TOPICS IN BRIEF.

CAN THEY STRIKE A MIXTURE THAT WILL SUIT THEM BOTH? -Evans in the Cleveland Leader.

explaining his attitude toward the agitators in the anthracite coal regions, and says:

"Their leader, John Mitchell, lives upon disturbance, and has openly threatened it for next year. He practically annexes President Roosevelt as a fellowunionist and a sympathizer. The opportunity for a strong disclaimer and for sound if unwelcome advice was tempting; but the President preferred to hide himself in a cloud of meaningless platitudes."

It should be noted, however, that in the speech which he delivered at Wilkesbarre after President Roosevelt finished his address, Mr. Mitchell said:

"It is equally important to say that of the bitter anmany tagonisms and prejudices of

MEMBERS of the New York smart set have been paying tribute to a smarter set.-The Washington Post.

THE trouble about the Panama Canal seems to be that no sooner does one man ,plan the great ditch than another ditches the great plan.-The Atlanta Journal. IN the peace negotiations about to open between Russia and Japan, China will probably figure very much like an Equitable policy-holder.-The Philadelphia Ledger.

RUSSIA has recently expelled several lyceum lecturers from the empire. There are some good. points about the Czar's government, after all.-The Atlanta Journal.

THE Zemstvo Congress made a beginning and then it stopped. It need not have followed the precedent of our annual Congress in this respect.-The Philadelphia Inquirer.

SOME of the trust magnates ought to be able to evolve a scheme by which China may be punished for its protests by being compelled to pay an additional profit.The Washington Star.

As the United States didn't bind itself to be sanitary under the terms of the Platt amendment, Cuba can not, of course, take possession of us and clean up New Orleans.-The Newark News..

A NEW ink has been discovered that will prevent the juggling of figures on post-office money orders. A barrel of it should be forwarded promptly to the crop statistics bureau of the Department of Agriculture.-The Washington Post.

RUSSIA is naturally incensed at the lavish entertainment of Secretary Taft in Japan, as she feels that she will have to foot the bills without the pleasure of participating in the festivities.-The Washington Post.

SECRETARY Sato says Japan would not take the Philippines as a gift. He may have been under the impression that the anti-imperialists necessarily would go with them.-The Brooklyn Standard Union.

SECRETARY Bonaparte will not allow bill collectors in the navy department during working hours. Some of the clerks doubtless would consider the privilege of working the full twentyfour hours equal to a vacation.-The Chicago News.

former years, both between the miners and their employers, and even among the mine-workers themselves, have been slowly but surely dissipated, and the prospect of permanent and honorable industrial peace grows brighter day by day."

In commenting upon these words, the Philadelphia Public Ledger, which, by the way, does not seem to be on friendly terms with Mr. Mitchell, remarks:

This is the most reassuring statement which has come from Mr. Mitchell, and made thus publicly in the presence of the President of the United States and thousands of the mine-workers, a tremendous responsibility rests upon Mr. Mitchell to see that the union which he represents and virtually controls does nothing to disturb the prosperous conditions or the prospects of peace of which he is so confident. Some of his ignorant followers may place an unwarranted construction upon the President's part in the proceedings at Wilkesbarre on Thursday, but no one knows so well as Mr. Mitchell that Mr. Roosevelt would be the first to condemn another resort to force in the coal region. The President must be the judge of times and seasons, but there are many who would have rejoiced had he taken the opportunity to lay before the miners, with characteristic plainness of speech, a few wholesome truths."

IN THE MIST.

From a print by Hiroshige II, a representative of Ukiyoye, the popular school of Japanese art.

and as possessing certain advantages which the novel has not, notably that of totality."" Mr. Lovett distinguishes between the "short story" and the story that is merely short. The short story proper, he tells us, begins its true history in recent times, and may be regarded as the original and characteristic literary form of the nineteenth century,at least in America, much as the Addisonian es

say and the novel were original and characteristic types of English literature in the century before. The peculiar quality of the short story has been defined by Prof. C. S. Baldwin as "Unity of impression through strict unity of form." Of the origin of this distinctive literary form Mr. Lovett goes on to say:

"The supremacy of a particular form of literature depends very largely upon the mechanical devices which exist for bringing author and public together. The institution of the traveling company of players, and of the theater in London, determined that Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson should be dramatists, and not story-tellers, pamphleteers, or epic poets. The appearance of the journal, in obedience to the demands of the eighteenthcentury public, gave an opportunity for the comment of Steele and Addison upon the lighter social topics. The bookseller, the circulating library, and the fashion of serial publication, together account for the long persistence of the typical British three-volume novel. In like manner, the vogue of the short story depends on the invention of the modern magazine. The magazine is, it is true, an eighteenth-century product; but it was, for many years, almost entirely a medium for circulating news and criticism, and found space for original literature chiefly in the form of poetry. Early in the nineteenth century, however, after the establishment of the great critical reviews, The Edinburgh and The Quarterly, there came into being certain lighter and more miscellaneous periodicals, such as The London, Blackwood's, and Fraser's, which gave employment to that brilliant group of miscellanists, of whom De Quincey is chief. These magazines published short fiction, but it is perhaps characteristic of British conservatism that the writers of these tales did not seek to separate them from forms of literature to which the public was already used. If Leigh Hunt, for instance, wished to introduce, a story into a series of articles, he gave it, so far as possible, the manner and the form of the essay. Carlyle translated from the German a number of rather long narratives which are, in effect, condensed novels, or romances. In America, on the contrary, the periodicals and year-books of mis

cellaneous literature were bound by no such traditions, and we early find the writers for them and the readers of them interested in those experiments in the technique of short fiction which constitute in English literature, as do the contes of Gautier and Mérimée, in French, a new species-in other words, a new fact in the process of creation."

The vital difference between the true short story and the tale, continues Mr. Lovett, appears in any study of American literature in the early years of the nineteenth century. "In America, as in England and in Europe generally, the cardinal fact to be reckoned with is the so-called Romantic Movement." Mr. Lovett suggests that it was the essential romanticism of Poe and Hawthorne' that resulted in "that complete and organic union between substance and form, that unity and totality of effect which, we have seen, constitute the peculiar art of the short story." He then proceeds to contrast the influences exercised upon succeeding fiction by these two early exponents of the short story. We read :

"Poe had undoubtedly a large influence on succeeding storywriters, American, English, and French. His influence has been the wider because his tales of cleverness really belong to no country or race. As in the case of Scribe, the international French dramatist, what was significant in his work, his technique, could be transported anywhere, would pass current among all nations, and could be counterfeited by any man of industry. Of things more difficult of transmission and assimilation-of national or local realism, of criticism of life-he has nothing. His characters are automata; his stories take place nowhere or anywhere; he has no ethical outlook. He is thus significant as an international writer rather than as the founder of the American school of fiction. That school, for its distinctive qualities, looks back to Hawthorne as its originator. . . . After all, however, Hawthorne's greatness is not a matter of mechanical skill, but of temperament. His quality is to be tested by its elusiveness under analysis or imitation. Any man of second-rate intelligence can imitate Poe, but Hawthorne is inimitable."

these rival schools, "which, differing in technic and motive, were united in their proud disdain of the new art which dared to represent the manners and customs of the common people." Harunobu and Hokusai, Kiyonaga and Hiroshige, leaders of Ukiyo-ye, are described as "the crowning glory of all the schools-the artists whose genius told the story of their country, day by day, weaving a century of history into one living encyclopedia, sumptuous in form, kaleidoscopic in color." The aristocratic schools had confined themselves entirely to representations of princely pageantry, to portraiture, and to ideal pictures of mythical saints and sages. Ukiyo-ye, we are told, "prepared Japan for intercourse with other nations by developing in the common people an interest in other countries, in science and foreign culture, and by promoting the desire to travel, through the means cf illustrated books of varied scenes." To Ukiyo-ye, we are further assured, the Japanese owed the gradual expansion of international consciousness which culminated in the revolution of 1868-" a revolution, the most astonishing in history, accomplished as if by miracle; but the esoteric germ of this seemingly spontaneous growth of Meiji lay in the atelier of the artists of Ukiyo-ye."

Mrs. Amsden traces the wonderful color sense of the print artists to the influence of a fifteenth century monk. But it may be claimed, she says, for Hishigawa Moronobu, an artist of the seventeenth century, that he was the real founder of the school. To quote more fully :

"The leading light in art in the beginning of the fifteenth century was Cho Densu, the Fra Angelico of Japan, who, a simple

ar

monk, serving in a Kyoto temple, must, in a trance of religious and tistic ecstasy, have beheld a spectrum of fadeless dyes, SO wondrous were the colors he lavished upon the draperies of his saints and sages. The splendor of this beatific vision has never faded, for the masters who followed in the footsteps of the inspired monk reverently preserved the secret of these precious shades, till at last, in the form of the Ukiyoye print, they were sown broadcast, and revolutionized the color sense of the art world. . . .

"In the middle of the seventeenth century appeared Hishigawa Moronobu, considered by many to be the real founder of Ukiyoye. His genius welded with the new motif the use of the block for printing, an innovation which led to the most characteristic development in Ukiyo-ye art. This art of printing, which originated in China and Korea, had, until the beginning of the seventeenth century, been confined solely to the service of religion for the reproduction of texts and images, but Moronobu conceived the idea of using the form of printed book illustration, just coming into vogue, as a channel to set forth the life of the people. Besides printing and illustrating books, he began printing single sheets, occasionally adding to the printed outlines dashes of color from the brush, principally in orange and green. These sheets, the precursors of

ONE OF THE THIRTY-SIX VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI.

By Hokusai, master of Ukiyo-ye, and nicknamed "the old man' mad about painting."

the Ukiyo-ye prints, superseded the Otsu-ye-impressionistic handpaintings, drafted hastily for rapid circulation."

The crowning glory of the popular school was Hokusai," the old man mad about painting," who wrote of himself, in a preface to his "Hundred Views of Fuji":

"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the forms of things. By the time I was fifty I had published an infinity of designs, but all I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-five I have learned a little about the real structure of nature-of animals, plants and trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at a hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage, and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do-be it but a line or dot-will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I do to see if I do not keep my word."

Hokusai died in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine, his work revealing a continual increase in power to the last. Of his work Mrs. Amsden writes:

"His fecundity was marvelous. He illustrated books of all kinds, poetry, comic albums, accounts of travels-in fact, his works are an encyclopedia of Japanese life. His paintings are scattered, and countless numbers lost, many being merely ephemeral drawings, thrown off for the passing pleasure of the populace. The original designs for the prints were transferred to the blocks, and lost, tho the master rigidly superintended the reproduction of his works, and his wood-cutters were trained to follow the graceful sweeping curves with perfect accuracy.

"Gustave Geffray truly gaged the genius of Hokusai in speaking of his 'fights beyond the horizon.' In the master we recognize the creator. He feels the mystery of the birth of mountains, as in that weird composition of Fuji, where the great cone is seen rising above circle upon circle of serpentine coils, forming the mystic tomoyé-symbol of creation and eternity. He feels the pulsation of the universe, and the life of ocean, and, in a frenzy of creative power, beneath his hand the curved crests of foaming waves break into life, flashing into countless sea-birds born of the froth of ocean. He is the painter of chimera, the prophet of cataclysm; he 'gives the world a shake, and invents chaos.""

On his death-bed Hokusai murmured, "If Heaven had but granted me five more years I could have been a real painter."

Labor and Result in Painting.-To estimate an artist's work in terms of the number of brush-strokes he uses seems a curious method, but it is employed by a correspondent of Nature (London,) in an interesting speculation as to the relation between the physical labor expended on a picture and the artistic result. Says this writer:

"The number of strokes of the paint-brush that go to making a picture is of some scientific interest, so I venture to record two

personal experiences. Some years ago I was painted by Graef, a well-known German artist, when, finding it very tedious to sit doing nothing, I amused myself by counting the number of strokes per minute that he bestowed on the portrait. He was methodical, and it was easy to calculate their average number, and as I knew only too well the hours, and therefore the number of minutes, I sat to him, the product of the two numbers gave what I wanted to learn. It was 20,000. A year and a half ago I was again painted by the late lamented artist Charles Furse, whose method was totally different from that of Graef. He looked hard at me, mixing his colors the while, then, dashing at the portrait, made his dabs so fast that I had to estimate rather than count them. Proceeding as before, the result, to my great surprise, was the same, 20,Large as this number is, it is less than the number of stitches in an ordinary pair of knitted socks.

"The following point impressed me strongly. Graef had a humorous phrase for the very last stage of his portrait, which was *painting the buttons.' Thus, he said, 'in five days' time I shall come to the buttons.' Four days passed, and the hours and minutes of the last day, when he suddenly and joyfully exclaimed, 'I am come to the buttons.' I watched at first with amused surprise, followed by an admiration not far from awe. He poised his brush for a moment, made three rapid twists with it, and three well painted buttons were thereby created. The rule of three seemed. to show that if so much could be done with three strokes, what an enormous amount of skilled work must go to the painting of a portrait which required 20,000 of them. At the same time, it made me wonder whether painters had mastered the art of getting the maximum result from their labor. I make this remark as a con. fessed Philistine. Anyhow, I hope that future sitters will beguile their tedium in the same way that I did, and tell the results."

The correspondent signs himself F. G. and may (or may not) be Francis Galton, the well-known biological statistician.

THE PURITAN OBJECTION TO WALT
WHITMAN.

How Walt Whitman fared at the hands of puritanism when

"

his" Leaves of Grass" was published is discussed in one of the chapters of Andrew Macphail's recent volume, "Essays in Puritanism.' It is the puritanism of the coterie of Boston men-ofetters that the author particularly deals with. These critics, he says, were "singularly unanimous in their judgment; and as it af terward turned out they were mainly in the wrong." Dr. Macphail does not answer their "wilful and vicious harshness" by vituperation; indeed, he affects to see something worthy of admiration in the conduct of any set of Pharisees who resist a doctrine which they believe to be false." To the generation which lived half a century ago," he says, "Walt Whitman was nothing more than the son of a carpenter, born of themselves, a man who spent his life among the toilers, chiefly where they suffered most; a man who uttered a few sayings which did not look like poetry when they were printed in a book." The case which they made out against him was not that it was strange and queer and unmetrical, without good sense or agreeable sound, but that it was unclean." The writer goes on to examine the state of mind of the people who laid the charge:

"It is the fashion to speak lightly of the early Puritans who settled in New England; to explain the narrowness of their lives by their hard environment; and to account for their insensibility by the lack of stimulation. If their lives were narrow, they were lofty; if they were insensible to what appeals to us in art and literature, they had ideals of their own, which so far transcended the things of this world that art and literature were not worth bothering about in comparison with them. To attain to a knowledge of God was the end of their striving, and in the struggle everything that we are making such a fuss about was trampled under foot. When a man gets it into his head that by searching he can find out God, he cares very little for the flower on the crannied wall, much less for the pictures of it or for the rhymes which the poet makes. Of course it is not pretended that the infertility of the country today in the various forms of art is due to a preoccupation with the things of God. The utmost that is urged is that the bent of the

people in the early days was toward theology and away from art, and that as time went on they finally attained to an attitude of strict neutrality or indifference to both.

"The period preceding the events which led up to the Civil War was, in many respects, the queerest in the annals of the United States; and the people who lived in that time could not know that there was a poet in their midst speaking for a generation which was not yet born. There was very little value set upon artistic expression of any kind, and but slight discrimination between what was good and what was bad in any form of art. ... The people.... were yet under the shadow of their ancestral tree. They did not care whether any given poetry was good or bad. They had no interest whatever in poetry. They knew it was wrong to hold their fellow-men in bondage, and they were resolute to put an end to that form of evil at least.”

Besides possessing this moral and spiritual preoccupation they held to certain standards of life up to which the poets were expected to live, and these were exemplified in the habits of the poets of Boston. The latter did not, like Whitman, “have a ruddy face and wear big whiskers, cross the ferry in the pilot-house of the steamer, ride on top of an omnibus and talk with low people, tread with bare feet the shore of Long Island, or swim naked in its waters." More than this, scandal was created by Whitman's revolt against the view taken of subjects which polite intercourse put under the ban. The writer quotes from a letter of W. W. Story to Lowell to show that the assumption of the New England mind was that "the main office of the blood was to minister to sensuality." On the other hand, says Mr. Macphail, "to Whitman this spirit in the blood was a noble creation for a divinely appointed and glorious purpose. He magnified it and made it honorable; the wise men of New England strove to put it under foot; or rather, the thing died of inanition, and they took credit to themselves for having destroyed it." Whitman was born free from conventions which hedged in his fellow-men. "He had the virtues inherent in the New England stock and was free from many of its vices." Mr. Macphail continues:

་

·

"He lived a life of freedom. He saw that his countrymen possessed some of the elements of freedom, and he wished to set them wholly free. He addressed them as a prophet, that is, as one who speaks for another. He examined himself as the son of humanity, and disclosed the record of his observations. As a result, the people said that he was possessed of a devil, that he was insane; and when Emerson hailed the Leaves of Grass in the words, I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I wish to see my benefactor'-the Boston Post could only account for the commendation of such a prurient and polluted work' on the ground that Emerson was also suffering from temporary insanity, and was impure-minded as well. Wo and shame,' this newspaper cried, for the land of liberty, if its literature's stream is to flow from the filthy fountain of licentious corruption. No merits can atone for the exulting audacity of the obscenity which marks a large portion of the volume; its vaunted manliness is the deification of self and defiance of the Deity; its liberty is the wildest license; its love the essence of the lowest lust.' It can not be alleged that this was a mere hasty utterance, for it was written in 1860, five years after the book appeared."

Whitman's view stands at the other extreme from that of puritanism, whose calm assurance he undertook to unsettle. Some abatements of his extreme views, the author claims, it may be necessary for us to make, now that we have been benefited by the courage of his gospel. How the two views stand opposed he sets

forth in the following:

"Those who have had the patience to inform themselves of the views upon human life which prevailed during the time of Jonathan Edwards, will observe that Whitman looked upon the matter in a different light. To those fathers in New England, humanity was a poor thing, a vile worm, loathsome, deformed, altogether filthy, and reserved for burning. Whitman looked on the thing as it is, not through the eyes of the dead, not as a specter in books. He went to the bank by the wood. He looked at humanity undisguised and naked. Clear and sweet was its soul: clear and sweet in all that is not its soul.' To this poet it was yet the even

ing of the sixth day, when God surveyed everything which he had made, and behold it was very good. The Puritan theologians saw only that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, that every imagination of the thoughts in his heart was evil continually; and whatever may have been the sentiments of the Creator toward His own handiwork, certainly it repented them that man had been made on the earth, and it grieved them to the heart.

"To Whitman's eyes everything was beautiful, in the full light of the sun, which was ugly and distorted in the fearful gloom which brooded over the world of the theologians. That gloom was yet heavy over New England when Walt Whitman came, crying out that all things should stand forth in the light."

A DRAMATIST ON THE ART OF ACTING.

Two

'WO theories have long been held and expounded with reference to the right relation between the actor and his art. According to one of these theories-Coquelin being its most conspicuous living protagonist-the actor is merely a clever, subtle, adroit imitator. His art consists in creating a perfect illusion, in making the audience feel what he himself does not and can not feel, his preoccupation being the minute, objective study of the expression of the mood or emotion which the character depicted by him is experiencing at the time. According to the other theory, defended by Sir Henry Irving, the actor is not" convincing." unless he sinks his own personality in the part played--unless he lives it and thoroughly identifies himself with it; in other words, acting, as he might say, is a subjective and sincere art, not mere virtuosity in mimicry and imitation.

The French school is supposed to share Coquelin's view, and as the French have always laid much stress on delicacy, refinement, and finish in acting, their testimony has been regarded as particularly significant. But Alfred Capus, the popular and admired playwright, in a series of articles on the theater and the art of the drama, not only adopts the opposite theory but carries it beyond the extremest point occupied by any other of its adherents.

We admire, he says in one of his essays in Le Figaro, those versatile and resourceful actors and actresses who pass from rôle to rôle and assume the most diverse and dissimilar parts without the slightest difficulty. We see and applaud them, he continues, as workmen, as princes, as magistrates, as poor wretches, as millionaires, and marvel at their skill and infinite variety. But these are merely popular favorites; they are not the great artists; they lack that supreme gift which is essential to authority and enduring fame. They are not the geniuses of the theater; they are forgotten as soon as their active career is closed. They are translators, not true interpreters; they do not give us the impression of life. M. Capus goes on to say:

SIR HENRY IRVING, Who holds that acting is a subjective and sincere art, not mere virtuosity in mimicry and imitation.

well as of the stage forbid this. Be he a Shakespeare or Molière, the playwright is obliged to select a brief period of the life of his characters; but if he is a genius, he will discover the hour at which the characters and their passions have attained their maximum intensity."

Capus compares Balzac's picture of a miser Eugenie Grandet "

in

M. BENOIT CONSTANT COQUELIN. The most conspicuous living protagonist of the theory that "the actor is merely a clever, subtle, adroit imitator."

with Molière's "l'Avare," and shows how incomplete, inadequate, rough, impressionistic the latter sketch is beside the thorough study of the same type by that novelist. If, then, the dramatist, owing to the limitations of his art, can not create a fullblooded, living character, is not the function of the actor to supplement this work, to supply the deficiency? To quote further:

"It is the actor who must unify and harmonize, by means of his own personality, the scattered words and disconnected actions of the character; he it is who must absorb and assimilate the sentiments and thoughts of this imaginary being and make them his own, to present them to the public in the order and unity of life. Nay, more; that which is not expressed and can not be in the text -the intentions, the implications, the roots, the thousand nuances of word, gesture, movement-the actor must divine these and add them to his part."

In short, the actor, to interpret life, must live, move, and lose himself in the part, and if this be impossible to him, he should not undertake the impersonation. If his own personality be in direct contradiction to that of the character, he should not play the part. Capus concludes as follows:

"No, one is not a great artist because one can play, with facility, with talent, with spirit, the most dissimilar parts-to-day a drama, to-morrow a comedy, the day after a farce. On the contrary, one is a great artist only if one can play certain parts in all their profundity, with all the intensity of life. What is interesting in the actor's art, as in every other, is originality-perfection. . . . Why do actresses impress us more deeply by their art than actors? It is not because of their charm as women, but primarily because the sentiments and emotions they habitually express permit them to put their whole personality, their soul, their physical and moral qualities, into their assumptions of character." -Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.

MR. NORMAN HAPGOOD, writing in Collier's Weekly of the late Secretary of State, says: "Too slight as was my acquaintance with John Hay, I have felt ashamed in his presence, because as he looked out across this earth, to the sky beyond, thoughts came to his heart, and words to his lips, in acknowledgment of the world's beauty, that I could in no way meet with any approaching richness of allusion. His friends everywhere, I imagine, had this exhilaration of losing the statesman in the poet. . . . I do not well know how to put in words this feeling, that when John Hay died it was more than one good statesman gone: it was the passing into dust of a being singularly full of light and of responsiveness to the manifold attractiveness of this puppet-show in which we live. It was the end of something encouraging and rare."