and America, particularly with respect to all questions of arbitration. Proposed by Hodgson Pratt. The Congress voted for a yearly conference of teachers and professors from schools and universities, and for unions of the students to meet at the various universities in turn.

5. The means whereby the public press may be influenced. The public press is too often the cause of the nation's quarrels. The editor of Il Secolo, E. T. Moneta, delivered a witty and sarcastic speech on the subject. It was voted that the societies of peace cannot attain any lasting results so long as public opinion does not strive against national hatred and war ideas. The press has been too willing to encourage national prejudices against neighbors, and has not helped the friends of peace in any way. Its great power is used too much for selfish purposes. The Congress votes its thanks to those few papers, which under adverse circumstances, have fought for the cause of peace. The Congress urges the establishment of a newspaper press to counteract the spiteful papers now issued. The next Congress will be convened at Bern, August, 1892.

IN.

POLITICS AND INDUSTRY.
THOMAS WHITTAKER.

Macmillan's Magazine, London, January.

N Europe there is at present no "military problem" in the sense in which there is an "industrial problem." This was not always so. Theories as to the form military organization should take were involved with disputed questions about the political structure of society. Partly by the influence of general ideas and partly by the conflict of forces, a solution capable of lasting for a time has been at length attained.

The cessation of the military problem as a question of general politics has been accompanied by the rise of the “industrial problem." A certain industrial system was accepted by everyone, and all change that was introduced in it came about through unconscious processes; or more exactly, through processes not determined by any conscious effort on the part of society, to shape the industrial system as it ought to be. So far as there was any conscious collective effort, it was simply an effort to promote prosperity within the lines of the existing system. It need hardly be said that the present is not a time when this is all that is aimed at. The whole attitude of society or of the State towards industry has become a question for conscious deliberation. The question is not simply to find the means of attaining an end that is agreed upon. There is no agreement even as to the general form of the solution. This being so, the question is not one simply for experts. At its present stage light may be thrown on it by reasoning that proceeds on entirely general grounds; that is, without any reference to specific proposals.

The best means of throwing light upon the question in its general aspect seems to be a classification of the chief possible solutions. There is at least a chance that the right solution may be arrived at by eliminating the wrong ones.

First the solution known as laissez faire may be considered. The advocates of this solution may be most correctly described as industrial anarchists. In spite of disclaimers, this is the doctrine that furnishes the intellectual basis for all attacks on "socialistic legislation." It owes its plausibility, partly to the fact that it really embodies some truth, and partly to a confusion. The confusion consists in an identification of economical laissez faire with political freedom. The truth it contains is the clear perception of some results of the science known as political economy.

The type of society that consistent industrial anarchy tends to produce is the plutocratic. When no function of the State in relation to industry is recognized beyond that of clearing the ground for unlimited competition, the consequence is that everything is made subordinate to this kind of industrial struggle, and that those who are most proficient in it, attain, together with wealth, the largest share of political power.

With conscious or unconscious art, the industrial anarchists proclaim their cause to be that of individual freedom. But when we look at the actual state of the case, the contradiction between individual freedom and regulation of industry by law is seen to be illusory.

The operations of the greater industry-and this is what it is commonly proposed to regulate-are part of an immense and complicated mechanism, where there is no room for really free contract in matters of detail between individual employers and workmen. The action of the mechanism, left to itself, is determined by the action of the comparatively blind forces recognized in economics-love of gain, and need of subsist

ence.

The antithesis of the anarchical solution is the socialistic. Socialism in its proper sense must be taken to mean the actual conduct by the central government or its subordinate governments and agents, of all industrial operations. It involves, of course, the substitution of collective for individual property. The purely economic argument against socialism is that it would be less efficient in producing wealth. Work done under direct compulsion of social authority would be badly done, and the absence of the hope that exists where there is competition would further depress all energies. For the Socialist the State exists, first, as an industrial mechanism, and all that is not industrial is superfluous. In short, Socialism is as soulless as plutocracy.

A solution different from either of these is accepted by Positivists and Catholics. Private property is allowed, but its use is to be ordered in accordance with a uniform religious doctrine, theoretically elaborated and applied to practice by a priesthood. No amount of material comfort, diffused to any conceivable extent, is worth this price. To permit either an old or a new Church to take the place claimed for it would involve the sacrifice of intellectual liberty.

The solution which remains to be considered is the doctrine of State control, or State regulation of industry according to the best ideas and knowledge obtainable at the time. This does not imply State ownership of all capital, which is the socialistic solution; but it implies that no limit shall be recognized to the action of the State upon industry, except the knowledge that such action would be injurions to the Commonwealth. There may be action or abstinence from action; at a time like the present, the bias ought to be in favor of action.

CLARENCE CLOUGH BUEL. Century, New York, February.

OUBTLESS, there are men among us who harbor scruples "against a money wager, just as there may be women who are too timid or too conscientious to smuggle; but that we, as a people, have a growing courage of our gambling propensities is a fact too obvious to be gainsaid.

The stranger in New Orleans, turn whichever way he will, finds his attention arrested by neatly printed slips of paper, hung on strings in the windows of the shops. He learns that these are mostly fractional lottery tickets, worth a dollar apiece, and that twenty of them make a whole ticket. Since 100,000 whole tickets constitute the ordinary monthly drawing, their money value is $2,000,000. What opulence! Out of that a sum of $1,054,600 is alleged to be distributed in 3,134 prizes, ranging from $300,000 to $100. What benevolence! The clever device of dividing each ticket into twenty parts was invented so that the Lottery Company, by keeping back parts of each ticket, when there is likelihood that all the tickets will not be sold, may preserve the ratio of sales and liability for prizes, and thereby avoid all risk to itself. The word "risk" is here used in a Pickwickian sense; it has no other meaning in the Lottery dictionary. The exact case is that you and others hand to the Lottery $2,000,000, and it gives back to some of you $1,054,600, or $52 out of every $100. That this is a swindle on the face of it is the very thing which the Lottery, as a profound

der $52.

Twice a year the Lottery increases its capital prize to $600,ooo, and the price of each ticket (of forty fractional parts) to $40; so the ratio is the same as usual. The aggregate of these monthly and semi-annual schemes is $28,000,000. And out of this great sum $40,000 (in lieu of all taxes, which would be several times as much), is paid to the Charity Hospital of New Orleans. A new miracle of the loaves and fishes! Since the Lottery has a local daily drawing which pays all the expenses of the concern, there is a possibility that its net income is only $13,440,000, if we admit that the drawings are honest; and this is a case in which honesty costs nothing except the tedium of waiting for the prize-money to come back from the sale of more tickets. It is a case also in which a semblance of honesty may serve as a great advertising feature. Fractions of the November capital prize were drawn in six widely separated cities, by which it appears that only three-tenths, or $90,000, of the capital prize of $300,000 may ever have left the coffers of the Lottery, in case only one fractional ticket was sold in each of those cities.

A drawing occurred the third day after my arrival. It took place in a theatre opposite the main office of the Lottery. Though the onlookers were a thin and a sad show, it was no ordinary spectacle to see General G. T. Beauregard and Lieutenant-General Jubal A. Early presiding over the wheels of fortune and producing by virtue of their ancient reputations a large part of the allurements of the Lottery. General Beauregard's job requires only a few hours time each month-I will not call it easy-the pay of which is variously estimated at $12,000 to $30,000. No matter how large the sum, it is a good bargain for the lottery. In marshaling the forces of the smaller wheel that contains the prize-slips in gutta-percha tubes, he did not wear full Confederate uniform or medals of honor. In his quiet civilian's dress he would readily be singled out as a gentleman of distinction. He sat in a chair, received the prizetubes from a blindfolded boy, and every twentieth prize closed the wheel for the periodical stirring up. Occasionally he yielded his place to an assistant.

General Early's wheel contained the hundred thousand numbers. It is six feet or more in diameter and in contrast to the other wheel justifies the remark of a New Orleans accountant, who bought lottery tickets until he visited a drawing and saw an omnibus full of numbers, and a silk hat full of prizes," which well represents the benevolent basis of the scheme.

The facts in regard to this Lottery-this great disinterested charity and its personnel, no matter how indirectly put, will seem harshly said. To a stranger the "daily drawing" with the "policy" playing in one hundred and eight special local offices, has a look compared with which the rest of the business is divine. It is hard to speak disrespectfully of any charity, but every local shop I entered breathed the atmospheric ooze of the pawnshop, and almost every customer I saw was a fit object of charity. Some showed a tremor of excitement in asking for their favorite number or combination. The best-dressed customer I saw was a widow in her weeds, her hat having the shape of a sun-bonnet.

The Lottery is the farthest reaching of all the pestilent gambling enterprises of the Union. Saloons, barber shops, and cigar-stands are the centres of its traffic. Even if the Lottery be stripped of the power of the State that it degrades, this kind of crime will still be carried on by somebody in secret, though on a smaller scale. But if the Lottery fastens itself anew on Louisiana, owning her as it will, body and soul, and if it secures control of Congress and the mails, as it is trying to do by its corruption funds, then let the country be equally kind to her allies the gambling-houses and pool-rooms; let each State have its own lottery, and induce John A. Morris to extend his benevolence by teaching his own New York as he has taught the Pelican State, how to feed her children off her own flesh, while she fattens him.

E

THE TRAGEDY OF HUMANITY. J. J. DAVID.

Die Nation, Berlin, January.

MERICH MADACH'S idealistic drama-the Tragedy of

Humanity which has recently been translated into German, has been regarded as of deep religious significance in Hungary, and has been represented at the National theatre in Buda-Pest with all the spectacular pomp for which that theatre affords such abundant opportunity, ever since the distinguished Aranyi discovered the young poet and brought him to the notice of his countrymen. The drama is called the Hungarian Faust, and was, doubtless, suggested by Goethe's great drama.

The opening is a prologue in heaven, precisely as in Faust. The heavenly hosts raise their voices in one grand chorus of praise. Only Lucifer stands aside, regarding the song of praise as flattery fit only to please a child. He regards himself as equal with God. The Almighty truly brought forth matter, but at the moment of its creation, he-Lucifer--also came upon the stage. There is nothing humorous about Madach's Lucifer. Madach is, indeed, devoid of humor, and his Lucifer enters on the war against the Almighty in terrible earnest. Scarcely had God allotted him two trees in Paradise as his share of the new Creation than he indulges the hope of acquiring the mastery of the whole earth. Madach regards Lucifer as necessary to the fullness of God.

In the garden scene, Adam is represented as animated with a sense of mastery over all created things, and Eve with a sense of security and protection, while their delight in the glory of nature is permeated with their love for each other, to which they give fond expression. Lucifer appears on the scene, assailing the woman with flattery, the man with dark promises. Would Adam follow him, he might himself learn to distinguish between good and evil, instead of thoughtlessly doing as he is told. This scene follows the Bible narrative: Eve plucks the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but before Lucifer can guide them to the Tree of Life the punishment of their disobedience overtakes them. They have voluntarily relinquished the guiding hand of God, who now gives them over to their fate. The warm atmosphere of God's love departs from Paradise, and Eve bewails the sorrows she foresees, while angels weep.

Eve con

Toil begins. Adam incloses a garden and tills it. structs a bower like that they dwelt in in Paradise. Her breast is full of pride with the reflection that she will be the mother of the coming race, while he triumphs in his sense of independence and freedom. The eritis sicut deus is realized; he feels himself a God. Lucifer now shows him the forces by which life is sustained, and Adam, troubled with the consciousness that he is mortal, seeks enlightenment as to his own future, and the future of his race; he will know to what end he and his children must struggle and endure. Lucifer consents. Adam and Eve shall review the careers of themselves, and of their posterity unto the most distant future, but that they may not despair he leaves them hope. Adam and Eve slumber, and with the significant dream begins the tragedy of humanity, of which their past was but the prologue.

Under many distinct personalities, Adam acquires insight into the progress of history, and at intervals encounters Eve, who remains fundamentally the same, not having an equal developmental capacity with him. In the first scene, Adam realizes himself as Pharaoh sitting on the throne of Egypt. Enormous buildings engage his attention, and he is animated by boundless desires which the almost unlimited forces at his command are powerless to gratify. His ear is deaf to the cries of his people, oppressed by compulsory labor. A slave sinks dying before the throne imploring help and compassion. His

wife throws herself upon him weeping. It is Eve, and the secret strain upon Pharaoh's heart draws him to her. He descends from his throne. From the mouth of the dying man he hears the terrible tale of inherited slavery. Millions die for one, and their lives are spent in sorrow, but to his wife every man is a world. Who will love me now? exclaims Eve. Adam will, and after a short struggle Eve unites herself to him. But Eve belongs to the people, she sympathizes with them, a feeling which Adam does not understand; the woes of the suffering pierce her to the soul, and she can have no peace, no joy, until they are appeased. Adam softens; he grants freedom. Sympathy with huanmity is born of his love.

The air is rent with shouts of triumph on the announcement that the work of the pyramids is suspended, and Eve seeks to console her husband for all his sacrifices; but Lucifer shows him a new horror. He tells him that time and the light shifting sand shall destroy the work of his hands, and Adam is restless. His proud position affords him no satisfaction. He tears himself loose from Eve, he must see yet another stage of the world's and of his own development.

Stage succeeds stage. He sees himself in the person of Miltiades again united to his faithful Eve, who with him is condemned to death by the demagogues on his return from victory. The scene shifts to Rome in her decadence, with the barbarians thundering at her gates, and society, with no higher aim than the gratification of the appetites. The future course of humanity is from excessive culture to barbarism, and Adam goes with the multitude, but not before he realizes that the "light o' love," whom he holds in his arms, is the woman Eve, whom God had given him to wife.

Adam plays his part in Christendom, figuring as Tancred among the Crusaders, as Danton in the French Revolution, and struggles with others for gold in the closing days of individualism when gold alone is the God of this world.

In a later stage he is ushered into the great commune. Here all labor is specialized; every one has his pursuit, and his task is allotted to him, There is no private property, no domestic possession. Love appears free, but pairing is in strict accordance with the laws of natural selection. The people are not named, simply numbered. Number 30 is scolded for overheating a kettle, and Adam recognizes in him an old acquaintance, Luther. Number 209 was Cassius, under threat of punishment for quarrelsomeness; Plato is punished for tending his cattle carelessly; Michael Angelo is put in the stocks for objecting to the work allotted him. The future pursuits of children are determined by the form of the skull. The mother has no right over them. One woman's voice alone is raised in protest, it is Eve's. Adam' desires to make her his wife, but “A sentimental man and a woman with excitable nerves! an unfortunate selection! Could result only in sick children!" Disgusted, Adam seeks to escape from earth, he flees into the boundless void. His organism is unsuited to the condition. He dies only to awake again on the bosom of the All-mother Earth with the words: I love again for I suffer. The final scene is now unfolded. The recuperative forces of nature are exhausted; a miserable, gloomy race of dwarfs people the earth. A deformed being, seeing a god in every strange object, and fearing lest some one should dispute with him his mess of sealflesh-that is the last man in whom Adam lives again; a filthy object-an Eskimo woman who fills him with disgust-that is Eve.

Adam awakes from his dream and determines to escape his destiny. It is too late. Eve approaches him, she feels that she is a mother. The first and strongest link in the chain of human destiny is forged; Adam's despair is however mitigated by the voice of God and the song of angels. He is directed to the good, in and for itself, regardless of the terrible end that he has foreseen. Struggle in the present, trust in the future. This alone becomes him. What is beyond that is in the hand of a stronger than he. There is hope.

AT

COUNT LEO TOLSTOÏ. FRITZ LEMMERMEYER. Unsere Zeit, Leipzig, January.

T the close of June, 1883, and consequently only a few weeks before his death, the Russian writer, Turgeniev, wrote a farewell letter to Tolstoi, in which, after expressing the gratification it afforded him to have been his contemporary, he implores him—“ Russia's great writer"—to return to purely literary work, as the true sphere for the exercise of his talents. The German public, at least that section of it which concerns itself with literature, concurs heartily in the view expressed in Turgeniev's last letter to the great Russian, for by this return it is impossible to understand anything except the relinquishment of that rôle in which, to a certain extent, Tolstoi has figured as the founder of a new Russian sect. As a sectarian leader, as a propounder of a new doctrine, he is hot to everyone's taste; by one he is regarded as a prophet, by another as a popinjay. No one capable of forming a literary judgment could well withhold his meed of appreciation of Tolstoi as a poet; and we may regret with Turgeniev that he has forsaken the realm of art for a moral purpose, the vacation of the poet for that of the schoolmaster.

Tolstoi's fame as a writer is founded on his celebrated romances, Anna Karenina" and " Peace and War; " his fame was extended by the publication of the Kreutzer Sonate," and will be still further heightened by Löwenfeld's edition of his complete works, of which the first volume has been already published.

Tolstoi's "Anna Karenina," far surpasses all his other works, both in care and delicacy of the treatment and in psychologic insight. And what an exuberance of ideas, what poetry, what native force! His characters are all drawn from the upper classes: officials, officers, landowners and their families are the actors, all beyond these is mere stuffing. There is scarcely an experience of life that is not treated with thoroughness—from birth to death, enduring love and enduring sorrow-and through it all the current of daily life as it flows on among the upper classes.

Admitting that the characters are imaginary, the innumerable realistic scenes and occurrences, be it a horse-race, a game of hazard, an exclusive entertainment, a theatrical performance, or field labor or hunting, are all without exception drawn from experience, and finished in minute detail; they are representations of actual life, of the universal in the particular instance, of the direct operation of living human forces working from within outward, and consequently constitute poetry. The central feature of the story is a case of adultery with its attendant consequences. Flaubert, in his Madame Bovary," has presented us with a more searching analysis of adultery than any other writer. Tolstoï is lsss subtle, less analytical, but more elementary, more passionate, more rapturous. The beautiful and nobly-disposed Karenina, wedded to an honorable, but rude, uncongenial man, leads a weary life in which the only light and warmth springs from her little son. She made the acquaintance of the officer Wranski-a knight, every inch of him he bewitched her, she was helpless and heeded not the precipice before her. She loved him-no, she was animated by a fury of love—to the exclusion of all other considerations. Her love was a tyrant which bitterly resented every attempt to cast off his yoke. When that at length occurred which had long been the one desire of Wranski's life, and for Anna an impossible, horrible, and hence seductive dream of happiness, she broke down, threw herself at his feet, and murmured, "My God, forgive me!" Her humanity is annihilated, her life wrecked. The inevitable pursues her remorselessly. She is too proud, too pure, to present herself in a false character. With mingled feelings of pain and contempt she informed her husband of her secret, and left him and her child to go away with the loved one. By the birth of her next child she was brought to the brink of the grave. Her husband,

shaken by the strength of her passion and remorse, showed himself magnanimously capable of doing anything for her, but she hates him for his very magnanimity, and remains with Wranski. Society excludes her. She pines for her boy; despair, ennui, self-contempt, love, hate, assail her by turns, Wranski does all he can to soothe her. In vain. She believes herself no longer loved, and hurries on to the last act of the drama-suicide.

In the whole literature of adultery from Tristam and Isolde to Anna Karenina, there is no woman who arouses our sympathy more thoroughly than Anna Karenina.

'Kreutzer

What a contrast between this work and the Sonate"! The latter romance is not wanting in profound situations, but where is the poets' constructive talent, where, his poetry, where, his ethical sense? The "Kreutzer Sonate" is a dark afterpiece; a cry from the infernal depths. Tolstoi would be truer than truth, and was untrue; he would be more moral than morality, and the work is immoral; he would be more natural than nature, and the product is unnatural. It is not to be questioned that the purest motives inspired his pen, but his work is a diabolical caricature of marriage. Truly, it is immoral when a man looks on a woman only to lust after her, and every marriage is a misfortune in which the parties seek only the gratification of their desires. Satiety, disgust, adultery, murder are the consequences. Tolstoï's conclusions are unassailable. But it is not true that all love between man and woman is immoral and every marriage a slough. The relation between the sexes, as nature designed it, is neither moral nor immoral, but simply a necessity, and Tolstoï's condemnation of it mere chaff. But the marriage relation is moral when love, purity of sentiment, friendship, self-abnegation attend the union. Under such conditions the marriage relation passes from a necessary to a moral relation.

The "Kreutzer Sonate can serve no moral purpose, deter no one from forming sexual relations. By its condemnation of the marriage tie it affords justification for illegitimate relations. No spark of poetry illumines the work, and its morality is false. Well, indeed, might the dying Turgeniev have pleaded with Tolstoi to retrace his steps.

preserve by oral tradition, altered, it may be, verbally, but not materially, the folk-songs and folk-tales which have lived for centuries on their lips. As to whether these are dying out or not different opinions are held. They have not yet, at least to any great extent, been replaced by music-hall doggerels and penny dreadfuls,

But while the masses still remain in the past, the cultured few keep more or less apace with the advance of knowledge in the West, and are alive to the importance of preserving, while this is yet possible, the oral literature of the peasantry. Afanasief, Hilferding, and other scholars have in recent times collected and recorded these echoes of a past that is being rapidly effaced. An Englishman, strange to say, Richard James, Chaplain of Embassy, about 1619, was the first to engage in the work. A manuscript in his hand, containing six songs, is preserved at Oxford.

So far as style is concerned, writes Mr. Ralston, the best English authority on early Russian literature, in his "Russian Folk-Tales". the Skazkas, or Russian folk-tales may justly be said to be character istic of the Russian people. There are numerous points on which the "lower classes" of all the Aryan peoples in Europe closely resemble each other, but the Russian peasant has-in common with all his Slavonic brethren-a genuine talent fot narrative, which distinguishes him from some of his more distant cousins. And the stories which are current among the Russian peasantry are exceedingly well narrated. Their language is simple and pleasantly quaint; their humor is natural

and unobtrusive, and their descriptions, whether of persons or events, are often excellent. A taste for acting is widely spread in Russia, and the Russian folk-tales are full of dramatic positions which offer a wide scope for a display of their writers' mimetic talents. Every here and there, indeed, a tag of genuine comedy has evidently been attached by the story-teller to a narrative which, in its original form was probably devoid of the comic element.

This oral literature, if we may use such a term, consists of pagan ritual songs, proverbs, riddles, etc., but it likewise includes (a) fragmentary epics or metrical romances, reciting the feats of bogatuiri, or national heroes, and (b) the skakza, or prose tale-avowed fiction.

The first class of composition is called builina. The builini segregate into several groups, each whereof is associated with certain localities, or certain historical personages. The chief groups, or cycles, are those of the older heroes, or quasidemigods of Vladimir, prince of Kiev, of Novgorod, of Moscow, of the Cossacks, and of Peter the Great. It is, however, to be remarked that it is by no means in those localities to which these legends attach, that the greatest number of builini have been written down from the mouths of the peasantry.

Elias of Mouroni is the dominant hero of the cycle of Vladimir. Valdimir himself fills a cycle similar to that of Charlemagne in the early romance of France. Not all the builini are occupied with purely Slavonic themes. It is evident that numerous legends from different lands have been acclimatized and framed in a Slavonic setting, and more or less impressed with a Slavonic character. Thus in the story of "Erusian Sazarevich" the legend of the Persian hero, Rustam of the Shah Nameh," has been recognized in Russian story. We find, too, the wide-spread myth of Perseus and his mother, Danaë, committed to the sea in a chest. The Egyptian siory of the robbery of the Treasury of Rhampsinitus, preserved by Herodotus, reappears; and there is a Slavonic version of the Celtic story of the Miller and his Lord.

Byzantine was largely an intermediary in the diffusion of Greek and Oriental legends among the South Slavonians, viz,, the Bulgarians, and through them in Russia. In the transmission of such traditions to the Slavonic peoples, the Byzantines played just such a rôle as the Jews and Arabs in the transfer of Eastern fable to Western Europe. As might be expected, Alexander of Macedon, who looms so conspicuous through the vistas of mediæval romance makes also a distinguished figure in Slavonic fiction, where one of his exploits is the incarceration of Gog and Magog in the bowels of a mountain, whence they are to issue at Doomsday.

"

Besides the Alexandreis the romance of the " Trojan War" of "Barlaam and Josaphat,” written in Greek from eastern sources by St. John Damascene, the story of India the Rich" was a favorite skazka. This latter is a version of the well-known feigned letter from Prester John to the embassy of Manuel Commenes.

The skazka of Akir the Wise, according to M. Bezsonof, is a Russian embodiment of an eastern legend of Asia Minor, and Akir himself much resembles Esop, who was in the service of the Babylonian king, Lycerus.

But from whatever quarter they were imported, the stories are usually so well Russianized that it is often difficult to recognize their descent.

The lineage of many of the fictions now domiciled in Russia has been traced, if not to their ultimate sources, at least to earlier homes, but it is not so clear how far stories of Slavonic origin have been diffused beyond Slavonic soil. Radlow, an authority on Mongolian languages, adduces inclinations of a passage of Russian legends into Asia. The subject is, however, comparatively unexplored; its study should be auxiliary to history, in throwing light on the movement and mutual relations of peoples. But it should not be unfruitful of other results.

The early lays and legends of a people are full of that freshness, force, and fire which evoke the highest order of art, whether literary or other. Our own olden tales of Arthur are vital even now, when Tennyson has given them their finest investiture.

A

HISTORICAL PAINTING.

ENRICO PANZACCHI.

Nuova Antologia, Rome, December 16. RTISTS and critics frequently nowadays ask the question: Is historical painting still possible in our time? Artistic questions at this day are complex; and it is necessary to turn them in your mind patiently and to take account of many judgments and opinions used in the war on this question going on in the field of art. Certain it is that historical painting has undergone a disastrous change. During all the first half of this century it was held in such high honor, that to it alone was given the title of great painting; but, after the meridian of the century had been passed, the taste of the greater portion of Italian artists became adverse to historical painting and they have taken much trouble to discredit and banish it. Although the reasons put forward have but partial and relative value and are, therefore, inadequate for the universality and absoluteness of the condemnation, we are obliged to recognize, to our sorrow, that the first and strongest motive for this sudden change of sentiment must be sought in the scant energy of our artistic life, which too easily allows itself to be ruled by impulses which come from abroad. What is the use of disguising a fact? For a considerable space of time artistic life in Italy has felt the force, directly or indirectly, of certain opinions which are formed and make much noise in France, or rather in Paris, where is the great artistic market, and where those who cry the loudest are always sure of being devoutly followed by very many among us, while in turn those whom we take as guides, find at home, for the most part, a public quite indisposed to listen to them with deference and far from unanimous in following them.

'Have you ever known Jesus Christ? Or Julius Cæsar? Or Francis the First? If not, then stop painting those great personages, and henceforward paint those people only who pass before your eyes." With this marvelous reasoning, Courbet thought that he had dashed to the ground for ever all the canvases of historical painting. In France, naturally, outside of the devout circle formed around Courbet, Art continued its march in its multifold ways; and all kinds of painting, including historical, continued to prosper in peaceful rivalry. In Italy, on the other hand-perhaps it is not too much to say, naturally!-since Courbet made his voice heard above all others, saying scandalous things in protesting, in regard to the refusal of the official exposition to receive his paintings, this particular outcry of his has been heard with docility and transmuted into an axiom, supposed to be obligatory on artists and critics.

The particular likes and dislikes of artists for certain forms of art I not only understand, but I believe them inevitable. These likes and dislikes are often necessary conditions for an artist, in order to put in force all his working power. Leonardo da Vinci, while he had a universal mind, was yet so much enamored of his own paintings that, in making comparisons, he not only depreciated but spoke contemptuously of poetry, music, and all the other arts. Moreover, the different forms of the same artistic discipline found in the temperament of an artist are like jealous fervor and repulsion. It is known, for example, that Michael Angelo held in contempt painting on canvas, calling it an art for women to practice. All his enthusiasm was concentrated on painting in fresco, which wanders rapidly over vast walls, wherein he found a field suitable for the fiery genius which reveled in depicting narratives of the Bible and Dante. Why wonder at this? Any one standing before the Madonna della Tribuna or in the Sistine chapel finds it easy to explain the phenomenon.

The present antipathy to historical painting cannot only be comprehended, but is in part justifiable. Historical incidents have too often been used by painters as a pretext for depicting cold theatric pomp. Fifty years ago the accessories were togas,

consular fasces, and statuesque figures of ancient heroes. Then came in fashion the history of the Middle Ages, afterwards the medieval historical romance; there was a flood of magisterial robes, of feminine trains, of monks' gowns, and steel armor. To find a scene in which some gesticulating figures could be put, sufficed for a painter to say: this is the thing for me. Thereupon he covered with his work a large canvas. Yet, standing before these huge canvases, what did the spectator understand and feel? Instead of the picture explaining the story—as Milizia required in his time—it was necessary to read a page of history or chronicle or romance in order to understand what the picture was about. When the page had been read, and the meaning of the painting thus explained the beholder remained indifferent, because the painter's work had not awakened a spark of thought or emotion in the soul. Yet this was the thing the artist ought to have aimed at.

In short, historical painting is not a work for all artistic minds or temperaments. This is a very high class of art, to reach which requires extraordinary gifts, strengthened by profound study and indefatigable researches. When nature and education, however, have combined to make an artist fit for such lofty work, it would be stupid prejudice to discourage him. The art of a country will never abandon one of its most genial, most efficacious, and most educative manifestations. The triumphs of historical painting will never cease, since the future cannot be closed to what rises spontaneously from the human mind. Historical painting is as immortal as history, no more, no less. Naturally, since for writing good books and painting good pictures are required qualities not easily or frequently found.

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.

AT

HYPNOTISM AND HUMBUG.

ERNEST HART, M.D.

Nineteenth Century, London, January.

II.*

T the base of the brain is a complete circle of arteries, from which spring great numbers of small arterial vessels carrying a profuse blood supply throughout the whole mass, and capable of contraction in small tracts, so that small areas of the brain may, at any given moment, become bloodless, while other parts of the brain may at the same time become highly congested. Now, if the brain, or any part of it, be deprived or partially deprived of the circulation of blood through it, or if it be excessively congested and overloaded with blood, or if it be subjected to local pressure, the part of the brain so acted upon ceases to perform its functions. The brain's regularity, and the sanity and completeness of the thought which is one of the functions of its activity, depend upon the normal quantity of the blood so circulating. If we press upon the carotid arteof blood passing through all its parts, and the healthy quality ries which pass up through the neck to form the arterial circle of Willis at the base of brain within the skull, we quickly produce insensibility. Thought is abolished, consciousness is lost; and if the pressure be continued all automatic actions of the body—such as the beating of the heart, breathing motions of the lungs, which maintain life, and which are controlled by the lower brain centres of ganglia—are quickly stopped, and death follows.

We have observed (where portions of the skull have been removed) that during sleep, the convoluted surface of the upper part of the brain, which in health and in the waking state is faintly pink, like a blushing cheek, becomes white and

* In the first part of this paper, published in last week's DIGEST, Dr. Hart shows that the hypnotic condition is entirely subjective; that it is independent of any passes, gestures, or any fluid emanating from the operator, as well as of any exercise of will-power on his part. He also refers to the complicated structure of the brain.