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LETTERS AND ART.

COLLEGE EDUCATION AS A TRAINING FOR LIFE.

THE

HE antagonistic views held by many as to the practical value of a college education have lately been prominently exemplified in the case of Mr. Charles M. Schwab, president of the new steel trust, who counsels boys who aim at success in business to avoid the colleges, and Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who values colleges so highly that he has recently startled the world by his great gift to the Scottish universities. Neither of these is a college man. From the standpoint of the latter, Mr. Gilmer Speed, the well-known American writer and a grand-nephew of John Keats, treats the subject at some length in Ainsley's Magazine (June). After referring to the fact that of the twenty-four men who have reached the office of President of the United States, fifteen were college men and only three without what may be called academic training, while all of the non-graduates save two were members of a learned profession, he continues:

"Suppose we leave this field of speculation, which leads back to the beginning of our national life, and confine ourselves to the present. In the present Cabinet of President McKinley there are eight members. Six of these are college men; one, himself a non-graduate, was a professor in a college when he entered the Cabinet. The remaining eighth man finished his education at an academy which likely as not ranked in scholarship with many of the colleges that confer degrees in all the dignity of a Latin text that many a recipient would be stumped to put into literal English. The administration of Mr. McKinley, himself not a college man, tho the graduate of a law school, is mainly conducted by men' of college training. There is probably no man in the country, not a crank, who will say it is any the worse for being so. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, where the legislative and judicial coordinate branches of the Government do business, let us see what is the collegiate condition of the judges and legislators. The judges are as follows, with the college of each opposite his name:

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"Here we see that the members of our highest court do not rank any higher as college men than the members of the Cabinet, though they are appointed and confirmed to office in large measure by reason of their great and sound information in a branch of learning that has been called the sum of all knowledge. Indeed, the magazine editors of the country, and the newspaper editors of New York City, as will presently be seen, in proportion have had greater early scholastic advantages. The Supreme Court justices, however, presumably on account of the nature of their work, are hard students all their lives, and some men comparatively illiterate in the beginning of their career on this exalted bench have become ripe scholars long before the end of their service. Judges, however, have better opportunities for self-improvement than almost any other men in active life. . . . .

"It has been difficult to determine exactly the collegiate status of the members of Congress. As well as I could make it out, it stands thus: Out of 86 members of the Senate, 44 are college men; out of 360 members of the House of Representatives 168 were graduated from college. . . . I confess that I was surprised at the showing, and I do not hesitate to say to the youth who would go to Congress that he will further his chances enormously if he will go through college and bear a proud sheepskin to his home, even tho he never be able to read its Latin text.

"I suspect that in the professions of medicine and law the proportion of college men who reach distinction and high earning

capacity is higher than in the higher fields of politics. In journalism, whether literary or political, the proportion of leaders who have had the advantage of college training is noteworthy. Of the eight leading New York dailies we find that seven of the editors-in-chief are college men. Of the fifteen most important monthly magazines, fourteen of the editors have been graduated from colleges. These may seem to be the higher intellectual walks in which others do not strive. Such is not the case. The others do strive, but they appear not to get up as high as the men who have had the four years at college. Recently a very useful and interesting book has been compiled, Who's Who in America. This compilation was intended to include all living Americans that had done things so notable as to make it interesting for the public to know about their achievements, their personality and history. But the title is more descriptive than any elucidation of it. Now this book includes 8,602 names, and these are presumably the present men and the women of distinction in the country in all the fields of endeavor. Of these, 3,237 were graduated from colleges, 271 were graduated from West Point and Annapolis, 733 attended college but were not graduated, 693 went to academies and seminaries, and 171 to high schools. That strikes me as an enormous proportion, if we grant that to get into this book is to indicate success already achieved. There are only a trifle over 25,000 college men turned out into the fields of practical work every year, while the total sum of new workers is largely in excess of 500,000-that is, as twenty to Yet, when we make up the roll of persons of distinction, we find that one out of two and a third of the men of note are college-bred; while if we make the exclusion a little less rigid and include all those mentioned above as having had the advantages of college training, we shall see that more than half of the distinguished persons in the country are within the inclusions. The figures seem to me to make a very plain story so far as what we call the higher walks of life are concerned.

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"As to practical affairs, it has been impossible for me to gather data anywhere nearly so comprehensive as that which I have presented. . . . I selected what seemed to me the half hundred most considerable railway companies in the country, and began a canvass of the presidents. I learned that eighteen of these were college men. That is largely in excess of the proportion of bankers, and proves, mayhap, that railroading is more intricate than cent per cent. While speaking of men of affairs there are some who loom so large that there is no indelicacy in mentioning them. The names of J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, James J. Hill, James Stillman, Charles Schwab, and William C. Whitney are all household words, and have been ever since the consolidation of those huge industrial enterprises that almost baffle the imagination in their immensity of inclusion. Of these only one--the last named-is a college man in the sense that we ordinarily use the term. Mr. Morgan went through the Boston High School and then attended lectures at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Likely as not he is as much a college man as he would have been if he had stayed at home and gone through Harvard or Yale. And quite rightly he should be set down as such. The rest of them are not college men at all, tho Mr. Hill and Mr. Schwab each went to an academy. But Mr. Schwab, who is at the head of the largest engineering works the world has ever dreamed of, has acquired his technical knowledge mainly by his own efforts and by study in practical work, rather than in schools of theoretical instruction. The others in the list, Mr. Carnegie, the two Rockefellers, and Mr. Stillman, had but common-school advantages.

"In this era of big things it is interesting to consider the cost of college instruction. That may enable us to make up our minds as to whether or not it pays. The grounds and buildings are appraised at $133,000,000; the productive funds at $138,000,000 ; the scientific apparatus at $14,000,000; the benefactions at $21,000,000, while the total income of them all is $21,000,000. That is a great sum, even greater than the $16,000,000 the poor people of the city of New York annually pay into the policy shops of the metropolis in a game in which they have no chance to win. Here is an illuminating contrast. The whole country pays $21,000,000 annually for its highest education; the metropolitan city alone puts $16,000,000 yearly in a game that only preys on the ignorant. I fancy no college man ever played policy except in the pursuit of knowledge and by way of experiment. When ignorance is so costly, higher education can not be very dear at twice what is now spent on it."

BROWNING'S PROFOUNDEST POEM.

UNIQUE dictum has just been pronounced by Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In a recent article he pronounces Browning's short and not very widely read poem, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came," to be among the greatest of imaginative works, and "Browning's profoundest attempt to touch the mystery of life." In Poet-Lore (April-May-June), he

writes:

"Childe Roland' ranks with the great imaginative works, with 'Christabel' and 'The Ancient Mariner,' and so unspeakably above Poe's 'Raven' that one is surprised to have heard it mentioned in the comparison; but the poet himself has left us no key to it outside of his own lines. And the criticism of others stops before it, mainly because of its supreme excellence. We see on reflection that there is really a Dark Tower in every thoughtful person's life, and that consequently the tower differs for each person. The power symbolizes the supreme aim of one's life at any moment,—something which may be a secret to one's next-door neighbor, to one's husband, wife, or children, and, very likely, to oneself, since we are as often guided by unconscious temperament as by deliberate purpose. At least, the tower stands for some controlling action to which all events and purposes have led up,-some experience never, perhaps, to be estimated at its full value until the leisure of the future life,-if that be leisure, which I doubt, at least for New England souls. Nor are we ever sure that heaven will afford us on a larger scale the delights of mutual investigation, altho I once heard my eloquent cousin, William Henry Channing, predict that we should spend much of eternity in unraveling the strange secrets of one another's lives. Alas! it is doubtful whether we shall ever unravel even those of our own.

For

"The poet Keats in classifying nature places at the head 'things real, as sun, moon, and passages of Shakespeare,' thus placing all else in a secondary and subordinate position. Browning the tower of 'Childe Roland' was a thing as real, as clearly to be dealt with, as little to be evaded, as a moonrise or an earthquake. It was a fact in the universe. You observe that he takes Edgar's first line by itself, and attributes the 'Fie, foh, and fum' to the wandering mind. This gives a key to the whole situation. Childe Roland's quest symbolizes the whole struggle and achievement of man. As to the details, every man interprets the tower for himself, every man has his own definition: no two persons can have the same tower. The visible materials of the picture are, after all, not so very remarkable. As our associate, Mr. Latimer, has said, 'There is nothing in it that does not belong to our New England scenery,'-not an item except the tower itself; and that is the most real thing about it, precisely because we can not see it, except in imagination. As another of our associate members, Mrs. Marean, has said: "This is a poem in which every reader may legitimately find his own meaning, just as he may in any other tale of a quest; but its descriptive power is of an order not dependent on the significance of the Round Tower at which it leaves us.'

"The Childe Roland' poem is simply Browning's profoundest attempt to touch the mystery of life. The Dark Tower stands for the supreme secret of each man's existence: we follow up streams, tread mountains, and reach only this at last. Friends and foes help to guide us to it; but we must go alone. The last finger extended may even be that of a malicious enemy. We may so shrink from it that the sky looks dark, the whole surroundings repulsive. All our early memories come back upon us, veiled in a shadowy mist; yet we go forward. This is the poem. The critics exhaust their variety of conjecture to show what it all means. Dr. Furnivall states that he asked Browning three times whether the poem was an allegory, and that Browning had said each time that it was simply dramatic-as if any human being could tell where ‘dramatic' ends and ‘allegory' begins! Given what is dramatic enough, and every human being may draw its own allegory from it. Mr. Kirkman and Mr. Sears Cook think the tower means death; Mrs. R. Gratz Allen interprets the moral as lying in sin and punishment; Mrs. Orr and Mrs. Drewry find that it stands for life and truth; Prof. Arlo Bates 'can think of nothing more heroic, more noble, more inspiring,' than the whole poem. As I said, every man finds in it his own tower; and, the more towers suggested, the greater

tribute to the spell, as woven by Browning. Life's supreme mystery, --that is the Dark Tower. It is the scene of each man's problem, the point to which all the paths of his life for the time converge, the concentration of the soul upon its own crisis, its own conflict. It is rarely that any one else knows precisely what his neighbor's Dark Tower is. Even the time of his approach to it is very likely unknown to his dearest friend. In a long life, or one long in emotion, if not in years, he may even pass through several such towers in succession: he never forgets how he felt when he approached them; but, strange to say, he forgets his exit from them. When he passed through one and has turned round, the Dark Tower has disappeared: even Browning provides no outlet from it; but, fortunately, life does very often, and we emerge. Browning's hero naturally sees for the moment in imagination all previous adventurers as lost. Yet each may, without his knowing it, have lived through the day, and conquered his tower by facing it; and each commonplace friend by his side, did he but know it, may have survived a greater peril than his own.

"I know of nothing in literature outside of Browning which is pitched upon the same key with his poem or carries us a step into the same world."

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON'S IMPRESSION OF LITERARY AND ARTISTIC AMERICA.

"VAST

AST expansion, collective force, inexhaustible energy "— these are the impressions made on Mr. Frederic Harrison by the physical and commercial characteristics of the United States during his recent trip to this country. Unlike most British travelers, he found very much in America to commend in the realm of art and general culture; and on the whole a more friendly appreciation of this country by a foreign visitor has not appeared in several years than is to be found in his recent article. Its value is by no means lessened by the fact that it is combined with some discriminating criticism. After giving what may almost be termed an enthusiastic survey of the material and political development of America, Mr. Harrison turns to the intellectual and social side. Writing in The Nineteenth Century and After (June) he says:

"Of course, for the American citizen and the thoughtful visitor, the real problem is whether this vast prosperity, this boundless future of theirs, rests upon an equal expansion in the social, intellectual, and moral sphere. They would be bold critics who should maintain it, and few thinking men in the United States do so without qualifications and misgivings. As to the universal diffusion of education, the energy which is thrown into it, and the wealth lavished on it from sources public and private, no doubt can exist. Universities, richly endowed, exist by scores, colleges by many hundreds, in every part of the Union. Art schools, training colleges, technical schools, laboratories, polytechnics, and libraries are met with in every thriving town. The impression left on my mind is that the whole educational machinery must be at least tenfold that of the United Kingdom. That open to women must be at least twentyfold greater than with us, and it is rapidly advancing to meet that of men, both in numbers and in quality. Nor can I resist the impression that the education in all grades is less perfunctory, amateurish, and casual than is too often our own experience at home. The libraries, laboratories, museums, and gymnasia of the best universities and colleges are models of equipment and organization. The 'pious founder' has long died out in Europe. He is alive in America, and seems to possess some magic source of inexhaustible munifi

cence.

"Libraries, of course, are not learning; museums and laboratories are not knowledge; much less is an enormous reading public literature. And, however much libraries may be crowded with readers, however spacious and lavish are the mountings of technical schools, and tho seventy millions of articulate men and women can pass the seventh standard of a board school, the question of the fruit of all this remains to be answered. The passing visitor to the United States forms his own impression as to the bulk and the diffusion of the instruments of education; but

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he is in no better position than any one else to measure the product. The sight of such a vast apparatus of education, such demand for education, and that emphatically by both sexes, must create a profound impression. The Cooper Institute of New York, one of the earliest of these popular endowments, still managed and developed by three generations of the same family from its venerable founder, the Jeremy Bentham of New York, is a typical example of a people's palace where science, art, and literature are offered absolutely free to all comers. But what is the result? Few Americans pretend that, with all the immense diffusion of elementary knowledge of science in the United States, the higher science is quite abreast of that of Europe. scholarship, in the technical sense of the word, in spite of the vast numbers of 'graduates,' the same thing may be said. And no one pretends that American literature rivals that of France in its finer forms-or indeed that of England.

Of

"The reason for this is not obscure, and it is hardly covered by the ordinary suggestion that the American people are absorbed in the pursuit of gain and material improvement. However much this may react on the intellectual world, the numbers of the American people are so great that numerically, if not proportionately, those who are devoted to science, art, and literature are at least as many as they are in England. The vast development of material interests is rather a stimulus to the pursuit of science than a hindrance, as the vast multiplication of books is a stimulus to authorship. But why suppose that a general interest in practical science conduces to high scientific culture, or that millions of readers tend to foster a pure taste in letters? The contrary result would be natural. Practical mechanics is not the same thing as scientific genius. And the wider the reading public becomes, the lower is the average of literary culture. But other things combine to the same result. The absence of any capital city, any acknowledged literary center, in a country of vast area with scattered towns, the want of a large society exclusively occupied with culture and forming a world of its own, the uniformity of American life, and the little scope it gives to the refined ease and the graceful dolce far niente of European beaux mondes, all of these have something to do with a low average of original literature. The lighter American literature has little of the charm and sparkle that mark the best writing of France, because, apart from national gifts of esprit, American society does not lend itself to the daily practise of polished conversation. After all, it is conversation, the spoken thought of groups of men and women in familiar and easy intercourse, which gives the aroma of literature to written ideas. And where the arts of conversation have but a moderate scope and value, the literature will be solid but seldom brilliant.

"But all these conditions, if they tend in the same direction, are perhaps of minor importance. The essential point is that literature of a high order is the product of long tradition and of a definite social environment. Millions of readers do not make it, nor myriads of writers, tho they read the same books and use the same language and think the same thoughts. A distinctive literature is the typical expression of some organized society, cultivated by long use and molded on accepted standards. It would be as unreasonable to look for a formed and classical style in a young, inorganic, and fluid society, however large it may be and however voracious of printed matter, as to look in such a land for Westminster Abbeys and Windsor Castles. America will no doubt in the centuries to come produce a national literature of its own, when it has had time to create a typical society of its own and intellectual traditions of its own.

"Literature, politics, manners, and habits all bear the same impress of the dominant idea of American society-the sense of equality. It has its great side, its conspicuous advantages, and it has also its limitations and its weakness. It struck me that the sense of equality is far more national and universal in America than it is in France, for all the peans to equality that the French pour forth and their fierce protestations to claim it. 'Liberty, equality, and fraternity' is not inscribed on public edifices in the United States, because no American citizen-or, rather no white citizen-can conceive of anything else."

Mr. Harrison has much to say of the artistic side of American life, particularly of the architecture. He writes:

"America is making violent efforts to evolve a national architecture; but as yet it has produced little but miscellaneous imi

tations of European types and some wonderful constructive de vices. A walk along the Broadway and Fifth Avenue of New York leaves the impression of an extraordinary medley of incongruous styles, highly ingenious adaptations, admirable artistic workmanship, triumphs of mechanics, the lavish use of splendid materials, and an architectural pet-pourri which almost rivals the Rue des Nations at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. There are some excellent copies of European buildings, such as the Giralda of Seville, Venetian palaces, châteaux from Touraine, Palladian loggie, and here and there a German schloss. There are some beautiful revivals of fine art, such as the thirteenth-century Gothic St. Patrick's, the Italian palaces of the Metropolitan and University clubs, the Renaissance palaces of the Vanderbilts. Facing the Central Park, each millionaire seems to have commissioned his architect to build him a mansion of any ancient style from Byzantine to the last French empire, provided only it was in contrast to the style of his neighbors. So commissioned, the artist has lavished skilful carving, singular ingenuity, and noble material in stone, marble, and mosaic. Many of these are interesting experiments and some are beautiful; but the general effect of such rampant eclecticism is rather bewildering.

"In constructive novelties the American builder is consummate. Amongst these are the Brobdingnagian piles of twenty stories, the substitution of lifts for staircases, the construction of edifices of steel, the profuse use of stone and marble as ornaments rather than as material, the multiplication of baths, heating apparatus, electric and other mechanical devices, and the intensely modern and up-to-date contrivances which put to shame the clumsy conservatism of the Old World. Nothing in Europe since the fall of old Rome and Byzantium, not even Genoa in its prime, has equaled the lavish use of magnificent marble columns, granite blocks, and ornamental stone as we see it to-day in the United States. The Illinois Trust Bank of Chicago-a vast marble palace-is, I suppose, the most sumptuous and one of the most beautiful commercial edifices in the world, and its safety-deposit vaults are among the sights of that city. The reckless use of precious marbles seems to threaten exhaustion of the quarries, but one is assured that they are ample for all demands. Why more use is not made in Europe of the magnificent marbles of America is not very obvious. But we certainly might easily adopt some of the constructive devices of their builders. Not, one trusts, the outrageous towers of Babel, in twenty or twenty-four floors and five hundred rooms, built of steel, and faced with granite as a veneer, which are seen in New York and Chicago, and hopelessly disfigure both cities. If these became general, the streets would become dark and windy cañons, and human nature would call out for their suppression. But the British architect has much to learn from modern American builders. In matters of construction, contrivance, the freeuse of new kinds of stone and wood, of plumbing, heating, and the minor arts of fitting, the belated European in America feels. himself a Rip van Winkle, whirled into a new century and a later civilization."

The Capitol at Washington impressed Mr. Harrison as being "the most effective mass of public buildings in the world," especially when viewed at some distance, and in spite of some wellknown constructive defects. "As an effective public edifice of a grandiose kind, I doubt if any capital city can show its equal," he continues. "This is largely due to the admirable proportions of its central dome group, which I hold to be, from the pictorial point of view, more successful than those of St. Peter's, the cathedral of Florence, Agia Sophia, St. Isaac's, the Panthéon, St. Paul's, or the new cathedral of Berlin." And Mr. Harrison has no hesitation in saying that the site of the Capitol at Washington is "the noblest in the world." "Washington, the youngest cityin the world," he adds, "bids fair to become, before the twentieth century is ended, the most beautiful and certainly the most commodious. It is the only capital which has been laid out from the first entirely on modern lines, with organic unity of plan, unencumbered with any antique limitations and confusions."

For Chicago, where Mr. Harrison spent a large part of his visit, he has some very appreciative words:

"Chicago struck me as being somewhat unfairly condemned as devoted to nothing but Mammon and pork. Certainly, during

my visit, I heard of nothing but the progress of education, university endoyments, people's institutes, libraries, museums, art schools, workmen's model dwellings and farms, literary culture, and scientific foundations. I saw there one of the best equipped and most vigorous art schools in America, one of the best Toynbee Hall settlements in the world, and perhaps the most rapidly developed university in existence. My friends of the Union League Club, themselves men of business proud of their city, strongly urged me to dispense with the usual visit to the grain elevators and the stockyards, where hogs and oxen are slaughtered by millions and consigned to Europe, but to spend my time in inspecting libraries, schools, and museums. No city in the world can show such enormous endowments for educational, scientific, and charitable purposes lavished within ten years, and still unlimited in supply."

WE

A NATION OF POETS.

WHEN Confucius was laying down principles for the educational system of China-principles dominant to this day -he made no reference to the educational trinity of our forefathers, reading, writing, and arithmetic, but presented a trinity of his own: 'Let poetry," he said, "be the beginning, manners the middle, and music the finish." The Chinese are accordingly a nation of poets, lyrical poets. The educated Chinaman not only celebrates all important events of his life in verse, but even the most ordinary occurrences call forth the lyric strain. When he escorts a guest, for instance, to some pretty pavilion or hillside, the ready pencil comes forth from his book and an impromptu poem is produced. All this may be somewhat artificial, writes Dr. W. A. P. Martin, president of the Imperial Univer

REV. DR. W. A. P. MARTIN.

sity, Peking, but it has its root in national sentiment; and he adds: "Of China it is true to-day as of no other nation that an apprenticeship in the art of poetry forms a leading feature in her educational system. . . . No youth who aspires to civil office or literary honors is exempted from composing verse in his trial examination. To be a tax-collector he is tested not in arithmetic but in prosody-a usage that has been in force for nearly a thousand years."

Epic poetry, Dr. Martin tells us, is wholly wanting in China, and dramatic poetry, tho abundant, is very primitive. But of didactic and lyric poetry there is an enormous quantity, and the lyrical verse is of a high quality. Official proclamations are frequently thrown into the form of didactic poetry, and there is a popular encyclopedia, in forty volumes, composed entirely in

verse.

Dr. Martin deals chiefly, however, with Chinese lyrical poetry and reproduces (in The North American Review, June) a number of charming specimens. Here are stanzas written by Kia Yi, a minister of state who was banished about 200 B.C., which are strongly suggestive of Poe's "Raven":

Betwixt moss-covered, reeking walls,

An exiled poet lay

On his bed of straw reclining,
Half despairing, half repining-
When, athwart the window sill,
In flew a bird of omen ill,

And seemed inclined to stay.
To my book of occult learning
Suddenly I thought of turning,
All the mystery to know

Of that shameless owl or crow,
That would not go away.
"Wherever such a bird shall enter
'Tis sure some power above has sent her,"
So said the mystic book, "to show
The human dweller forth must go."

But where, it did not say.
Then anxiously the bird addressing,
And my ignorance confessing,
"Gentle bird, in mercy deign
The will of Fate to me explain.

Where is my future way?"

It raised its head as if 'twere seeking
To answer me by simply speaking;
Then folded up its sable wing,
Nor did it utter anything;

But breathed a "Well-a-day!"
More eloquent than any diction,
That simple sigh produced conviction;
Furnishing to me the key

Of the awful mystery

That on my spirit lay.

"Fortune's wheel is ever turning,
To human eye there's no discerning
Weal or wo in any state;
Wisdom is to bide your fate."

That is what it seemed to say
By that simple "Well-a-day."

[graphic]

The Sappho of China was Pan Tsi Yu, born about 18 B.C.. The best known of her poems is the following ode inscribed on a fan and presented to the Emperor:

Of fresh, new silk, all snowy white,

And round as harvest moon;

A pledge of purity and love,

A small but welcome boon.

While Summer lasts, borne in the hand, Or folded on the breast,

'Twill gently soothe thy burning brow, And charm thee to thy rest.

But ah! When Autumn frosts descend,
And Winter's winds blow cold,
No longer sought, no longer loved,
'Twill lie in dust and moid.

This silken fan, then, deign accept,
Sad emblem of my lot-

Caressed and fondled for an hour,
Then speedily forgot.

The culmination of Chinese lyric poetry was reached during the dynasty of Tang (620-907 A.D.). Tu Fu and Li Po were the Dryden and Pope of that age, we are told. The former had a long struggle with poverty, while the latter became early a court favorite, and after his death was adjudged "the brightest star that ever shone in the poetical firmament of China." Dr. Martin reproduces two of his poems, one of which, a drinking-song, we reprint:

ON DRINKING ALONE BY MOONLIGHT.
Here are flowers and here is wine;
But there's no friend with me to join
Hand to hand and heart to heart,
In one full bowl before we part.
Rather, then, than drink alone,
I'll make bold to ask the Moon
To condescend to lend her face
The moment and the scene to grace.
Lo! she answers and she brings
My shadow on her silver wings-
That makes three, and we shall be,
I ween, a merry company.
The modest Moon declines the cup,
My shadow promptly takes it up;
And when I dance, my shadow fleet
Keeps measure with my fleeting feet.
Altho the Moon declines to tipple,
She dances in yon shining ripple;
And when I sing, my festive song
The echoes of the Moon prolong.
Say, when shall we next meet together?
Surely not in cloudy weather,
For you, my boon companion dear,
Come only when the sky is clear.

MR

SLIPSHOD USE OF THE ENGLISH

LANGUAGE.

R. Alfred Ayres has been for years belaboring actors and actresses for their loose way of pronouncing common words, and he has published a number of popular little books, the latest of them entitled "Some Ill-Used Words," designed to correct the more flagrant errors in speech and writing. In Harper's Magazine (July) he makes a plea for more care in the use of our mother-tongue, and indicts the English-speaking people as offenders beyond the people of any other of the civilized nations. He writes:

"From observation I know that in Germany and in France, and I am told that in Spain and in Italy, a critical knowledge of one's mother-tongue is reckoned the most desirable of all the polite accomplishments. Nor do I doubt that the like is true of other continental countries-Holland, Denmark, and Sweden, for example. In Berlin, where I once was quite well acquainted, in cultured circles, during an entire evening, no matter how many present, one would not hear a word mispronounced or a sentence wrongly constructed, complicated as the German grammar is. Nor would one hear anything that savored of dialect, except a slight missounding of the g. All the difficult-and gloriously sonorous-vowel sounds, which never by any chance are made by the lower orders, one would hear made by every one without exception in a cultured circle in all their purity. Never a slip in syntax, never a dative, for example, where the accusative is required, an error constantly made by the less educated.

"In France, one finds the cultured quite as fastidious in their speech as are the cultured Germans. There, too, one hears no mispronouncing, and no involuntary syntactical slips. Euphony with the Frenchman is paramount, and to avoid certain verbal terminations that are ear-offending, he will sometimes employ a construction not strictly grammatical; but aside from that the cultured Frenchman is always strictly grammatical.

"How different in the most cultured English-speaking circles! True, one can not, without attracting attention, use seen for saw or saw for seen, done for did, or put two negatives in a sentence; but one can misuse the auxiliary verbs continually, misuse the tenses, use adverbs where adjectives are required, adjectives where adverbs are required, misuse the cases, use lay for lie, since for ago, without for unless, the indicative where the subjunctive is required, and so on and on, without attracting attention, unless there chances to be a stickler for purity present."

But in matters of orthoepy, Mr. Ayres thinks, the English and Americans are especially flagrant offenders. Go where one will, he says, one meets with college and seminary graduates that mispronounce at every breath. He continues:

"Within a month I have met a graduate of a New England college and a graduate of a Pennsylvania seminary that pronounced father fother: and daughter dot-er. It is quite safe to assert that fully twenty-five per cent. of our educated people pronounce the little, much-used word very incorrectly. Instead of the vowel's being pronounced short and up in the teeth, it is pronounced in the throat, which is very objectionable, or it is so prolonged as to make it very like long a. One's mispronouncing comes, of course, from one's surroundings. If a child never hears any mispronouncing, it will never mispronounce-at the least, never any of the words in common use. This being true, how desirable it is to pronounce well, since to pronounce ill is evidence, as far as it goes, that one's surroundings have been of the unlettered sort! A gross error, orthoepical or grammatical, may quickly take the nap off the handsomest suit that ever came from the tailor."

Among the specifications which Mr. Ayres brings to support his indictment are: sounding the a short (as in can) in pronouncing such words as basket, dance, fast, half, etc., whereas the proper sound lies between that of a in fat and a in father; sounding the o in such words as body, gone, on, song, as if it were an a; mangling final unaccented vowels in such words as peril, interim, judgment, chapel, Latin; giving the sound of o in nor to the same letter in the final syllable of words like pastor, castor, actor, whereas the o in such words is obscure and should

not be heard. Of all the common errors, the hardest to correct, Mr. Ayres says, is in the sounding of a in such words as care, dare, swear. "The correct sound is made in the throat, the incorrect sound is nasal and is made in the roof of the mouth."

R

"L'AIGLON" IN ENGLAND.

OSTAND'S latest play, in which the Napoleonic legend plays the dominant part, does not, naturally, appeal to the English playgoing public as it appealed to the French, nor even as it appealed to the American. And yet, when the critic of Literature (London, June 15) seeks for other plays with which to compare it, he does it the honor of choosing Shakespeare's "Hamlet" for the comparison. This critic, A. B. Walkley, writes of its recent production in London by Bernhardt as follows:

"Considered merely as a play, 'L'Aiglon' is essentially undramatic, because it lacks unity of theatrical impression, nor does it even present a series of definite and decisive actions. What unity it has is a unity of ideas; it raises the ghost of the Napo leonic legend; but, in the language of the spiritualistic séance, the ghost will not consent to 'materialize.' It may be said that the unity of some of Shakespeare's chronicle-plays (and ‘L'Aiglon' is a chronicle-play—the 'tragicall historie' of the education, futile aspirations, and premature death of the Duke of Reichstadt) is also a unity of idea only, but then there is no chronicleplay of Shakespeare which fails, as this play fails, to present a series of definite and decisive actions. It may also be said that indecision and inaction are of the very essence of the story, which is that of a Napoleonic Hamlet, a 'Hamlet blanc,' as they call him. The answer is that 'Hamlet,' tragedy of irresolution tho it be at its core, does on its surface contrive to present much bustling and even violently melodramatic action. In lieu of action, M. Rostand gives us curious details, 'documentary' bricà-brac and literary embroidery."

Mr. Walkley remarks further that there are "two really fine imaginative moments in the play" - one the mirror scene, where Metternich endeavors to show the Duke that he is his mother's child rather than his father's, and the other the scene of the imaginative reproduction of battle on the field of Wagram, when "one feels that John Bright's 'Angel of Death' has passed over the scene and' you can almost hear the beating of his wings.' "Max," writing in The Saturday Review (London, June 15) in the tone of raillery that seems to be the vogue with dramatic critics nowadays in England, and is being imitated to a considerable extent on this side, says:

"There are they who would encore eternity. Some of these folks, I make no doubt, were at the first night of 'L'Aiglon,' and felt, when the thing ceased, that they had been spending a very happy four-five-five hundred-and-five—how many hours, by the by, was it? Would that I could classify myself among these happy inexhaustibles! But I can not; nor (it comforts me to believe) could the vast majority of my fellow first-nighters and of them who have seen the play since its production. You call us insular? We hang our heads, pleading in extenuation that we live on an island. Were we Frenchmen, probably we should enjoy 'L'Aiglon' very much. For this probability there are two reasons; Firstly, Frenchmen can listen with pleasure to reams of rhetoric in theaters. If the rhetoric be good in itself, they care not at all whether it be or be not dramatically to the point. Secondly, Frenchmen have an enthusiastic cult for Napoleon. Now, 'L'Aiglon' is composed chiefly of reams of excellent but irrelevant rhetoric about Napoleon, and reams of details about him. Little wonder, then, that Paris took kindly to it. But how should London follow suit? Unless it be dramatic, rhetoric, however good, bores us: such is our fallen nature."

THE new prominence of Mr. W. D. Howells in American critical literature has lately attracted attention. By the terms of his agreement with Messrs. Harpers, Mr. Howells now furnishes one article monthly for Harper's Magazine ("The Easy Chair "), for The North American Review, and for the present for Harper's Bazar. He thus has a unique opportunity of reaching three numerous classes of readers, and of registering his views on American literature and drama.

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