success,
and wish it the utmost prosperity in the future.
Edmund J. James.
University of Illinois, April 18.
Greetings and many happy returns to The Dial. It
stands for all that is scholarly, just, and true, in
American letters. Chas. F. Holder.
Pasadena, Calif.. April to.
A journal of literary criticism which sets out calling
itself by the name of that trustworthy old friend of
mankind, the dial, and which succeeds in living up to
its name, is rightly the object of congratulation because
of its consistency and of thanks for the service it ren-
ders. In a country and at a time in which production
of books is so facile and abundant, and in which the
best — for reasons of commerce, prejudice, favoritism,
banality of taste, or ignorance — too often runs danger
of enjoying both less fame and less material support
than the second-best or even the worst, it is necessary
to the good health of both writer and reader to have at
least one or two journals of dial-like solidity and per-
manence, of dial-like steadfastness and indifference to
the random fluctuations of temperature and breeze, of


328
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
dial-like security from the accidents that beset the
dollar watch or from the noise that clamors from the
steeple clock, of dial-like constancy to one great source
of light — in a word, of dial-like sense and sobriety and
reliability. Those who feel the need of a reliable time-
piece to help them know the literary time of day are
grateful to The Dial for its unity and integrity of
purpose, for its reviews written by men who read the
books they review, for its resistance of the old tempta-
tion to be smart rather than truthful, and for its edito-
rial championship of the literary and critical ideal.
They wish it long continuation of usefulness and pros-
perity. Grant Showerman.
University of Wisconsin. April it.
I beg to send you sincere greetings on the Thirtieth
Anniversary of your journal's significant career. Sus-
tained and unobtrusive excellence is rare in this clamor-
ous market; and your readers are grateful to you for it.
Congratulations and God-speed to The Dial.
„ ... Percy Mackaye.
Cornish, N. //., April 19.
The Dial's Thirtieth Anniversary ought to be matter
for congratulation to all Americans. There is only one
other periodical of ours which can be ranked with it
for honesty and independence. Its continued existence
and usefulness pleasantly reassure us against the fear
that one congested Eastern city is to continue to absorb
most of the writing men of promise in the new world,
as well as most of the incoming Hebrews and Slavs of
the old one. H. W. Boynton.
Bristol. R. I.. April U.
Let me send you every message of congratulation
on the happy occasion of your Thirtieth Anniversary.
During these thirty years, as I wrote ten years ago,
The Dial has seemed to me the most unbiassed, good-
humored, and sensible organ of American criticism.
Barrett Wendell.
Harvard College. Cambridge. Mast.. April 15.
Many thanks to the forces of Heaven and Earth, and
to all concerned in the existence and influence of The
Dial! The name, glorious in American literature, has
been made still more illustrious by the conduct of this
periodical, for whose presence and power every lover of
good literature must be grateful. Noble traditions and
a prophetic vision have characterized every issue that
has come to us here at the Armour Institute, as for years
before the beginning of our work among the young men
it came to my study table. No teacher of English lit-
erature can afford to let this anniversary occasion pass
without rejoicing with those who have students under
their charge that we have had thirty years of this steady
onward-moving guidance. F. W. Gunsaulus.
Armour Institute of Technology. Chicago. April 17.
My congratulations on the Thirtieth Anniversary of
The Dial. I have known The Dial for just fifteen
of its thirty years, and in that time respect for the sin-
cerity and candor of its reviews has grown to admira-
tion for the high ideals of its editor and affection for
the journal itself. Ephraim Douglass Adams.
Stanford University, Calif., April IS.
Congratulations warm and sincere to The Dial and
its editor, for the thirty years of splendid work per-
formed with courage, tact, wisdom, and grace: a
remarkable record, of which all who know it may well
be proud. J. H. Crooker.
Bolton. April IS.
I have known The Dial from the day it was born,
and read it by fits and starts with pleasure and profit
down to the last numbers, and I think it has no rival in
the literary journals of our own land. The last num-
bers I have read with especial satisfaction.
Robert Collyer.
New York, April is.
Let me congratulate you upon the happy completion
of the thirtieth year of The Dial, a very notable
achievement — more notable, I think, than Mr. God-
kin's, because "The Nation " by including politics made
a wider appeal for popular support. I have faith that
the men who do the good work in this world will receive
eventual recognition, even though their names do not
crowd the headlines of the daily press.
F. H. Hodder.
University of Kansas. April 19.
"Remember, brethren, that the Lord did n't send
down all the Holy Ghost he had over in Palestine on
the day of Pentecost." Thus spake with unction once
an old minister out on the far edge of California. And
I want to announce in the same spirit of prophecy that
the genius of Culture has not centred all h»r gifts on the
eastern seaboard of our country. I cannot here speak
of the virile verse and fiction that have risen beyond the
Alleghanies. But speaking only of literary criticism,
I wish to say that The Dial, out in the heart of the
nation, has continuously and consistently stood for the
highest ideals; has been quick to discern and keen to
encourage everything making for righteousness in the
world of American letters. All success to its high
purpose! Edwin Markham.
West New Brighton, N, Y.. April t6.
The Dial has long been a favorite among the lit-
erary periodicals that I regularly read, and I always
take pleasure in commending it as I find opportunity.
I seldom have to disagree with its critical decisions,
and never doubt their honesty and impartiality. The
special attention given to library management is one
of the best among its minor features, and exceptional
withal. W. J. Rolfe.
Cambridge, Mass., A pril to.
I send you my hearty greetings and congratulations on
your having reached the Thirtieth Anniversary of The
Dial, both editor and paper sound of mind and body,
and rich in the affectionate appreciation of a large and
ever growing circle of friends. J. C. Brannkh.
Stanford University. Calif., April 20.
Prevented until now by illness, I can only even at
present dictate a line — too tardily, I fear — to con-
gratulate The Dial on reaching its thirtieth birthday
and on having fulfilled the unique mission it, so fortu-
nately for American letters, appointed to itself in 1880.
I wish I could write more. I rejoice to believe that the
larger part of The Dial's life and exceptional useful-
ness lies still before it. George W. Cable.
Northampton. Mass.. April in.
To find out and praise the good, to run down and kill
the bad, to pass judgment on the tolerable and put it in
the right line of probation, — these duties of a journal
of criticism you have done, and done well. May you
have your reward in discovering that great American
author, who, by all sound reckoning, is to come one of
these days out of the Middle West!
Francis B. Gummkrk.
Haverford College, April 2.1.


1910.]
329
THE DIAL
Please accept my cordial congratulations on your
Thirtieth Anniversary. The Dial has stood almost
alone in these thirty years for high standards in litera-
ture and for ideals in both literature and scholarship.
It has always had the courage of its convictions, for
which above all else it deserves the approval of everyone
who possesses enlightenment or who seeks after it.
Harry Thurston Peck.
Columbia ITnivertity, New York, April 16.
It is a privilege to send greetings to The Dial, and
to wish it long continuance of life and prosperity, and
the fewest changes in form and spirit that are consistent
with progress. Edward S. Martin.
New York City. April 17.
It is a pleasure to write you a word of congratulation
on your Thirtieth Anniversary. I hope to have the
same pleasure at the fortieth — not to say the fiftieth —
with the same founder and editor at the helm. It is
something worth while to have a place where you can
say your say on the literature that stirs you (or does
not stir you), without fear of publisher, editor, or
reader. The Dial has always been an opportunity for
the writer as well as the reader. And when we look
at our American periodicals in general, we see what
reason we have to be thankful for such an opportunity.
Edward E. Hale, Jr.
Union College, New York, April 19.
Let me, as one of your interested readers for many
years, joy with you on the occasion of your Thirtieth
Anniversary. And so, I believe, ought all lovers of the
best in literature and in life. Few indeed are they who
can offer such a worthy record in the world of letters.
The Middle West particularly, and the entire country
generally, ought to wish you many happy returns of the
event. Duane Mowry.
Milwaukee, Wit., A pril 18.
For a good many years I have looked to The Dial
to indicate the true course of literary light, and it has
never disappointed me. I regard it as the sanest and
most trustworthy book journal published in America.
Let me offer hearty congratulations on your thirtieth
birthday. James A. B. Scherer.
Throop Inttitute, Patatlena, Calif.. April ts.
Please accept our hearty congratulations upon the
results of thirty long years devoted to upholding the
higher standards of literary journalism. It is good to
realize that anything so sane can go steadily forward.
It refutes the charge that with us nothing is desirable
except change, and that only mediocrity succeeds. Our
best wishes for the future success of The Dial, which
starts next month on its road to a fiftieth anniversary.
John Lane Company,
Rutoer Bleecker Jewett, Manager.
New York, April 2t.
I wish to add my congratulations to those of your
many other friends on The Dial's thirtieth birthday.
I always feel that a review in The Dial is trustworthy.
Opinions and judgments differ, but literary appreciation
of the finer sort is a species of intuition and can seldom
go far wrong. Add to this a literary conscience, and
you have the rare combination which has made The
Dial what it is. It never sacrifices truth to brilliancy
or says an unjust thing in order to make a telling phrase.
It is more than interesting, — it is reliable.
Walter Taylor Field.
Chicauo, April 11.
Allow me to congratulate you most sincerely on the
completion of the thirtieth year of The Dial. I do
not know of any similar paper in this country which has
maintained a higher ideal or followed a more consistent
practice in independent criticism. I wish you many
another anniversary of this high enterprise.
Woodrow Wilson.
Princeton Univertity, N.J., April 19.
I send my cordial greetings to The Dial on its com-
pletion of thirty years of service to literature and cul-
ture. Too few of our periodicals have survived the
temptation to be an excuse for half an Inch of adver-
tisements; only a very few are seriously devoted to
literature as a special field. May The Dial continue
to be an honored exception for many a decade to come.
John Erskine.
Columbia Vnivertity, New York, April 21.
Congratulations and many happy returns! It is pos-
sibly not in order for a contributor to comment on the
success of his journal, but he may perhaps be allowed
to testify to the wisdom and daring of his editor. The
timidity of the average American editor answers to the
tyranny of American public opinion. We have nothing
like the intellectual freedom which centuries of struggle
have won for Europe. But the editor of The Dial
has never been afraid to risk his circulation and adver-
tising for the sake of the right, in the defense of
unpopular causes, or to keep alive free discussion. To
have done this for thirty years is to be a great editor.
Like the Parliament man in Charles the First's time,
he has told the truth and not been hanged for it.
Charles Leonard Moore.
Moorettown, N. J., April IS.
Congratulations and good wishes for The Dial's
Thirtieth Anniversary. I have been a sincere admirer
of The Dial for many years. It has consistently stood
for the best things in life and literature throughout its
career, and I have long felt the most entire confidence
in its literary and other judgments.
Oscar Fay Adams.
Botton, April 18.
Our generation has entered more fully into the free-
dom of thought than the generations that have gone
before us. We have not been without our vagaries, but
we have had our revelations. Our methods of expres-
sion have suffered a similar relaxation, with more of loss
and less of gain. There has been a lax impressional
and vulgar quality in our utterance, which has interfered
with the weight and quality of truth. A sensuous and
pictorial form has prevailed which has obstructed men-
tal illumination. We are glad that The Dial has been
content with the light with none of its bewildering sheen.
Williamt Colleue, Mast.. April 19. JoHN Bascom-
My hearty congratulations on this anniversary of
The Dial. While I cannot claim an acquaintance of
thirty years, for at least two-thirds of the period
measured by The Dial's existence I have regularly
enjoyed its monthly and later its semi-monthly advent.
Clear, clean-cut, handsome in its page and type, digni-
fied and scholarly in tone, The Dial deserves the splen-
did recognition it has received. Its leading articles, its
literary essays, its critical reviews, have been models in
their kind. Who ever read a pert or supercilious com-
ment in The Dial? Well do I remember a certain
emphatic and indiscreet communication written with
sophomoric fervor in Quixotic defense of much-maligned


380
[May 1,
THE DIAL
"poor little Jane" Austen, which was returned with a
charming letter from the editor. He expressed full
and hearty agreement with the writer's sentiment and
his vehement attack upon the traducer, — nay, he even
added the comforting statement, " So and so is undoubt-
edly an ass—-but let's not say it in The Dial." Thus
his skilful touch upon the regulator has kept the inner
works in accurate adjustment; the pendulum has never
lost its calm steadiness of swing; the hands have duly
registered the critical judgment of a generation; and
The Dial's open face has ever recorded standard
time. It is a great achievement; and we of the Middle
West are proud of The Dial, — not that it is a product
of the Middle West, or that it is the representative of
the Middle West, but because in Chicago we have had
for thirty years a publication representative of the
world of letters, a journal which has so admirably filled
its place in letters, and an editor whose literary ideals
have had no small influence upon the taste and judgment
of his time. I send my best wishes for the future pros-
perity of The Dial, and my sincere regard.
W. E. Simondb.
Knox Collegt, Illinois, April 19.
The Dial has, from the outset, consistently upheld
high standards of thinking and speaking. In both ways
it has performed a long and a lasting service; and it
deserves what it has solidly won — the great respect of
those who in this country recognize the vital alliance
between criticism and creativeness. No other American
publication known to me has so uniformly held its pages
above the level of spleen and personalia.
„ „ . _.. James Lane Allen.
New York City, April go.
It is no ordinary achievement to have held up before
a reading public for thirty years a Dial on which is
recorded faithfully, without prejudice or subsidy, the
progress of the world of literature and thought. I con-
gratulate not only the management but the public as
well. Edwin Erle Sparks.
Pennsylvania State College. April IS.
The Dial's shadow is of steady enlightenment,
marking in clear outline the figure of Truth. Its thirty
years of casting a quiet shadow of keen judgment, just
criticism, and human touch on the brain and heart of a
public is a surprising refutation of the popular belief
that sensationalism is the sine qua non of success.
,ur J., , r. A; A. MAURICE LOW.
W ashington, D. C. Aprtl 19.
Among American periodicals there is no such other
record as The Dial's. Great journalism has pivoted
always — and always must — upon a personality. The
singleness, the consistency, the purpose and standards,
"without variableness or shadow of turning," which
make Character, must derive from an undivided master.
Else there is a wobble. We like people and papers
that we know where to find. In the average Press, we
do n't know. They are acephalous, but full of "hands."
They record the "pressure" like isobaric lines on a
weather-map — now up, now down, and always wavy.
Greeley and Bowles and Dana, Garrison and Curtis and
Pixley — six different kinds, but all Individuals — were
more implicitly trusted, I think, by more Americans of
mind than to-day trust all the papers in the United
States put together. Circulation is one thing; "infloo-
ence " is another; but conviction by mental leadership —
that is the greatest thing that ever befalls a journal.
All those other oracles of our Golden Age are gone.
But here is the quiet Dial marking now its thirtieth
birthday — consecutive still under the same sensitive,
serene, unswerving bridle-hand, and all and always in
Chicago! It is not so much a "record " as a benediction.
The Dial stands alone now in American letters — a
monument and an example. And this is because it has n't
had to keep swapping minds. Many an able seaman has
helped to trim its sails and stow its cargoes; but at the
wheel always the one steady hand. Power to The Dial!
May its shadow never fall less true to the Hour and its
need. Chas. F. Lummis.
Lot Angelet, Cal., April ZO.
I feel that I owe a most hearty greeting to The Dial
on its Thirtieth Anniversary, in return for the unalloyed
satisfaction it has given me all these years. I am sure
that all its readers will join with me not only in the
greeting, but in the hope of its continued prosperity
along the lines it has hitherto followed.
New York City. A ptil IS. HENRY M. Alden.
The Dial in its present estate has lived a generation.
May a century hence find it flourishing like a green bay
tree; for such a paper is sorely needed. In my opinion,
we have in this country no equal organ for the discussion
of art, literature, and the things of the mind in general.
The West should regard your publication as one of its
most honorable assets. Richard Burton.
University of Minnesota. April It.
Greeting to The Dial, and best wishes for many
more decades of usefulness and increasing influence.
May it ever keep in the Sun, and tell in Straight Lines
the Passing Time to all who linger in the Garden of
Letters. Charles Atwood Kofoid.
University of California, April it.
Of course I am glad to add my tribute to the steady
merit and courage of your Dial, if we may ascribe such
human virtues to that friend of the Sun which counts
no hours except the serene ones, but is no less faith-
ful in cloudy weather, if we may credit the author of
"Hudibras,"—
"True as the dial to the sun,
Although it be not shined upon."
It is pleasant to see that your Dial has enjoyed more
sunshine than the two American magazines that pre-
ceded yours — Emerson's quarterly which you mention
with deserved praise, and Moncure Conway's Cincinnati
monthly of that name, published by him for a single
year, which you pass over in silence. It deserves to
be recalled, however, partly for Conway's spirit and
enthusiasm in setting it up in that bear-garden which
Cincinnati proved to be in his case, though it stood
there but for a year; and partly for his contributors,
who were Emerson, Howells, Octavius Frothingham,
Conway, and (for verses only) myself, among others
who are now less known. Short as its career was, it
justified Conway's pleasing figure in presenting its first
number to the world, — " symboUzed," he said, "not so
much by the sun-clock as by the floral dial of Linmeus,
which recorded the advancing day by the opening of
some flowers and the closing of others: it would report
the Day of God as recorded in the unfolding of higher
life and thought, and the closing-up of old superstitions
and evils. It would fain be a Dial measuring time
by growth." Such has been the mission of your own
Dial, to which so many good pens have contributed,
and for which I have occasionally written an article.
Had I been mature enough in 1844, when but twelve


1910.]
331
THE
DIAL
years of age, I should doubtless have sent verses to
Emerson's Dial, which was a harbor for youthful poesy
as well as for the oracular oak of Concord, the New
England Dodona from whose leaves we heard the
"Sphynx" and "Wood-Notes," and that epigram
worthy of the Greek Anthology,—
"The sense of the world is short,
Long and varions the report, —
To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not ontlearned it,
And, how oft soe'er they've turned it,
Not to be improved."
And now, one of your oldest readers, I salute your
Anniversary with faith, hope, and charity, which every
journal, old or youthful, needs. p_ B_ Sanborn.
Concord, Matt., April 19.
Topics in Leading Periodicals.
May, 1910.
Aerial Transit, The Future of. Century.
African Game Trails — VIII. Theodore Roosevelt. Scribner.
American Art, The Story of—IV. Arthur Hoeber. Bookman.
American City Government, New. George K. Turner. McClure.
American Galleries, Treasures of. F.J.Mather. World't Work.
American Women after the War. Ida M. Tarbell. American.
Ancient Crafts in New York. Philip Verrill Mighels. Harper.
Arran Islands, The. Maude Radford Warren. Harper.
Australian Ballot, The Multifarious. P. L. Allen. No. A mer.
Baseball, The Science of. H. 8. Fullerton. A merican.
Bear, Rock; Mountain, Posing the. I. Dnnklee. World To-day.
Beaumont and Fletcher, Plays of. A.C.Swinburne. No. A mer.
Boy Criminals —VIII. Ben B. Lindsey. Everybody'!.
Brazil, American Sanitation in. H. M. Lome. World't Work.
Cancer, New Facts on. Burton J. Hendrick. McClure.
Capital. The Conservation of. James J. Hill. World't Work.
Captain's Duties on an Ocean Liner. C. T. Delany. Atlantic.
Census of 1910, Taking the. E. D. Durand. Review of Ret t.
Charity, Organized, in New York. R. W. Bruere. Harper.
Chaucer. William L. Corbin. Century.
Churchill, Winston. Frederick Taber Cooper. Bookman.
City Building in Germany. Frederic C. Howe. Scribner.
Coal Reserve of Alaska. Richard H. Byrd. World To-day.
College Men and the Bible. C. S. Cooper. Century.
Commission Government in America. World To-day.
Cost of Living, Increased. J. L. Laughlin. Scribner.
Couer. Jaques. Olivia Howard Dunbar. Harper.
Country Parish. The. Winifred Kirkland. Atlantic.
Crow, The, and its Virtues. W. L. Finley. World To-day.
Czar, Policing the. Xavier Paoli. McClure.
Democrats and Republicans. Herbert Croly. North American.
Dock Facilities. Our Neglected. J. L. Mathews. Everybody't.
England and Germany. Sydney Brooks. Atlantic.
Farm, The Poor Man's. David Buffnm. A tlanttc.
Farmers, Helping Men to Be. 8. A. Knapp. World't Work.
Farming on Saturday Afternoons. H. Markley. World To-day.
Gambling, Petty. Elias Tobenkin. World To-day.
Geology and Life. John Burroughs. A tlantic.
Gotch, Thomas C. Charles H. Caffln. Harper.
Great Britain, Crisis in. Sydney Brooks. North American.
Haroun-al-Raschid. E. Alexander Powell. Everybody't.
Holy Land, The — IV. Robert Hlchens. Century.
Honduras: A Land of the Future. N. O. Winter. World To^iay.
Hull House, Twenty-two Years at. Jane Addams. American.
Humor, The New. Some Figures in. Amos Stote. Bookman.
Immigrants, Our, The Skulls of. Burton J. Hendrick. McClure.
Japanese Industrial Revolution. E. Mazey. World To-day.
Justice. A Plea for. A. C. Humphreys. North A merican.
Jutland and Tree-Planting. William Hovgaard. World't Work,
Legislative Game, The. Samuel Hopkins Adams. American.
"Machine" Convention, Doom of. R.S. Binkerd. Rev. of Rev t.
Malbone, Miniaturist. Donald H. Haines. Scribner.
Manhood. Endowing. Arthur T. Hadley. World't Work.
Martin, Riccardo. Henry T. Finck. Century.
MedallicExhibition. International. A.P.Andrew. Rev.of Revt.
Michelangelo. Rhys Carpenter. North A merican.
Military Preparedness. W.H.Carter. North American.
Millet's American Indians, De Cost Smith. Century.
Mississippi, The Precious Control of the. World't Work.
Mojeska, Helena, Memoirs of— VI. Century.
Naval Observatory, The U. S. C. 8. Claudy. World To-day.
Nature Photography, A Leader in. H. W. Lanier. Rev. of Revt.
Newspapers, The Case for the. W.P.Hamilton. Atlantic.
New Theatre. A Year at the. W.P.Eaton. Atlantic.
New York, Lower. Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer. Century.
New York, The Transformation of. J. A. Offord. World To-day
Northwest, Life in the Far. E. K. Broadus. Atlantic.
Oregon. On the Road to. Charles M. Harvey. Atlantic.
Paoli. M. Xavier. Rene Lara. McClure.
Peace, A New Reason for. Norman Angell. World't Work.
Pictures. Talks on — III. Sir Caspar P. Clarke. Everybody't.
Pittsburg. The Truth about. James Oppenheim. American.
Piatt. Thomas. Lemuel E. Quigg. North American.
Political Science, Endowed School of. H. Croly. World't Work.
Politics. Hide-and-Seek. Woodrow Wilson. North American.
Public Expenditure, Waste in. M. T. Herrick. Review of Revt.
Pullman Company, Probing the. Lynn Haines. American.
Rat, Onr Duel with the. W. A. Du Puy. McClure.
Reconstruction Period. Diary of— IV. Gideon Wells. Atlantic.
Religion. The Restoration of. George Hodges. Atlantic.
Rhino. The. A. Radclyffe Dugmore. Everybody't.
Roads. Walter Pritchard Eaton. Scribner.
Roosevelt's Home-Coming. Walter We! ] man. Review of Revt.
School Improvements, Cost of. J.M.Rogers. Lippincott.
School-Teacher, Country, Autobiography of. World't Work.
Sierras, The. Stewart Edward White. American.
Silhouette, Revival of the. Gardner Teall. Bookman.
Society among Lobster Palaces. Julian Street. Everybody't.
South American Progress. Albert Hale. Review of Reviewt
8 ted man. Edmund Clarence, Unpublished Letters of. Harper.
Strikes, The Limitations of. J. J. Feely. North American.
Tangier. The Infidel City. Mary Heaton Vorse. Harper.
Telephone, The Future of. Herbert N.Casson. World't Work.
Theatrical "Stock"and its Dividends. G.Monmouth. Bookman.
Tourists, Sixteenth-Century. E.S.Bates. Atlantic.
U. S. Ex-Official. Confessions of a. Atlantic.
Verse, New. William Dean Howells. North A merican.
Vivisection, Restriction of. GenevieveGrandcourt. No.Amer.
West. Middle —What It Wants. World't Work.
Wool, A Battle Royal in. Everybody'!.
List of New Books.
[The following list, containing 107 titles, includes boohs
received by The Dial since its last issue.]
BIOGRAPHY AND REMINISCENCES.
Robert Herrick: A Biographical and Critical Study. By
F. W. Moorman, Ph.D. Illustrated in photogravure, etc.,
large 8vo, 344 pages. John Lane Co. $5. net.
Bygone Days In Chicago: Recollections of the "Garden
City" of the Sixties. By Frederick Francis Cook. Illus-
trated. 8vo. 400 pages. A. C. McClurg A Co. $2.75 net.
Some Musical Recollections of Fifty Tears. By Richard
Hoffman; with biographical sketch by Mrs. Hoffman. Illus-
trated, 8vo, 168 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. 11.50 net.
The Book of Daniel Drew: A Glimpse of the Fisk-Gould-
Tweed Regime from the Inside. By Bnock White. 8vo, 423
pages. Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.50 net.
George Herbert, Melodist, 1593-1833 By E. S. Buchanan.
16mo, 76 pages. London: Elliot Stock.
HISTORY.
The Roman Republic. By W. E. Heitland, M.A. In 3
volumes, large 8vo. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $10. net.
The Rise of South Africa: A History of the Origin of South
African Colonization from the Earliest Times to the Year
1857. By G. E. Cory. Vol. I.. From the Earliest Times to
the Year 1820. Illustrated, large 8vo, 420 pages. Longmans,
Green, tc Co. $5. net.
The War In Wexford: An Account of the Rebellion in the
South of Ireland In 1798. By H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M.
Broadley. Illustrated in photogravure, etc., large 8vo, 343
pages. John Lane Co. $4 net,
A History of the Irish Parliamentary Party. By F.
Hugh O'Donnell, M.A. In 2 volumes, illustrated in photo-
gravure, etc.. large 8vo. Longmans, Green, & Co. $5 net.
Johnson's Wonder-Working Providenoe. 1628-1651. Edited
by J. Franklin Jameson, Ph.D. With facsimiles, large
8vo. 285 pages. "Original Narratives of Early American
History." Charles Scribner's Sons. $3. net.
GENERAL LITERATURE.
Revolution, and Other Essays. By Jack London. 12mo, 309
pages. Macmillan Co. $1.50 net.


332
[May 1,
THE
DIAL
The Theory of the Theatre, and Other Principles of Dramatic
Criticism. By Clayton Hamilton. 12mo, 248 pages. Henry
Holt ft Co. $1.50 net.
Woodland Paths. By Wintbrop Packard. 16mo, 289 pages.
Small. Maynard ft Co. $1.20 net.
Althea: Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties. By Vernon Lee.
New edition; 12mo. 278 pages. John Lane Co. $1.50 net.
Tales of Bengal. By 8. B. Banerjea; edited by Francis Henry
Skrine. 12mo, 187 pages. Longmans, Green. ft Co. $1. net.
The Works of James Buchanan. Comprising his Speeches.
State Papers, and Private Correspondence. Edited by John
Bassett Moore. Vol. XI., 1860-1868. Large 8vo, 616 pages.
J. B. Lippincott Co. $6. net.
Orsu. A Tale of Many Incarnations: The History of a Soul.
By Justin Sterns. With frontispiece in tint, 12mo, 197 pages.
New York: Lenox Publishing Co. 11.25.
An Interview. By Daniel W. Church. 12mo, 163 pages.
Chicago: Berlin Carey Co.
BOOKS OF VERSE.
The Poems of James Ryder Randall. Edited, with intro-
duction and notes, by Matthew Page Andrews. Illustrated,
12mo. 221 pages. New York: Tandy-Thomas Co. $1. net.
In Praise of Gardens. By Temple Scott. With frontispiece.
16mo. 240 pages. Baker ft Taylor Co. $1.25 net.
Verses and Sonnets. By Julia Stockton Dinsmore. 8vo,
151 pages. Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.25 net.
FICTION.
Nathan Burke. By Mary 8. Watts. 12mo, 628 pages. Mac-
millan Co. $1.60.
Lady Merton, Colonist. By Mrs. Humphry Ward. Illus-
trated in photogravure, etc., 12mo, 351 pages. Doubleday,
Page & Co. $1.60.
The Green Mouse. By Robert W. Chambers. Illustrated in
tint, etc., 12mo, 281 pages. D. Appleton ft Co. $1.50.
Little Aliens. By Myra Kelly. Illustrated, 12mo, 291 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1 60.
The Taming of Bed Butte Western. By Francis Lynde.
Illustrated, 12mo, 410 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50.
The Sky Man. By Henry Kitchell Webster. Illustrated,
12mo. 344 pages. Century Co. $1.20 net.
Just Between Themselves: A Book about Dichtenberg. By
Anne Warner. With frontispiece in color, 12mo, 275 pages.
Little, Brown, ft Co. $1.60.
Franklin Wlnslow Kane. By Anne Douglas Sedgwick.
12mo. 369 pages. Century Co. $1.50.
Hearts Contending:. By Qeorg Schock. With frontispiece
in tint, 12mo. 272 pages. Harper ft Brothers. $1.60.
Snow-Fire. By the author of " The Martyrdom of an Em-
press." Illustrated in color, 8vo, 369 pages. Harper ft
Brothers. $1.50 net.
Olivia L. Carew. By Netta Syrett. 12mo, 374 pages. John
Lane Co. $1.60.
The Red Symbol. By John Ironside. Illustrated, 12mo, 356
pages. Little. Brown, & Co. $1.60.
The Island Providence. By Frederick Niven. 12mo, 310
pages. John Lane Co. $1.50.
The Arch-Satirist. By Frances de Wolf Fenwick. With
frontispiece in color. 12mo, 368 pages. Lothrop, Lee ft
Shepard Co. $1.60.
The Eternal Fires. By Victoria Cross. 12mo, 865 pages.
Mitchell Kennerley. $1.60.
The Green Cloak. By Yorke Davis. Illustrated, 12mo, 807
pages. Sturgis ft Walton Co. $1.50.
The Game of the Golden Ball. By Elizabeth and Adrian
Johnson. Illustrated. 12mo. 351 pages. MacaulayCo. $1.50.
The Little Knight of the X Bar B. By Mary K. Maule.
Illustrated, 12mo, 461 pages. Lothrop, Lee ft Shepard Co.
$1 60.
Hard Pressed. By Fred M. White. 12mo, 819 pages. R. F.
Fenno ft Co. $1.60.
Tet Speaketh He. By Gertrude Capen Whitney. 12mo, 86
pages. Sherman, French ft Co.
I Choose. By Gertrude Capen Whitney. 12mo, 90 pages.
Sherman, French & Co. Il.net.
The Apple-Tree Cottage. By Elinor Macartney Lane.
Illustrated in tint, 16mo, 52 pages. Harper & Brothers.
50 cts. net.
Far from the Madding Crowd, By Thomas Hardy. New
edition; with frontispiece in photogravure, 16mo. 476 pages.
Harper ft Brothers. $1.26.
TRAVEL AND DESCRIPTION.
Beyond the Mexican Sierras. By Dillon Wallace. Illus-
trated, 8vo. 301 pages. A. C. McClurg ft Co. $2 net.
Switzerland of the Swiss. By Frank Webb. Illustrated.
12mo. 249 pages Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50 net.
Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers. By Karl Baedeker.
Seventh edition: with maps and plans. l6mo. 624 pages
Charles Scribner's Sons. $3. net.
RELIGION.
History of the Christian Church. By Philip Schafl. Vol. V.,
Part II.: The Middle Ages, by David S. Schaff, D.D. Illus-
trated, large 8vo, 795 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.25
net.
The Spiritual Unrest. By Ray Stannard Baker. 12mo. 299
pages. Frederick A. Stokes Co. $1.35 net.
A Search After Ultimate Truth: The Divine Perfection
Inherent in Man and in all Creation. By Aaron Martin
Crane. 12mo, 497 pages. Lothrop, Lee. ft Shepard Co.
$1.50 net.
Social Service Series. Comprising: The Church and the
Labor Movement, by Charles Stelzle; The Child in the Nor-
mal Home, by A. L. McCrimmon: The Social Mission of the
Church, by Alfred Wesley Wishart; The Churches outside
the Church, by George W. Coleman; The Home as the
School for Social Living, by Henry Frederick Cope: The
City Ab It Is and Is To Be, by Clinton Rogers Woodruff.
Each 12mo. American Baptist Publication Society. Paper.
ART. ARCHITECTURE, AND MUSIC.
Six Greek Sculptors. By Ernest A. Gardner, Illustrated.
8vo. 260 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2. net.
Town Planning in Practioe: An Introduction to the Art of
Designing Cities and Suburbs. By Raymond Unwin. Illus-
trated, large 8vo, 416 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $6. net.
The Manor Houses of England. By P. H. Dltchfleld. Illus-
trated in color, etc., large 8vo, 211 pages. Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $3. net.
Sohool Architecture: A Handy Manual for the Use of Archi-
tects and School Authorities. By William George Bruce.
Fourth edition: illustrated, 32mo, 285 pages. Milwaukee:
Johnson Service Co.
Judaism in Music. By Richard Wagner; translated, with
introduction and notes, by Edwin Evans. 12mo, 95 pages.
Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25 net.'
The Organ: A Manual of the True Principles of Organ Playing
for Beginners. By Sir John Stainer: edited by James H.
Rogers. Large 8vo, 124 pages. Boston: Oliver Ditson Co.
$1. net.
BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG.
Four Boys and a Fortune: Why They Went to England and
What They Found. By Everett T. Tomlinson. Illustrated.
12mo, 370 pages. Lothrop, Lee, ft Shepard Co. $1.50.
Little Miss Fales. By Emilie Benson Knipe and Alden
Arthur Knipe. With frontispiece in color, 12mo, 226 pages.
Harper & Brothers. $1.26.
The Boys of Brookfteld Academy. By Warren L. Eldred.
Illustrated, 8vo, 381 pages. Lothrop, Lee ft Shepard Co.
$1.25.
John and Betty's History Visit. By Margaret Williamson.
Illustrated, 8vo. 291 pages. Lothrop, Lee ft Shepard Co.
$1.25.
EDUCATION.
Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year
Ended June 80,1909. Vol. II.. large 8vo, 1373 pages. Wash-
ington: Government Printing Office.
The President's Report, University of Chicago. July 1908-
July 1909. 8vo, 280 pages. University of Chicago Press.
German Students' Manual of the Literature, Land, and
People of Germany. By Franklin J. Holzwarth, Ph.D
12mo. 213 pages. American Book Co. tl.net.
German Grammar for Schools and Colleges. By W. H. Fraser
and W. H. van der Smissen. 12mo, 846 pages. D. C. Heath
ft Co. $1.10 net.
Selections from Early German Literature. By Klara
Hechtenberg Collitz, Ph.D. 12mo, 285 pages. American
Book Co. $1. net.
An Outline of Logic By Boyd Henry Bode. 12mo, 324 pages.
Henry Holt ft Co.
A College Course in Writing from Models. Edited, with
introduction and notes, by Frances Campbell Berkeley.
12mo. 478 pages. Henry Holt ft Co.
Progressive French Idioms. Compiled by R. de Blanchaud.
16mo, 119 pages. D. C. Heath ft Co. 60 cts. net.


1910.]
333
THE DIAL
The Elements of English Versification. By James Wilson
Bright and Raymond Durbin Miller. 12mo. 166 pases. Giun
& Co. 80 cts. net.
A Manual of Debate. By Ralph W. Thomas. 12mo, 224
pages. American Book Co. 80 cts. net.
Agrioulture and Its Educational Needs. By Andrew Sloan
Draper. 16mo, 92 pages. Syracuse, N. Y.: C. W. Bardeen.
60 cts.
German Prose Composition, with Notes and Vocabularies.
By Carl W. F. Osthaus and Krnest H. Biermann. 12mo,
191 pages. American Book Co. 85 cts. net.
Exercises in German Syntax and Composition for
Advanced Students. By Marian P. Whitney and Lilian L.
Stroebe. 12mo. 194 pages. Henry Bolt & Co.
Composition In Narration. By Joseph Russell Taylor.
16mo, 129 pages. Henry Holt & Co.
The Song Series: Book Two. By Alys E. Bentley. 8vo. 142
pages. A. S. Barnes Co. 42 cts. net.
An Inland Voyage, and Travels with a Donkey in the
Cevennes. By Robert Louis Stevenson; edited by Allan
Abbott. With portrait, 16mo, 327 pages. "Merrill's English
Texts." Charles E. Merrill Co. 40 cts. net,
Cranford. By Elizabeth Cleghorn Oaskell; edited by H. E.
Coblentz. Illustrated, 12mo, 279 pages. Houghton Mifflin
Co. 40 cts. net.
The Human Body and Health. By Alvin Davison. Illus-
trated, 12mo, 191 pages. American Book Co. 40 cts. net.
Merrill's English Texts. New volumes: Thoreau's Walden,
edited by J. Milnor Dorey: Macaulay's Essays on Lord ('live
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portrait, 16mo. Charles E. Merrill Co.
Theme-Book In English Composition. By Alfred M. Hitch
cock. 12mo, 113 pages. Henry Holt & Co.
MISCELLANEOUS.
The American Public Library. By Arthur E. Bostwick.
Ph.D. Illustrated, 12mo, 394 pages. D. Appleton & Co.
$1.50 net.
The Library and the Librarian: A Selection of Articles from
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Edmund Lester Pearson. 8vo, 87 pages. "Librarian's
Series." Woodstock, Vermont: Elm Tree Press.
Descriptive Meteorology. By Willis L. Moore. Illust rated in
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An Outline of Individual Study. By G. E. Partridge. 12mo,
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Self Help and Self Cure: A Primer of Psychotherapy. By
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Nervous States: Their Nature and Causes. By Dr. Paul Du-
bois: translated by Edward G. Richards. 12mo, 100 pages.
Funk & \Vagnails Co. 75 cts. net.
Mary of Plymouth: A Story of the Pilgrim Settlement. By
James Otis. Illustrated, 12mo, 156 pages. American Book
Co. 35 cts. net.
A Simple Explanation of Modern Banking Customs. By
Humphrey Robinson. 16mo, 111 pages. Small, Maynard
& Co. 25 cts. net.
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THE DIAL
a Semt=j3aonti)l2 Journal of iittrarg fiCtttfctsm, ©isnisston, artlJ Enfortnatfon.
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THE DIAL, Fine Arts Building, Chicago.
Entered H Second-Class Matter October 8,1892, at the Post Office at
Chicago, Illinois, under Act of March 3,1879.
No. 574. MAY 16, 1910. Vol. XLVIII.
Contents.
PAGE
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT OPERA 343
CASUAL COMMENT 346
How Mark Twain grappled with the riddle of the
ages. —The book-rambles of an ex-President.—The
increasing vogue of the roof-garden reading-room. —
Miss Jane Addams's story of her vocation.—Some
maxims of Pudd'nhead Wilson. — Poetic genius and
practical efficiency.—A record-breaking book-thief.
—The library and the country parson. — Trusts as
material for fiction. — The ramification of a great
public library.—The European demand for the books
of Colonel Roosevelt.—Mrs, Humphry Ward as seen
through French eyes.
A PIONEER WOMAN EDUCATOR. Percy F.
Bicknell 348
TWO HEROES OP MODERN ITALY. Roy Temple
House 349
THE LONG PATH OF LIGHT. John Bascom . . 352
THE CAREER OF AN AMERICAN DIPLOMAT.
W. H. Johnson 353
THE GENIUS OF THE FRENCH. Ellen FilzGeraJd 355
THE NEGRO PROBLEM VIEWED ACROSS THE
COLOR-LINE. Walter L. Fleming 357
BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS 359
The Laureate's latest volume. — Two books on the
problem of Woman's work. — A Russian Admiral
in Japan. — Biology and medicine. — The Quaker as
a citizen. — Romantic career of a Frenchman in the
Civil War. — Correspondence of a countess in diplo-
matic life. — Two years behind the footlights. —
Popular talks on astronomy.
BRIEFER MENTION 362
NOTES 363
THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF "THE DIAL":
ADDITIONAL TRIBUTES 363
LIST OF NEW BOOKS 365
OBSERVATIONS ABOUT OPERA.
The operatic situation as it exists in this
country is about to enter upon a new phase, in
consequence of the retirement of Mr. Oscar
Hammerstein from the field and the consolida-
tion of interests recently engineered by Herr
Andreas Dippel. The competition of the last
four years between Mr. Hammerstein's forces
and those controlled by the Metropolitan Com-
pany has had both good and bad consequences.
On the credit side of the balance we have the
spurring of effort which has revolutionized stage
management, which has made it possible to pro-
duce German, French, and Italian works, chorus
and all, in the languages in which they were
written, and which has enlarged the old routine
repertoire by the introduction of many modern
productions. But on the debit side there has
been the frantic bidding of one company against
the other for individual singers, and a general
recklessness of extravagance which would long
before this have spelled bankruptcy for ordinary
purses. The rivalry between the two organiza-
tions has been conducted upon "sporting " lines,
and the public has benefitted in a very notice-
able way. At the close of his last performance
this year, Mr. Hammerstein addressed the audi-
ence in these words:
"This season has been a most unfortunate one
financially. New York has been flooded with opera,
and as a consequence the losses have been enormous.
Bat I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that,
large as my losses have been, those of the other house
have been still larger. But I assure you that my efforts
will not relax. I will be in the field as long as you
aid me."
Since these brave words were spoken, Mr.
Hammerstein has seen a great light and with-
drawn from the cut-throat competition. The
light radiated from an offer made him by the
Metropolitan Company, placed by rumor at the
figure of two millions, and probably sufficient,
in any case, to recoup him for his losses. Thus
he quits the game with full sporting honors, and
with a salve to soothe the irritation of the
inflamed pocket nerve.
Hard following upon the retirement of this
Prince Rupert of an impresario, comes the
announcement of a friendly split in the Metro-
politan management whereby Herr Dippel be-
comes the director of a new organization which


344
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
will give opera in Chicago and Philadelphia —
a season of ten or twelve weeks in each city.
This organization is to have its own conductors,
singers, choruses, and orchestra, and will be the
equal of the Metropolitan Company in all artistic
respects. Moreover, it will maintain amicable
relations with New York (and with Mr. Russell's
Boston organization), which will make possible
an interchange of all the more important singers
as occasion arises. Since both Chicago and
Philadelphia already have magnificent opera-
houses, the success of the new arrangement is
much less problematical than would otherwise
be the case. The new company is an Illinois
corporation, and is financed in Chicago and
New York, but the former city has the majority
interest, and thus becomes the headquarters of
the enterprise.
The outcome of this new turn of the kaleido-
scope is that opera on the grand scale will be
given next year in only the four cities of New
York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston; for
it is a part of the understanding that neither of
the companies shall make even short engage-
ments in other cities. This is hard on the other
cities, but in the present stage of the general
operatic situation it is probably a wise decision.
We have no idea that it will be the permanent
solution of the problem; nor should it be, in our
opinion. But just now it is distinctly matter
for congratulation that these four operatic foci
should be henceforth assured for the American
public. Another advantage is found in the
elimination of that competition of which the
great singers have been so quick to take advan-
tage, and which has made operatic production
of late years so needlessly expensive. It will
always remain the most costly form of public
entertainment; but its cost may now be kept
within some sort of reasonable bounds. All
this smacks a little of the trust methods that
the public looks upon as reprehensible, for the
new organization is earmarked by the limitation
of output and the suppression of competition
which are popularly thought to be the wicked
devices of greedy monopolists. But we should
say, on the whole, that the artists were the
monopolists here concerned, and that we were
dealing with a benevolent trust actuated by pub-
lic-spirited considerations. We do not imagine
for a moment that the men who are assuming
the risks (and the risks are certainly real ones)
have any idea of making money, or that their
plans are dictated by selfish motives. We should
think it safe to say that the utmost for which
they hope is to come out even at the end of the
year, and that their paramount desire is to serve
the interests of art and contribute to the devel-
opment of the sense of beauty.
The interest of the new enterprise is focussed
in Chicago, because it is based upon the initia-
tive of a group of Chicagoans, and because it
will add a greatly-needed element to the aesthetic
life of this city. Opera has hitherto had in Chi-
cago only a sporadic and precarious existence.
There has never been a permanent organization
on a large scale, and we have had to be content
with brief visits from Eastern companies, usually
made at the fag-end of the season, with depleted
forces and under a conscienceless management.
We have had to put up with all sorts of make-
shifts, from the early days of Strakosch and
Mapleson to the later days of Grau and Conried.
To get off as cheaply as possible, without making
the inadequacy of the performances too glaring,
has until very recently been the actuating prin-
ciple of the management in its dealings with this
city. We have been regaled with scrub orches-
tras, hastily recruited from the ranks of local
musicians, with ragged and decrepit choruses,
singing cheerfully in Italian to the German or
French of the principals, with a stage-manage-
ment often so slovenly as to be beneath critical
contempt, and with productions brutally mangled
as to text, sometimes even mutilated to the extent
of excising an entire act. And of this precious
sort of entertainment we have had in some years
two weeks, in some years a single week, and in
some years none at all. Only this year and the
last have we had productions well-oppointed in
all the essential respects, and been given the
privilege of witnessing performances that could
hardly be matched elsewhere in the world.
This leads us to the final topic of our observa-
tions about opera—to the sordid but unavoidable
topic of dollars and cents. Chicago is fortunate
in possessing the most commodious opera-house
in the United States. Its erection was a public-
spirited enterprise, and one of its chief objects,
as loudly proclaimed when the house was built
nearly twenty years ago, was to make possible
the production of opera at a schedule running
up to three dollars for the best seats. This
schedule would correspond, considering the
respective capacities thus brought into compari-
son, with the five-dollar maximum schedule of
the Eastern houses. The pledge thus tacitly
given to the public was observed for more than
ten years; then the prices were raised until the
five-dollar schedule came to prevail. By keep-
ing Chicago on short commons of a week or two
a year (with an occasional year of fasting), the


1910.]
345
THE
DIAL
plan was made to work — some of the time, at
least. Last year a two weeks' season on these
terms was extraordinarily successful; this year
a four weeks' season was attempted, and has
resulted in a heavy deficit. On some evenings
the house was filled; on others (and more of
them) it was less than half-filled.
The moral of these facts, when applied to next
year's contemplated season of ten or twelve
weeks, is plain enough. We have followed the
history of opera in Chicago pretty closely for
the past thirty-five years, and there is no con-
clusion we feel safer in drawing than that which
affirms the impossibility of making opera pay
in this city upon a five-dollar schedule. We
consider it as nearly certain as anything can be,
that such a scale of prices will prove disastrous;
and yet we are given to understand that this
scale is likely to be put into effect. That a scale
materially lower will result in larger gross
receipts, is to us a foregone conclusion; and it
is at least demonstrable that a scale with a three-
dollar maximum would, if it kept the house
filled, be ample to provide for the expenses of
the projected organization. The sanguine expec-
tations that now seem to prevail among the men
responsible for our new departure in things
operatic are seriously threatening the goose
(which is the dear public) that alone can lay
the golden eggs of their desire.
CASUAL COMMENT.
How Mark Twain grappled with the riddle
of the ages, the insoluble problem of necessity
and free-will, may be seen by the curious in a little
privately-printed book from the humorist's pen,
entitled "What is Man?" which was printed four
years ago, it is said, with no name of author or
printer on the title-page. The little volume was in
the writer's mind for about twenty years, he con-
fesses, before it took material form in manuscript;
and then seven more years passed before it was
printed, every sentence and every word of it being
pondered deeply by the author in the mean time.
But all this meditation has failed to produce any
results of significance. That veritable Sphinx's
riddle which most thoughtful persons early see to be
unanswerable, and early learn to cease puzzling over,
as a snare and a menace to all sanity of mind and
resoluteness of purpose, is thus tritely treated by
our would-be philosopher after his twenty years of
thought: "It is a desolating doctrine; it is not inspir-
ing, enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out
of man, it takes the pride out of him, it takes the
heroism out of him, it denies him all personal credit,
all applause; it not only degrades him to a machine,
but allows him no control over the machine; makes
a mere coffee mill of him, and neither permits him
to supply the coffee nor turn the crank, his sole and
piteously humble function being to grind coarse or
fine, according to his make, outside impulses doing
all the rest" From a strictly rationalistic stand-
point, that is all true enough; but, like many other
true things, it lacks novelty. However, the book
was written for its author rather than for the world
or for critics.
The book-rambles of an ex-President, nar-
rated by the rambler's own pen, with critical com-
ments and explanatory remarks, contribute not a little
to the interest of his recent journalistic utterances. It
seems that the original "Pigskin Library," already
referred to in these columns, became considerably
enlarged by accessions as its owner felt their need
in the intervals of his combats with wild beasts in
Africa. Fact and fiction, science and sentiment,
history and philosophy, all have their place in this
now famous Library, — attesting Mr. Roosevelt's
sincerity in his assertion that too much heavy reading
is quite as bad as too much light reading. Among
other passing observations is his declared opinion that
Dumas, in his novels dealing with the French Revolu-
tion, is a decidedly better historian than Carlyle in
his famous chronicle. "I have certainly profited as
much," he asserts, "by reading good and interesting
novels and stories as by reading anything else, and
from the contemporary ones I have often reached,
as in no other way I could have reached, an under-
standing of how real people feel in certain country
districts, and in certain regions of great cities like
Chicago and New York." His good sense is reflected
in his declaration that there is no such thing as the
hundred best books or a five-foot shelf of the best lit-
erature, for there are thousands of best books vary-
ing in value for different readers. Concerning such
selections of representative works or parts of works,
he doubts "whether there is much good in this
'tidbit' style of literature." Yet some af the things
that seem but tidbits to his Gargantuan appetite
may afford no mean repast for others at the literary
banquet-board.
The increasing vogue of the roof-garden
reading-room is apparent from a contemplation of
the thriving and well-frequented aerial apartments
of this sort now in use in New York and soon to be
at the high-tide of their summer popularity. No
fewer than five of the branches of the New York
Public Library are equipped with roof-garden
reading-rooms, of which the New York "Times"
has something of interest to record. "The branch
on Rivington Street," it says, "first opened one of
these outdoor reading-rooms in 1905. In that first
summer nearly 7500 readers gladly escaped from
the unbearable heat of the reference room and did
their reading on the roof. Since then new buildings
have been planned with this feature. These out-
door reading-rooms are planned for both afternoon
and evening use. There will be awnings over the top
to shield from sun and occasional showers; tables


346
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
around which the readers can congregate, and a
network of electric bulbs strung over the top so that
there will be plenty of light for the industrious who
wish to study. The Rivington Street roof, the model
for these later and larger ones, has proved almost
unbelievably popular. During the five and one-half
months it was open last summer, from May to Octo-
ber 12, no less than 28,586 persons sat around the
tables in the little square space. The largest assem-
blage for a single month was in July, when 8246
people took their books up there. The Hamilton
Fish Park Library roof, which opened for the first
time last summer, had a patronage of over 16,000
for its first season, with 6152 readers during the
month of September alone." The excellent pioneer
work in this field performed by Mr. Lummis at
Los Angeles should not be forgotten.
Miss Jane Addams's story of her vocation,
which is appearing serially in "The American
Magazine" under the title, "Twenty Years at Hull
House," appeals irresistibly to lovers of the best in
autobiography. Like Mr. Booker Washington's and
Mr. Jacob Riis's own stories, it is the modest and
straightforward account of worthy achievement in
earnest and loving labor for one's fellow-creatures.
Her home life in a little Illinois town, her education
and spiritual quickening at Rockford College, which
represented "one of the earliest efforts for woman's
higher education in the Mississippi Valley, reflecting
much of the missionary spirit of pioneer Mt. Hol-
yoke," her sturdy resistance there against the pres-
sure of a narrow denominationalism, her subsequent
choice of medicine as a profession and the poor as
her patients, her enforced relinquishment of this
plan because of illness, and her travel experiences in
Europe, where a visit to East London and its scenes
of poverty strengthened her purpose to devote her
energies to the amelioration of the condition of the
masses — all this is related in full and absorbing
detail. Incidentally she recalls a visit of Bronson
Alcott's to Rockford College, whose pupils were eager
to render some service to the father of her who wrote
"Little Women." But Miss Addams was interested
rather in the friend and associate of Emerson, and
she remembers "cleaning the clay of the unpaved
street off his heavy cloth overshoes in a state of
ecstatic energy." These recollections deserve, and
probably will have, republication in book form.
Some maxtihb of Podd'nhead Wilson, that later
creation of Mark Twain's humorous fancy, deserve
immortality. For droll association of incongruous
ideas, and for shrewd insight into weak human
nature, they are admirable. For example: "The
holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady
and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last
through a lifetime, if not asked to lend money."
"' Classic' A book which people praise and do n't
read." "The man with a new idea is a crank until
the idea succeeds." "Truth is stranger than fiction,
but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possi-
bilities; truth is n't." "Few things are harder to put
up with than the annoyance of a good example."
"It were not best that we should all think alike; it
is difference of opinion that makes horse-races."
"The English are mentioned in the Bible: 'Blessed
are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.'"
"April 1. This is the day upon which we are re-
minded of what we are on the other three hundred
and sixty-four." "Why is it that we rejoice at a
birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are
not the person involved." "A cauliflower is nothing
but a cabbage with a college education." What
additional gems of wit and wisdom the world is yet
to enjoy in that sealed (though already partly pub-
lished) Autobiography, we that are now living shall
never know, if the author's purpose of having the
manuscript released only after a century has passed,
is executed.
Poetic genius and practical efficiency do
not necessarily war against each other. Current
reports from Roumania picture to us the poetqueen,
who is known in the world of letters as Carmen
Sylva, as one of the ablest business women of her
time. It is her judicious development and adver-
tising of the talent and the resources of her country
that, together with her own fame as a poet, have
made little Roumania one of the best-known and
most prosperous of the smaller European kingdoms.
Embroidery, the silk industry, and various manu-
factures crushed out under the Turkish yoke, she
has revived and made a source of wealth and pros-
perity to her people, thus proving herself possessed
of shrewd practical abilities commonly regarded as
at the opposite pole from poetic inspiration and
a devotion to the ideal. But, as Dr. Washington
Gladden remarks in his late volume of reminiscences,
in a passage touching on the life and character of
his college mate, the eminently successful editor of
"Harper's Magazine," a few years' dreaming of
dreams and absorption in ideals constitute not the
worst of preparations for noble and effective work in
the world of the prosaic here and now. Dr. Mar-
tineau could descend with ease and grace from the
preparation of a lecture on Spinoza's philosophy to
the repair of a broken shutter on his study window.
There is something appropriate and satisfying in this
inclusion of the less by the greater, this efficiency in
small matters exhibited by men and women devoted
to the large things of life.
• • •
A record-breaking book-thief was not long
ago arrested in New York in the act of offering
stolen library books for sale, but by jumping his bail
of two thousand dollars he has escaped the penalty
imposed by law. The current annual report of
the Brooklyn Public Library records losses, for the
year 1909, of 6131 volumes that have disappeared
from the shelves, and 2356 volumes that were lost
by borrowers and not paid for. Figures like these
tend to destroy confidence in one's fellow library-
frequenters; but there is a morsel of comfort, how-


1910.]
347
THE
DIAL
ever bitter its flavor, in the fact that not the Brooklyn
public in general, but one professional thief in
particular, and his accomplices, are responsible for
a great part of these disappearances. An exami-
nation of the books recovered proves that the mis-
creant is an expert, and that his field of operation
has been of considerable extent, embracing nearly
all of Greater New York. The skilful obliteration
of marks of ownership was one of his specialties,
and he also took elaborate pains to secure one per-
fect copy of a valuable book by destroying perhaps
half a dozen in the process. That so accomplished
a villain should still be at large is cause for anxiety
and alarm to public librarians.
...
The library and the country parson have,
in New England, been brought into relations exceed-
ingly helpful to the parson through the liberal policy
pursued by the General Theological Library, which
has its home in Mt. Vernon Street, Boston. At the
recent semi-centennial celebration of the founding of
this library, addresses were made by Dr. George A.
Gordon, Rev. Paul Revere Frothingham, and other
clergymen of note, their remarks bearing on "the
vital importance to the preacher of familiarity with
modern thought, and the significance of the service
rendered by the library to New England clergy-
men." The generosity of one of the directors of
the General Theological Library has made it possi-
ble for distant users of the library to borrow and
return books without expense to themselves for car-
riage, the postage being paid out of a fund estab-
lished for the purpose. No fewer than twelve hun-
dred clergymen, in different parts of New England,
are now enjoying this privilege. The library is
well equipped, especially in recent important works
of interest to its readers, and is undoubtedly doing
excellent service in rendering backwoods theology a
thing of the past in the erstwhile haunts of stiff-
necked puritanism. ...
Trusts as material for fiction have by many
American novelists and story-writers been skilfully
and profitably used; and now the French litterateur,
M. Paul Adam, issues a ponderous work of the im-
agination entitled Le Trust, on which he has been at
work almost six years, or from the time of his visit
to this country as Commissioner of the World's Fair
at St. Louis. The book is said to contain scores of
characters, of many nationalities, and of all sorts
and conditions, long-winded descriptions of scenery
in all parts of the world, elaborate disquisitions on all
the sciences and 'ologies, and solid pages of turgid
rhetoric—with here and there a passage of excellent
and smoothly-flowing prose. Whatever its value as
an essay on the iniquities of capitalists and the wily
ways of corporate greed, as a novel it can hardly
hope for a great popularity. Will any English or
American publisher have the courage to bring it out
in translation? The scene of the story being laid in
New York, Cuba, the Alleghenies, Paris, Dauphiny,
and Egypt, the book in some respects appeals to a
cosmopolitan public.
The ramification of a great public library
is interestingly illustrated in Brooklyn, where this
branching process has now resulted in twenty-seven
subsidiary libraries or "branches," four "stations,"
and two "deposit stations," with a prospect in the
near future of two additional Carnegie branches and
five stations. To help the dwellers in this favored
city to find their way to the nearest public storehouse
of literature, permission has been obtained from the
proper authorities to place in the stations of the ele-
vated railroads placards showing the location of all
these branch libraries. This is indeed bringing the
books to the people, and should effect much in pro-
moting the "library habit"; but the true lover of
the public library and its unimagined richness of
accumulated treasures will always prefer to seek the
fountain-head, the central library, rather than draw
on the necessarily slender resources of branch or
station, or even draw through the branch or station
from the great central repository. Applications for
the latest novel can, of course, just as well be made
( usually without success) at the branch or the station.
The European demand for the books of
Colonel Roosevelt has naturally received an
enormous stimulus from the distinguished author's
visit in person. Fashionable London, hoping to meet
him at dinners and receptions, has been clamoring
for his "best book," and has been reading him up
in that scrambling fashion known to all who have
ever prepared themselves at the last moment to meet
some literary lion from abroad. That sort of read-
ing, so different from the leisurely enjoyment of "a
book of verses underneath a bough," is effective in
its way, and at least diminishes the chances that
one will compliment Mr. Thomas Hardy on the fine
character-study in "Fenwick's Career," or ask Mr.
Bernard Shaw when he is going to write some more
"Barrack-Room Ballads." And the practice has
this advantage for the visiting lion,—that it helps
on the sale of his books, creating a kind of tidal
wave that precedes his own advent to foreign shores.
...
Mrs. Humphry Ward as seen through
French eyes is pictured in the " Revue des Deux
Mondes" by M. Firmin Roz, and thus enjoys a
distinction accorded to many contemporary English
and American writers by the generously appreciative
directors of that excellent magazine. Mrs. Ward is
ranked as one might have expected, with such illus-
trious English women novelists of the past as George
Eliot and the Bronte sisters. She gives us what is
best worth depicting in English society to-day, says
the French reviewer, who names "Lady Rose's
Daughter " as an instance of its author's best work,
thoroughly English in its tone and portraying in
lifelike manner the aristocracy of England — for
which, by the way, and for the politics of England,
Mrs. Ward cherishes something like a passion, as
many a somewhat wearisome page of her stories
convincingly testifies.


348
[May 16,
THE DIAL
A Pioneer Woman Educator.*
Mary Lyon was by no means the first Amer-
ican woman to espouse the cause of advanced
education for her sex — Miss Catherine Beecher
at Hartford and Miss Zilpah P. Grant at Ips-
wich, as well as others, having gone before and
prepared the way for her larger undertakings
and achievements. From the two above-named
women — especially from Miss Grant, who be-
came better known to many as Mrs. Banister,
and whom she assisted in the principalship of
the Ipswich school — the future founder of Mt.
Holyoke Female Seminary drew much of her
early inspiration as a pioneer educator of young
women. The story of that eminently successful
pioneering is now for the first time told in as
full detail as possible by Miss Beth Bradford
Gilchrist, a Mt. Holyoke graduate, who is evi-
dently imbued with the Mary Lyon enthusiasm
for woman's higher education, and is also filled
with the sincerest admiration for Mary Lyon
herself. Miss Gilchrist's "Life of Mary Lyon"
has for its documentary sources "all known
manuscripts bearing intimately or remotely on
Miss Lyon's life," and its preparation was
prompted by "a request made several years
ago by President Woolley, voicing a demand
that has been gathering force through more
than thirty years."
Mary Lyon was born in the little hill-town
of Buckland, in western Massachusetts, where
the poor rock-ribbed farms are all tilted heaven-
ward as if in perpetual admonition to their toil-
worn owners to look on high for those richer
satisfactions that are certainly not to be wrung
from the thin and unfertile soil of the New
England hillsides. February 28,1797, was the
day of her birth, and she was the fifth of seven
children, all girls but one. When the father of
this rapidly increasing family died, the problem
of support for the widow and her little ones
became a serious one; but Mrs. Lyon was a
mother in all respects worthy of her famous
daughter, and her energetic and resourceful
administration of the little farm and the father-
less home must have been a useful lesson in thrift
and contrivance to Mary. It was "on the whole"
(Mary Lyon's favorite phrase) the best of disci-
plines for her who was to rear, with the slender
means available in that region, a lasting monu-
*The IiiFB of Mart Lyon. By Beth Bradford Gilchrist.
Illustrated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
ment to its love of learning and its high esteem
for the things of the spirit. As the writer
well says, —
"Only in Old New England could it have mattered
so little to be poor. There the world gave a chance at
competence, instead of wealth. Money was not highly
esteemed; people had little of it, perhaps because they
had for it few uses. America was young, and money
is seldom reckoned among the chief assets of youth.
Unsmothered by things, minds had plenty of room in
which to work. Education was the badge of the only
aristocracy recognized; at the head of the intellectual
hierarchy stood the minister, a college-bred man. The
phrase carried a rare and high significance."
The satisfying of Mary Lyon's eager thirst
for knowledge was necessarily accomplished with
difficulty, and in fitful spurts of progress inter-
rupted by wearisome halts and delays. Money
had first to be earned for a term of attendance
at some academy or seminary, and then, panting
with desire at sight of the fair domains of learn-
ing just coming in view on the horizon, the
scholar was forced to pause and consider once
more the prosaic question of ways and means.
But whenever opportunity offered she grasped
it with both hands. At Sanderson Academy in
Ashfield, a school and town since become asso-
ciated with other famous names beside hers,
she was assigned, one Friday night, a lesson in
Adams's Latin Grammar. It was a new study
to her, but between Friday and Monday she com-
mitted to memory practically the whole book,
and amazed both the teacher and the listening
scholars as she recited page after page at the
afternoon session while the sun went down
behind the western hills and the school forgot
the meaning of "four o'clock." She afterward
confessed that she had studied all Sunday, and
it is not recorded that she was censured for it.
Teaching alternated with learning in Mary
Lyon's educational development, and it will
perhaps comfort some young and temporarily
disheartened instructors to read that her first
attempts were by no means great pedagogic
triumphs. She is even discovered weeping bit-
terly and vowing never to teach another day.
"Government," which meant so much in the
country school of old time, and which is still so
immensely significant, was the rock on which
she nearly suffered shipwreck. Her spirits were
too high, her love of fun too intense, to give her
at first the calm dignity and quiet command of
the thoroughly successful teacher. Indeed, her
merriment of disposition seems to have been a
lifelong source of trouble to her in the class-
room, but a fault that her devoted pupils were
more than glad to pardon in her. Experience


1910.]
349
THE DIAL
in Miss Grant's school, first at Derry, New
Hampshire, and then at Ipswich, Mass., ripened
her powers for the great undertaking of her life,
the founding and organizing and management
of the seminary at South Hadley which has
since developed into Mt. Holyoke College. The
raising of the funds necessary for even a modest
beginning was a task to discourage a heart less
stout than Mary Lyon's. In a passage describ-
ing the situation, we read:
"If she dreamed dreams, these hard-headed men
and women, wringing meagre livings from rocky hill-
sides, understood very well that nothing is more real
than the stuff that dreams are made of. Their sons
grew up to be editors, statesmen, preachers, presidents
of colleges. They would give their daughters a chance,
too. Miss Lyon made a business proposition, and they
took her record as security, looking to her to get their
money's worth. One daughterless man, tilling a farm
not over-fertile and with five sons to educate, gave her
a hundred dollars. Two spinster sisters living in the
slender comfort of their time signed each for the same
sum; soon afterwards they lost their property, but rather
than be denied the pleasure of fulfilling their pledges
they earned the money with their own hands. Of such
gifts was Mount Holyoke built."
On the rich she could not count with this cer-
tainty for sympathy and aid in her great work.
Of one wealthy family from whom she had con-
fidently expected a handsome contribution, she
finally had to confess:
"< Yes, it is all true, just as I was told. They live in
a costly house, it is full of costly things, they wear
costly clothes' — then drawing nearer and almost clos-
ing her eyes, she whispered with unforgettable empha-
sis, ' But oh, they 're little bits offolki I'"
The charter for Mt. Holyoke Female Semi-
nary was granted in 1836, and the factory-like
building that first housed the school was opened
and recitations began in the autumn of 1837.
From that date to the spring of 1849, when she
died, Miss Lyon was the life and soul of the
institution her hands and brain had created.
The story of her work there, of her methods, of
the rare qualities of mind and heart for which
her pupils admired and loved her in her life-
time and remembered her long after her death,
is all excellently told by Miss Gilchrist, who has
drawn to the full on the personal recollections
of Miss Lyon's now diminished company of her
former pupils and intimate friends. A word of
hers, or a trait of character, may be transferred
here from those rich pages ; but the book must
be read as a whole to get any adequate concep-
tion of Mary Lyon's strong and original person-
ality. "Sometimes I almost fear that we shall
read our minds away," we find her saying in
her early teaching days, "with a perpetual suc-
cession of books of mushroom growth." What
would have been her alarm in this respect had
she survived to the present time! The follow-
ing homely incident is rich in significance:
"Her speech was the more effective because she never
used words when an action would do instead. Deeds in
her hands served the same meaning purpose as stories
in the mouth of Lincoln, and like him she never broke
their force by making the application. Entertaining
anecdotes are told to show the masterly skill with which
Miss Lyon wielded this kind of suggestion. One deals
with incipient graft. A clever pie-circle conceived the
satisfying idea of lessening the amount put into each pie
an unnoticeable degree so as to provide an extra one for
their own eating. Nobody, so far as they knew, was
aware of the expedient, until one day each girl in the
circle received an invitation to come to Miss Lyon's room.
Presenting themselves in her parlor at the appointed
hour, they found on the table a thick, luscious pumpkin
pie, which their hostess cordially served to her enlight-
ened and shame-faced guests."
A sentence from her lips describing her school
is worth quoting. "This institution is a great
intellectual and moral machine," she declared
to her girls, "and if you will jump in you may
ride very fast."
From the Bibliography appended to Miss
Gilchrist's book it appears, as might have been
expected, that Mary Lyon was not one to court
publicity in print. She wrote hardly anything
for publication. Books and articles about her,
too, have not been many, which makes the pre-
sent biography the more welcome. Its two por-
traits of Miss Lyon and its views of the Seminary
at different dates, with other appropriate illus-
trations, are all of interest. It is a biography
to place beside that of Alice Freeman Palmer;
the same intelligent zeal and loving sympathy
have gone to the making of both.
Percy F. Bicknell.
Two Heroes of Modern Italy.*
The history of Italian Union is the history
of four men: Mazzini the agitator, Garibaldi
the fighter, Cavour the organizer, and Victor
Emmanuel the ruler. Chance has placed in our
hands at one and the same time a biography of
the agitator, and one of the popular champion;
for Madame Mario's history holds Mazzini con-
stantly in the foreground, and Mr. Trevelyan
furnishes us a prologue and an epilogue with the
•The Bibth of Modern Italy. By Jessie White
Mario. Edited by Duke Litta-Vigconti-Arese. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons.
Garibaldi and the Thousand. By G. M. Trevelyan.
New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.


350
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
aid of which we have a fairly complete life of
Garibaldi.
In the opinion of Mr. Trevelyan, the time is
ripe for a profitable study of the period. "Fif-
teen years ago there was not enough printed
matter and MS. available, and fifteen years
hence there will be nothing left except these
printed sources. But oral witness has its his-
torical value," as both books prove very conclu-
sively. Their tone, method, and viewpoint are
of course widely different. Madame Mario,
born of English and American parentage in
1832, but married in 1857 to Mazzini's sup-
porter Alberto Mario, and herself devoted heart
and soul to the cause of Italian Republicanism
— giving her life to it, in fact, as nurse, writer,
lecturer, teacher, organizer—is telling the terri-
bly serious story of her own experiences, and, with
all her generosity and breadth of sympathies,
is telling it as a partisan. Mr. Trevelyan, his-
torian of another generation, writing without
bias and with only a scholar's interest, is more
objective, more reliable, more enamored of lit-
erary effect; but there is something in a story
of action and suffering, when told by one who
has acted and suffered, that takes effect as no
scholar's compilation can do.
Madame Mario had made the acquaintance of
Garibaldi on a visit to Italy in 1854; she had
at once become not merely his devoted admirer
but his very intimate friend, and had somewhat
later taken charge of his then invalid son, Ric-
ciotti, had seen him almost completely cured in
England, and sent him back to fight bravely for
his native land in half a dozen wars. Garibaldi's
affection for his " sisters in the faith" seems to
Anglo-Saxons a trifle exaggerated, and in one
case at least an effusive letter to a "sister" was
interpreted as a proposal of marriage, to the
unbounded astonishment of the innocent author.
As a matter of fact, there is no question that in
such relations, as in all others, Garibaldi was
one of the most scrupulously honorable of men.
During a visit to England, some years after the
death of his brave wife Anita, he won the heart
of a lady of means and family; but learning that
her son was opposed to the union and that his
motives might be misconstrued if he married
her, he abruptly broke off relations with her,
though in so doing he did violence to both inter-
est and inclination. It is true that in this case
the feelings of the lady herself might have had
more weight with him than they seem to have
carried; but the gallant though blundering
Ligurian was actuated only by generous motives,
whatever the result of his actions may have been.
It is in the pages of Trevelyan that we see this
modern hero of romance at his best. Garibaldi's
exploits in Sicily rank with those of Wallace in
Scotland, of Tell in Switzerland, of Joan of Arc
in France, — with the difference that Garibaldi's
deeds are well-attested and are ours to study in
detail. And with all his magnetic personality, his
absolute fearlessness, his irresistible enthusiasm,
his was the most lovable, the most generous, the
most innocent, the most childish nature imagin-
able. While living in the Island of Caprera,
he learned one night that a new-born lamb had
been lost among the rocks. A long search by
lantern-light failed to find it. In the words of
one of his friends, —
"It was nine o'clock, and raining, and we were very
tired; so we once more returned to the house, and went
to bed. An hour afterward we heard the sound of
footsteps in the next room, and the house-door opened.
. . . About midnight we were roused by a voice; it was
the hero returning, joyfully carrying the lost lamb in
his arms. He took the little creature to his bed, and
lay down with it, giving it a bit of sponge dipped in
milk to keep it quiet . . . and he spent the whole night
caressing and feeding the foolish creature."
Contrast this incident with the act of the Mon-
tefusco jailer who killed a nightingale because
its songs were comforting the apostles of Italian
liberty whom he held as prisoners, and the con-
trast gives some idea of the difference between
the generous enthusiasm that animated the
patriots and the bitter hatred which that enthu-
siasm aroused in the breasts of their Austrian
and Neapolitan oppressors.
The conquest of Sicily with a thousand men,
when Palermo alone held a garrison of twenty
thousand, was the most remarkable military
exploit of the century. It may be urged that
the entire population of the island was aiding
him; but the support which the invaders received
from the Sicilians, aside from moral support,
seems to have been surprisingly small. There
is a Sicilian proverb, "Better a pig than a
soldier"; and even when inspired by the encour-
agement and example of those brave northern
Italians who had come so far to risk their lives
for a principle, the Sicilian's military method
was generally to await the issue from a respect-
able distance and come in very enthusiastically
at the death. The forced evacuation of Palermo
was a most beautiful game of "bluff," for
although the urban population aided Garibaldi
much more effectively than the countrymen had
done, his ammunition ran short and he could
scarcely have prolonged the conflict a day longer.
But the "bluff" succeeded, the Sicilian cam-
paign was the decisive struggle of the war, and


1910.]
351
THE
DIAL
Garibaldi enjoyed a sort of popular worship
that has been the lot of few moderns. Venosta
wrote:
"When Garibaldi passed through a village, you would
not have said he was a general, but the head of a new
religion followed by a crowd of fanatics. The women,
no less enthusiastic than the men, brought their babies
to (him) that he should bless and even baptize them."
And the popular idol never deserved a fall.
Blundering often and egregiously, a creature
of wild impulse at times, woefully lacking in
tact and foresight and thus often harming the
cause it was his dearest wish to further, he
remains to the end as pure in motives as a man
could well be.
Quite as much can be said for Mazzini, the
melancholy exile who tasted the infinite bitter-
ness of laboring that others might reap the
fruits of his labor, and who died an object of
aversion to many who were enjoying the liberties
his sad life had brought them. Patriotism was
a religion with these men, to a degree that is
inconceivable to our selfish and materialistic
generation. There is food for the most search-
ing thought in Garibaldi's refusal to live in
America because there a man "acquires a new
home and forgets his country"; in the martyr-
dom of Mazzini, a man of affectionate home-
loving nature, who lived his life alone and in
exile rather than make the slightest concession
to an unjust oppressor; in the refusal of
Alberto Mario to take the oath of allegiance to
Victor Emmanuel, and his acceptance of poverty
and obscurity in preference to place and prefer-
ment under a government which he disapproved.
And Mario's attitude suggests the difficulty
which stood most stubbornly in the way of
Italian liberty. There was what seemed for a
long time a hopeless difference of opinion among
Italians as to the form of government they
wanted when they should be freed from Austria
and the local despots. The monarchy under the
House of Piedmont prevailed through the clever-
ness and enterprise of Cavour, and many Repub-
licans, like Garibaldi, suffered a change of views
and supported it; but others, like Mazzini and
Mario, remained Republican to the end, and
thus suffered with their contemporaries. But
there is no need for them to suffer with pos-
terity; our admiration for Cavour, who was
patriotic and shrewd, need no longer lessen our
sympathy for Mazzini, whose patriotism burned
so hotly that shrewdness could not live in the
same breast with it.
Anglo-Saxons feel a particular interest in the
part that England played in the reconstruction
of Italy. Mr. Trevelyan tells in detail of Glad-
stone's efforts to arouse the civilized world in
protest against the treatment of political prison-
ers by the King of Naples, — efforts which pro-
duced their effect in spite of the retort of the
Neapolitan historian De Sivo, who reminded
"Lord Gladston" that the English, who sold
their wives with ropes round their necks for a
few "pences," had no call to complain of the
"little trials in Naples." Both of the volumes
before us are full of the doings of the British
Foreign Secretary, the brave Lord Palmerston,
and of various indignant English diplomatic
representatives in Italy; and Madame Mario's
pages are strewn with allusions to Mazzini's
encounters with English and American notables
during his eighteen years' residence in England.
Carlyle, grim old Absolutist in theory, was one
of the lovable little Italian's stanchest friends,
and his wife was even more cordial,—although
Mrs. Carlyle, be it said in all reverence, was
depressingly uncertain, and not always fair to
him or others. Harriet Martineau — " deaf as a
post," but " the woman with the broadest views
and most cultivated intellect" in England —
was favorably impressed with him and his cause.
Charles Dickens was his friend and honest
admirer. The sympathy of the Brownings with
Italian liberty is too well known to need discus-
sion,— although Mrs. Browning's admiration
for Napoleon III. later affected her attitude
toward Napoleon's bitterest enemy. Rogers, the
poet, who was frequently Mazzini's host, was,
according to him, "the first Englishman who
foretold that there would arise a third Italy."
Tennyson, who treated Garibaldi with great con-
sideration on the occasion of his visit to England
in 1864, seems to have ignored Mazzini, and
was severely criticized by him for the "insular
selfishness " displayed in his poems. Margaret
Fuller, Cobden, the Italian champion in Parlia-
ment Joseph Stansfield, and a goodly list
besides, proved that the Anglo-Saxon is capable
of generous impulses when the liberties of other
countries are in question. George Sand in
France and Kossuth in Hungary were Mazzini's
friends and helpers, — though Kossuth acted
rather strangely on at least one occasion, and the
enthusiastic Frenchwoman was more socialist
than Nationalist.
Madame Mario's narrative, which ends very
abruptly with the year 1864, is supplemented by
an admirably clear and concise little story of the
events to 1871, furnished by the editor of the
volume. Roy Xemple house.


352
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
The Long Path of Ljght.*
A fitting treatment of a subject so profound
as "The Problem of Human Life" calls for
wide and deep insight, both into the problem
itself and into the manner in which the leading
writers in philosophy have regarded it. If phi-
losophy means anything of moment, it carries
with it some solution of the problem of life;
and the connection of those who have taken a
prominent position in philosophical discussions
is to be found in the bearings of their theories
on the solution of this problem. The book
before us is a presentation of the view of " great
thinkers from Plato to the present time," and
demands, therefore, a mastery of the theme
itself, and of the way in which the deepest and
most obscure thought of the world has been
associated with it.
The book is made up of three portions, treat-
ing of Hellenism, Christianity, and the Philo-
sophical Modern World, giving the great forms
and eras of belief. It is not at all necessary
that such a work should conform closely to our
own conviction, if its insights are far-reaching
and able to quicken the mind in its apprehensions
of the bearings of human life. As the volume is
much too comprehensive for even a brief treat-
ment of the whole, we will confine ourselves to
the second part, which treats of Christianity, its
origin, and its earlier and later forms. The
first topic embraces the character of Christianity
and the view of life held by Jesus; the second
topic covers the Pre-Augustinian and Augustine
periods, and the Middle Ages; the third period
is that of the Reformation and of the later cen-
turies. We are to bear in mind that the book is
not a history of these periods, but a relatively
brief and sharp discussion of fheir relation to
each other and to the general problem of human
life. This purpose affords illumination, and the
plan is carried forward with a temper fitting the
work. The unity of Christianity is not found in
its origin, itself affected and narrowed by special
conditions; nor yet in an historical sequence
which at every stage came under changing cir-
cumstances and was modified or turned aside by
them, but in a distinctive primary purpose which
went everywhere with it as its inner power. It
was a religion of salvation. It grew into and
out of existing conditions, but always in refer-
ence to their improvement and development.
• The Problem of Hdmxn Life. By Professor Rudolph
Eucken, of the University of Jena. Translated by William
S. Hough, of Washington University, and W. R. Boyce
Gibson, of the University of London. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.
This salvation was not of a physical, ontological
sort, but ethical in its character. It was to be
built up out of, and founded upon, the existing
qualities of the world; but it was to owe its
form and power to a peculiar sense of the near-
ness of the divine life to human life. The pre-
sence of God in the world created new thought
and affections, in whose activity all other activi-
ties took on a new direction. The world was a
place of difficulties and discouragement and fail-
ures, but one in which the least attainment lay
in the pathway of the highest success. Religion
ceased to be an accident or incident of life, and
became its very substance — that without which
existence sank into worthlessness. Instantly
there sprang up a new feeling of the unity of
men, sharing together the divine love and guid-
ance. The individual could not be enriched
except by a wealth which came to all. Hence
arises not simply a return of good and evil in
endless circuits,—pleasure followed by pain and
pain by pleasure, — but a history of the world,
a progress of events under the divine presence
according to the divine plan. Gains and losses
alike were brought into one forward movement.
The mind and heart and active powers were all
kept alert in the fulfilment of one great pur-
pose, dear to God and man.
This conception altered the relation of men
to suffering. Suffering became a revelation,
an emphasis placed upon events as they aided
or thwarted the supreme end of growth. Suf-
fering united men more closely to God and
more sympathetically with each other. Yet
suffering was not to be accepted as an ultimate
good; we were to escape it by rising above it,
by going beyond it, by coming more fully under
the good. Obedience and life were not plain
simple things, but things of much complexity
and confusion. Difficulties were to be encoun-
tered in new forms, and by means of them we
were to rise into wider and richer views of the
divine purpose and the divine love. The mo-
ment we stopped or accepted any good as ulti-
mate, the vision of growth began to escape us,
and we became as other men, with our portion
in the present only. We lost our divine lead,
and became subject to the endless tide of vicis-
situdes. A mighty life-force had been planted
in us, and only as we became aware of it and
gave way before it did we become the children
of God. Life was not made easier by Chris-
tianity, but rather more difficult. The solu-
tion was to be wrought out; the repose lay
beyond the present, was itself so much of the
nature of effort that we could never rest upon


1910.]
353
THE DIAL
it in simple indolence. All our achievements
were living achievements, and led to others like
them. Our triumphs were successes in doing
and being according to the mind of God and
the spiritual force of the world. Not indolence,
but successful activity, a revelation constantly
enlarging within itself, was the goal of Christian
effort.
How did Jesus present this vision? He offers
it as the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not simply
an inner transformation, but an external one as
well. It is an "inseparable union of trust in
God with love of men." It is a kingdom of spir-
itual life; a union of men in the goodness and
mercy of God. Man is not left in anything at
the sport of physical events. These are all
gathered up in the watchfulness and protection
of God. The human grows into the likeness of
the divine, since it is viewed from the beginning
as in the presence of the divine. Thus the
child's nature, subject to all guidance and in-
struction, is the type of the Christian nature —
the fitting recipient of apprehension and explan-
ation. But in this obedience there is no burden
since it unfolds under the law of love — love
directed toward God and toward men. The
ethics of Jesus rest on these divine and human
relations, and unites them in the highest har-
mony. It thrusts aside the hypocrisy of the
Pharisee, which covers up under the law the
entire brood of personal interests. The follower
of Christ was to propose to himself the same
perfection which he found in the fatherhood of
God. Thus the Kingdom of Heaven — a sim-
ple, original idea—was revolutionary in its effect
on human life. It stands in growing collision
with the world as found in human society, and
feels increasingly the conflict. The ultimate
and rapid triumph of the harmony and fulness
of life over the partial and conflicting interests
prevalent among men came to seem both assured
and immediate.
The spiritual power of a faith is measured by
the conception of life which is expressed by its
founder. The image and life of Jesus have
remained, amid all aberrations, the constant
centre and revelation of subsequent Christian
thought. From this starting point, the simple
spiritual personality of Christ, the author pro-
ceeds to its speculative enlargement by the early
church, and later to its intense and compre-
hensive expression in the life and belief of
Augustine.
It is the purpose of this brief notice neither
to follow this long path of fight, nor to estimate
its revelation. We wish simply to indicate
the comprehensive and inteUigent way in which
it is pursued, the thoughtfulness with which it
has been wrought out, and the reward which it
is sure to bring to those who pursue it in a kin-
dred temper. JoHN Ba8COM>
The Career of ax American
Diplomat.*
There has been some discussion as to whether
or not our political system really admits of the
"diplomatic career," in the meaning given to
that term by long practice over the water. In
Mr. Foster's record, one may fairly claim that
the possibility has been demonstrated, and the
great value of diplomacy on that plane, as com-
pared with a service which is made the football
of domestic politics, has been proved at the same
time. This, too, in spite of the fact that he
entered the service by the well-worn political
route. As Chairman of the Indiana State Re-
publican Committee, in 1872, he had led his
party to a triumphant success in the October
election, which of course had its effect in in-
creasing the majority of Grant a month later.
Senator Oliver P. Morton, with his usual assur-
ance in matters depending on his influence with
Grant, told the young Chairman to take the
Federal "Blue Book" and pick out whatever
office he might want. The Swiss Mission was
modestly selected ; but for once Senator Morton
had tripped, for Grant had already assured the
incumbent of that post of his retention. Instead
of the " something just as good," however, Mr.
Foster was overwhelmed by the immediate offer
of the Mexican Mission. With no foreign lan-
guage at his command, and no diplomatic expe-
rience, he frankly informed the Senator that he
doubted his own ability for such a position, and
felt inclined to refuse the offer. Morton was
not impressed, however, and persuaded him to
accept. With ordinary politicians, that would
simply have meant a term of ineffective service,
with a return to politics or business when the
post was wanted for some other successful cam-
paigner. But Mr. Foster had in his makeup a
feeling of moral obligation to do his duty, and
the deficiencies which he had painfully felt in
prospect were rapidly removed. The Mexicans
were soon convinced that the new minister was
an able, honest, and broad-minded man, from
* Diplomatic Memoirs. By John W. Foster, author of
"A Century of American Diplomacy," "American Diplo-
macy in the Orient," "The Practice of Diplomacy," etc.
In two volumes, with illustrations. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co.


354
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
whom they need fear no attempt at the double-
dealing by which the profession of diplomacy is
so often disgraced; and this conviction was of
great value during the period of strained rela-
tions caused by the delay of the Administration
at Washington in recognizing the validity of
the revolution led to success by Porfirio Diaz in
1877. In 1880 Mr. Foster was transferred to
St. Petersburg, where he remained less than two
years, as he had concluded that family inter-
ests demanded his attention. This brief period
included the assassination of Alexander the
Second, of which an interesting account is given
in these memoirs ; also some of the famous state
trials of the Nihilists—among others, of Sophie
Perofsky, a woman of aristocratic connections
and superior education, who had waved the sig-
nal for the throwing of the bomb by which the
Emperor was slain. It is told of her that she
was accustomed to sleep with a hundred pounds
of dynamite under her bed, in order to be able
to balk the officers of their prey if she and her
associates were detected. Sixteen years later,
Mr. Foster's services were again employed at St.
Petersburg by the McKinley Administration —
this time on a special mission in connection with
the Fur Seal negotiations.
His determination to return to private life,
formed in 1881, was reversed two years later at
the earnest solicitation of President Arthur, who
recognized his special fitness for the Spanish
Mission, and for the inauguration of a policy
of commercial reciprocity with the Spanish-
American countries upon which the President
had set his heart. He entered heartily upon
the scheme for commercial reciprocity, but was
forced to conclude in the end, after added
experience under the Harrison and McKinley
Administrations, that our system of government
furnishes too many disturbing elements to admit
of that permanence without which the recip-
rocity system can be little else than a source
of irritation in our negotiations with foreign
countries.
By special request of the President, Mr.
Foster remained at Madrid for a time, under
the Cleveland Administration, and might have
remained longer but for his own desire to with-
draw and take up once more the practice of law.
But his well-known diplomatic abilities were
destined to interfere with this plan, as before.
A call to the cabinet of President Harrison as
Secretary of State, renewed attempts at recip-
rocity treaties, the Bering Sea Arbitration,
the Alaskan Boundary Settlement, and the
Hague Peace Conference, all drew him at dif-
ferent times into the service of his country, and
in every case to his own credit and to the pub-
lic good.
Most interesting of all, however, are the pages
which tell of the call received by Mr. Foster
from the Emperor of China, in the closing
days of 1894, to act as adviser to the Chinese
commission which had just been appointed to
the bitter task of going to Japan to sue for
peace. It was a notable opportunity, and nobly
used; but space will not admit the details of
the story here. We may only state that his
thoroughly disinterested service to China, in the
hour of her humiliation and peril, was indirectly
one of the best services which it was ever his lot
to render to his own land.
In their important contributions to American
history, these volumes are of the highest value.
There is not one of the great subjects treated
on which new light is not thrown ; and when we
get to the position that young men may inten-
tionally prepare themselves for diplomatic ser-
vice with some chance of being actually called
to it because of such preparation, Mr. Foster's
volumes will inevitably form an important ele-
ment in their reading. If space were available,
we would gladly quote some of his estimates of
the men with whom his career brought him into
contact. These are generally kindly, and never
harsh in tone, — though there are times when
the lancet goes deep by suggestion, if not by
direct thrust. For instance, when the desire of
Marcus A. Hanna to enter the Senate made it
politically requisite to take John Sherman from
that body and thrust him, in his old age and
physical weakness, into the new and difficult
duties of the office of Secretary of State, we are
told that this was " an act from which the kindly
nature of President McKinley doubtless shrank,
but which he did not feel at liberty to evade."
Two points in his theory of diplomatic ethics
are worthy of especial attention and emulation.
At the outset of his career, in Mexico, Mr.
Foster found his diplomatic colleagues, almost
without exception, making investments in Mexi-
can mines or speculating in mining stocks. For
himself, he set the rule at once that as a diplo-
matic representative he should have no interests
of any kind whatever in the country to which
he was accredited, and no personal complications
in the claims of any of his fellow countrymen.
If all our representatives, especially to the coun-
tries of this hemisphere, had been equally con-
scientious in observing the demands of personal
and national propriety in this matter, our repu-
tation would have been spared a good many


1910.]
355
THE
DIAL
stains which it now has to carry. The other
point relates to the attitude of the diplomat to
home politics. During his mission to Mexico,
Mr. Foster was persuaded by Senator Morton
to return temporarily to the United States and
take part in the electoral contest of 1876. "I
regard that act," he says, "as one of the most
serious mistakes of my diplomatic career. A
diplomatic officer, more than any other, should
be a non-partisan representative." He also re-
lates in another chapter an experience of Secre-
ary Hay, who was persuaded (if that is the word
to use) by President Roosevelt to make a speech
in New York City on the eve of the campaign
of 1904. He remonstrated with the President,
insisting that the Secretary of State should not
take part in politics, since it would have a bad
influence on the Diplomatic Corps, and injure his
influence with the Senate, which must pass on
his treaties and policies. To all this, the reply of
President Roosevelt was that if Secretary Hay
did not make the speech the election might be
lost, and he not be Secretary of State the next
term. We close with a few lines from Mr.
Foster's own closing paragraph:
"When, at the close of my mission to Spain, I re-
sumed my residence in Washington, 1 was fifty years of
age; and from that date forward I did my most laborious
and successful work. It seemed as if the earlier portion
of my life had been merely a preparation for the labor
which was in store for me, and which proved the most
useful and important. I have been highly honored by
my country with many important public trusts, but I
have the consciousness of having earnestly striven to
discharge them faithfully."
W. H. Johnson.
The Genius of the French.*
A new book with the title "The French
Procession: A Pageant of Great Writers," is cer-
tainly promising; dedication and a prefatory
letter to Vernon Lee give almost a pledge of that
rarest of intellectual treats, a literary causerie;
the author's name is a guarantee of good work.
We in America have long known Mary F. Rob-
inson as a writer whose poetry has a sure though
narrow appeal; we know also that as Mrs. James
Darmesteter her interpretation of French history
has been scholarly and vivid; now, as Madame
DuClaux, this Englishwoman with long French
affiliations is fully equipped to present what she
calls the " literature of a great nation, in its vast
succession and continuity, as it passes down the
* The French Procession. A Pageant of Great Writ-
ers. By Madame Mary DuClaux (A. Mary F. Robinson).
New York: Duffield & Co.
ages." This literature, she says, " appears as a
spectacle, a progress, a pageant, wherein every
figure is not only a marvel but the embodiment
of a whole invisible plexus of secret influences,
ideas, traditions, and revolts.1' Gladly does the
reader take a position with the author on her
balcony, which she calls "the watch-tower of a
tranquil mind," to look on this pageant—"the
continuous genius of a people."
A glance at the table of contents, which
serves as a telescope to sweep the whole proces-
sion into our ken, shows the great divisions of the
progress —" In the Distance," "The Roman-
tics," "The Sons of Science." The first division
permits a promiscuous grouping. Here are poet,
king, scientist, mystic, rebel, in due range. How
shall we come close to the spirit of the French
nation, if those we look upon differ so markedly
in temperament as Fe'nelon and Voltaire? We
listen to the overture to the march in the essay
on French Poetry, eager for a clue to the line
of thought we are to busy ourselves with as this
varied company troops past us. But this over-
ture, though strong and fine, is found to have
little relation to what follows. In the entire com-
pany there are but five poets—Ronsard, Racine,
Victor Hugo, Alfred De Musset, and Beaude-
laire, — and these are so distantly scattered in
the procession as to lack impressiveness. We
must be satisfied, then, with this essay as a com-
ment on French Poetry; for of these five poets
only Racine is closely described. Some may think
he is given more than his due; others may feel
that Villon is more representative of the early
modern French spirit than Ronsard, and that
Paul Verlaine is more typical of later French
poetry than Beaudelaire.
Accepting them, however, as chosen, Madame
DuClaux, in interpreting these poets as part of
the "continuous genius of the French," shows
herself to be more of a biographer than critic.
Victor Hugo will not be made clearer to an
English reader by the mass of personal detail
which in nowise explains his poetry. Alfred
De Musset is enmeshed in his amorous intrigues,
till the fair soul of the hapless youth seems lost
in a maze of gossip. Beaudelaire is not keenly
defined as a decadent; and being here in the
rank of the poets, he gains no laurels for his
beautiful prose. In spite of Madame DuClaux's
avowal of allegiance to French poetry, there is
reason to doubt its warmth. True, France has
no such poets as England; but the French
themselves feel no lack in their poetry. From
infancy they lisp it in the fables of Fontaine;
in early youth they are well grounded in the sen-


356
[May 16,
THE DIAL
lament of Lamartine and in the wit of Moliere.
As for Victor Hugo, he is by acclamation the
very " genius " of French poetry. But it is just
this subtle genius we do not get from mere bio-
graphical data. It is well, after looking at these
poets, who are far apart in other ways than in this
procession, to read again Madame DuClaux's
introductory essay on French Poetry, and thus
be assured that her feeling for the subject is
sincere and even noble.
Not only is the treatment of the poets of the
pageant unsatisfactory, that of the great prose
writers of France is even more so; for it is
through French prose that English readers may
best discern the French spirit. Hence one re-
sents a broad inclusion of minor influences in
French thought, when these might better give
way to the originative forces that have given
French literature, in so many aspects, an
unquestionable superiority. Voltaire, Balzac,
Sainte-Beuve, and Anatole France fill large
places in French literature; but do they vitally
cohere without Rabelais and Montaigne? Here
was an excellent opportunity to define the
"continuous genius" of the French people —
a genius for satire, for urbane discursiveness,
for social insight, for subduing the whole realm
of thought and (as with Balzac) of passion, to
rhythmic order, to stable congruity; above all,
a genius for what might be called literary conse-
cration. Any of this group is typical of this
one phase of French literary biography—none
more so than Voltaire; yet Madame DuClaux
allows Professor Lanson to say the only vital
thing about Voltaire, a man in whom meet so
many tendencies of the French mind — keen-
ness, criticism, a zeal for human progress even
when deriding the steps thereto, a passionate
interest in the things of the mind independent
of race or religion, a catholic intellectuality.
Goldsmith's description of him defending En-
glish literature in a hostile company symbolizes
Voltaire's attitude toward all literature. His
impatience of Congreve, for wishing to be
thought an English gentleman rather than a
writer of witty comedies, suggests the difference
between the literary spirit of France and of
England. The French subordinate life to liter-
ature; the English use literature for some gain
in life.
Balzac, whose conquest of literature is Napo-
leonic, whose Comedie Humaine expresses in
its very title the French genius for social inter-
pretation, has made but little impression upon
Madame DuClaux. In this, as in so much of
her book, she is busied with what is adventitious
in a man's life, and not with what is essential
in his art. She admits that Balzac created the
modern novel, and then denies any meaning in
this honor by ranking him with Sir Walter
Scott. The man who saw society and saw it
whole, who caught the secret of passion as it
affects life, and of money as a passion, and of
vocational success as it is thwarted by or rises
superior to either sex or money, has no affinity
with Walter Scott. Fortunately, Madame Du
Claux saves herself from total error in her
estimate of Balzac by a real appreciation of
some of his qualities; but his splendid achieve-
ment— so all-inclusive, so integrated, so start-
ling in insight, that his name comes to mean
life — needs a connotation other than this. So
too does Balzac's critic enemy, Sainte-Beuve,
who did for French literature what the novelist
did for French life — grasped it entire and
gave it new meaning, teaching any critic who
comes after him that he must know not only
literature but history and philosophy in their
relation to the individual writer. Madame Du
Claux is not a vital literary critic, and there-
fore does not do justice to the greatest of critics.
She does, however, approach something like
real critical acumen in her study of Anatole
France, whom she discriminatingly contrasts
with Maurice Barres in a few large generaliza-
tions which are worth more as criticism than
whole pages of intimate gossip.
Madame DuClaux's interest in French his-
tory is keen; her ability to trace the under-
currents, to point out the depths and shallows
of its wayward course, is sure. It is only fair
to give all possible credit to the part of the
pageant in which men of historical significance
appear. The placing of Louis Quatorze in
relation to the spirit of his time is excellent.
Rousseau has perhaps never been so thoroughly
presented within the small compass of an essay.
One may question the right of LaClos and
Liancourt to be in this august assembly; but
being here, they are amply accounted for. The
interpretation of " The Sons of Science" is also
illuminating. Whether they are real scientists
like Fontenelle, or those who, like Ernest Renan
and Hippolyte Taine, applied a scientific method
to the study of religion and literature, their part
in the procession is made brilliant and convinc-
ing. In fact, there is a tendency throughout
these discussions to make philosophy and science,
as developed by the French, their real genius;
whereas the genius of the French is distinctively
literary, and everything else is subordinate to
this. And because of this literary power


1910.]
357
THE DIAL
they bear away the palm for movements and
measures they did not originate. John Locke
anticipated Rousseau's educational doctrine,
just as Richardson had anticipated much of
the sentimentality of "La Nouvelle Heloi'se";
but Rousseau alone possessed the magic of
the winged word to blow his truth about the
world. He had the power of the angel voice
to trumpet his message till it toppled the throne
of kings. German theologians pointed out the
necessity of Hebrew philology in the history of
religion before Ernest Renan. They lacked
Renan's sweet reasonableness in proving this;
hence Renan is read and the Germans are for-
gotten. Even Fenelon's lessons to the Due de
Bourgogne are cast in artistic form. French-
men, whether scientists, scholars, reformers, or
critics, are writers above all else, and form is
the priceless wedding-garment which singles
them out at the feast of things intellectual.
The quality of this form is what we should most
wish to see when all these types are massed as
a Pageant of Great Writers. But our guide,
intellectually alert as she is, forgot this in
attending to much which, though creditable to
her learning, |is not closely according to her
initial programme.
No degree of attention to philosophy and sci-
ence as an expression of the French spirit can
keep one from looking, as this pageant passes,
for a persistent element in French history and
letters — a line of notable women. By the
promise made of a literary review in the preface,
Madame de Maintenon has a more legitimate
right among the choice and master spirits of
her age than Louis XIV. She had a finer influ-
ence upon Madame DuClaux's favorite, Racine.
Madame de Sevign^ had a quality of the French
spirit beautiful to know. By a perverse selec-
tion, we have a paper on "Goethe in France,"
though the very logic of the subject demands
that we see how France went well equipped to
Goethe when Madame de Stael was gathering ma-
terial for her De VAllemagne. The only woman
observable from the tower is George Sand, and
she is so trivially exhibited that her place might
well have been given to Flaubert, who loved to
call her master. The enthusiastic Sandist, will
resent Madame DuClaux's airing of unpleasant
facts which in no way affect the fine imagina-
tion of that unique force in literature. There
are two essays on George Sand, and scarcely a
word about her literary fecundity, her fine idyllic
sense, her aptitude for an intellectual comrade-
ship so helpful to Balzac in his precarious career,
to Sainte-Beuve's simple life of reading and
writing, and to Flaubert in his sullen isolation.
The varied gifts of George Sand should not
be ignored, even by an Englishwoman. Both
Elizabeth Barrett and George Eliot were glad
to acknowledge their indebtedness to her. Lit-
erature itself has been enriched by her love of
the picturesque, her large feeling for things
human, her ease and grace in writing. She
belongs truly to the French genius.
And what is this genius? Is it not a match-
less sincerity toward art, and toward literature
as the greatest art? This sincerity is their
inspiration to an almost superhuman industry
in acquiring a style adequate to every form of
expression. Style — that is the gift of the
French. It is not in their literature alone, but
in their whole range of life, — in their delicate
food, their ornate clothing, their fine speech,
their distinguished manners, their superb capi-
tal which in itself is a glory of art.
Ellen FitzGerald.
The Negro Problem Viewed across
the Color-line.*
The American Race-problem is one which
still interests writers and readers, if one may
judge from the annual output of books and
pamphlets about it. Once in a long while a
book is written which is worth reading; many
are useless, or worse. Professor Kelly Miller's
"Race Adjustment" is well worth reading.
The author is a negro, born in North Carolina
during the Civil War; it is probable that he
was a slave for two years, although " Who's
Who in America " does not enlighten us on that
point; for the past twenty years he has been a
professor in Howard University. He has wit-
nessed the trial of various plans for the solution
of the race-problem, and has seen most of them
fail; he knows much of the conditions of negro
life, and is acquainted with the plans and opin-
ions of the leaders of the race. His book con-
tains nineteen chapters; the most important
topics treated are Radicals and Conservatives,
The Leopard's Spots, Social Equality, The City
Negro, Religion as a Solvent of the Race Prob-
lem, Surplus Negro Women, Rise of the Pro-
fessional Class, Frederick Douglass, Higher
Education of the Negro, Roosevelt and the
Negro.
The temper of the book will surprise those
who once thought that Professor Miller belonged
•Rack Adjustment. Essays on the Negro in America.
By Kelly Miller. New York: The Neale Publishing Co.


358
[May 16,
THE DIAL
to the radical wing of the negro progressives.
With two exceptions — these being fierce and
excusable criticisms of Mr. Thomas Dixon and
Mr. John Temple Graves—the papers making
up the volume are moderate' in feeling and state-
ment; they show evidence of plain common-
sense, and there is an absence of that peculiar
irritating quality that is usually found in race-
problem literature. The style is clear and force-
ful, vivid at times; but never is the language
violent. The author is fond of comparisons,
and makes some effective ones. The following
striking sentences are selected as typical:
"Verbal vehemence void of practical power to enforce
demands is an ineffectual missile to be hurled against
the stronghold of prejudice."
"All truly useful men must be, in a measure, time-
servers; for unless they serve their time they can
scarcely serve at all."
"Douglass insisted upon rights; Washington insists
upon duty."
That he possesses a sense of humor, the writer
frequently shows; as when, in quoting Freeman's
suggestion for a solution of the Celtic and Afri-
can race-problems, he remarks: "Let each Irish-
man kill a negro, and get hanged for it."
The best of the book is the first chapter — an
interesting comparision of the policies and the
leaders of the negro radicals and conservatives.
Booker Washington is classed as a conservative;
Professor DuBois, and Trotter, editor of the
Boston " Guardian," are leading radicals. The
author is conservative, but will not yield unre-
served allegiance to Washington. One interested
in learning what the negroes think about the
negro problem will profit by this discussion of
the conflicting policies and the keen analysis of
the motives and principles of the rival groups
of leaders. Washington, the conservative, who
came when others had failed,—"a time-server"
in the best sense; supported by white opinion;
who talks of duties rather than of rights; con-
structive, not critical; quiet and diplomatic, not
disputatious; business-like, not heroic, is con-
trasted with Trotter, the extreme radical, who
would insist on absolute right, yield nothing for
expediency's sake, and altogether disregard the
opinions of whites. The estimate of Washing-
ton and his policies is especially good.
"Few men have Bhown such power of development.
. . . He avoided controverted issues, and moved, not
along the line of least resistance, but of no resistance at
all. He founded his creed upon construction rather
than upon criticism. He urged his race to do the things
possible rather than whine and pine over things pro-
hibited."
Of the radical chief, he says:
"Mr. Trotter is well suited to play the role of a martyr.
He delights in a reputation for vicarious heroics. Being
possessed of considerable independent means, he willingly
makes sacrifices for the cause, and is as uncompromis-
ing as William Lloyd Garrison. Mr. Trotter, however,
lacks the moral sanity and poise of the great emancipator.
With him, agitation is not so much the outgrowth of an
intellectual or moral comprehension of right and repre-
hension of wrong, as it is a temperamental necessity.
Endowed with a narrow, intolerant intensity of spirit,
he pursues his ends with a Jesuitical justification of
untoward means. Without clear concrete objective, such
as the anti-slavery promoters had in view, he strikes
wildly at whatever he imagines obscures the rights of
the Negro race. He has the traditional irreverence of
the reformer, an irreverence which delights to shatter
popular idols. President Eliot of Harvard University,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Booker T. Washington are
shining marks for his blunt and bitter denunciation. He
sets himself up as the moral monitor of the Negro race."
Professor DuBois, the other radical whose
books on negro affairs have attracted wide atten-
tion, began, the author says, as a calm scientific
investigator, but under the influence of Trotter
he became an agitator of the extreme type, one
of the leaders of the "Niagara Movement"
against color discrimination. It is the author's
opinion that Professor DuBois is not suited to
the role of agitator.
"He is a man of remarkable amplitude and con-
trariety of qualities, an exact interrogator, and a lucid
expositor of social reality, but withal a dreamer with a
fantasy of mind that verges on the fine frenzy. . . .
His place is the cloister of the reflective scholar."
In the rest of the book there is little that is
wholly original; it is chiefly a new treatment of
old subjects. The author calls attention to a
fact frequently unconsidered — that the rise of
"democracy " in the South and the accession of
"popular leaders" to power has resulted in
greatly increased race friction. But, as he
further says, in comparing the opportunities
offered to the negro in North and South,—
«It must be conceded that the Southern white man
frequently displays commendable personal good-will
toward individual Negroes who come within the circle
of his acquaintance or control. In general, there is the
widest margin between his avowed public policy and
his personal demeanor. No reputable Southerner is
half as bad as Senator Tillman talks"
That religion is destined to be one of the
strongest forces in the solution of the race
troubles, is the belief of the author, who asserts
that a basis for cooperation and mutual help-
fulness will be found in the fact that nearly all
negroes are members of the two great demo-
cratic churches, the Baptist and the Methodist,
— a fact true also of the Protestant whites.
The negro professional and business classes are
developing rapidly; a fact of more importance
than the criminality of the lowest classes. The
statistics quoted seem to show that city life is
not good for negro man or woman, and that


1910.]
359
THE DIAL
few opportunities are offered in a city. "As
one walks along the streets of our great cities
and views the massive buildings and sky-seeking
structures, he finds no status for the negro
above the cellar floor." On the other hand,
the negro "by virtue of his geographical dis-
tribution holds the key to the agricultural
development of the South,"—the concentration
of the race in the black belt, the "Land of
Gosheu," being as effective now as it was fifty
years ago to bar out white competition.
So many opinions of Mr. Roosevelt's negro
policy have been recorded that it seems proper
to allow this one:
"He is not permanently wedded to any one question
as the dominant note of his career. He suddenly takes
up a measure, settles it, and drops it, and goes in quest
of issues new. And so in dealing with the negro he has
established the principle but has desisted at the point
of practical application."
Walter L. Fleming.
Briefs on New Books.
In his latest book, "The Bridling of
Zt.^ZT Pegasus" (Macmillan), Mr. Alfred
Austin has brought together a series
of miscellaneous essays in criticism, — one of them
inspired by the recent ter-centenary of Milton's
birth, another delivered as a lecture some ten years
ago before a Dante Society, still another published
in one of the English magazines while Tennyson
was yet alive, and most of the rest written appar-
ently before the end of Tennyson's century. The
first of the essays — there are ten in all, and each
of them must make interesting reading for all who
find pleasure in the critical essay — is on "The
Essentials of Great Literature," and is a plea for a
return to first principles in the criticism of poetry.
These principles Mr. Austin conceives to be, first of
all, melodiousness and lucidity; and after these, the
largeness of conception and the power that we asso-
ciate with epic and dramatic verse. The dethrone-
ment of poetry in popular favor in recent times he
attributes largely to the neglect of these essentials
in current criticism, though he holds that there have
been other contributory influences at work, in "the
perpetual reading of novels of every kind," the
increase of the feminine or sentimental in literature,
and " the febrile quality of contemporary existence."
The sentimental note in our literature furnishes the
theme of the second essay. The third treats anew
the time-worn theme of Milton's likeness and unlike-
ness to Dante. The fourth — the most substantial
and the most spirited chapter in the book — deals
with the relative rank of Byron and Wordsworth,
and is an attempt to discredit sundry of Matthew
Arnold's dicta in his famous prefatory essay on
Wordsworth. Mr. Austin admits the justness of
Arnold's assertion that Wordsworth must profit by
the "boiling down" process to which Arnold sub-
jected him in his volume of selections, but denies
that this is true also of Byron; in like manner he
argues, with much emphasis — and, it must be
admitted, with something of plausibility — that
Arnold was wrong in contending that Wordsworth
reveals more of life than does Byron, or that he
reveals life more powerfully; he also demurs to
Arnold's judgment that a poetry of optimism is
necessarily a greater poetry than that in which the
note of sadness and discontent is struck, although
he seems to contradict himself later in his essay on
"Poetry and Pessimism." Another stirring essay,
"A Vindication of Tennyson," is directed against
the poet Swinburne, whom Mr. Austin calls to
account for having once charged Tennyson, strangely
enough, with " inaptitude for musical verse." The
remaining essays are concerned with "Dante's
Realistic Treatment of the Ideal," " Dante's Poetic
Conception of Woman," "The Relation of Litera-
ture and Politics," and "A Conversation with
Shakespeare in the Elysian Fields." The volume
adds little or nothing to our stock of critical theory,
is in no sense constructive, but in its insistence on
faith in first principles and on loyalty to the masters
it is bound to have a wholesome influence.
_ . , The almost simultaneous publication
Two oookm on ... ...
the problem of of two exhaustive investigations into
woman't work. the industrial status of working wom-
en testifies to the increasing and serious interest in
the subject. Miss Elizabeth B. Butler's "Women
and the Trades," published under the Russell Sage
Foundation by the Charities Publication Committee,
is based on a close study of four hundred establish-
ments in the "millionaire city" of Pittsburgh in
which the labor of women and girls was utilized, and
includes a survey of the employment of 22,185 of
those women and girls at twenty-seven trades. Miss
Butler's book is not a mere statistical statement of
numbers, hours, wages,—these things have been
accurately ascertained and stated, — but a sympathe-
tic discussion of all the factors, social as well as
economic, in the problem of women's employment
in Pittsburgh. It appears that less than one per
cent of the workers are skilled, while less than two
per cent deserve the name of craftswomen; twenty-
three per cent do work that requires only dexterity,
and of sixteen per cent not even dexterity is de-
manded. This means that by far the great majority
of the women studied are industrially helpless,—that
is, doing work which makes no demand on their
intelligence and affords little opportunity for ad-
vancement. Miss Butler points out the serious con-
sequences of this condition to the community. She
shows that few (less than two per cent) get elsewhere
— in clubs, social and educational, or in other social
organizations—the training that is lacking in their
work. One cannot begin to indicate the important
facts here brought out, or the ways in which the
Pittsburgh community, and many others of which it


360
[May 16,
THE DIAL
is a type, must begin the task of protecting women
wage-earners. In the United States as a whole,
women are engaged in 295 of the 303 occupations
specified in the Twelfth Census; and it is an inter-
esting problem to trace out the beginnings of their
careers as wage-earners, to see how recent a condition
is their wide distribution in gainful occupations, what
the conditions of their early industrial employment
were, what wages they received, what were their
hours of work and their surroundings. These things
Miss Edith Abbott's " Women in Industry" (Apple-
ton) tells us. It is the most comprehensive and care-
ful study, historical and statistical, that has been
made of the employment of women. In it their
industrial life is traced from colonial times through
the period of transition from house industries to the
present factory system with its minute division of
labor. A general survey of the fields of industry in
which women were earliest employed, with many
quaint and amusing quotations from old note-books,
records, and periodicals, is followed by histories of
special industries, chosen because of their impor-
tance, now or earlier, in the employment of women
workers. An interesting conclusion from the gen-
eral survey is that, contrary to popular belief, '' the
increase in the number of women employed in fac-
tories has not meant the 'driving out' of men," the
proportion of women in the New England mills
having steadily declined since 1827, when they were
nine-tenths of all the operatives, to 1900, when they
were less than half. The data which Miss Abbott
has collected disprove also another frequent asser-
tion regarding women—that they have only recently
become self-supporting; the early records show that
women supported themselves before the era of the
factory. The discussion of the problem of women's
wages confirms, in connection with the broad field
of women's employment, what Miss Butler's study
revealed as true for them in Pittsburgh: that for
the most part "women not only do the low-paid but
the unskilled work." This volume is in one respect
unlike Miss Butler's: one seems to detect in it a
hidden brief for the "cause of women "; while the
other work, though sympathetic, is nevertheless
impartial in its attitude. Together they are distinc-
tive and important contributions to the problem of
woman's work.
A Ruttian Captain Vladimir Semenoff, of the
Admiral Russian navy, in a book called "The
<n Japan. price 0f filoed » putton) gjTes 8ome
realistic and often harrowing details of his capture
at sea, in company with Admiral Rojestvensky, in
the late war between Japan and Russia, and of his
detention in hospital and prison on Japanese soil.
The volume is a sequel to "Rasplata" and "The
Battle of Tsushima," from the same pen, but is of
independent interest as illustrating the kind of tactics
and gunnery, on both sides, that made possible the
easy defeat of one naval force by another. Captain
Semenoff himself was disabled by severe wounds,
and must be given credit for putting forth such
strenuous resistance as was in his power; but his
narrative, perhaps not wholly with intention, reveals
a state of laxness and incompetence in the Russian
navy that fairly startles the reader. The narrative
covers the period from the middle of May, 1905,
to the sixth of December, when the author found
himself back in St. Petersburg, with the disheart-
ening prospect before him of being court-martialed
for dereliction of duty. "Is this the price of blood?"
he asked himself. "Is it for this we have shed it?"
The translators of the book, Mr. Leonard Lewery
and Major F. R. Godfrey, have indulged here and
there in English that may fairly be called peculiar.
For example, on an early page we read: "If but
one of them had dared to evince his glee openly in
my presence whatever, I think I would be able to
clench my teeth in his throat till they would have met
there." An interview with Admiral Nebogatoff,
after he had submitted to the inevitable and saved his
men at the expense of his honor, shows the unfortu-
nate man in a rather touching frame of mind. "I
had not the courage to do it," he confesses, in answer
to the query why he had not sunk his ships and taken
to his boats—an operation that he felt convinced
would have condemned three-fourths of his men to
certain death; "I had not the courage to do it, and
to this alone I plead guilty. I am sure you will
believe it was not to save my own skin that I acted
thus: I was the Admiral, and means would always
have been found of saving me." The diarist im-
presses one as a man of sturdy resolution and remark-
able physical endurance. The conditions under
which he kept his journal were extremely trying, to
say the least. But to this difficulty much of the
peculiar interest of the book is due.
Under the title "Some Wonders of
SZ""" Biology" (D°dd> Mead & Co.), Dr.
William Hanna Thomson has re-
printed a series of essays which originally appeared
in "Everybody's Magazine." Their aim is the
popular presentation of certain medical topics not
generally understood by the layman. In fact, if
"medicine" had been substituted for "biology" in
the title, a more just relationship between the cover
of the book and its contents would have been effected.
For while the science of medicine is certainly applied
biology, the relationship between the applied and
pure science here is not so close in current thought
or usage as quite to justify labelling as "biology"
a book dealing with such topics as abnormalities of
the mind, infection, and the like. Dr. Thomson is
a fluent and entertaining writer. Four of the seven
essays which make up the volume deal primarily with
medical aspects of psychology. Here the author is
at his best, — though the traditional granum talis
will not come amiss even here. The last two essays
are concerned with very broad and fundamental
problems of philosophical biology. Their titles are
respectively "Is this Earth the Only Abode of Phy-
sical Life?" and "The Nature of Physical Life."
On the whole it is fair to say that these two essays


1910.]
361
THE
DIAL
do not satisfactorily solve the questions they raise,
although there is not to be found even a perfunctory
expression of modest doubt on the author's part as to
whether there may not still be left something worth
discussing in regard to these great problems after
this book is finished. Indeed, Dr. Thomson's manner
of dealing with the intellectual difficulties implied in
the chapter-headings quoted, in its mingling of genial
but at the same time absolute certainty, and the
smallest but none the less distinct bit of a patronizing
tone, is much like that adopted by the old-school
country " doctor" in his amelioration of visceral ills.
The conclusion reached is that the earth is the only
abode of life, chiefly because "Man himself is alto-
gether exceptional. . . . He is simply supernatural,
and above all biology." Just what this really has
to do with the questions under discussion, does not
appear. But since the chief purpose of these last
two essays is plainly to inculcate the highest moral
principles, the logical non sequitur may perhaps be
overlooked.
The Quaker
at a citizen.
Mrs. Francis B. Gummere (Amelia
Mott Gummere), in a volume entitled
"The Quaker in the Forum" (John
C. Winston Co.), considers " an aspect of Quakerism
which," she says, with some excess of emphasis on
the peculiar nature of her researches, "has hitherto
received no attention." The writing of the book was
suggested, she tells us, by the question of a professor
of history in a New England college, who asked when
the Quakers obtained the franchise in America. In
seven somewhat rambling and pleasantly anecdotal
chapters, the civil status of the follower of George
Fox is discussed, with abundant references to author-
itative sources of information. First the Quaker
attitude toward the oath—hardly a topic that "has
hitherto received no attention" — is considered at
some length, with illustrative instances; and then
come chapters on the Quaker as a "Wanton Gos-
peller," "The Quaker Franchise," "The Quaker
Citizen and the Law," "The Quaker in Interna-
tional Politics," "The Quakers and Mirabeau," and
"Quaker Loyalty." The fifth of these essays seems
to owe its being chiefly to the fact that the writer
has in her possession a silver cream-jug presented by
Dr. John Fothergill, a Quaker physician in London,
to Benjamin Franklin, upon the latter's departure
for America in 1775; this chapter is less compre-
hensive and general in its nature than its title might
lead one to expect. The book is appropriately illus-
trated, chiefly with portraits.
Romantic career 0ne of most interesting and
o/ a Frenchman unique of careers among Americans
in the Civil War. is that of General Regis deTrobriand;
and this career is commemorated in a worthy biog-
raphy by his daughter Mrs. Marie Caroline Post
.
One could hardly ask for more in a novel of adven-
ture than is to be found in this book. General de
Trobriand came of a line of soldiers reaching back
to William the Conqueror. He was the first in
these hundreds of years to enter a different career,
and this because under the House of Orleans the
army was closed to him as a loyal upholder of the
Bourbon line. Chance brought him to the New
World in 1841; he married a New York heiress
and remained a loyal American, though by birth he
belonged to the high nobility and could claim the
"sixteen quarterings" that gave him position among
the proudest, and in his boyhood had made him a
page to the Bourbon heir to the throne. Regis
de Trobriand excelled in many things. He could
swim seven miles, and then row his defeated contest-
ants back to the starting-point; he was a writer of
skill and superior style in both French and English;
a musical and dramatic critic, an excellent musician,
a painter of reputation, a friend and companion of
noted men and women on both sides of the Atlantic.
When the Civil War broke out, although he was in
middle life, he offered himself to the Government,
and served with distinction throughout the war,
rising to the rank of Major General. A volume
of his reminiscences, "Quatre ans de Campagnes a
PArmee du Potomac," is a fine story of the cam-
paigns of that army, and did much to shape French
opinion on American matters. At the close of the
war he was made a colonel in the regular army, and
served on the frontier until he was retired for age.
The story of this interesting life is well told; an
obstacle to the enjoyment of it will be found by some
in their inability to read and appreciate the best por-
tions— letters, diaries, and the like—which are in
French and untranslated. (E. P. Dutton & Co.)
corropondence "The Correspondence of Priscilla,
of a counter in Countess of Westmoreland," edited
diplomatic u/e. by her daughter, Lady Rose Weigall,
and published by the Messrs. Dutton, constitutes a
sufficiently bulky sequel to the "Letters of Lady
Burghersh during the Campaign of 1813-14,"
which appeared in 1893. The writer of both
series of letters was, by birth, a Pole ( Priscilla Ann
Wellesley Pole) and a niece of the great Duke of
Wellington; while her marriage to Lord Burghersh,
afterward eleventh Earl of Westmoreland, a soldier
and a diplomat, connected her with another family
of distinction. Her familiar correspondence, thought
by her daughter to throw "a new and true light on
much that has been misconceived, especially in re-
gard to the formation of the German Empire," has
the naturalness and varied interest that an intelli-
gent and observing woman, residing successively at
various European capitals and mingling with court
society, might be expected to impart to her informal
descriptions of her surroundings. As to the new
light thrown on the formation of the German Em-
pire, since her latest published letter is dated 1865,
and her earlier references to the hopes and plans of
German unity are neither very numerous nor very
startling in their revelations, the illumination can
hardly be considered dazzling. But those interested
in European history of the last century, especially


362
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
those old enough to remember much of its making,
will find entertainment in the book, which is, more-
over, appropriately though sparingly illustrated and
carefully indexed.
Two year. "The Diarv of a Daly D<5butante"
behind the (Duffield ) is made up of "passages
footlighix. from the journal of a member of
Augustin Daly's famous company of players," if the
title-page is to be credited; and a "publishers'
note" informs the reader that the Diary, written in
1879-81, has quite by chance become available for
publication thirty years later. "It is printed ver-
batim," we are to believe, "with only such omis-
sions as have seemed expedient for personal reasons,
the writer having since become well known in
another walk of life." Who the writer is, may
furnish food for conjecture to the veteran theatre-
goer; but as the parts assigned to her by Mr. Daly
were always inconspicuous, and sometimes mute,
there is small danger that her veil of anonymity will
be rudely torn aside. Her first impressions of her
fellow-players — some of them, like Mr. John Drew
and Miss Ada Rehan, subsequently famous — are
of special interest. The tone of the Diary is good-
natured throughout; in fact, the daily entries are
just such as a well-bred and wide-awake young lady
might be expected to write under the given condi-
tions. Play-going readers, especially if old enough
to have witnessed the performances of the Daly
company from the beginning, will find innocent
amusement in this "Diary of a Daly Debutante."
A book of English origin is intro-
on ai/ron'omt*. duced to American readers, with the
title " Chats about Astronomy " (Lip-
pincott). The title is an accurate description of the
contents. Mr. H. P. Hollis, the learned President of
the British Astronomical Association, may be pre-
sumed to have knocked the ashes out of his pipe (if
he smokes), and to have summoned his stenographer
that he might chat to him in more or less desultory
fashion on a dozen loosely connected topics of astro-
nomical import. Four of the chapters are about the
earth; the longest of the other eight attempts to give
the reader an introduction to the constellations.
Notwithstanding the chatty nature of these talks,
the author has been careful about his facts — an
exception being the story on page 41 about what
Halley said concerning the return of his comet.
There are evidences of careless proof-reading: on
page 41 some Greek words have their accents and
breathings in sad disarray ; such slips as " Astrope,"
"chartering stars," "Enke," "Aquita," "Delphi-
nas," "Aldeharan," and " Crommelia," are not very
creditable. But aside from these minor defects, the
book may be recommended to anyone who does not
care for a systematic and orderly treatment of the
subject, and will not miss the beautiful illustrations
with which popular books on astronomy are usually
adorned.
BRIEFER MENTION.
Messrs. £. F. Dntton & Co. publish a new edition of
"The Works of Sir John Suckling in Prose and Verse,"
edited by Mr. A. Hamilton Thompson. The plays and
the letters, when added to the more familiar lyrics, make
up a stouter volume than one would expect. The original
title-pages of the several publications are reproduced in
facsimile, and there is a considerable body of notes.
"The aim of this volume is, among other things, to give
a concrete discussion of ambiguity, to simplify the study of
causal connections, and to treat with greater detail than
is usually done the type of inference called circumstan-
tial evidence, the nature of proof, and the postulates of
reasoning." This is the programme of "An Outline
of Logic," by Professor Boyd Henry Bode, published
by Messrs. Henry Holt & Co. It is an excellent treatise
upon a too-neglected subject, and one of its most useful
features is found in the extensive set of appended
exercises.
One of the best series of supplementary reading-
books that have ever been planned is that published by
Messrs. Harper & Brothers under the editorship of Mr.
Percival Chubb. The readings are to be from the most
typically American of American writers, and a volume
made up from the juvenile books of Mr. Howells opened
the series not long ago. It is now followed by "Travels
at Home by Mark Twain," a volume of passages taken
from the author's accounts of life on the Mississippi
and in the Nevada of "Roughing It." Two further
volumes from Mark Twain are soon to be added to the
series. We bespeak a hearty welcome from school
people for these books.
To the series of "Original Narratives of Early
American History" (Scribner) the editor, Professor J.
Franklin Jameson, has contributed a reprint, with exten-
sive annotations, of Captain Edward Johnson's famous
"History of New England," better known as "The
Wonder-Working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New
England "— for that is the title supplied by the running
headlines of the original edition. It is now forty-three
years since the last previous appearance of this work,
as it was given to the public with a learned introductory
essay by William Frederick Poole. Professor Jameson
has availed himself of Poole's scholarship, and has con-
tributed much of his own besides. He is himself a
descendant of the author, which has lent a special interest
to the task of presenting the work to a new generation
of readers.
A new edition of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche,
in English translation, is being published by the Mac-
millan Co. It is under the supervising care of Dr. Oscar
Levy, and will comprise eighteen volumes in all. The
following works are now at hand: "Thoughts out of
Season," in two volumes, respectively translated by Mr.
Anthony M. Ludovici and Mr. Adrian Collins; "The
Birth of Tragedy," translated by Dr. William A. Hauss-
mann; the first part of " Human all-too-Human," trans-
lated by Miss Helen Zimmern; the first part of "The
Will to Power," translated by Mr. Ludovici; and "On
the Future of our Educational Institutions" with
"Homer and Classical Philology," translated by Mr. J.
M. Kennedy. For readers who prefer their Nietzsche
homoeopathic-epigrammatic doses, we recommend the in
little book edited by Mr. A. R. Orage, and entitled
"Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism." This volume is
published by Messrs. A. C. McClurg & Co.


1910.]
363
THE
DIAL
Notes.
Mr. Joseph B. Gilder, late editor of "Putnam's
Magazine" and long associated with his sister Miss
Jeannette L. Gilder in the management of "The
Critic," has undertaken the editorship of "The New
York Times Saturday Review."
The interesting announcement is made of a life of
Bret Harte for the "American Men of Letters " series.
It is the work of Mr. Henry C. Merwin of Boston, who
has been engaged upon it for several years, and has had
access to unpublished manuscripts and other authorita-
tive sources.
Messrs. Ginn & Co. publish a revised edition of that
sterling text, "The Leading Facts of American His-
tory," by Mr. IX H. Montgomery. This book is par-
ticularly well supplied with apparatus for the aid of
both student and teacher, and has in a marked degree
the merits of conciseness and accuracy.
A lawyer's brief for the existence of God and a belief
in immortality is embodied in Judge Lysander Hill's
"The Two Great Questions " (Chicago: Regan Printing
House). The argument is based on a vast array of
evidence offered by the processes of nature, and on the
difficulty of explaining all the facts of existence by
merely natural law.
Descendants of the Scotch Irish, and genealogists of
whatever ancestry, will be interested in "Scotch Irish
Pioneers in Ulster and America," by Mr. Charles K.
Bolton, Librarian of the Boston Athenseum, a book
which Messrs. Bacon & Brown of Boston announce as
nearly ready. The work has been in preparation for
several years, and will form an important contribution
to the history of American colonization.
Among the interesting books to appear in June is a
new novel by Sienkiewicz, dealing with the problems of
modern life. It is translated from the Polish by Mr.
Max A. Dresmal, and is to be published by Messrs.
Little, Brown, & Co. The same firm announces a new
book by Selma Lagerlof, the famous Swedish author to
whom was recently awarded the Nobel Literary Prize
of $40,000. The novel is entitled "The Girl from
Marsh Croft," and is translated by Miss Yelma Swanston
Howard.
Professor Willis L. Moore, Chief of the United States
Weather Bureau, has written a text-book of " Descriptive
Meteorology," which is now published by the Messrs.
Appleton. It is an exhaustive work, abundantly illus-
trated with charts and diagrams, and is designed for the
needs of men in training for the work of forecasting. It
may also serve well as a manual for advanced college
students. We note with interest that the author is not
to be numbered among the deserters from the Laplacian
hypothesis concerning the origin of the Solar System.
The most complete history ever prepared of an early
American magazine is about to be published by the
Boston Athenaeum. It comprises the weekly records of
a club of brilliant young men of New England who
edited " The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review"
just a century ago. The book, which will be hand-
somely illustrated, will contain an introduction by Mr.
M. A. DeWolfe Howe, a complete collation by Mr.
Albert Matthews, as well as extensive bibliographical
notes of early books reviewed, and a complete list of
authors of contributions to the ten volumes of the
magazine.
THE DIAL'S THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY.
ADDITIONAL TRIBUTES.
The Dial continues to receive congratulations
and tributes, from individuals and the press, on its
Thirtieth Anniversary, just past. If any excuse
were needed for adding to the full measure of
appreciations printed in the preceding issue, it might
be found in the fact that these also belong to the
collection, as well as in their interest and the rarity
of the occasion which called them forth.
While others offer flasks of praise
I bring my humble vial I
Live long t Live long and useful days!
May Fortune's sun pour golden rays
Upon the faithful Dial!
Many congratulations on the auspicious event. The
anniversary marks an era of fair and candid criticism,
of honest and sincere appreciations.
Nathan Haskell Dole.
Boston, May 1.
I congratulate you on the Thirtieth Anniversary of
The Dial. I remember the Dial of the Transcenden-
talists, to which an aunt of mine was a subscriber, and
always thought of it when I read your Dial, which I
did for many years, and which I think has justified the
words of the prospectus of the Dial of seventy years
ago. Melville W. Fuller.
Supreme Court. WatMngton, D. ft, May S.
I appreciate very much what The Dial has done for
us and for many causes in which I am interested. The
maintenance of such a journal represents a high form
of public service, and I am not sure that it does not
represent the highest form of public service now open
to men. Benjamin I. Wheeler.
University of California, April W.
This note from a constant reader of The Dial dur-
ing the thirty years of success you and your associates
and friends are so happily celebrating has been delayed
only to give you time to digest all the more important
things coming to you. Yet constant readers are not
without value, I take it, and their very existence is
evidence of their appreciation, not loud but deep. The
Dial, especially to one trained in judicial methods, is
a balm as well as an education and inspiration, and my
gratitude for the privilege of its comfort and instruc-
tion during these many years would be hard to plumb.
May at least another thirty be its and yours to bless
with beauty and worth all the friends among whom I
hope always to be. Eugene E. Pbussino.
Chicago, May 6.
I wish to congratulate The Dial on its Thirtieth
Anniversary. The Dial is one of the very few literary
periodicals that I find worth reading at all. So from
my point of view you have been greatly successful. You
should take the foremost place among our periodicals
devoted largely to literature. Wilbub L. Cross.
Yale University, May k.
I always enjoy reading The Dial. I like its com-
mon sense, its good judgment, its conscientious fairness,
its thorough scholarship. I will not call its deliverances
oracles, but they give me a somewhat similar feeling at
once of confidence and of finality. The Dial does tell


364
[May 16,
THE
DIAL,
to all who are interested in culture and literature the
state of life and growth that is now arrived and arriving.
I join the generation it has helped and guided for thirty
years in wishing it hearty Godspeed.
Jacob Gould Schurman.
Cornell Univertity, N. Y., May S.
That The Dial should be alive to celebrate the
Thirtieth Anniversary of its birth should not be a source
of wonder, but when one looks at the cheaper magazines
and most of the higher priced ones, all of them grovel-
ling before the raw intelligence of the masses, it is a
wonderful achievement to make a success of such a
publication as The Dial, and the credit should be in
accordance with the achievement.
Isaac R. Pennypackbb.
Saranae Lake. N. Y., April 19.
I send my congratulations on the Thirtieth Anniver-
sary of The Dial. I wish to add my testimony to the
abundance which you have received. It is now a good
many years since I began reading The Dial, and no
more welcome visitor comes to me. I appreciate espe-
cially the generosity of its criticisms: those who are
admitted into its precincts receive the best of greetings.
May you long live and prosper. Louis J. Block.
Chicago, May S.
My very cordial congratulations to The Dial on the
achievement of so long a period of consistent service to
literature, and the hope that successors in my office may
have the privilege of a similar congratulation upon the
prolongation of this period to a full centennial.
Herbert Putnam.
Library of Congrett, Wathington, £>._ C. April tS.
My heartiest congratulations on your Thirtieth Anni-
versary. The fine thing about The Dial is that it does
not depend on another light, but adds to the literary
world a lustre of its own, while marking the progress
of that world. And this may you continue doing for
another generation. David T. Thomas.
Univertity of Arkansas, May 9.
May I congratulate you upon your admirable Thirtieth
Anniversary number. I spent most of last evening
reading it. Certainly we have nothing else on the same
high literary plane as The Dial. Hearty congratu-
lations. W. W. Ellsworth (The Century Co.)
New York, May 6.
Please accept our congratulations upon your Thirtieth
Anniversary. May the next thirty years be as fruitful
in good deeds and good works as the past thirty, and
may all those who have had a part in this development
during the past thirty years live to take an active part
in the development within the next thirty years.
George W. Jacobs & Co.
Philadelphia, April 30.
I feel that The Dial is one of the few journals in the
country true to the best ideals of literature, and a valu-
able paper to the critical reader, the publisher, and the
general public. John Macrae (E. P. Dittton & Co.)
New York, April tS.
We hasten to offer our congratulations upon your
Thirtieth Anniversary. A periodical that can keep its
high standard for thirty years, as yours has done,
deserves success. Dcffield & Company.
New York. April t9.
The Dial, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary
this week, is a literary journal of remarkable enterprise
and independence, and Sir Walter Besant once declared
it to be unsurpassed by any other literary journal in
America or England. It was founded in 1880 by Mr.
Francis F. Browne, who named his venture after the
famous " Dial " which Margaret Fuller conducted, and
to which Emerson, Thoreau, and many of the other
New England transcendentalists, contributed. Margaret
Fuller's journal ceased after sixteen quarterly numbers;
but its namesake has had a longer, if not quite such a
brilliant, career. Mr. Browne is justly proud of the
fact that he has directed its policy for so long a period,
and that, though published in a city often described as
the most unliterary in the United States, it is read all
over the Republic, and includes among its contributors
many of the most distinguished men of letters in
Amerioa. London Nation.
Chicago has amused itself, and others, by announcing
itself from time to time as " the literary centre " of the
nation. This is an indefinite phrase, and the boast is as
meaningless as it is harmless. The city has a few
authors, a few publishers, and many readers of books.
But in one respect it is unique. It has the only purely
literary jourual of the first rank in America. May 1
The Dial celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Begun
as a monthly, it was changed to a fortnightly publica-
tion eighteen years ago, and it is still under the control
of its first editor, who has been associated with literary
effort in Chicago for nearly half a century. It has stood
for the highest ideals in art and politics, although touch-
ing upon the latter only incidentally, and it has undoubt-
edly exercised upon its readers a powerful influence
towards better things. It has earned the praise of great
authorities on both sides of the Atlantic for its unbiased
judgments and its fearless independence, and its refusal
to compromise with unhealthy and sensational tenden-
cies in literature has won general admiration.
Chicago Tribune.
With the first week of May comes the issue of The
Dial commemorating the close of its thirtieth year.
During that long interval, a generation of human life,
its founder, Mr. Francis F. Browne, has been continu-
ously its editor, an achievement in personality and
literary journalism that is almost without exception.
For thirty years The Dial has come regularly out of
Chicago, recording and commenting upon the passing
and the permanent in literature with a just and author-
itative voice. During most of that time, and at the
present moment, The Dial stauds alone as the only
American newspaper whose sole object is the chronicling
and criticism of literary achievement. May it continue in
length of years and in wisdom. Boston Transcript.
That admirable literary journal, The Dial, of Chi-
cago, has just rounded three decades of continuous
publication under the same editorial auspices. . . . Mr.
Francis F. Browne has been editor of The Dial since
its first number appeared in May, 1880. For twelve
years he issued the periodical as a monthly, but for the
past eighteen years it has been a fortnightly. The Dial
has never missed an issue, and its stability of manage-
ment is almost unique in American journalism. Its
editor has made us all his debtors many times. His has
been a quiet but effective influence in the nation's liter-
ary development, which we hope may be continued far
into the future.
American Review of Reviews.


1910.]
365
THE DIAL,
To have brought a literary journal safely through
thirty years of life in Chicago, in a country not famous
for enthusiasm over affairs of culture, is an admirable
achievement. It is a tribute in part to editorial devo-
tion, but more particularly to the probity which has dis-
tinguished The Dial. Concessions have been made
neither to the general preference for sensational litera-
ture nor to advertisers' desire for indulgence. This rare
standard has never been deserted, and the success of
The Dial is good testimony that there are publishers
and public who appreciate disinterested criticism. That
such success may continue and greatly increase must be
the wish of all Mr. Browne's contemporaries. And
Chicago especially must desire that this anniversary be
the portal to even wider and stronger influence.
Chicago Evening Post.
The Dial is to be congratulated upon its thirtieth
anniversary ; but those who have a full appreciation of
its high aims, a realizing sense of how firmly it has
abided by the faith for sound literature, and how well
it has performed its work in its chosen field, will hold
with us that thirty years is but a milestone in a career
which is destined to continue with honor for many years
to come. New York Times Saturday Review.
To The Dial, that admirable fortnightly review of our-
rent literature and vehicle of sound criticism, our hearty
congratulations on the occasion of its thirtieth anniver-
sary. Our personal congratulations, too, to its founder
and helmsman, who has kept it steady on its consistent
course by the polestar of duty to the best interests of
literature in the main phases or relations of the term —
the author's, the reader's, the publisher's. . . . By
austere adherence to its high standards, by develop-
ment on its original right lines, and avoidance of the
commercial temptations that beset a journal with an
ideal, The Dial stands to-day on an eminence of
success and international recognition that vindicates the
judgment of its founder and his faith in the Emersonian
marim of hitching one's wagon to a star.
Milwaukee Sentinel.
During the whole three decades of its existence this
unique and estimable literary fortnightly has been
edited by its founder, Mr. Francis F. Browne, whose
strong personality and high critical standards have
somehow achieved the apparently impossible feat of
maintaining in Chicago the one purely literary period-
ical in the country. Mr. Browne's success, like that of
Theodore Thomas with his orchestra, was due to no
concession to popular lack of taste, but to a sort of stern
enthusiasm for the best. Mr. Browne and Chicago are
alike to be congratulated on The Dial's anniversary.
Chicago Record-Herald.
On May 1 The Dial celebrates its thirtieth anniver-
sary. It is pleasant to reflect that such a paper, printed
in the West and devoted to the interests of letters, has
had a life so long and a career so honorable and useful.
The Dial is one of the very few periodicals in the United
States which has steadily stood for high aims and ideals,
and in a consistent and dignified and fair-minded fashion
kept its readers in touch with our literary production.
There is special reason for congratulation that such a
publication has been developed in the Middle West; but
locality aside, the country at large should rejoice that
The Dial exists, and bids fair to become a centenarian.
It is one of Chicago's most distinctive and creditable
institutions. The Bellman (Minneapolis).
The Dial of Chicago is thirty years old this spring.
It is a high-class periodical, and it is no slight accomplish-
ment to bring a literary periodical in America safely
through so long a life. We wish it well, and hope it will
live many times as long, with no loss of the cultivation
and independence which have marked its history for
three decades. Collier's Weekly.
The Dial deserves and will receive the hearty con-
gratulations of the best men and women, widely scat-
tered in space and in station. It has been true to the
vision which called it into being. It has been an im-
partial and sagacious interpreter of current literature.
Unity (Chicago).
Every lover of scholarly criticism, of unbiassed
opinion, of pure English, and of a sane viewpoint, will
rejoice that The Dial has achieved its splendid record
and maintained its high literary standard.
The Graphic (Los Angeles, Cal.)
The Dial celebrates this month the Thirtieth Anni-
versary of its appearance among the literary journals of
this country, or, perhaps truer still, of the world, since
its praise is in every centre of literary culture abroad as
well as at home. An unusual circumstance of its history
is that during all this time its policy has been directed
by the same editor, whose rare gifts have been unre-
servedly dedicated to the work of bringing The Dial
to a place of preeminence among journals of its class.
His reward is the praise of the discerning. . . . While
The Dial remains faithful to its present ideals and to
its own splendid history, always will there be assurance
of a criticism which unites sympathy and insight with
the highest integrity.
Northwestern Christian Advocate.
List of New Books.
[The following list, containing 140 titles, includes books
received by The Dial since its last issue.]
BIOGRAPHY AND REMINISCENCES.
Memories of Sixty Tears at Eton, Cambridge, and Else-
where. By Oscar Browning, M. A. Illustrated in photo-
gravure, etc., large 8vo, 364 pages. John Lane Co. $5. net.
Robert Dodsley: Poet, Publisher, and Playwright. By Ralph
Straus. Illustrated in photogravure, etc., large 8vo, 407
pages. John Lane Co. $6.50 net.
The Life of Mary Lyon. By Beth Bradford Gilchrist. Illus-
trated in photogravure, etc., Bvo. 462 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Co. $1.50 net.
Ruskin and hie Circle. By Ada Earland. Illustrated in photo-
gravure, etc.. 8vo, 340 pages. O. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.75 net.
Marlon Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long
Life. 8vo. 498 pages. Harper & Brothers. $2. net.
An Old-Pashloned Senator: Orville H. Piatt of Connecticut.
By Louis A. Collidge. Illustrated in photogravure, etc.,
large 8vo, 655 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $3. net.
Famous Blue-Stockings. By Ethel Bolt Wheeler. With
portraits, large 8vo, 351 pages. John Lane Co. $4. net.
HISTORY.
The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Con-
duct: A Narrative and Critical History. By George Cary
Eggleston. In 2 volumes, large 8vo. Sturgis & Walton Co.
$4. net.
A History of Perugia. By William Heywood; edited by B.
Langton Douglas. Illustrated, large8vo. 411 pages. "His-
toric States of Italy." Q. P. Putnam's Sons. $3.50 net.
The Ohio Country, between the years 1783 and 1816. By
Charles Elihu Slocum, Ph.D. Large 8vo, 321 pages. G. P.
Putnam's Sons. $2. net.
Early Rhode Island: A Social History of the People. By
William B. Weeden, A.M. Illustrated, 12mo, 880 pages.
"Grafton Historical Series." Grafton Press. $2.60 net.


366
[May 16,
THE
DIAL
Colonial Mobile: An Historical Study. By Peter J. Hamil-
ton. Revised and enlarged edition; illustrated, large 8vo,
594 pages. Houghton Mifflin Co.. $3.50 net.
The Story of Padua. By Cesare Foligno. Illustrated in
photogravure, etc., 12mo, 320 pages. "Mediaeval Towns
Series." E. P. Dutton & Co. $1.75 net.
South Amerioan Fights and Fighters, and Other Tales
of Adventure. By Cyrus Townsend Brady. Illustrated,
8vo, 842 pages. "American Fights and Fighters Series."
Donbleday, Page & Co. 81.50.
British Interests and Activities In Texas, 1838-1846. By
Ephraim Douglass Adams, Ph.D. 12mo, 266 pages. Balti-
more: John Hopkins Press. $1.50.
GENERAL LITERATURE.
Leading American Novelists. By John Erskine, Ph.D.
With portraits, 8vo, 378 pages. Henry Holt & Co. $1,75 net.
An Approach to Walt Whitman. By Carleton Noyes. With
frontispiece in photogravure, 12mo, 231 pages. Houghton
Mifflin Co. $1.25 net.
Essays on the Spot. By Charles D. Stewart. 12mo, 292 pages.
Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.25 net.
Rest and Unrest. By Edward Thomas. 16mo, 190 pages.
E. P. Dutton & Co. $1. net.
The Confessions of a Barbarian. By George Sylvester
Viereck. 12mo, 207 pages. Moffat. Yard & Co. $1.25 net.
The New Baedeker: Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Travel-
ler. By Harry Thurston Peck. Illustrated, 12mo. 352 pages.
Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.50 net.
The Literature of the Victorian Era. By Hugh Walker
8vo. 1067 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
The Lost Art of Conversation: Selected Essays. Edited,
with introduction, by Horatio S. Krans. Illustrated, 12mo,
366 pages. Sturgis & Walton Co. $1.50 net.
The Excursions of a Book-Lover: Papers on Literary
Themes. By Frederic Rowland Marvin. 8vo, 331 pages.
Sherman, French & Co. $1.50 net.
The Dawn of the World: Myths and Wierd Tales Told by
the Mewan Indians of California. Edited by C. Hart
Merriam. Illustrated in color, etc., large 8vo, 273 pages.
Arthur H. Clark Co. $3.50 net.
The Two Knights of the Swan: Lohengrin and Helyas. By
Robert J affray. Illustrated, 8vo, 123 pages. G. P. Putnam's
Sons. $1.25 net.
A Collection of Eastern Stories and Legends, for Narration
or Later Reading in Schools. By Marie L. Shedlock; with
foreword by T. W. Rhys Davids. With frontispiece, 12mo,
141 pages. E. P. Dutton & Co. 50 cts. net.
NEW EDITIONS OF STANDARD LITERATURE.
The Complete Works of Friedrloh Nietzsche. Edited by
Oscar Levy. New volumes: Thoughts out of Season, trans-
lated by Adrian Collins; The Birth of Tragedy, translated
by Wm. A. Haussmann; The Will to Power, translated by
Anthony M. Ludovici; Human All-Too-Human, translated
by Helen Zimmern; On the Future of our Educational
Institutions, translated by J. M. Kennedy. Each 12mo.
Macmillan Co.
The Works of George Meredith. Memorial Edition. New
volumes: Sandra Bellonl; Rhoda Fleming; Evan Harring-
ton. Each illustrated in photogravure, etc., 8vo. Charles
Scribner's Sons. (Sold only in sets by subscription.)
The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Edited by C. F.
Tucker Brooke. New edition; 12mo. 664 pages. Oxford
University Press. $1.75 net.
Causeries dn Lundi. By C. A. Sainte-Beuve: translated, with
Introduction and notes, by E. J. Trechmann, M. A. In 5
volumes, 16mo. E. P. Dutton & Co. Per vol., 50 cts.
Oxford Poets. New and cheaper editions, comprising: The
Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, edited by Thomas
Hutchinson; The Poetical Works of Lord Byron; The Poet-
ical Works of Sir Walter Scott, edited by J. Logie Robertson;
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by
W. J. Craig. Each with portrait. Oxford University Press.
DRAMA AND VERSE.
The Shadow Garden, and Other Plays. By Madison Cawein.
12mo, 259 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.50 net.
Flays. By Mrs. W. K. Clifford. 12mo, 329 pages. Mitchell
Keunerley. $1.50 net.
The Frozen Grail, and Other Poems. By Elsa Barker. 12mo,
125 pages. Duffield & Co. $1.25 net.
Russian Lyrics: Songs of Cossack, Lover, Patriot, and
Peasant. By Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi. 12mo.
139 pages. Duffield & Co. $1.20 net.
Songs of Cheer. By John Kon drink Bangs, l2no, 64 pages.
Sherman, French & Co. $1. net.
Thirty-Six Poems. By James Elroy Fletcher. 8vo. 70 pages.
London: Adelphi Press.
Thysia: An Elegy. With frontispiece, 16mo, 56 pages.
Mitchell Kennerley. $1. net.
Dreams. By Louise Cann Ranum. 12mo, 46 pages. Boston:
Poet Lore Co. $1.
FICTION.
Fortune. By J. C. Snaith. 12mo. 358 pages. Moffat, Yard &
Co. $1.50.
The Undesirable Governess. By F. Marion Crawford.
Illustrated, 12mo, 227 pages. Macmillan Co. $1.50.
The Right Stuff. By Ian Hay. With frontispiece. 12mo, 314
pages. Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.20 net.
The Girl from the Marsh Croft. By Selma Lagerloff: trans-
lated by Velma Swanston Howard. 12mo, 277 pages. Little.
Brown, & Co. $1.50.
A Marriage under the Terror. By Patricia Wentworth.
12mo, 384 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.85 net.
Danbury Rodd, Aviator. By Frederick Palmer. Illustrated,
12mo. 810 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.50.
The Emigrant Trail. By Geraldine Bonner. With frontis-
piece in color, 12mo, 496 pages. Duffield A Co. $1.50.
Studies in Wives. By Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. 12mo, 318 pages.
Mitchell Kennerley. $1.50.
The Master Girl: A Romance. By Ashton Hilliers. 12mo.
245 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.25 net.
The Twisted Foot. By Henry Milner Rideout. Illustrated,
12mo, 248 pages. Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.20 net.
The Ramrodders. By Holman Day. With frontispiece.
Unto, 353 pages. Harper & Brothers. $1.50.
The Illustrious Prinoe. By E. Phillips Oppenbeim. Illus-
trated, 12mo, 823 pages. Little, Brown, & Co. $1.50.
Mademoiselle Celeste: A Romance of the French Revolu-
tion. By Adele Ferguson Knight. With frontispiece in
color, 12mo, 322 pages, George W. Jacobs & Co. $1.50.
The Early Bird: A Business Man's Love Story. By George
Randolph Chester. Illustrated in tint. 12mo. 280 pages.
Bobbs-Merrill Co. $1.50.
An American Baby Abroad. By Mrs. Charles N. Crewdson.
Illustrated. 12mo. 328 pages. Little, Brown, & Co. $1.50.
The Innocent Murderers. By William Johnston and Paul
West. With frontispiece, 12mo. 844 pages. Duffield & Co.
$1.50.
The Sheriff of Dyke Hole. A Story of a Montana Mining
Camp. By Ridgwell Cullum. With frontispiece in color,
l2me, 447 pages. George W. Jacobs & Co. $1.50.
The Man Higher Up. By Henry Russell Miller. Illustrated.
12mo. 402 pages. Bobbs-Merrill Co. $1.50.
An Army Mule. By Charles Miner Thompson. Illustrated in
tint, 12mo. 194 pages. Houghton Mifflin Co. $1. net.
Royal Lovers: The Adventures of Two Empresses. By
Helene Vacaresco. 12mo. 307 pages. John Lane Co. $1.50.
The Daughters of Suffolk. By William Jasper Nicolla.
Illustrated, 12mo. 333 pages. J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.50.
Ragna. By Madame Anna Costantini. 12mo. 401 pages. Sturgis
£ Walton Co. $1.50.
The American In Paris: A Biographical Novel of the Franco-
Prussian War. By Eugene Coleman Savidge. Third edition;
8vo, 278 pages. J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.50.
Our Lady of Darkness. By Albert Dorrington and A. G.
Stephens. Illustrated, 12mo, 371 pages. MacaulayCo. $1.50.
Just Horses. By Bewell Ford. Illustrated, 12mo, 198 pages.
Mitchell Kennerly. $1. net.
A Dilemma: A Story of Mental Perplexity. By Leon Idas
Andreiyeff; translated by John Cournos. l2mo, 114 pages.
Philadelphia : Brown Brothers, $1.
Montes the Matador, and Other Stories. By Frank Harris.
12mo, 264 pages. Mitchell Kennerley. $1. net.
A Saint of the Twentieth Century. By Fannie Bond Rice.
12mo, 808 pages. Richard G. Badger. $1.50.
The Angel of Lonesome Hill: A Story of a President. By
Frederick Landis. With frontispiece, 16mo. 40 pages.
Char