with the cooperation of coaches and trainers the objectionable features would be done away with, without spoiling the greatest American college game."

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The other college papers are just as ready to defend the game. The Harvard Lampoon treats with sarcasm the statement that this "pleasing pastime of American football" is "nasty," rough," and an uninteresting game." The action of Columbia in abolishing the game is, in the opinion of the Amherst Student, "a most radical step," and one "which will probably not be endorsed by our leading institutions," altho it" should prove of value in bringing about wise reforms." The Princeton Tiger is at a loss to understand Columbia's attitude, which, it thinks, is the natural "result of the general and popular tin-pan furore about the game." "It would not be a pretty piece of business," we are told further, "to have to say that we had here in America a game which got beyond our power to control, and which we had to quit because we couldn't handle it properly and play it like gentlemen." The rest of the American universities are called upon to "stick by it" and do their best to play the game "decently and fairly."

G. Stewart McConochie, editor of the Madison Daily Chronicle, writes that the "true cause of the evils of football to-day is the spirit of commercialism," and he goes on to say that the agitation for reform, which threatens to destroy the game, "is largely supported and reinforced by those persons who have never played the game or whose football education has been confined to the bleachers."

Probably the most serious stab that the game has received from its friends comes from Karl Friedrich Brill, the Harvard tackle, who has been in the game ten years. He says, in a statement in

the Boston Herald:

"I don't believe the game is right. I dislike it on moral grounds. It is a mere gladiatorial combat. It is brutal throughout. When you are opposed to a strong man you have got to get the better of him by violence. I fail to see where the gray matter in a man's head is exercised at all, nor am I able to see how football is the intricate game some proclaim it to be."

CALLING ON SENATOR DEPEW TO RESIGN.

THE

HE most prominent Republican that the Democratic and Independent press have won over to their side, in the campaign they are waging to force Chauncey M. Depew out of the United States Senate, is State Senator Edgar T. Brackett, of Saratoga Springs. He is quoted as saying that Mr. Depew "must and will resign," but if he should refuse to do so, then he [Brackett] will introduce a resolution on the first day's session of the approaching Legislature, calling upon him to vacate his seat at Washington on account of his discreditable connection with the insurance scandals.

The head and front of this movement that is seeking to secure the resignation of Senator Depew and also of his colleague, Thomas C. Platt, are The American (Dem.) and The Evening Post (Ind.) of New York City. The Post declares bitingly that even worse for the Senate than the conviction of Burton and Mitchell" is the "presence of these two statesmen of the Empire State," and it then remarks:

"The name of Depew has become a byword and a shame. Within a year of his reelection for a second term, he has fallen so low in public estimation that a clergyman has called for his expulsion from a social club, and he himself is practically ostracized. Not a vote would be cast for him were he a candidate for reelection, and the demands for his resignation will grow in volume. Indeed, it will be surprising if there is not an effort made in the Legislature to pass a resolution asking for it. Against his colleague the feeling is not so bitter, perhaps because he is physically feeble, perhaps because his character has been better known. For years past Platt's sale of legislation has been understood and his personal reputation has been pretty clearly fixed. Yet his recent

a collector and disburser of corrupt political funds," and that Depew has been "a railroad lobbyist for a lifetime." Therefore both "must go." But, says The American in a satirical vein, upon calling upon Senator Depew to resign:

"In the scheme of nature, Senator Depew was given neither the claws of the bear, the swift sinews of the deer, nor the strong arms of the Standard Oil magnate. Soft speech, and dainty ways, and a well-groomed air, a modulated voice, and an amiable smile were his weapons for taking what he needed and keeping what he I wanted. Hostile criticism will shrivel the muscles of his face with such an icy blast that his smile will be frozen, and his air of gay assurance will be turned to the awkwardness of rigidity. His manner of gentle fawning in the presence of the rich, and amiable insolence in the presence of those he considered beneath him, will fade away with the loss of his respectability.".

The only Republican paper we have seen which has joined in the hue and cry against Senator Depew is the New York Press, which, however, has but little hope that he will voluntarily quit the Senate, in spite of the fact that he is so discredited, as The Press claims, that he would no longer dare to address a popular gathering of people, or openly take any part in the councils of his party in the State. Thus a few days after the Senator resigned without explanation his directorship in the Equitable Life Assurance Society, The Press remarked as follows:

"Those gossipers who breathed scandalous reports to the effect that Chauncey M. Depew had resigned his United States Senatorship owe him a most abject apology. It was Depew's Equitable directorship that he had resigned. There was nothing left for him to do but get out of that post or be kicked out. Therein he was too much even for Thomas F. Ryan or Paul Morton to stomach. In the United State Senate, however, there are others who delight to do him honor. There he is welcome. There he has not outlived his usefulness to those of his kind. The commission bought with funds stolen from the widows and orphans can not be revoked. It was a gross libel on him for any one to hint that he would give up anything which could not be torn away from him by main strength--and of all things, a senatorship of the United States, worth at least $500,000 this year to men of a certain type."

LETTERS AND ART.

THE

A LITERARY MYSTERY SOLVED. HE most interesting literary mystery in the United Kingdom for the past ten years, says the New York Times, has been the identity of "Miss Fiona Macleod." This mystery is apparently solved by the death of Mr. William Sharp, followed by the authorized confession of his 'wife that he and Fiona Macleod were the same person. Yet even among the personal acquaintances of Mr. Sharp there are some who still refuse to believe that the invisible lady of Ireland was entirely a myth. These not only point to the intrinsic differences between the writings signed William Sharp and those over the name of Fiona Macleod, but they even claim to have been shown by Mr. Sharp a photograph of his mysterious protégée. Others, on the other hand, assert that the mystery had for some years been a transparent one, so that Mrs. Sharp's revelation came as no surprise to them. According to The Evening Post (New York), Mr. Sharp, during his recent visit to this country, confessed that "Miss Fiona was a kind of relative of his, and that he edited -practically rewrote-all her copy before it reached the printer." The English "Who's Who," which is strongly opposed to noms de plume, devotes considerable space to Miss Fiona Macleod, and states that her recreations are "sailing, hill walks, and listening." One of "her" chief pleasures, comments the New York Times, must have been "listening" to guesses regarding "her" identity. The same paper goes on to say:

From England it spread over the Continent, gradually awaking the ancestral pride and giving new life to the legendary memories of every nation or tribe which felt itself beaten in the hard political and material conflict of the last century. In fact, one of the most striking paradoxes of recent history is the curious growth of the sentiment of universal brotherhood alongside of this everincreasing and narrowing Chauvinism. It is working to-day in Brittany and Provence, in Poland and Hungary and Finland; it shows itself even in this country in the odd conviction that we must have a Southern and a New England, a Western and an Eastern literature. That Ireland, with its rich and ancient language and its magnificent literary treasures, not to mention its political grievances, should have been struck by the madness in a specially virulent form was only to be expected."

"Here is the real mystery. Sharp was a well-known man of letters, a most industrious author, clever and cultivated, a friend of many famous people, editor of numerous volumes, and a critic for various periodicals, but he never attained fame. In a moment he could have become famous instead of respected. The word that would have given him renown he never spoke, and it has been left to his widow to make him famous after his death.

"Famous his memory will undoubtedly be. Those poems of 'Fiona Macleod' are more than brilliant productions; they have struck a new note in European literature. To them is directly traceable the 'Celtic movement,' which is now so well defined and strong a force. Indeed, the chief argument for the theory that Fiona Macleod was no nom de plume-at least, the nom de plume of no known person-was that the poems were unlike anything that any one else was writing, or capable of writing, many of the critics said.

46

That is to put the cart before the horse. 'Pharais, a Romance of the Isles,' Fiona's first book, was published in 1894. Five years earlier than that, Mr. William Butler Yeats showed what path he was to take by his 'Wanderings of Oisin,' and in 1893 Dr. Douglas Hyde, an admirable scholar and the very heart of the 'movement,' founded the Gaelic League, of which he naturally became the first president. In its larger aspect, that renaissance of national traditions was only one phase of the spirit that swept over the whole of Europe during the nineteenth century. Its first impulse goes back even to the days of Bishop Percy, the Wartons, Gray, Walpole, Macpherson, and the others who started the Gothic revival.

Such a disguise as Mr. Sharp assumed, continues the same writer, "fitted in with that subtle feminine strain which runs all through the Celtic imagination, and the alluring secrecy of it gave an additional charm to the songs and tales from haunted, almost forgotten regions."

Under his own name Mr. Sharp was known as the general editor of the Canterbury Poets and other series, and as the author of more than a score of volumes of verse, critical biography, and fiction. Following is a list of the works in prose and verse of "Fiona Macleod":

it

"Pharais: A Romance of the Isles

The Mountain Lovers," 1895; "The SinEater," 1895; "The Washer of the Ford," 1896; "Green Fire," 1896; "From the Hills of Dream," 1896; "The Laughter of Peterkin," "Old Celtic Tales Re-told," 1897; Spiritual Tales," ""Barbaric Tales," and "Tragic Romances," 1897; The Dominion of Dreams," 1899; "The Divine Adventure," "Iona," and "Other Studies in Spiritual History," 1900; "Poems Old and New," "For the Beauty of an Idea," "The Magic Kingdoms," and "The House of Usna."

WHAT

THE APPEAL OF TRAGEDY.

HAT is the pleasure that human beings find in tragedy? Do we take pleasure in pity and fear, or in other painful experience?" To a discussion of these ancient riddles of esthetic experience Prof. Ethel Puffer, of Wellesley College, devotes an interesting chapter in her recent book, "The Psychology of Beauty." The writer begins, of course, with Aristotle's famous definition, which is as follows: "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." Every emotion contains, according to Aristotle, be it ever so painful, an ecstatic, and hence a pleasurable element. In the tragic emotion "pity and fear are aroused to be allayed, and to give pleasure in the arousing and the relief." But Miss Puffer maintains that the matter is not so simple as Aristotle's views would make it. Pity and fear, she argues, do not in themselves produce pleasure, relief, and repose. Therefore" these emotions as aroused by tragedy are either not what we know as pity and fear in real life, or the manner of their undergoing brings in an entirely new element on which Aristot e has not touched." Why do we feel with, rather than toward or about, the actors? she asks. She recalls the theory that emotion is the "instinctive response to a situation," but comments that "the spectator at a play is completely cut off from all possibilities of

influence on events." We read further:

Between his world and that of the footlights an inexpressible

gulf is fixed. He can not take an attitude,' he can have nothing to do in this galère.. Since he may not act, even those beginnings of action which make the basis of emotion are inhibited in him. The spectator at a play experiences much more clearly and sharply than the sympathetic observer; only the proportions of his mental contents are different. This, I say, accounts for the absence of the real pity and fear, which were supposed to be directed toward the persons in the play.

"Let us briefly recall the situation. The house is darkened and quiet; all lines converge to the stage, which is brightly lighted and heightened in visual effect by every device known to art. The onlooker's mind is emptied of its content; all feeling of self is pushed down to its very lowest level. He has before him a situation which he understands through sight and hearing, and in which he follows the action not only by comprehension but by instinctive imitation. This is the great vehicle of suggestion. We can not see tears rise without moisture in our two eyes; we reproduce a yawn even against our will; the sudden or the regular movement of a companion we are forced to follow, at least incipiently. Now the expression which we imitate brings up in us to a certain extent the whole complex of ideas and feeling-tones belonging to that expression . . a spectator at a play is forced . . . to follow quite literally, the emotional movements of the actors."

PROF. ETHEL PUFFER.

She maintains that "the much-discussed Katharsis or emotion of tragedy is not the experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but rather pleasure in the experience of ideas tinged with emotion."

...

most. We sit on the level of the creator of the work of art, not on that lower level of the physical struggle for material existence. Expanding this view, Miss Puffer continues:

These persons

"Every play contains at least two actors. are, normally, in conflict. Othello menaces, Desdemona shrinks; Nora asserts her right, Hilmar his claim; L'Aiglon vaunts his inherited personality, Metternich holds the candle to the mirror ! But what of the spectator? He can not at once shrink and menace, assert and deny. . . . Real emotion implies a definite set of reactions. . . two opposed movements can not take place at the same time. Ideas, however, can dwell together in amity . . . emotions, lacking their organic conditions, are in abeyance.

'This is the typical dramatic moment, for it is the one which is alone characteristic of the drama. Only in the simultaneous realization of two opposing forces is the full mutual checking of emotional impulses possible, and it is only in this simultaneous realization that the drama differs from all other forms of art. When the two antagonistic purposes are actually presented to the onlooker in the same moment of time, then alone can be felt the vividness of realization, the tension of conflict, the balance of emotion, the alleviation of the true Katharsis !

But what is this? No emotion, after all, when the very traditional test of our enjoyment of a play is the amount of feeling it arouses! where hearts beat, hands clench, tears flow! Emotion. there is, it may not be denied; but not the sympathetic emotion of the traditional theory. What emotion? The mutual checking of

impulses issues in a balance, a tension, a conflict which is yet a bond; and this it is which is the clew to the excitement or exaltation which in the dramatic experience usurps the place of definite feeling. . . The tense exaltation of the typical esthetic experience, undirected, unlimited, pure, of personal or particular reference, is reproduced in this nameless ecstasy of the tragic drama.

As we might have foreseen the peculiar Katharsis, or pleasurable disappearance or alleviation of emotion in tragedy, is based on just those elements in which the drama differs from other forms of art, Confrontation, not action as the dramatic principle, is the important deduction from our theory; is, indeed, but the objective aspect of it."

In the Greek drama the "only element in common with the modern type is found in the conflict of wills." As another example of this conflict, this confrontation of two opposing powers in idea, the medieval drama of "Everyman" is quoted as "nothing but a succession of duels, material or spiritual. It is, indeed, the two profiles confronting one another, our sympathy balanced and suspended, as it were, between them, which characterize our recollections of this whole great field." Further:

"The esthetic meaning of 'Lear' is not in the terrible retribution of pride and self-will, but in the cruel confrontation of father and daughters. The notoriously successful scene in an English drama of to-day, the duel of Sophy and Lord Quex-tolerably empty tho it is of real feeling and significance becomes successful merely through the consummate handling of the face-to-face element."

From these oppositions, these duels of influence with influence, "arise, for the catastrophe of drama, that exaltation and stern joy which are indissolubly connected with the experience of will in real life." A few minor quotations are worth attention, illuminating as to the point of view, as: "When there is a way out" of this collision or conflict, "we have comedy." But " tragedy ensues when there is no way out. Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it-completely justified, or at least felt as inevitable on both sides-the more we are shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to oneself and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies." And so the author thus sums up her original analysis: The "much-discussed Katharsis or emotion of tragedy is not the experience of emotions and pleasure in that experience, but rather pleasure in the experience of ideas tinged with emotion."

THE

THE FLIPPANCY OF MODERN HUMOR. HE late Canon Alfred Ainger, in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institute more than a decade ago and which now reaches this country for the first time, in his posthumous volumes of "Lectures and Essays," animadverts against certain tendencies in the humorous writing of his day in words which seem no less applicable to present conditions. Being a critic whose contemporaries were the writers of the mid-nineteenth century, his view of literature partook of the moral seriousness which characterized their outlook. These early Victorians, as Mr. Chesterton has put it, might say "We do not know," but not one of them ever ventured to say "We do not care.' It is this attitude of apparently not caring, as emphasized in the school of humorous writers who succeeded Dickens and Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, that Canon Ainger particularly condemns. The later humor he finds monotonous" and "wearying," and for the reason that its principal ingredient is scorn-"scorn too," he says, "which is not earnest enough to take the form of misanthropy, as with Swift, or even of a moral indignation against particular offenders, as with Pope." He charges those whom he designates as the "American drolls" with the responsibility of having set this fashion which he deprecates. We read further:

46

"

The popular variety of modern scorn, in writing called humor.

ous, is the flippant. And flippancy may be defined as the attitude which assumes that nothing in heaven or earth matters very much, and that any one is a simpleton who thinks it does. "That man had never kindly heart, nor ever sought to better his own kind, who

HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ.

Recipient of the Nobel prize in the field of idealistic literature.

first wrote satire with no pity in it.' So wrote Lord Tennyson; but 'the satire with no pity in it,' if prompted by a genuine aversion, is a more respectable thing than the satire which has no core of reality in it at all, but is mere badinage, or chaff, made out of the one simple prescription-a contempt for what once upon a time was considered rather worthy of respect than otherwise. Take some serious interest of human nature and suddenly and unexpectedly treat it as if it were not serious-that is the key to much of the popular humor of the day. The American drolls have used it largely. You know to whom I refer, and will not suppose me forgetful of such true humorists, scholars, and poets as J. R. Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes. And these American drolls (not the American humorists) have largely influenced the wags who provide us over here with a corresponding entertainment. The name of 'topsy-turvydom' has been coined for one of the most familiar of these forms. This, of course, is mere drollery, a clever feat of intellectual posture-making, and is absolutely devoid of any claim to be called humor. For its essence is contempt, its method is cynical, its quality is inhuman.. And by far the most ignoble kind of cynicism is the cynicism, not of conviction, but of having no convictions: the cynicism of caring nothing for anybody, if only a laugh can be got out of it.'

The conditions of life which find their symptoms in the kinds of humor above analyzed are not of a higher but of a lower order, the writer avers. And, he declares, it is because of this lowering of conditions that the methods of the older humorists are out of favor with us. He continues:

"We live in an age which is a strange mixture of over-fastidiousness and under-fastidiousness, and it is surely a sufficient illustration of it that many who find they have outgrown the humor of Dickens and Thackeray, yet seem to find unqualified delight in Mark Twain or Mr. Gilbert's Savoy extravaganzas. The humor which is most popular in England just now is built, not upon sentiment, but upon cynicism. I have kept this word 'sentiment' out of my lecture thus far, because it is so difficult to use in a sense that will command respect. . . . To most persons 'sentiment' means little more than sentimentality'; but the one thing is as distinct from the other as was the eloquence of John Bright from the rhetoric of the average popular preacher. And if it was 'sympathy' that gave John Bright's eloquence its real power, so it is sympathy that makes humor either strong or enduring. And in this sympathy, which includes reverence, I fear it must be justly said that the popular humor of to-day is wanting-and in wanting it, forfeits all just claim to the title. And I further venture to think that, in so far as the methods of the great humorists gone before us are out of favor with us, and seem to be poor and tame in comparison with our own, it is not because we have outgrown them, but because we have degenerated from them. It is not they

who are not good enough for us, but we who are not good enough for them. I know that there are those who, while they sneer at Dickens, yet profess to retain unbounded appreciation of Shakespeare or Sterne or Goldsmith. But I doubt in many cases if such criticism is quite sincere. Shakespeare is on our shelves and on our stages; but I do not see him much taken down from the shelf, or repaired to on the stage, save when he is furnished out with transformation scenes. We are hypocritical often even in our

amusements."

TH

NOBEL PRIZES FOR 1905.

HE announcement of the Nobel awards for 1905 reveals the fact that the lengthening list still lacks the name of any American. It has been remarked, also, that these prizes, instituted some years ago by Alfred Nobel, have very infrequently fallen to Englishmen. But these facts, says The Outlook (New York) are not to be regarded as the slightest evidence of unfairness in the committee of award. It will be remembered that the five annual prizes, of about $40,000 each, are bestowed for the most important discoveries in physics, in chemistry, in physiology or medicine, for the most distinguished work in the field of literature, and for the best effort toward the fraternity of nations and the promotion of peace. The peace prize is awarded by the Norwegian Storthing, and the literary and scientific prizes by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. This year the peace prize goes to the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, whose novel, "Die Waffen Nieder!" ("Ground Arms "), published ten years ago, is said to have supplied the impulse which resulted in the birth of The Hague peace tribunal. She is the second woman to receive a Nobel prize, the other being Madame Curie, for the discovery of radium. A leading Ger

man review has said of the baroness's book: "No literature and no language can point to any presentation of this subject so comprehensive, so exhaustive, and at the same time so enthralling. We are here dealing-and in this judgment many men of eminence concur-with the most important work treating of war that has ever appeared, and with one of the highest achievements, moreover, in the range of contemporary belles lettres." The Baroness von Suttner was one of the Austrian delegates to the International Peace Congress held at Boston last year, and is an earnest advocate and organizer in the cause of international peace. The award in medicine goes to Prof. Robert Koch, of Berlin, for his efforts toward the prevention of tuberculosis.

BARONESS BERTHA VON SUTTNER.

Her novel, "Ground Arms," has won her the Nobel prize for the promotion of peace.

In chemistry the prize falls to Prof. Adolph von Beyer, for his work in organic chemistry, while the prize-winner in physics is Professor Lenard, of the Kiel University, because of his researches into the nature of cathode rays. The literary prize is