LETTERS AND ART.

IN

AGAIN, THE POET-LAUREATE.

N our issue of January 18 we presented a number of opinions concerning the fitness of Mr. Alfred Austin for the position to which he has been called. Since then a few more utterances important enough to be chronicled have appeared. Mr. W. D. Howells says, in Harper's Weekly:

"Whatever else may be said of the choice of Mr. Alfred Austin for poet-laureate of England, there can be no dispute concerning the relief it will bring upon one point. The ingenious contrivers of newspaper symposiums can not ask people now to say, in from two hundred to five hundred words, who ought to be poetlaureate; and until there is another vacancy in the office which I hope Mr. Austin may fill as long as he likes, the whole literary class may devote itself to the business of making an honest living. To be quite frank, it was never of the least consequence, to anybody out of England, who should be poet-laureate, and all the interest expressed in the matter was quite, or nearly quite, factitious. The office, if it ever had any dignity, is a purely bouffe conception in our time, and except that it is such a very obvious joke, it is rather a wonder it has escaped the attention of Mr. William Gilbert. The notion of any great man seriously performing its duties is inextinguishably comic; and the selection of a man who is not great and never can be great has the highest propriety and fitness imaginable, as far as these duties are concerned."

Mr. Hamilton Mabie remarks, in The Outlook, that Mr. Austin carries us back, not to Davenant and Colley Cibber and the singers of the second grade of laureates, but to Eusden and Pye, poets of the lower rank-the rank from which the official singers have usually been taken. "And yet," says he

"Mr. Austin is an English gentleman of culture, dignity, and ability; a man of scholarly tastes and attainment, of high character, and of unquestioned ability. He does not lack talent, but he lacks the kind of talent which the world has come to associate with the position to which he has been called. He is essentially a prose writer, and it has been his ill fortune to be thrust into a place which two great poets have held in succession. His clearcut face expresses virility, decision, energy; but there is no imagination in it. It is the face of a strenuous rather than of a spontaneous man; of a poet who has formed himself by deliberate and laborious effort rather than one who has had the help of heaven in following the lines of his own inclination. All that high aims, hard work, a wholesome life, and an honorable ambition can accomplish in a man to whom the higher gifts have been denied has been wrought in Mr. Austin; but the ease, the spontaneity, the freshness, and the magical charm of the poet he has never compassed. They are beyond him; in spite of all his striving and his painstaking effort he remains an artisan, unable to cross the invisible line which separates the man at work from the man at play, the craftsman from the artist."

Remarking that neither Mr. Swinburne nor Mr. William Morris would have accepted a post that he considered ignominious and anomalous, The Saturday Review (London) adds:

"But, unfortunately, the nation had learned under Wordsworth and Tennyson to regard the poet-laureate as the chief of the poets. Lord Rosebery recognized the difficulty of the situation, and, tho pressure was brought to bear on him, did his duty, used the opportunity, and made no appointment. This wise example was much harder to set than to follow, and, after Lord Rosebery's refusal to appoint, it was comparatively easy for Lord Salisbury to maintain the refusal. Unfortunately, Lord Salisbury, as Matthew Arnold long ago noted, has a dangerous ignorance of literature. No one believed it possible to eclipse Mr. Balfour's brilliancy in giving a pension to a certain Mr. Brooks. No one believed it possible; but Lord Salisbury has easily surpassed our expectations, and given the laureateship to a prosaic and commonplace penman. Lord Rosebery had deserved well of his country, for by refusing to appoint he had made refusal easy to his sucLord Salisbury, in peculiarly fortunate circumstances, has passed over the greater poets, and selected the feeblest of all,

cessor.

and in so doing has fitted the fool's cap on his own head for all time."

A correspondent of The Westminster Gazette thinks that Mr. Austin is a meritorious writer, with many elements of the poet in him "lacking only, in fact, the two or three supreme qualities." He then says of Mr. Austin:

"If he never thrills or enchants us, he seldom flagrantly offends. His diction is undistinguished but not altogether imitative, placid but not tawdry. If his thought is something less than epoch-making, his feelings, his enthusiasms, are undeniably sincere. Very genuine is his love of English nature, tho, perhaps, like the Player-Queen, he doth protest a little too copiously. As for his patriotism and his royalism-the essential qualifications of a laureate they are irreproachable, uncompromising, ecstatic. Here is part of the dedication prefixed to his philosophic drama, 'Prince Lucifer :'

"TO THE QUEEN'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. 'MADAM: On the memorable Midsummer Day, when You received the loving homage of Your faithful People, I had no lyric nor Jubilee ode to lay at Your feet; for the imagination is overwhelmed, rather than stimulated, by the retrospective contemplation of the half century of Your happy Rule. But who can forget, that in a special sense, this year is Yours?'

"Could anything be more courtly? Not content with minding his P's and Q's, Mr. Austin proclaims his devotion in his capital Y's. It only needed a capital at her Majesty's feet to make this a masterpiece of typographic loyalty.”

A CHAT WITH TOLSTOÏ ON LITERARY SUBJECTS.

COU

OUNT TOLSTOÏ seldom visits Moscow or St. Petersburg, preferring to work in the solitude of his country home. Recently, however, one of his plays was given, for the first time, at the principal Moscow theater, and he paid the city a brief visit. A reporter of the Kourier interviewed him, and an interesting conversation on a number of literary topics followed. We translate part of it from the report published in the Moscow paper. Referring to his work, Tolstoi said:

"I envy the journalistic fraternity. The journalist is not compelled to devote himself absolutely to his work, body and soul, and to suffer those agonizing pains which accompany the birth of some substantial work. Moreover, the journalist acquires a technique which, I confess, I have not been able to develop. Not only do I use the greatest efforts in elaborating and polishing every line of my writings, but I find extraordinary difficulty in the composing of an ordinary letter, and I frequently have to rewrite it several times. I write with ease only when I lose all consciousness of the process itself and am occupied solely with the ideas seeking expression. At present I am rewriting and changing my new novel, and this work is exceedingly difficult and painful. There is plenty of work, and but little time left. Old age makes itself felt; death is near. How much time I wasted in my youth-valuable time spent aimlessly and fruitlessly! With what pleasure do I look upon those who, while still young, have clear aims and definite tasks in view, to which they can apply themselves deliberately and systematically! From the bottom of my heart do I wish them success in their undertakings." In regard to modern novelists, Tolstoi expressed himself briefly, as follows:

"In surveying contemporary novelists and novels, I am bound to say that I hardly ever find anywhere a single original idea, or even a single original literary turn. Only what is one's own is of value and can invest an artistic production with vitality and verisimilitude. Possibly my old age accounts for part of this, but it is a fact that I love the old works and the old men. words, the reflections of the past epoch seem to me purer, better, and more moral than the contribution of the young generation. The old faith in truth and ideals seems shaken; the old inspiration gone."

In other

This led Tolstoï to refer to the decadent school, which has found considerable support among the Russians. He said: "By 'decadents' I mean those artists-writers, dramatists, and

IT

1.W. Story

his work. With the weight of years and mourning and sickness almost was obscured that natural gaiety, that perpetual spring of vital enjoyment of life, which made him such a charming personality. The recent death of the loved companion of his life had left him alone in spirit, and he longed to depart. His work was done, as poet, man of letters, and artist, and it was crowned at the last with the greatest achievement of all. In his bereavement all interest in life and all power seemed to have gone, but it remained for Love to work another miracle, to revive the benumbed powers for an effort which was to evoke his greatest genius, and to give the world a work which represents his highest aspirations and his most refined skill. He was induced by his friends, in order to draw his mind from preying upon itself, to begin, the summer after her death, a monument to his wife. She, as he used to confess, had always been his inspiration. He had learned to depend upon her judgment, and to have every day in his studio the benefit of her criticism upon the work of the day. This new work saved his life temporarily. He entered upon the task with enthusiasm and with the clearest artistic vision, and felt himself sustained by her presence.

So lost was he at times

in this illusion that at the close of a day of labor he expected her, as usual, to come in and criticize his work. When the door opened, and he turned expectantly with a smile from his clay to ask the usual question, and saw a face that was not hers, the pathos of the moment of disillusion was beyond words. The monument was finished during the summer, and was put into marble before his last sickness. It is to be placed next to the

monument.

grave of Shelley, in the most poetic of cemeteries, under the walls of Rome. The situation perhaps determined the character of the It consists of an altar, upon which a female figure has cast herself, with the head bowed forward upon the arms. The attitude is that of the abandonment of grief. Every line in the yielding marble expresses this with a power of plasticity very seldom reached by an artist before. It is seen in the flowing robe of the figure, this abandonment to sorrow, and looked at from behind this impression of reality is perhaps most vivid. The stone seemed to me to flow rhythmically in the measure of mourning. The monument is classically simple, but never before did Story put so much feeling into any work, nor so completely fuse his artistic skill in expression. In the opinion of sculptors whose judgment is of most value, this is the greatest of Story's works."

ERRORS IN CARLYLE'S "FRENCH REVOLU

Q

TION."

UITE a formidable list of mistakes as to fact in Carlyle's "French Revolution" is submitted in an article by Mr. J. G. Alger in The Westminster Review for January. Speaking of the lack of facilities for the composition of such a work sixty years ago, Mr. Alger says that even had the facilities been greater, Carlyle would perhaps have refused to sift the rubbishheaps; for on July 24, 1836, when nearing the end of his task, he wrote to his wife: "It all stands pretty fair in my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more about it, but to plash down what I know in large masses of colors, that it may look like a smoke and flame conflagration in the distance, which it is." Mr. Alger thinks that Carlyle's conception of the Revolution would not have been modified by further evidence, and that the work itself will never lose value. It was not, he says, in Carlyle's temperament to revise subsequent editions of his books. From a man in whom, as in primitive times, priest, poet, and historian were blended, we can not expect studious watch for corrections. Carlyle's books are said to have always made him ill, consequently when once finished he thought no more of them. A book with him was the eruption of a volcano-once active, thenceforth at rest. Mr. Alger regrets that Carlyle did not keep his work posted up to date, nor pay any attention to the deluge of publications on the Revolution which was going on during the latter part of his lifetime. "But," says he, "Carlyie was a seer, not an antiquary, and some inaccuracies do not prevent his book from being a classic. Just because it is a classic, however, it should now be edited." Some principal corrigenda are then pointed out, a part of which we here quote:

"The famous reply of Liancourt to Louis XVI. has been inaccurately related. He did not wake up the King on the night of July 14 to describe the capture of the Bastille as not a revolt, but a revolution. It was two days before, on apprising the King of the ferment in Paris, that, to Louis's remark, 'Why, it is a revolt then,' he answered, 'No, sire; it is a revolution.' The fall of the Bastille was known at Versailles the same afternoon. Carlyle has adopted Jacobin exaggerations as to the famous Versailles banquet which formed the pretext for the march of the Paris mob. The alleged orgie was the dinner úsually given by their comrades to a newly arrived troop, and the Flanders regiment had been sent for on account of two unsuccessful attempts by a Paris mob (on August 13 and September 17) to march on Versailles. Desmoulins asserted that the dinner cost 26 francs a head; it really cost 34 francs. There was no trampling on the tricolor, for the garrison had not yet relinquished the white cockade. . . Passing on to the 'feast of Pikes,' the celebrated Baron Trenck, it should be known, was not then in Paris, tho the waxwork Mme. Tussaud, or whoever wrote her book, remembered dancing with him that night, for he was then in Hungary, and, had he foreseen the guillotine, would have remained there. Morande, the scurrilous pamphleteer, is mentioned by Carlyle as also a victim of that guillotine. He richly deserved it, but he contrived to escape notice in the provinces, became one of Napoleon's justices of the peace, and lived till 1806. .. Tho rightly thinking little of Thiers's first and immature work, Carlyle

adopted his grotesque blunder as to a contemplated monster guillotine, despatching 150 persons at one blow. There was an intention of trying the Luxembourg prisoners in one batch, and Judge Dumas began constructing an enormous scaffolding, a dock in which they were to be ranged in tiers, but, on Fouquier Tinville's representations as to the bad effect of such a spectacle on the public mind, the plan was abandoned. Thiers mistook échafaud, in the sense of scaffolding, for échafaud, scaffold. The Goddess of Reason was not Mlle. Candeille, but another operasinger, Maillard."

Among the "less excusable" misakes of Carlyle the following are noted:

"At the opening of the States-General he makes the procession go from St. Louis Church to Nôtre Dame, whereas it went from Nôtre Dame to St. Louis, where La Fare, Bishop of Nancy, after drawing an exaggerated picture of the oppression of the peasantry, turning to the monarch, exclaimed, 'And all this is done in the name of the best of kings,' whereat the expected plaudits resounded. The nobles did not at that ceremony wear 'bright dyed cloaks of velvet,' but black ones, to match their black coats, vests, and breeches. The cardinals alone, and there could have been only three, wore red copes, the other prelates having rochets and purple mantles. It is a slight matter, but Paris was not divided in 1789 into forty-eight districts, but into sixty; on the subsequent division into sections, however, there were fortyeight. Nor did Fouquier Tinville notify sentence of death to Lamourette or any other prisoner, for he was not judge, but public prosecutor. Mme. de Buffon, Egalité's mistress, was not the light wife of a great naturalist too old for her,' nor even the widow, but the daughter-in-law.

...

Carlyle probably died without any consciousness of his gravest mistakes, his account of the King's flight to Varennes. It was not till March, 1886, that Mr. Oscar Browning, who in the previous autumn had been over the ground, showed, in a paper read before the Royal Historical Society, that the account, while 'a very vivid picture of the affair as it occurred, in its broad outlines consistent with the truth,' was 'in almost every detail inexact,' 'almost every statement false or exaggerated.' Carlyle's cardinal blunder was that he took the distance from Paris to Varennes to be only sixty-seven miles, whereas it is one hundred and fifty. 1 should imagine that he confused Varennes-en-Argonne with Varennes-Jaulgonne, a village not lying far off the route now sixty-six miles by rail. From this blunder flowed a whole catalog

incessant contributor to magazines and newspapers, a serious and unwearied student. And we expected that he would take rank as a classic in the field in which the very first requirement is a sense of unlimited leisure; that letters written in an inn parlor between a morning and afternoon examination would rival the fruits of the endless summer afternoons of Les Rochers, or the endless winter evening of Olney!

"To ask anything of that sort was surely to ask for what we had no right to expect. There is no evidence that Matthew Arnold possessed any special gift for writing letters; but, however that may be, it is certain that he did not possess some other things equally necessary to the attainment of the art in its perfection; for letter-writing is an art, and, like every other, demands that time should be freely given to it, that it should have principal place in the occupations of those who aim at practising it with success."

Mr. Bailey says that no one will doubt that Matthew Arnold remains, now that he has been dead eight years, and is likely to remain permanently one of the half-dozen great names which the last half-century has added to our literature. He then says:

"Tennyson the poet, Browning the thinker, Carlyle the seer; with these, and with one living name, Matthew Arnold will certainly take his place as one of the great literary forces which have gone to make this last generation of the nineteenth century what it is. No one will claim for Matthew Arnold that he had the artistic gift of Tennyson, or the genius of Carlyle; nor could be approach Browning in subtlety of intellect, or Ruskin in eloquence. But a great artist is a fact, like the Elgin marbles or St. Paul's, and only indirectly an influence, and, while Browning's position is rendered insecure by a carelessness, as Carlyle's is by an eccentricity, of style, which must tell more and more against them, the teaching of Ruskin is embedded in books dealing with a special subject, which is not every man's study. In this way Matthew Arnold may prove in the end a more powerful influence than any of them."

IN

A FORMULA FOR HUMOROUS SHORT

STORIES.

N closing a critical essay on William Edmondstoune Aytoun, in The New Review for January, Mr. J. H. Millar speaks aside as follows concerning the construction of the humorous short story:

"While Aytoun's glory as a writer of parodies is shared by others, his distinction as a writer of humorous short stories is unique. The short story has, within the memory of a child of ten. come into such vogue that no young author can rest satisfied till he has succeeded in producing something that reads like a long story arbitrarily mutilated. The short story of humor, however -the pure farce in narrative-is comparatively seldom essayed; and tho examples are not wanting of jerky and boisterous vulgarity meant for fun, few latter-day contes are intended, at all events, to amuse. The conditions necessary to the success of the humorous short story are easy enough to enumerate on paper, however hard they may be to fulfil in practise. The plot must not be complicated; the motives must be simple and straightforward, not recondite nor subtle; no 'problems' must be propounded, and no recesses of the soul probed; the characters must be sharply presented from some definite point of view; they must hit a happy mean between rigid adherence to a well-settled convention and originality (as thus: the father must be testy, the daughter beautiful, the hero blessed with a light purse and the knack of getting into scrapes and out of them); there must be plenty of high spirits, but no lapses into meaningless buffoonery: the adventures and incidents may somewhat exceed the bounds of probability, but must never trespass upon the absolutely incredi ble; the whole must be suffused with a tinge of exaggeration or caricature, which is never to deepen into the hue of outrageous burlesque. Above all, the author must have the lightest of touches, and be able to carry the thing off with an indescribable, easy, man-of-the-world air."

IT is stated that Zola has withdrawn his candidature for M. de Lesseps's seat in the Academy, and has announced his intention of coming forward to contest the chair left vacant by the death of Alexandre Dumas.

SIR FREDERICK LEIGHTON, LATE PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY.

was said in 1854, when Millais had just been elected an associate. Twentyfour years later, in 1878, Leighton was elected president of the Royal Academy. The Herald gives the following data:

"Frederick Leighton was born in Scarborough, England, in 1830. His father was a physician, who recognized his son's bias toward painting and concluded to give him an art training. It was Signor Meli, in Rome, who taught him to draw, and at fourteen he was a student at the Accademia di Belle Arti, at Florence. Some of young Leighton's work fell under the eye of the American sculptor Hiram Powers, who saw in it much promise. Subsequently he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where Professor Steinle grounded him still further in his art. It has been said that there was always a coldness in Leighton's color, due to the frigid influence of Steinle. Other cities visited by him were Berlin, Brussels, and Paris. He first exhibited at the London Royal Academy in 1855 'Cimabue's Madonna Carried in Procession Through the Streets of Florence.' This work was an immediate success, and was purchased by Queen Victoria, and was afterward seen in the Manchester and other art exhibitions. Other works of his are 'The Triumph of Music,' 'Paolo and Francesca,' 'The Odalisque,' 'Ariadne,' 'Wedded,' 'Hercules Wrestling with Death, 'The Harvest Moon,' 'The Daphnephoria,' 'Cymon and Iphigenia,' 'Andromache,' 'The Bath of Psyche,' 'Spanish Dancing-Girl,' 'Star of Bethlehem,' 'Venus Disrobing for the Bath,' and 'Jonathan's Token to David.' In 1877 his 'Athlete Struggling with a Python' was secured by the Royal Academy authorities for two thousand guineas under the Chantrey bequest. He was elected associate of the Royal Academy in 1864, Academician in 1869, and president in 1878 on the death of Sir Frederick Grant. In 1886 he was created a baronet, and was only this year raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Leighton, one among the New Year's honors conferred by the Queen. He had not yet taken his seat in the House of Lords." Concerning the art-work of Lord Leighton, The Tribune speaks in part as follows:

"It may be asserted that Sir Frederick has lost himself sometimes in the delights of a gracious form, that he has become enamored of a linear ideal, that he has sought in drawing the effect which can spring from spiritual qualities alone. This criticism is familiar but false. Because he was lacking in passion his imaginative force was weakened, and he leaves the spectator cold where he ought to prove stirring in the highest measure. But this does not argue an indifference to the spirit of a theme and preoccupation with details of draughtsmanship. On the contrary, it is often plain that Sir Frederick would have reached a much loftier plane of imaginative excitement than he did, if he could. The impression left by his works is often that they have

་

just failed to 'come off," that through no fault of the artist they have fallen short of an ideal which in everything but inherent temperament he is qualified to pursue. Our readers will doubtless recall the great picture of 'Hercules Wrestling with Death,' which figured in the Exposition at Chicago. There he had a mighty theme, and in almost everything that constitutes masterly pictorial art the canvas was a masterly performance."

Transvaal Literature.-"Who reads an African book? Thousands of people it appears, from many editions of many of these works. It is astonishing merely to confront the books which have been written in the Transvaal. Many of the South African books, it is true, have been begun or finished on the journey from England to Africa, or from Africa homeward. Some of them have been written under the English flag, either in the mother island or in the Cape Colony. But across the Vaal itself the river which the Boers made their boundary to the South when they shook the dust of Cape Colony from their feet and made their great exodus northward-on the other side of this Jordan of the Boers there have been books enough written to stock a small village public library. For the general reader, however, all of South Africa is a fascinating field at present, and as everybody who goes to the Transvaal goes also to Cape Colony, and writes of both, there is no need to make too fine differentiation in the literature of these far-away lands. Olive Schreiner's 'Story of an African Farm' is, probably, the piece of fiction which has made itself most felt, quite as much for its vivid descriptions of the scenery and life, as for the wo of the morbid heroine who loved and lost a cad adored. There are numberless books on social and religious topics by missionaries of all nations, particularly Dutch ones who have gone from Holland to the Transvaal since the northern exodus from Cape Colony of their kin, the Boers, sixty years ago. Huguenot blood too is mingled with the tears and prayers of those who have struggled to hold up the standard of the ideal in South Africa, and their books have the sturdy, never-say-die quality of their kind. Every woman who can write at all tries her pen at a book on South Africa, if she goes either to the Cape or to the Transvaal, and the result is a lot of delightful reading."-The Evening Transcript, Boston.

NOTES.

SIR JOSEPH BARNBY, the English musician, principal of the Guildhall School of Music, died in London on the morning of January 28. He was born in York, August 12, 1838. He was destined for a musical career, and began it when he was seven years old as a chorister in the cathedral of his native town. He afterward studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was graduated in 1857. He was subsequently organist in several London churches. and was appointed conductor of the oratorio concerts at St. James's and Exeter halls, and in 1872 succeeded Gounod as conductor of the Royal Albert Hall Choral Society. In 1875 Mr. Barnby was appointed director of a musical institution at Eton. The London Musical Society was founded in 1878 for the production of works not generally known, and Mr. Barnby was its first conductor, continuing at this post till 1886. In that year he was made conductor at the Royal Academy of Music, to succeed Mr. Shakespeare. He subsequently became director of the Guildhall School of Music. He received the honor of knighthood in 1892. He was the author of a great number of choral works that have had a considerable degree of popularity. His oratorio of 'Rebekah was produced in 1870. One of the most widely known is the part song, 'Sweet and Low.'

NEWS was received in this city on January 25 of the death at his home in England of Alexander Macmillan, the founder of the publishing house of Macmillan & Co. Alexander Macmillan was born of humble parentage in the Island of Arran, Scotland, in 1815. He left his father's barren farm to begin life as a schoolmaster in a village near Paisley. In 1843 he gained a place in the London publishing house of which his elder brother Daniel was a clerk, and remained there for four years on a slender salary. Then he and Daniel set up a book-shop of their own in Aldersgate Street., purchased a small business at Cambridge, and became booksellers to the university. They prospered, and two years later established their London publishing house, which steadily increased in importance and extent of business. Upon the death of Daniel Macmillan, in 1857, Alexander assumed the management, and continued in it until about ten years ago, when he relinquished the duties to enjoy the leisure of his later years. Five years after his retirement he was stricken with progressive paralysis.

The Sunday Magazine, London, says of Ian Maclaren : "It is rather startling to learn that the Rev. John Watson, the Presbyterian minister, the creator of 'Drumtochty,' is not a Scotchman at all. He was born in Manningtree, Essex, so that he is not even a North-countryman. But he was educated in Perth, Stirling, and Edinburgh, and his first parish was Logiealmond, a village between Perth and Crieff, which is the original of 'Drumtochty.' He only stayed three years in the parish. It is twenty years since he quitted it for a southern charge, and it was only the other day that on the appeal of Dr. Robertson-Nicoll he resurrected his reminiscences in the story which has obtained such a world-wide celebrity.

SCIENCE.

CAN WE HEAR WITHOUT HEARING?

THE

HE affirmative of this paradoxical question is practically maintained by Prof. W. Romaine Newbold in The Popular Science Monthly (January), in one of a series of articles on "Suggestibility and Kindred Phenomena.' In cases where a sound, for instance, is not heard because the attention is taken up with something else, he regards it as making an impression on the "subconsciousness”—that is, it produces a change in the brain substance, and a corresponding mental state, but both the change and the state remain isolated, and are not brought into relation with the rest of the system, so that the sound in one sense is heard, but in another quite unheard. This position can be better understood from a few paragraphs from Professor Newbold's article, which we quote below. He says:

"I am sitting in a chair and reading an interesting story; the clock strikes and I do not hear it. Why? There are only four possible theories. We must suppose that the air vibrations strike the ear-drum and are propagated through the ear-bones and lymph to the auditory nerve. Then either (1) the physical process is blocked at some point between the terminal filaments of the auditory nerve in the inner ear and its origin in the cortex; or (2) the irritation reaches the cortex, but fails to awaken any cortical process; or (3) it awakens a cortical process which is unaccompanied by any mental state; or (4) it awakens both a cortical process and a mental state. For the first of these alternatives there is no evidence. On the contrary, since I hear the clock strike if I am expecting it, and since all theories require us to regard expectation as dependent upon cortical processes, if any mental phenomena are, we must look to the cortex for the explanation and not to the peripheral machinery. The second alternative is conceivable, but there is no direct evidence for it and there is some against it. It is frequently possible, for example, to awaken by hypnotic suggestion a memory of the event which was not consciously experienced, and, as memory depends upon the traces left by earlier experiences in the cortex, it would seem to follow that there must have been a cortical disturbance. The third alternative is more probable. There is reason for believing that any cortical process must attain a certain degree of intensity before its mental concomitant comes into being at all, and perhaps the existence of other active processes prevents its attaining that degree of intensity.”

Professor Newbold now proceeds to the fourth supposition, namely, that there is both the brain-charge and the mental state corresponding to a sound. He discusses this as follows:

"We would then assume, in the case under consideration, that the cortical process in the auditory center generated a sound. But how is this to be reconciled to the testimony of consciousness that I heard no sound?

"Well, it may be that I did hear it, but instantly forgot it, so that my present memory of that period contains no trace of it. That this frequently happens there can be no doubt, but there are many curious phenomena which require a further assumption, and that further assumption may be thus stated: The sound may have existed simply as a solitary sound, all alone, not in my consciousness or in the consciousness of any one, but as a bare mental event, related to my consciousness much as a sound in your consciousness is related to mine. It is not an easy conception to grasp, for our mental life always consists of many elements, and it would seem that this multiplicity is essentially involved in our notion of consciousness. Yet occasionally we have experiences which belp us in forming the conception of a mental state existing outside a personal consciousness. I remember a trifling operation upon the eye which I once underwent. For a few seconds my consciousness seemed reduced to one elementa flood of frightful pain, which was not in my eye but seemed to pervade my whole being, to the almost complete exclusion of all else. Again, under nitrous oxid, my consciousness seemed reduced to something so rudimentary as to be wholly indescribable. I have heard of many similar experiences.

"Without pronouncing upon the relative merits of the last two

hypotheses I shall develop some of the logical implications of the latter. A state such as I have described, supposed to exist within my head, so to speak, but outside my consciousness, may be described as subconscious. There are, then, two conceivable ways in which a mental state may vanish from the upper consciousness. The cortical process upon which it depends may die away; it then perishes absolutely; or the cortical process may be dissociated from the system underlying the total consciousness and yet remain active, thus giving rise to a subconscious state. Subconscious ideas and sensations must be capable of development in intensity and in perfection of finish, so to speak; must be able to awaken associated ideas, to produce bodily movements, to affect secretion and other metabolic processes. It would appear possible that the dissociated processes underlying them may suddenly effect union with the upper system, thus intruding the subconscious state into the upper consciousness. When it does not actually effect union it is conceivable that some of its results, such as its associated ideas or emotional consequents, may appear in the upper consciousness. It is also conceivable that its mere existence may disturb the normal tension of the cortical activities . . . and thus affect the upper consciousness. A mental state supposed to be thus growing and working subconsciously has been happily termed by Pierre Janet a mental parasite or neoplasm. For all these inferences, which I have stated as deductions from the hypothesis that there exist mental states dissociated from the normal conciousness, there is a great deal of direct evidence, and it is upon an inductive study of that evidence that the hypothesis is based; but the limitations of space prevent my giving concrete illustrations."

FR

A SAVAGE WITH A TAIL.

ROM time to time travelers have reported that they have heard of races of tailed men far in the interior of Africa or Asia. Once in a while one says that he has seen such a man. But all these stories have now been surpassed by that of a Frenchman, M. D'Enjoy, who asserts that he has not only seen a savage with a tail, but has talked to him and felt of his caudal appendage. As M. D'Enjoy's story has been published in the Bulletin of the French Geographical Society, we need not apologize for inserting it here, tho some will think that it requires corroborative evidence. It should be noted, however, that the sensational picture of a wild man with a tail two or three feet long, that has recently appeared in a daily paper, represents nothing in the French traveler's story. The "tail" seen by him was but a slight prolongation of the backbone, and may have been a deformity such as has been more than once noticed among Europeans. We translate below so much of M. D'Enjoy's narrative as relates to the caudal appendage. After describing his journey through the almost unexplored interior of Cochin China, he says that he entered the country of the Mois or barbarians, a people of whom those nearest the coast are civilized, while farther inland they are quite savage. In the unbroken forest M. D'Enjoy discovered a village containing but a single habitation, formed like a long tunnel made of sticks and leaves. The inhabitants rushed off, yelling, and scattered through the woods; but one, who had been gathering honey in a tree, was surprised and captured by the party. Says M. D'Enjoy:

"Our prisoner had enormous ankle-bones, sharp like the spurs

of a cock.

"His skin was dark, but rather bronzed than black, his voice hoarse, his face oval, his nose long, his hair smooth. "Large, with erect stature, powerful limbs, and head carried high, he looked like a bronze statue.

"But he had a tail, like a monkey.

"This discovery stupefied me; I approached him and, to be cer tain that I was not the victim of an illusion, I felt of the caudal appendage of the savage.

"I proved thus that the vertebral column of the Moi was extended beyond his body by three or four vertebræ, forming a little tail, like that with which fauns are represented.

"Surprised at my examination, the prisoner turned suddenly