Kingdom, as Mr. J. J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, was hoping would come to pass if nothing interfered with his plans.

What is the real animus back of this unfriendly step which the Chinese have taken against America? The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quotes Col. Charles Denby, former minister to China and ex-member of the Philippine Commission, and now diplomatic adviser of the viceroy of North China, as saying that it is the desire of China to enforce respect for travelers, merchants, and students. Says this paper:

"In his view, the Chinese Government has no objection to the Chinese exclusion laws, so far as they are limited to keeping out of this country laborers of the coolie class. Indeed, in his opinion, if the exclusion laws were repealed, the Chinese Government would itself pass laws forbidding coolies to come to this country. The government has a contract to furnish laborers for the mines of South Africa and has difficulty in securing men enough to fill those contracts."

But the Singapore Free Press takes an entirely different view. It shows that the wording of the protest drawn up at Shanghai, where the movement originated, was "against the severe restrictions which America is imposing against all immigration of Chinese laborers within her borders." The use of the word "laborers" makes The Free Press conclude that the fight is against exclusion of any kind. This view seems reasonable in the light of certain facts given by Mr. Stephen Bonsal in an article in the New York Herald. Says this writer: "The democratic tide is rising in China even as in Russia, in Japan, and in the rest of the world. A man would seem to be regarded as a man for all that in China to-day even if he be but a coolie." Some doubt is expressed by the Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune as to whether it will be possible, on account of this present temper of the Chinese people, to obtain China's consent to another treaty with the United States providing for the exclusion even of coolies.

THE JAPANESE PRESS AGENT.

SLAVON

LAVONIC stolidity and Oriental secretiveness are proverbial. As the Russian and Japanese peace plenipotentiaries and their attachés are representative men of their respective countries it was naturally expected that they would display these peculiar racial qualities and envelop themselves during all the course of their mission in a veil of impenetrable reserve and silence. But

they did nothing of the kind. They submitted to be interviewed, were tempted into answering statement with counter-statement, and then into contradicting themselves in a way that dompletely surprised and delighted the newspaper men with whom they came in contact. Says the New York Evening Post: "There have been peace conferences many, and plenipotentiaries have met before, but we doubt if the world's history up till now can show the sort of diplomatic shouting from housetops to which we are to-day listening."

Mr. A. Imara Sato, of Baron Komura's suite, began the talking, and he kept it going even after Mr. Serge J. Witte, the Czar's senior peace envoy, landed at New York last week. On August 2, however, he seemed to realize that he had overstepped the limits of discretion, and so he expressed his regrets to the reporters who had assembled at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and informed them that their daily meeting with him must end. 'It has been very pleasant," he politely said, "but now we must stop. I shall be so very busy." But before he announced this resolution (which was soon broken) he had told about all that a diplomat could tell. Says the New York World:

them have even reached St. Petersburg, and comments thereon have been cabled back to this country."

On August 5 the peace plenipotentiaries departed for Oyster Bay. But before they left Mr. Sato was unable to refrain from imparting a few final "confidences to his newspaper friends. If he is correctly reported by the New York Tribune, he publicly and freely discussed with his interviewers again all the more important problems to be solved at the conference at Portsmouth. So it appears that Mr. Sato is the person whom the world has to thank for the information that Japan will insist upon keeping Saghalien and demand an indemnity of $700,000,000 as the first terms of any treaty of peace. The announcement that he was speaking "absolutely for himself" was not made until time was given to find out what effect his remarks would have upon the authorities at St. Petersburg and the world at large. Newspapers are now asking what object, if any, Baron Komura had in attaching to his suite such a talkative man as Mr. Sato, for they are in doubt as to whether they have been grossly deceived or have been made the unwitting instruments for conveying " bluffs" and threats to Russia. Thus the New York Sun, in a half-humorous vein, says:

'The masterly skill with which Mr. Sato screened his force in its journey from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, the strategic genius he has displayed in keeping it perfectly covered ever since it occupied and entrenched itself in the Waldorf-Astoria, a week ago yesterday, can not be overpraised.

"The selection of such a man for a post of such peculiar diffi

culty, moreover, is on

ly another evidence of the astuteness of Baron Komura himself. Knowing the Japanese genius for anticipating with minute preparation all future contingencies that may be humanly possible, it can not be doubted that the newspaper interview feature of the peace conference expedition to America was studied and perfected before leaving Tokyo with as much minuteness of detail as were the more vital plans involved in the contest."

If the purpose of Mr. Sato was to elicit expressions of opinion

from Russian officials, he must feel greatly satisfied with his success, for the Czar, if a special cable to the New York Times be true, took occasion to publicly declare "his approval of the recommendation to continue the war till the enemy is crushed, and, above all, not to think of the cession of territory or the payment of an indemnity, and to make no peace unworthy of great Russia"; and Mr. Witte, while en route to this country, was reported to have said: "I am afraid peace negotiations will be ended in a week. The Japanese conditions are too intolerable to admit discussion." Mr. Witte, however, upon landing, declared, through an interpreter, to the reporters assembled to meet him, that if he made this remark, "it was in a private capacity, and he had no knowledge that it was to be used for publication."

THE REAL YELLOW PERIL.

-McCord in the Newark News.

NOT THE EASY SUMMER RESORT FOR HIM IT USED TO BE.

- Payne in the Pittsburg Gazette.

A

LETTERS AND ART.

THE COMING THING IN FICTION.

N intelligent attempt to estimate the modern tendency of any art, and to forecast its future development, can scarcely lack interest, tho it may well lack finality. We are apt to be grateful to the man who offers us a generalization to which we can relate our confused artistic impressions. Such a generalization in the field of fiction, with the work of Mr. Maurice Hewlett as text, is advanced by Nathaniel Stephenson in The World To-day (Chicago) for August. According to Mr. Stephenson, the tendency of modern fiction is to desert the mere depiction and analysis of sentimentalism as exemplified in the novels of Thackeray and Meredith, and to concern itself instead with the struggle between sentimentalism and will, and the final triumph of the latter. The love-stories, as well as the warstories and the business-stories of the new fiction, we are told, are all of them the glorification of the man whose standards are within himself, whose actions are controlled by his will, who is not at the mercy of his sensibilities." This tendency is conspicuous, it is claimed, in the work of Mr. Maurice Hewlett, whom Mr. Stephenson regards as "the connecting link between two worlds, between Thackeray and the future." Lest he should seem to make extravagant claims for Mr. Hewlett, the critic adds:

66

"I do not mean that he is the genius of the moment. I am at a loss to see how any one can hesitate to assign that eminence to Mr. Kipling. Mr. Barrie, likewise, has many talents which Mr. Hewlett lacks. But through neither of these flows the old stream of the strenuous thinking of the English novel. Mr. Hewlett, tho in a rather slender conduit, has opened a channel out of that stream, and conducts a part of it into a new tract of time."

Mr. Stephenson illustrates his meaning by reference to "The Forest Lovers," which "is a book to be accounted for." We read:

"The essential situation of that book is worth stating in general terms: A man loves a girl, but his love is egoistic and preconceived; she loves him with all her heart, but for his own sake she will not let him love her falsely; she repudiates that sort of love; thus a conflict arises in the man's mind between his preconception of love and love itself. The issue is whether he will put down the preconception, destroy the egoism, and win a moral victory over himself which shall lift him to the girl's level. This is a sort of situation that is not frequent in recent fiction. It sets Mr. Hewlett apart as a man who thinks through his narrative. We notice in it two things: First, he recognizes that the attraction of woman for man is a deeper and subtler thing than a mere straight pull on the sensibilities; second, that the test of a man is how, when his preconceptions meet with fact, he endures his ordeal."

Sentimentalism, claims Mr. Stephenson, was the characteristic vice of the nineteenth century. "It permeated all the life of that century and was the vicious streak through all its reasoning." He indicates the treatment accorded to sentimentalism by Thackeray and by Meredith, from which have developed Mr. Hewlett and the "new fiction." To quote in part:

"In Thackeray the presentation of sentimentalism took the form purely of a probiem in expression. He was the artist first of all. What he sought was a perfect exposition. . . . George Meredith took up and carried forward the study of sentimentalism. But with him exposition gave place to analysis. A stronger intellect than Thackeray, he was inferior as an artist. The thinker, the

movement. Not the analysis of our minds in repose, but the display of character in action. He continues:

"Hence we have that wide range of conflict -man resisting, enduring, overcoming his difficulties-which fills the fiction of the moment. . . . Everywhere it is war. And one should also notice that what we crave is successful war. He who fights and wins-in some way or other-is the man we want to hear about.

"But no people of wide interests can keep from bringing their record of the emotional life into line with their record of the material life. In a moment when we are eager to see man triumphant over circumstance materially, we wish to see him win the same triumph emotionally. We demand heroes in fiction who show the same kind of independence, the same kind of devotion in love and

war.

'And the degree of subtlety in our standards will be the same in one case as in the other. In what we ordinarily understand as 'action,' we demand to day an independence -or the idea of an independence that is grandly superior to circumstance; that has delivered itself from its sensibilities, whose strong mind is in stable equilibrium. Our idea of the man of action is one who cannot be worked,' who is impervious to external stimulus except when that stimulus is approved in his own mind. At our national military academy the candidate for admission must pass a series of temper tests.' In Mr. Kipling's picture of the barrack-room we see that the new recruit is put through a similar process. They ragged him low and cunnin'' to test his relation to external stimulus. Not until he can so rule his sensibilities that his conduct is the expression of his own will -not a mere reaction to external stimulus, but often a defiance of it in obedience to a standard in his own mind-will he be accepted as a soldier.

"Precisely the same idea is coming forward in the treatment by our novelists of that crucial matter which will always be the pillar of fiction, the love-affair. For Prosper le Gai,' life is a temper test,' woman is the angel of the Lord summoning him to his ordeal. For the novelist of the strenuous age, love is the expression of an interior standard not dependent on external stimulus. His hero must deal by woman, not in the spirit of give and take, of balanced bookkeeping, of paying for what he gets in its own coin, but in accord with his inner standard irrespective of how she acts toward him."

The conclusion of the whole matter, says Mr. Stephenson, is the contrast of motive of the sentimentalist and the man of genuinely strenuous nature. This he sums up as follows:

"When we look close at the sentimentalists, whether in Thackeray, or Meredith, or Mr. Hewlett, we find that invariably the key to them is the same. We must touch their sensibilities in order to get a motive for action. This is true of the sentimentalist in life. Sentimentalism is consistent with much apparent good ness, with generosity, with devotion, with sacrifice even. But always this goodness upon analysis turns out to have an insecure foundation. The sentimentalist is an epicure of feeling. He

sides with the under dog, for example, because the spectacle touches his sensibilities, and if he resist their appeal he will be uncomfortable. This is a typical case of the motives of the sentimentalist. A situation in which no such appeal is made does not move him. One which outrages his sensibilitics destroys entirely his capacity to think. He contrasts with the man of sympathy, the man who can escape from himself and find a motive for action without the appeal to his sensibilities or even in defiance of that appeal. He contrasts still more with the man of conviction-who may or may not be also a man of sympathy-who can find a motive in his own ideas of right and wrong, to whom appearances are nothing, who holds his own course in defiance of everything but conviction, who culminates in Job, and the words,' Tho he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.'

"That note is the coming thing in fiction."

"SQUAW-TALK."

HỶ is it,” asks Mary K. Ford, a writer in the New York

"WHY Bookman, "that the American woman, lauded to the

"

skies when written of, is addressed when written to as about on a par mentally with a child of twelve?" In the vocabulary of the American Indian, as this writer reminds us, “squaw-talk” is the term for any kind of foolish, irrelevant, or untrue talk—the kind of talk that "is good enough for women." "Squaw talk," according to Mary K. Ford, is a fitting description of the woman's page of the average newspaper, "where recipes for face lotions, advice as to the proper way of conducting the feminine side of a courtship, and answers to foolish questions on etiquette combine with the silliest of stories to make up a page that for sheer inanity and stupidity is hard to beat." But the same faults, she complains, tho in a less degree, are to be found in a more ambitious class of literature. As an instance:

"Not long ago Miss Elizabeth McCracken wrote very interestingly in The Atlantic Monthly on the place held by the drama in the lives of the humbler citizens. These articles were widely copied and quoted, and Miss McCracken was commissioned to travel through the United States to gather material for a book on the women of America and the widely varying positions in life which they fill. It was naturally expected that she would have much to say that was interesting and suggestive, but the book was intended for women, and the author succumbed at once to the fancied necessity of writing' squaw-talk,' with the result that her work is marred by the two great blemishes which so often disfigure literature addressed to women.

"A more serious fault mars her chapter on woman's suffrage in Colorado. The result of the important experiment is of great interest to all intelligent women, and had Miss McCracken been writing for The Atlantic Monthly it is upon the political phase of the question that she would have enlarged, but she was writing for women, and a different tone was necessary. Consciously or unconsciously, she has written down to us, with the result that the whole chapter is devoted to the everlasting question of whether or no suffrage is destroying the womanly' qualities of the newly enfranchised."

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If the written word to women be so much in the nature of squaw-talk," what shall be said of the oral? asks the writer. She answers her own query by recalling Mrs. Wharton's story, "The Pelican," in which is satirized the kind of “ talk" that is supposed to be popular with women to-day. We read :

"It will be remembered that in this story a young widow finds that the easiest way to earn her living is to give lectures. She begins with one upon Greek art, goes through a series of ' Homes and Haunts of the Poets,' and then, as years go on and her audiences become more sophisticated, has a course on modern theosophy, Schopenhauer, and the cosmogony. These lectures are of course attended only by women, and Mrs. Wharton characterizes both the lecturer and her audience in a few terse words: 'It was

Women occupy much the same position toward the drama as toward fiction, continues the writer; they are the great theatergoers of this country, and “no play displeasing to them has any chance of a lasting success." Nevertheless the much-abused theatrical manager "is never guilty of the folly of producing a play designed especially for women and advertised as such." She adds:

"Those who deny to us any appreciation of dramatic satire or humor need only count the women in the audience at one of Bernard Shaw's plays, plays in which sentiment is entirely subordinated to the wit and satire of the dialogue. That genuine humorist, Rosina Vokes, was a great favorite with women. Miss Beatrice Herford's clever monologues, leveled tho they be at our foibles and failings; Miss May Irwin's fine humor; the broader burlesques of Messrs. Joseph Weber and Lew Field-all these appeal as strongly to women as to men."

Mr. Hamerton, in "The Intellectual Life," written thirty years ago, recognizes and deplores the fact that men often condescend intellectually to women, and offers this excuse: "We may not teach, because it is pedantic, and we may not contradict because it is rude." He adds that "where women have most culture men are most open and sincere." Women are now better educated, have a wider grasp of affairs, and have entered business life with marked success, concludes Mary K. Ford, but the attitude of men toward them is ever the same, “and ́ squaw-talk,' at least in literature, will probably be our portion for some time to come."

6

A PROTEST AGAINST THE LITERATURE OF EXPOSURE.

MR.

R. GEORGE W. ALGER files a protest against the "literature of exposure" which has been so conspicuous a feature of late both in the magazines and in the book-publishing world. The New York Globe comments on the timeliness of this protest "in view of the recent great vogue of the Tarbells, the Steffenses, and the Lawsons." 'Exposure," alleges Mr. Alger, "has become a peculiar art, which, like some other arts, seems to exist for its own sake." Mr. Alger regards it as a manifestation of our“ almost superstitious reverence for publicity." And he remarks the analogy of its method to that of the old-time exhorters, who began by proclaiming human nature vile and unspeakably depraved. While theology has recognized that its methods and theories of destructive criticism were fundamentally wrong, says Mr. Alger, the literature of exposure is proceeding as tho that lesson had never been learned. Two points in the literature of exposure are especially worthy of note, we are told. The first is its extraordinary copiousness, and the second is that "so few of the writers who so cleverly point out to us our social sores seem to have any kind of salve in their hands." Mr. Alger, writing in The Atlantic Monthly (August), goes on to state more fully the case as it appears to him. We quote as follows:

"In the past decade there has grown up in this country a school of incomplete idealists, social reformers, who, in their methods and theories, seem to have gone back to the old-time theology. They seek to apply to society as a whole the methods which failed with the individual. From one branch of this cult has come the modern literature of exposure.' They show us our social sore spots, like the three cheerful friends of Job. They expose in countless pages of magazines and newspapers the sordid and depressing rottenness of our politics; the hopeless apathy of our good citizens; the remorseless corruption of our great financiers and business men, who are bribing our legislatures, swindling the public with fraudulent stock schemes, adulterating our food, speculating with trust funds, combining in great monopolies to oppress and destroy small competitors and raise prices, who are breaking laws and buying judges and juries. They show us the growth of business' graft,' the gangrene of personal dishonesty among an

honorable people, the depressing increase in the number of bribetakers and bribe-givers. They tell us of the riotous extravagance of the rich, and the growth of poverty. These exposures form the typical current literature of our daily life. As our appetite grows jaded and surfeited, the stories become more sensational so as to retain our attention. Titus Oates and his plot live again in the amazing historian of modern finance. The achievement of the constructive elements of society has been neglected to give space to these spicy stories of graft and greed.

The literature of exposure is not criticism in any such sense, and in comparison is simple indeed. For it exposes, not the opportunities which create temptations, but the individuals who succumb. It seems to arraign, not the defects in the social system, but humanity itself, by the denunciation of a countless number of individuals who do real or fancied wrongs. It takes the whole burden of moral responsibility from the shoulders of society, and throws it all on the individual, instead of making a just apportionment of the load.

There is comparatively little which is constructive about this kind of work, and it is for the most part merely disheartening. Its copiousness and its frequent exaggeration have a strong tendency to make sober and sane citizens believe that our political and business evils can not be grappled with successfully, not because

"There is a hard lesson for us in the writings of Mr. Davidson. We are convinced by him that if we want to found our idealism on some basis less flimsy than that of sentiment, we must strip off the ideals that now obsess us. If we desire to arrive at a true appreciation of life or literature, we must criticize as if no one had anticipated us in the work. To compensate for nineteen hundred years of error, we must cultivate the neglected virtue of strength. Only thus can we be ourselves, and fully realize our latent power. "After all, the thesis of materialism that we find set before us here is not so repellent as it seems. After years of what is little

better than Manicheeism we are at last told that matter is not impure but lovely; that man should be 'one with the mountains'; that the landscapes of the world are beautiful, not because of a soul residing in them nor because their creator had esthetic ideals, but because they are what they are-lovely in themselves."

PROGRAM VERSUS ABSOLUTE MUSIC.

the people has deteriorated—a heresy more dangerous, if adopted than all the national perils which confront us to-day, combined."

An inherent defect with much of the literature of exposure, he continues, is that it exists merely for the shock it gives:

"It is as important to the community as it is to the individual that its capacity for being shocked with itself should remain unimpaired. Nothing worse can happen to it than to have its moral cuticle hardened by much drubbing, and made insensitive to criticism. The inherent defect with much of the literature of exposure is that it exists merely for the shock it gives, and is of no further profit to the community."

"THE FIRST REALIST IN ENGLISH POETRY."

“A

66

CLERK of Oxenford," essaying an estimate of John Davidson, the brilliant Scotch poet and critic, selects the realism of this poet as the most interesting point about him, and goes so far as to characterize him as the first realist that has appeared in English poetry." The Clerk's paper, which appears in The Monthly Review (London, July) is remarkable for other unhesitating and unqualified statements. For instance, "of his blank verse I will simply say that it is the best since that of Milton." "His imperfections," we are told, "surpass the perfections of other men." Of these imperfections we read:

"They are quite obvious, being chiefly due to a strained desire for simplicity, and to perpetual over-emphasis of his point. Sometimes he will spoil a ballad with lines too colloquial for the hurrying meter; sometimes he will just mar a fine speech in blank verse by getting it involved, and hard to follow, or by the unnecessary introduction of some abrupt phrase from common parlance. This is naturally more apparent in his earlier works."

This enthusiastic Clerk proceeds to formulate for us the "message" of his realistic poet. To quote :

"He says not only 'Break conventions that stand in your way,' but 'live as if convention, as if Christianity, as if thirty centuries of literature had never existed.' He puts a new and far more difficult interpretation on the 'Know thyself' of old. .

Intimately connected with Mr. Davidson's philosophy of life is his passion for the country. He loves nature for her simplicity and beauty, and writes about it as if it were a new and particular revelation, as if it had never become a hackneyed theme, as if spring poets had never been bywords.

"I doubt if the most ardent admirer would stand by this reformer in his utter condemnation of Christianity, convention, and culture, and take refuge in a materialism that says the body and soul are But more might be inclined to agree with the fascinating theory held unconsciously by the Greeks, and held very consciously

one.

ence of opinion between those painters who do not hesitate to yoke their art with a literary theme or motive, and the artistic purists, like Whistler, who demand that a painting be a thing complete and final in itself, independently of story or allusion. The art of music, it appears, can boast a somewhat analogous controversy. The case for "poetic," or what is more commonly called "program" music, is interestingly defended by Mr. Ernest Newman in his recent volume of "Musical Studies." Program music, we read, is "purely instrumental (¿.e., non-vocal) music that has its raison d'être in a definite literary or pictorial scheme." It has been called the new music." Mr. Newman contends that it is not, as some critics maintain, to be regarded as the outcome of a decadent age. It has received development later than "absolute music," because until the last century it "simply could not be written." The technique of the orchestra had first to be developed. Now we have its highest manifestation in the "symphonic poem, invented by Liszt, developed by Tschaikovsky, and perfected by Strauss." This, contends Mr. Newman, is the perfect art-form for which we have been waiting, and which Wagner thought he had discovered in “music-drama." The writer shows that whereas most of the older orchestral music of any value was absolute music, most of the later orchestral music of any value is program music. "The momentum of the latter species," he declares," seems to be increasing every year." To its disparagers he says:

"It will not do to pooh-pooh a phenomenon of this kind, nor seek to fasten upon it the explanation that some of the new men write music depending upon literary or pictorial subjects because they can not write music of the other kind. This is like saying that Shakespeare pusillanimously wrote dramas because he could not write epics-which is probably a true saying but quite irrelevant. The point is, why should Shakespeare, with a gift for good drama, force himself to write bad epics? And if a man's musical ideas spring from quite another way of apprehending life than that of the absolute musician, why should he abjure his own native form of speech in order to mouth and maul unintelligently the phrases and the forms of another musician whose mental world is wholly foreign to his?"

The difference between the two kinds of music is fully brought out, says Mr. Newman, when one analyzes the phrases of an ordinary symphony and those of a modern song. The former never express actuality, and the effect derived may be termed physiological rather than psychological. To quote:

"In the old symphony or sonata a succession of notes, pleasing in itself but not having specific reference to actual life-not attempting, that is, to get at very close quarters with strong emotional or dramatic expression, but influencing and affecting us. mainly by reason of its purely formal relations and by the purely