LETTERS AND ART.

THAT

THE NOVEL OF A GREAT POET.

`HAT a man who has won a practically undisputed place as the most illustrious living English poet should, in his sixtyeighth year, publish his first avowed work of prose fiction is in itself a matter of unusual literary interest. Such was the recent appearance of Swinburne's "Love's Cross-Currents," an event rendered the more remarkable by the fact that, in spite of the eminence of its author, the book evoked no small volume of unfavorable criticism. The London Academy, for instance, regards it as one of the things which, like the parodies that so unwisely have been included in the complete edition of his poems, the world would willingly let die." 'For the most part the book is without passion, even the passion of words," says the London Outlook. 'It is a story of ineffectual lives told ineffectually." This note is sounded on many sides, and with considerable emphasis. It is not, however, by any means the only note in the chorus. The reviewers, both English and American, approach Swinburne's "novel" from various viewpoints. Some are concerned over the question as to whether the book ought to have been published at all; others discuss the merits of the epistolary form as an artistic vehicle, while others seek for evidence that the world has lost a great novelist in gaining a great poet.

"Love's Cross-Currents," it appears, actually first saw the light as far back as 1877, when, under the title "A Year's Letters," it was published in The Tatler, over the signature "Mrs. Horace Manners." It was on the urgent advice of his friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton, that Swinburne decided, at this late date, formally to acknowledge his "buried bantling." Slight in plot and action, the book resolves itself into a group of brilliantly drawn characters, who are indicated briefly in the following words by Mr. C. H. Gaines, in Harper's Weekly:

"Take a number of intellectual, cultivated people-preeminently capable of emotion, more or less restrained by moral habitude. Take especially four young people of about the right age and condition for falling in love. Of this number let two be young women, already married, as it would seem, indifferently well. Bring these ardent natures together, and you may reasonably expect an imbroglio. The principal characters are Reginald Harewood, an ardent young man of poetic temperament, with an overplus of youthful folly, passionately in love with his cousin, Clara Harewood, who is married to an uncongenial scientist, a young woman with some points of likeness to Reginald, but lacking his 'splendid natural silliness'; Francis Cheyne, a brother of Clara, tentatively in love with another cousin, Amicia, the wife of Lord Cheyne, more conscientious than Clara, but also less capable of resistance. Lastly, the grandmother and aunt, Lady Midhurst, who intrigues to prevent mischief. All these are set before us in swift, vivid character-sketches."

As to

Lady Midhurst is a dea ex machina, who by her diplomacy controls and plays the game for them all. 'Married ladies in modern English society," she writes ironically to the sentimental, fragile Amicia, "can not fail in their duties to the conjugal relation. . The other hypothesis is impossible to take into account. being in love, frankly, I don't believe in it. I believe that stimulant drugs will intoxicate, and rain drench, and fire singe; but not in any way that one person will fascinate another. Avoid all folly; accept no traditions, take no sentiment on trust; . . . don't indulge in tragedy out of season. . . . Resolve, once for all, in any little difficulty in life, that there shall be nothing serious in it. . . .” Several reviewers find a flavor of George Meredith in the style, and the critic of the New York Sun fancies that "several British literary reputations would never have been acquired had Mr. Swinburne published his book at the time he wrote it." The London Morning Post commends the book as "a lively hit at English hypocrisy"; while the critic of the London Times concludes that for his part "better than the story, better even than the incisive

prologue, we love the dedication with its rioting periods and its kingly courtesies. It is a real tumultuous voice, fortunately

for us, still to be heard at times."

Dr. William Barry, writing in the London Bookman, discovers in these letters "the mixed passion, cynicism, polish, and frivolous-earnest unbelief, that old French correspondence exhibits." We read further:

"It is not a comparison-merely a reminiscence-but those who are acquainted with Jane Austen's Lady Susan' will find her in these pages, grown old and past marrying, not past mischief-making. The glitter and the flicker of Congreve, too, strike out as we turn them. In short, they are literature. They amuse, interest, occasionally tease, and should be taken as light comedy. How unexpected a note in Mr. Swinburne that is need not be dwelt upon. He has given us neither a romance nor a novel, perhaps; but he has added a volume to the great French series of Letters by Clever Women of the World."

To quote Mr. C. H. Gaines once more:

Quite apart from the critical curiosity which it may arouse, and considered merely as a story, Swinburne's novel is one book in a thousand. Indeed, this single romance from his pen would seem to prove that the author, if he had chosen to devote his powers to fiction, might have become as great a novelist as he is now a poet; and while the world could ill afford to spare the magnificent poetry which Swinburne has produced, it may well regret that he has created only one such novel as 'Love's Cross-currents.

"The letters as a whole are a pungent satire on British morality, its sensual sentiment, and its capacity for whitewashing the moral sepulcher. It would be hard to define the relations between Reginald and Clara, Francis and Amicia. To the end we are baffled and bamboozled. That, of course, is the game as it is played on this side of the channel. We are left in doubtful certitude even as to the paternity of the posthumous child-this totally idiotic fragment of flesh and fluff, which [writes Lady Midhurst] my daughter has the front and face to assert resembles its father's family.'

JA

HOW CIVILIZATION IS KILLING ART IN
JAPAN.

APAN, before she donned the habit of the West and sold herself for Western gold, writes Mr. Sydney Adamson, lived a pleasant life and dreamed beautiful things into form in ivory, silk, and wood, delicate cloissoné, and fragile porcelain. She far outdid China in the sense of form and of color," producing marvels of effect unknown beyond her shores." But this, laments Mr. Adamson, was before "the great trading nations, learned in little save the wonderful machine power of enormous production," came on the scene to "trample out unconsciously the flower of art." Now "Cockney dealers, German curio merchants, American dry-goods' agents are all beguiling the Japs for gold into cheap production, and, worse, insisting on an adaptation of the worst Western ideals of design, which, handled by Japanese, produce a villainous mongrel compound offered in America and Europe to the world as Japanese art." The writer alleges that we have nearly killed in twenty-five years the real decorative art of Japan, which has taken centuries to develop. "We do all sorts of mad things in these days," he suggests, then "why not form a society for the preservation of art in Japan?" He is convinced that the dealers and buying agents who demand specialties to suit supposed American and European tastes are the real criminals, and that the public if left to choose from good alone would be content. How far apparently the evil influence has already spread we may gather from the following statements (in Leslie's Weekly, New York):

"Bad enough it was to turn out cheap imitations of Japanese paper and metal work in Birmingham and Paris; worse still when

"I had wandered through his large rooms filled with the greatest conceivable crimes against art and nature, asking vainly if he had nothing really Japanese to show me. I told him frankly that his store was filled with abominable rubbish. He admitted it, tho I believe to this day he does not know the difference. I wanted to buy some good Japanese prints. He called his manager, a Japanese, and to them both I explained minutely what kind of prints I meant-those cut on wood by the artist and printed in colors on paper. He appeared ignorant of the existence of such art, and appeared to consider me a mild lunatic. I then asked who were the leading artists in Japan; they did not know. In despair I asked if they had any Utumaros. They apparently had never heard of the greatest of Japanese masters. Once before, in Nagasaki, I tried the same experiment. There, after much explaining, a Japanese dealer in Satsumas and ivory admitted that he had seen such prints, but had no idea where they were made or where one could buy them. Vaguely, he suggested perhaps in Yokohama.”

THE GLAMOUR OF THE EAST UPON WESTERN LITERATURE.

KIPLING'S

ten years' soldier," who tells us that "when you've heard the East a-calling, you won't heed nothing else," might claim, on the strength of that discovery, a certain kinship with several of the great ones of European literature—with Goethe, for instance, and Byron, and Victor Hugo. How upon the imaginations of these writers and of Ochlenschlager the East laid its glamour, with the result, in each instance, of some characteristic artistic production, is indicated by Dr. Georg Brandes in vol. V. of his "Main Currents in Nineteenth-century Literature." Brandes has been called "the Taine of the North," and some critics claim for him a degree of poetic insight which they deny to Taine. In his discussion of Hugo's work and influence Dr. Brandes writes:

“Victor Hugo took the verse which André Chénier had created, that pellucid medium of pure beauty, and when he had breathed upon it it gleamed with all the colors of the rainbow. Strangely enough it was again from Greece that the inspiration came; but this time from modern Greece. Under the impression produced by the Greek war of liberation Hugo set to work to write his Orientales.' But what a different use of language! The words painted; the words shone,' gilded by a sunbeam' like the beautiful Jewess of the poems; they sang as if to a secret accompaniment of Turkish music. First had come Ochlenschlager's East. This was the East of the child, of the fairy-tale book, of the 'Thousand and One Nights-half Persia, half Copenhagen. It was dreams of genii in lamps and rings, of diamonds and sapphires by the bushel, the illimitable splendors of imagination all grouped round a few imperishable poetic types. Then came Byron's East, a great decorative background for passion in its recklessness and melancholy. The third in order was Goethe's, the East of the 'West-östlicher Divan,' the refuge of the old man. He took the reposeful, the contemplative element of oriental philosophy and wove German Lieder into it. Rückert, the great word-artist, followed in his steps.

'But Hugo's East was different from all of these; it was the brightly variegated, outward, barbaric East, the land of light and color. Sultans and muftis, dervishes and caliphs, hetmans, pirates, klephts-delicious sounds in his ears, delightful pictures before his eyes. Time is a matter of indifference—far back antiquity, Middle Ages, or to-day; race is a matter of indifference-Hebrew, Moor, or Turk; place is a matter of indifference-Sodom and Gomorrah, Granada, Navarino; creed is a matter of indifference. 'No one,' he tells us in his preface,' has a right to ask the poet whether he believes in God or in gods, in Pluto, in Satan, or in nothing.' His province is to paint. He is possessed by a genius which leaves him no peace until the East, as he feels it, is before him upon paper."

THE

THE SELF-REVELATION OF MONTAIGNE. HE new series of "French Men of Letters" which promises to hold for English readers the position occupied by the "English Men of Letters" series, treats in its initial volume of Michel de Montaigne, whom Sainte-Beuve once characterized as the wisest Frenchman that ever lived." The author of the volume, Edward Dowden of Dublin University, speaks of Montaigne as in a certain sense an "interviewer," because of his confidential attitude toward his public. "In days when the professional' interviewer' did not exist, he must play the part of his own interviewer on behalf of the friendly reader." This attitude, the author further points out, is nevertheless so misleading as to the real Montaigne that he "eludes us at first and much more afterward." He "is still a challenge to criticism." We find besides "the simple Gascon gentleman, frank and loyal," who greets us at first, population of spirits, moods, humors, tempers." In apparent amazement at this variety the writer asks:

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a

"Is it humanity itself, so undulant and various, with its strength and its weakness, its elevations and its mediocrities, its generosities and its egotisms, its eternal doubt, its eternal credulities, its sociability and its central solitude, its craving for action, its longing for repose, its piety and its mockeries, its wisdom and its humorous follies-is it humanity itself that we are coming to know through this curious exemplar of the race?"

Montaigne was the first to adopt the essay as a form of literary self-expression. His material was always himself, or at least the world seen through his own temperament. He was almost without "method" of self-study, says Mr. Dowden. 'He started with no à priori assumptions, theological or philosophical; he did not systematize his results; he made no attempt even to unify the record of his thoughts and feelings under any theoretical conception of himself; he was content to set down an observation here and another observation there; if the Montaigne of to-day differed from the Montaigne of yesterday, he recorded the present and immediate fact; he differed from himself as much as from other men; he was one of a diverse and undulant species." Continuing the author writes:

44

Montaigne was not a saint; nor did he claim for himself the title of philosopher. He professed himself no more than the average man. And precisely for this reason he had the better right to be communicative about himself; through his representation of an average man—neither a saint nor a beast-he was really exhibiting humanity itself; ‘each man carries in his own person the entire form of the condition of the race. He offered himself to the world, if the world chose to take him so, as a specimen of the genus homo, as one of themselves. To his friends he offered the portrait of Michel de Montaigne. He was not erecting the statue of an illustrious individual in the great square of a city, in a church, or any public place. It was for the corner of a library, to entertain a neighbor, a kinsman, a friend. There was not so much of good in him that he could not tell it without blushing. Here, as the author in his opening words informs the reader, his end was private and domestic; when his friends had lost him, they might find him here, his humors and conditions, his few merits and his many defects. Had he lived among those nations which dwell under the sweet liberty of the primitive laws of nature, he would gladly have painted his portrait at full length and without a rag of clothing. All the worth of his book lay in the fact that it was a book of good faith.' And yet the other thought, that in painting himself he was painting the human creature, and not merely an individual, was always in the back-shop' of Montaigne's mind. He could not construct a four-square body of philosophy; he was not a system-maker or system-monger; yet one thing he might give as his gift to the world-some scattered notes on that curious creature, man, as seen in the example which lay nearest to his observations; as seen in himself. He never wanders from himself and from humanity which is his true theme. . . . The portrait which he has drawn of himself emerges from the entire canvas of the Essays' for him who stands at the right point of view. Regarded from one position we discover in the book a series of discourses, moral, politic, and military. Moving aside, and looking at it obliquely, the portrait exhibits itself."

·

INCREASING POPULARITY OF THE EROTIC

MR.

NOVEL.

R. BASIL TOZER, who states that circumstances necessitate his reading a great number of modern novels in the course of the year, claims to be not alone in noticing that “during the past five or six years the English novel of average merit has been steadily undergoing a change." This change, which he alleges and deplores, is an “increasing tendency to deal with unsavory topics with quite unnecessary freedom." He says it seems only a short time ago that a large proportion of the ordinary reading public (meaning more particularly the circulating-library public) "professed to consider" popular writers of the "Ouida" type as "improper " for young people; that they were not admitted into houses where there were young girls of "an inquisitive turn of mind,” and that it was the business of parents and guardians to keep such books out of their reach. He welcomes the death of the "problem" novel, which came upon us in such floods a few years ago, but thinks that the present trend in fiction of " average merit" materially lessens our grounds for gratulation. He writes (in The Monthly Review, London):

"To-day there may be said to be comparatively few schoolgirls well in their teens-and I don't make this assertion without having first of all gone carefully into the subject and made strict inquiries -who would not smile at the thought of exception being taken to their reading anything' Ouida' ever wrote. Nor is this to be wondered at if you come to look into the class of fiction that the schoolgirl has been battening upon, either with or without the consent of her guardians, for the past few years. For, out of eighty-seven selected novels that I have by me at this moment, and that have been published within the last three years and a half, books that have had a considerable vogue, and have all, at one time or other, been obtainable at the circulating libraries, seventeen adopt the attitude of sneering at matrimony as a thing 'played out'; eleven raise upon a pinnacle imaginary corespondents in imaginary divorce cases; twenty-two practically advocate that married men shall be allowed to keep mistresses openly; seven hold up to ridicule the woman who is faithful to her husband; and twenty-three describe seduction as openly as it can be described in a book that is not to be ostracized by the bookstalls."

Of the evils attendant upon the conditions he describes, Mr. Tozer writes:

Apart from the false impression of life that is conveyed in works of fiction whose sole' merit' is that because they deal more unreservedly with themes and topics not usually spoken about quite so bluntly in every-day conversation they are able to command a good sale, there is the probability that the taste such books will leave will whet the mental appetite for something stronger still. And as the mental appetite becomes so whetted, the desire to read books that possess literary merit of any kind almost invariably grows feebler. It is no unusual thing to-day to hear women of a certain set asking one another what books they have read and can recommend that are really haut-goût,' a phrase meaning, when used by them with reference to novels, books that verge as closely as possible upon the immoral. Only recently, indeed, a woman of this stamp remarked to me in the most ingenuous way imaginable that when she got hold of a book' she had been told contained' equivocal passages,' she at once tried to find the passages referred to, and then, when I have read those parts, my interest in the book is at an end.' Could anything be much more pitiable? Place before such a reader a masterpiece by de Maupassant, by Zola, by Pierre Loti, or even a finished work by one of our modern English novelists known to be a little unconventional in his treatment of certain situations, and the only portion that will in the least interest her-and she is typical of a class of readers that is steadily increasing-will be a page or two here and there that deal with unsavory subjects and are intended to be introduced only incidentally. All the true merits of the book-the dramatic power possessed by its author, his charm of style, the strength of his writing, his vigorous handling of the chief characters-will be passed over unrecognized. Yet such readers constitute the class that probably is directly to blame for the descriptive

writing that year by year comes closer to the boundary line at which the censor will lift up his hand, and it will be interesting to see how close to that line the writers will be allowed to approach before the censor thinks it time to interfere."

In looking over the novels by modern writers of moderate repute, Mr. Tozer says that he is struck by the fact that by far the most "daring-I should like to call them the most prurient-books among them have been written by women." His investigations show, he claims, that a man able to write clever fiction generally deems it more artistic to veil, to some extent, certain scenes, whereas the woman novelist of the same caliber will, in her description of similar situations,“ tear off every stitch of veiling that can possibly be spared.” This he explains by the theory that it is woman's nature to endeavor to outshine all other members of her sex who may be following the avocation she herself is engaged in. So he says: When it comes to writing' boldly' Mrs. A. will, in her new novel, sail just a little closer to the wind than Mrs. B. did in her last successful work; and then when Mrs. B.'s turn comes again, Mrs. B. will place Mrs. A.'s audacious story quite in the background by promulgating some preposterous theory on the advantages of free love, or some such subject, that will set a considerable section of the lending-library public whispering and surreptitiously tittering, and will at the same time gratify her vanity and perceptibly increase her royalties."

Mr. Tozer disclaims any implication that all women writers "have recourse to these rather despicable tactics," but thinks" that many, especially of the second and third ranks of novelists, are unable to resist the temptation to outstrip their rivals if they can, and that they attempt to do so by bordering more and more upon the indecent." He puts before us half a dozen novels which have sold well, and notices that the second book of each writer is far more "daring" than his first, and in each case his third comes very near to describing in plain English "certain acts that a limited number of medical works alone are supposed to deal with.”

He discovers, however, a directly opposite tendency in the fiction exploited by the English weekly and monthly magazines. This curious feature of the situation he does not explain. We read:

How different is the tone of the serial story of average merit that appears in our weekly and monthly periodicals from that of the average novel of equal literary merit that is published between covers before appearing elsewhere. It is safe to say that no serial story at present running in any English daily newspaper or in the ordinary periodical press of England is unfit to be read by the class that we have gradually come to speak of as young people.' Why this should be I am unable to say, unless it is that editors of periodical publications have a greater sense of their responsibility, and of the duty they owe to the community, than certain publishers. But such a supposition, considered from the rational standpoint of hard common-sense, must unfortunately be deemed quixotic, and therefore the only alternative conclusion to be arrived at is that a vast section of the multitude of men and women who read serial fiction regularly have not really a craving for stories that have a vein of double entente running through them, or that appear to advocate a loose code of morality, but that on the contrary they desire the fiction they read to be sound and wholesome throughout. Possibly it is this very desire that leads certain wellmeaning persons to grow by degrees fastidious in precisely the opposite way. The editor of one of our most popular weekly journals showed me quite recently a handful of letters that he had just received from men and women in different parts of the world who took very strong exception to a young man being described in a story-paper as kissing a girl to whom he was not engaged to be married! I think,' one letter ran,' that descriptions of this kind can serve no good purpose, and may indirectly lead some of our young men into sin !'"

Mr. Tozer maintains that the larger part of modern fiction deals with unsavory topics with too much freedom, and that there are numerous books placed upon the market almost daily which contain narrative and descriptive matter which would not have been

tolerated less than a score of years ago. He translates the word "daring" to mean stories as immoral as their publishers deem it safe to let their authors make them." It is this vein, he says, which new authors take in the serious endeavor they are making to attract attention. As to the probable result of this tendency he continues:

'What the end will be, where the line will be drawn, and by whom or when it will be drawn, it is not possible to say at present. That it will be drawn, sooner or later, is certain, and the probability is that the first move will be made by some body of men of a highly religious bent, who will defeat their own object at the outset by endeavoring to discover a great deal of evil where no evil exists, and by condemning a number of very admirable novels simply because these books, being among the most widely read of modern novels, they will deem it' politic' to attack in the belief that in doing so they are attacking the very foundations. Indeed, as serving to illustrate the likelihood there is of this occurring, it is interesting to note that attacks have been made by various no doubt well-intentioned clergymen, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, upon at least two of the finest and most dramatic novels that have been published within the last few years, namely, Mr. Robert Hichens's Garden of Allah' and Mr. Eden Phillpotts's Secret Woman.' Such books belong to the very class to which this article is not intended to refer. It is because we have so few masterpieces that a great proportion of the lending-library public is driven to fall back upon the scores of novels that, being only moderately clever, endeavor to compensate for their obvious deficiency by purveying obscenity glossed over. As a very distinguished writer said to me lately, 'It is not that we haven't authors with imagination, and it is not that we haven't authors with a practical and extensive knowledge of life, and it is not that we haven't authors with brains; but it is that we haven't authors, or at least we have so few authors, with the three attributes combined.'"

THREE STYLES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

N spite of the fact that, "owing partly to the enormous proportion of monosyllables, partly to the prevalence of sibilant and dental sounds," the words of the English language are overwhelmingly ugly and unmusical," says Mr. Charles Leonard Moore, English literature, "beyond all other literatures," is "drenched and irradiated and alive with style." Words that sing themselves, he argues, are surely more advantageous to the builder of sentences than "words that halt and grunt and groan." Yet the writer of English "has to labor with his raw recruits of vocables, to make them stand at attention or walk in file; when he wants them to give voice together, he finds that they are dumb or hoarse or hissing." Hence if the secret of style were a mere matter of the words used, English literature, he urges, would be very nearly styleless. But on the contrary he finds that even its bad styles are not like the bad styles of other literatures, merely ponderous or commonplace." Continuing, he points out that while there are, in a sense, as many styles as writers, nevertheless 'prose style in English falls into three great species, to one or other of which most pieces of composition may be referred." Of the first of these we read further (in The Dial, Chicago) :

"The first of these species is the prose which M. Jourdain was delighted to find that he talked. It is the plain, straightforward, unadorned language of life. But we must beware of thinking that this style, as it exists in the pages of great writers, is without art. There is perhaps as much art in the plainness of Swift, the naturalness of Defoe, the simplicity of Bunyan, as in the ordered and far-wheeling sentences of Milton or Burke. Let any one try to do a piece of work like Franklin's autobiography, and he will discover the difficulty of the method. Always the necessary instrument of men of action, and for direct narratives of real experiences, this style has been revived in recent years for the use of fiction, and in fact for many other purposes. Much of Poe's and Stevenson's work was done in it, tho at their best they put off corduroy and donned silks and satins and velvets."

The second prose species in English, according to Mr. Moore,

is "the ornate, elaborated, monumental, periodic style-the socalled prose poetry." He writes:

"De Quincey, defending this his favorite style, somewhere asks what a writer of the caliber of Swift would have done if set such a theme as Belshazzar's feast and told to develop all the implications and consequences of the story. Probably Swift would have made something awful of the matter. But it may be doubted whether the few strong words which the Bible devotes to the incident are not more impressive than any fantasia which Jeremy Taylor or Milton or De Quincey himself could have written around it. Unquestionably, the lofty prose flights of these writers are superb, but there is a touch of falsetto in them. They try to give the sensuous effect of verse without verse's sensuous apparatus of rhythm and rime, without its allowed elisions and inversions which tend to concentration and concreteness. And, in the second place, they are an imitation of the poorest kind of poetry-descriptive poetry. Great poetry does not linger and loiter; it strides on from action to action, from thought to thought, and gives its descriptions very largely by means of hints and flashes and implications. In the set pieces of Ruskin and De Quincey and Jeremy Taylor, we can not see the forest for the trees. . . . I do not in the least deny that such work is valuable and wonderful. But it is not quite the real thing either of poetry or prose."

"It is a style whose colloquial ease is not the home-bred rusticity of our first species, whose sparkling polish is not the impasto brilliancy of our second. It is simple from richness, glowing from within. It is keen and flexible and glittering, like a Damascus blade. It is terse. It does not tire. It does not overdwell. The supreme master of this prose is Shakespeare; his corival in art, tho, alas, not in matter, is Congreve. Goldsmith reigns on a little lower level; and there is no fourth to rank with them. Their prose gives the essence of character in immortal words. We recognize it as our real inheritance of speech, which we all ought to share, but which we have somehow been cut out of. No girl ever said like Rosalind, 'A star danced, and under that I was born'; but the phrase gives us at once a picture of the heroine and a precious pearl of language to put away among our verbal treasures. No fine lady ever uttered such a speech as this of Millamant's: 'What is a lover that it can give? One makes lovers as fast as one pleases, and they live as long as one pleases, and when one pleases they die; and then, if one pleases, one makes some more.' All the adorable coquetry of the woman is in those words, and they are, besides, a set of cadences which affect the literary student with delight and despair. No wandering bear-leader ever put forth a claim to be a gentleman in the words of Tony Lumpkins's boon companion, Tho'd I be obligated to dance a bear, my bear only dances to the genteelest of tunes, "Water Parted or the Minuet in Ariadne.' The clown rises before us in this sentence, which must tickle the fancy forever.

6

"

"Sheridan has a skyrocket imitation of this style. Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, as a reward for their love of it, sometimes attain to its pure perfection. Thackeray struggled to achieve it all his life; but his success is at best quite questionable. . . . Strange as it may seem, Dickens is really the more consummate master of this style..

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Cardinal Newman and Matthew Arnold are perhaps the best modern masters of this style in serious matters. This species of prose, informal, easy as an old shoe, is, as it were, made for letterwriting; and as a consequence the great English letter-writers, Gray, Cowper, Keats, FitzGerald, are among its best exponents. Keats's prose, indeed, is almost pure Shakespeare. Among Americans, Poe has the glitter tho hardly the ease of the style, Lowell its unction, and Emerson its inward irradiation."

VERNON LEE, writing in the Westminster Gazette, remarks that modern England seems to lack a real school of novelists. "The great ones," she goes on to say, "are independent and individual, proceeding not from other novelists but, by odd genealogical freaks, from poets and philosophers-such for instance, as Wordsworth, Browning, Carlyle; and as a consequence they have, with magnificent and most living traditions of style, no knowledge, save what each can work out for himself, of the actual business of novel-making." Commenting on these statements, The Evening Post says: "All this is true, and might be said, not of the English novel alone, but of all branches of English literature. The 'school,' properly speaking, does not exist among us; it is individual genius or nothing."

SCIENCE AND INVENTION.

A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION OF BURKE'S "RADIOBES."

THE

HE interest aroused by the experiments of John Butler Burke of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, England, in which he demonstrated the production of bodies resembling living organisms by the action of radium on gelatinized bouillon, has been largely due to the fact that Burke's explanation of his results has been hitherto practically the only one offered. Scientific men have been free to assert their belief that radiobes possess none of the attributes of life or that they are simply abnormal or deformed crystals, but these beliefs have not had experimental backing. Now, however, comes Sir William Ramsay, the eminent English chemist, with a plausible explanation of the phenomena obtained by Burke, based on his own wide experience. In an article published in The Independent (New York, September 7) Sir William writes as follows:

"Mr. Burke made use of, as a medium, a sterilized broth, or bouillón, rendered semisolid by the addition of gelatin. On this he sprinkled a minute trace of a salt of raIdium. After some time microscopic growths appeared, which increased in size, and, apparently, budded, but which, remarkable to say, were soluble in water. I wish in what follows to indicate how it may be possible that these growths have been produced, tho, not having seen Mr. Burke's organisms,' I do not wish to dogmatize. Professor Rutherford and Mr. Soddy some years ago discovered that the power of discharging an electroscope possessed by compounds of radium and thorium was due to the evolution of a gas, to which the name' emanation' was applied."

would be gas, or, rather, a mixture of the gases oxygen and hydrogen. The emanation, enclosed in such a sack, would still decompose water, for enough would diffuse through the walls of the sack, which, moreover, would naturally be moist. The accumulation of more gas would almost certainly burst the walls of the cell, and almost equally certainly in one or two places. Through the cracks more gas would issue, carrying with it the emanation, and with it the property of coagulating the walls of a fresh cell. The result of the original bubble would resemble a yeast cell, and the. second cell a bud, or perhaps more than one, if the original cellhappened to burst. This process would necessarily be repeated. as long as the radium continued to evolve emanation, which would be for the best part of a thousand years. The 'life,' therefore,. would be a long one, and the budding' would impress itself on an observer as equally continuous with that of a living organism." In closing, Professor Ramsay says:

"The supposition that the pouring of energy in some form into matter similar to that of which living organisms are made, and which serves as sufficient food for actual living organisms, might conceivably result in the production of life is a very attractive one. But one is bound to be skeptical, and the explanation which I have ventured to suggest appears to me to be sufficient to meet the case. But no one will rejoice more than I if it should ultimately prove to be inadequate."."

With this emanation many experiments have been conducted during the past few years, and it has been discovered, among other things, that it appears to change into helium, undergoing a sort of decomposition. During this process much heat is evolved, due chiefly to the spontaneous change undergone by the emanation. Some of the liberated energy may also appear as chemical action, for a solution of the emanation in water decomposes the water into its constituent gases, oxygen and hydrogen. To quote again:

"Now, to come back to Mr. Burke's experiments: A possible explanation appears to me to be suggested by some of the facts which I have adduced. Mr. Burke made use of solid radium bromide in fine powder. He sprinkled a few minute grains on a gelatin-broth medium, possibly somewhat soft, so that the granules would sink slowly below the surface. Once there they would dissolve in and decompose the water, liberating oxygen and hydrogen, together with emanations, which would remain mixed with these gases. The gases would form minute bubbles, probably of microscopic dimensions, and the coagulating action of the emanation on the albumen of the liquor would surround each with a skin, so that the product would appear like a cell; its contents, however,

The Body as a Source of Electric Light.-Interesting experiments on a luminous phenomenon produced by rubbing the human skin with electric-light bulbs have been made by Professor Sommer, of the University of Giessen, Germany. Says Cosmos (Paris) in a note on the subject abstracted from the Revue Générale des Sciences (Paris):

"Taking hold of the bulb of a small electric lamp, he observed one night that whenever his hand touched the bulb the latter showed a light like a luminous mist which illuminated certain parts of the bulb as well as his fingers, even before the electric current was turned on. This remarkable phenomenon could be reproduced several times by rubbing the bulb with the hand. It should be said, however, that the experiment did not succeed with all bulbs and that those that had been used for some time and had on them the well-known dark deposits of carbon were apt not to show the effect. When, on the contrary, the lamp was new or unused, even without any metallic conductor at all, if rubbed smartly on the skin, for example on the forehead or forearm, and suddenly removed, it showed the phenomenon described above. If, after removing the lamp, it is suddenly stopped, its contour is seen to be distinctly illuminated and a bright spot is observed in the middle of it.

"When, after having rubbed the lamp on some part of the body, another part is touched-the cheek, for instance the same luminosity is produced, even without further rubbing, by the simple contact, lighting up part of the face. If the breath strikes a lamp that has been rubbed on some part of the body, a wellmarked light is also produced. The phenomena in question, according to Professor Sommer, are partly physiological, that is to say, they belong to the human or animal organism. But as, on the other hand, a part of the phenomena may be also produced by rubbing on other substances, they must be governed in part by a physical law, which presents itself in the human body under special conditions. This luminosity may also produce photographic effects."-Translation made for THE LITERARY DIGEST.