navy is to be continued at the expense of having defenseless shores, then the time has come when a change of policy must be made. There is no doubt that the money expended for coast defenses will bring a better return in protecting our country than the same amount of money appropriated for ships. At the present time I am more interested in protecting our own shores than I am in providing for a fleet which could operate either in the West Indies or along the coast of South America. In other words, I am more desirous of appropriating money for the protection of this land than I am for expending sums in preparing to attack some one else.

"The bill presented by the Committee on Coast Defenses is intended to meet the wants of the nation in this respect. It has received the approval of the Secretary of War and of the chiefs of the two great departments of engineers and ordnance. If it shall be adopted, provision will be made for the construction of the fortifications necessary for the defense of the principal sea-coast cities of the United States. The aggregate number of direct fire high-power guns of all calibers required is 517; the aggregate number of mortars is 1,056. For the construction of these guns, emplacements, and carriages about eight years will be required, and the sum of at least $80,000,000. This sum can not be judiciously expended in a less time except under great stress and at additional cost to the Government; and even in that case it will be very difficult to complete the armament in a much shorter period. It is provided in the bill that the sum of only $10,000,000 be appropriated for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1897, and that an expenditure be authorized of $10,000,000 for each of the succeeding seven fiscal years, ending June 30, 1954; thus the tax would be comparatively light for each year."

SEC

FREE SILVER AND THE WORKINGMAN. ECRETARY CARLISLE has delivered another speech on "Sound Money," this time in Chicago and in response to an invitation from a number of members of labor organizations in that city. The Chicago papers report an attendance of about 5,000 at the Auditorium, where the speech was delivered, among whom the workingmen largely predominated. The speech, nearly two hours in length, was closely and quietly followed by the audience, but at its end the meeting broke up in confusion, with hisses, and cheers for Debs, through the persistent attempts of silver men to gain a hearing in propounding certain questions to Mr. Carlisle. A number of newspapers quote and commend the following statement made by Mr. Carlisle of the position of the free-silver advocates:

"The naked proposition is that the United States shall coin, at the public expense, for the exclusive benefit of the individuals and corporations owning the bullion, all the silver that may be presented at the mints into dollars containing 371 grains of pure silver, or 4121⁄2 grains of standard silver, worth intrinsically about 51 or 52 cents, deliver the coins to the depositors of the bullion, aud compel all the other people in the country to receive these coins at a valuation of 100 cents each in the payment of debts due them for property sold, for labor and service of all kinds, for pensions to soldiers, and sailors and their widows and children, for losses sustained under policies issued by life and other insurance companies, for deposits in savings-banks, trust companies, building associations, and other institutions, for debts due to widows and orphans by guardians, executors, and administrators of decedents' estates, and other trustees for salaries of all civil, military and naval officials, and the compensation of private soldiers and seamen, and, in short, for every kind of obligation recognized by the laws of the land, except only in cases where the prudent capitalist has taken the precaution in advance to contract for payment in gold or its equivalent.

The positions taken were that free-silver coinage would contract the currency by stopping the use of gold as money; that the silver dollar would fluctuate according to the price of silver bullion in the market; that wages of workingmen would be paid in depreciated currency, which would greatly diminish in purchasing power. On this latter point the Secretary says:

"After struggling for more than a quarter of a century, through labor organizations and otherwise, to secure a rate of wages which would make the proceeds of a day's work equal to the cost of a day's subsistence for the workingman and his family, you are asked by the advocates of free coinage to join them in destroying one half the purchasing power of the money in which you are paid and impose upon yourselves the task of doubling the nominal amount of your wages hereafter; that is, to struggle for another

quarter of a century, or perhaps longer, to raise your wages in a depreciated currency to a point which will enable you to purchase with them as much of the necessaries of life as you can purchase now; and if, after years of contention, privation, and industrial disorder, you should at last succeed in so adjusting wages that they would procure at the higher pricse of commodities just what they will procure now at the existing prices, what would you have gained by the change from the old to the new conditions? "Moneys received for wages, like money received on every other account, is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged for other commodities, and it is scarcely necessary to suggest a dollar worth 50 cents will not purchase as much in the markets as a dollar worth 100 cents. To call a dime a dollar would add nothing whatever to its intrinsic value or to its purchasing power. If these propositions are correct, it is clear that when wages are paid in a depreciated currency the rates of wages must be increased in proportion to the depreciation of the money and in proportion to the increase in the prices of other things, or the laborer will suffer a loss But I affirm that it is the universal rule that the rates of wages do not increase in proportion to the depreciatien in the value of the money in which they are paid, and that when the currency is depreciated the rates of wages do not increase in proportion to the increase in the prices of the commodities the laborer is compelled to purchase. If there has been a single exception to this rule in this or in any other country, my investigations have not enabled me to find it, and I do not believe one can be found."

Mr. Carlisle also paid his respects to those members of the Philadelphia Manufacturers' Club who have recently declared for free silver, under which, as he puts it, they could pay wages in depreciated silver and sell their products for gold in foreign markets, and declared that "the American laborer has a right to demand pay for his work in as good money as the employer receives for his products in any part of the world, and when he surrenders this right he is doomed to the same fate that has already overtaken his brothers in the silver standard countries."

We give some of the comments of the press of the country on the relation of the silver question to the interests of the workingman, as brought out in this speech:

Will Clear Away Clap-Trap.-"The Secretary spoke for workingmen and in the main-to workingmen. The question of currency is of more importance to the laborer than to the capitalist who employs him. And the earner of the daily wage is at last awake to that fact. The lucid presentation of the case for a gold standard, to which thousands of Chicago workingmen listened last night-and which tens of thousands more are reading to-day—will clear away the clap-trap and elusive teachings of the Altgeld-Hinrichsen school of currency-tinkers. . . . Free coinage of silver-even if the savings-banks should be able to stand up under the 'runs' of panic times-would scale down the value of deposits 50 per cent. As a result of this, the depositors-the 4,875,000 savings-banks depositors of the country-would receive, instead of 1,810 millions of dollars, only 905. What is true of savings-banks would be true of building and loan associations, and life-insurance corporations. Free-silver coinage would enable these institutions to discharge obligations to the people amounting to 16,000 millions by the payment of 51 or 52 cents on the dollar.

"Is any wage-earner prepared to support a political movement which would yield this crop of disasters to the wage-earning class? The capitalist sometimes contrives to profit by a panic. The laboring man never. Is any Chicago wage-earner ready to play off his happiness and home against the greed of the speculator?" -The Evening Post, Chicago.

A New Departure. "To discuss the abstruse topics of finance before an audience of plain workingmen is a new departure. And yet this action is strictly in line with Mr. Carlisle's previous policy. It is an indication of his profound political sagacity. More than any other statesman of his time, he goes back to first principles in his discussion of the problems of the day. As labor is the foundation of wealth, whose existence requires the estabishment of a monetary system suited to the needs of the laboring men, so he realizes the necessity of addressing his arguments primarily to the toilers. They form the basis of industrial society, and the capitalist is only the capstone. Few of the acute intellects who have labored to bring about a better thinking on the great subject of a proper monetary standard have understood that the best way to make the pot boil was from the bottom. They have addressed their argument mainly to the commercial, not to the industrial, classes, in singular obtuseness to the fact that it is the many who need convincing, not the few. In this respect they have been in unfortunate contrast to their opponents who have unhesitatingly avowed themselves in opposition to moneyed men

IT

LETTERS AND ART.

MRS. BARR TALKS TO SOROSIS ABOUT
NOVELS.

T is well known that Mrs. Amelia E. Barr, the novelist, is opposed to the so-called Woman's Rights movement (see THE LITERARY DIGEST of February 15), but she does believe that woman is the born story-teller" and that the fiction of the twentieth century is to be woman's work. At a late Sorosis meeting, held at The Waldorf, this city, Mrs. Barr for the first time in her life addressed a woman's club. The question for discussion being "Is the exaltation of the novel and the decadence of poetry, epistolary writings, and the essay, a development or a retrogression in literature?" Mrs. Barr, when her turn came to speak, first addressed herself to poetry, saying, among other things:

"The province of verse is higher and narrower than that of prose. It deals with the mountain peaks of passion in every phase, but if we look at it as regards the passion of love a sufficient explanation for its falling-off will be found. When men and women loved as they did long centuries ago, old ballads did not overdo the delights and agonies of passion; but it goes hard with verse when people, said to be in love, seriously ask themselves if they can live on $1,000 a year; when woman has to take in account social position, lawyers, milliners, and dressmakers, and the man has to ask himself what luxuries he has to give up, and how this self-denial will affect him with his fellows. Such kind of tragic possibilities do not require verse to set them forth. Verse may be a nobler vehicle for thought, but it must deal with simple and intense emotions, and can not explain the complex life of the present era."

Mrs. Barr does not underrate verse. She believes that while verse can not descend below a certain level without degradation, prose can concern itself with the trifles of daily life. Verse, she thinks, will continue to "dominate a certain number of minds." As to the essayist, she asserts that "the world of to-day has no leisure for essayists; it will not bear the didactic mood." And as to letter-writing she says:

"It has succumbed to the invincible spirit of the times. Nobody now ever tries to write a good letter, for not Mme. de Sévigné herself, or Horace Walpole, could be charming with a typewriter on a postal card. Do you say, 'Love-letters'? These are at least full of passion and nature, and, therefore, genius. Why should there be love-letters now? Are there not railways, bicycles, and hansom cabs existing for lovers, so that love-letters are a lazy way of making love, and ought to be an anachronism? You will say some lovers are too poor to travel. Then they are too poor to marry, for they ought to remember in these expensive times that railway journeys are cheaper than children."

Mrs. Barr declares that "these facts" prepare the way for an assertion that the novel is the natural and the most forcible literary expression of our times, and the most popular. Remarking that "literary fashions are not accidents," she concluded by saying:

"The subjects touched by clever and experienced novelists are precisely those that women want opinions on, and if their views do not quite satisfy, they have probably suggested deeper ones than would have occurred to most readers unaided. Again, the novel is a mirror in which society sees her own face. During the last few decades more fiction has been written than history, biography, poetry, and philosophy united, and the novel has become the favorite vehicle of genius, just as the drama was in the days of Elizabeth and the essay in Anne's time.

"The novels of to-day justify the popular taste for them. They are more than merely interesting stories. If a man or woman has a theory to air, or a moral panacea to vend; if he or she is a soul afflicted with a mission, or possessing a gift of narrative, or -even a poetic heart, the novel at once suggests itself as the exponent of the ideas or feeling.

"Woman is the born story-teller of humanity, and men may leave her to strike the note to which the fiction of the twentieth century will respond. For it is the daily incidents, the joys and sorrows of men, women, and children in some great emergency

or long-desired enjoyment, the pictures, memories, and hopes of visible life that fill the thoughts of women, and whatever occupies the thoughts stirs the imagination. But the minds of men are a medley of books, ballot-boxes, five-per-cents, bank-reserves, railway-regulations, cotton, currency, race-courses, wars, telegraphs, cables, and spectacular dramas, and as the thoughts of men so are their imaginations. Besides, the male mind is too didactic. It brings sermons into novels, and wants to preach to the universe. When the modern man writes about the affections, he fails signally. It is a woman who will write the most charming nonsense, and not be afraid. Novel-writing is the progressive phase of literature. It will never go back or fall into decadence.. It will keep time and step with life's progress."

INFLUENCES THAT AFFECTED POE.

THE

'HE appearance of the works of Poe, newly edited by Mr. Stedman and Professor Woodberry, continues to excite comment on the character of Poe. The Atlantic (April) thinks that in spite of his scorn for their pretensions, Poe was, in his way, as deeply affected by the enthusiasm of the so-called Transcendentalists of New England as the most radical among them; that while he was not a reformer in the ordinary sense, he remained always just within the outer fringe of this new humanist movement; that its effect upon him was purely psychologic, and the human mind became, in his estimation, a "treasure-house of undreamed-of possibilities, which was but the poet's version of the value of the individual." Yet The Atlantic thinks that Poe was no more conscious of this than he was that Goethe's researches in natural history actuated him when, in imitation of Coleridge, he humanized his redoubtable raven. Remarking that the effect of Coleridge's influence on Poe has never been properly estimated, and that Coleridge transmitted a special and unique influence to Poe alone, the editor goes on to say:

"One aspect of the general influence which Coleridge exerted upon Poe is curiously exemplified in his poems from the time that he began to write. Coleridge was among the first to humanize nature. It was a fashion of the day, and a part of those tendencies of thought already briefly indicated. It arose, probably, from a haziness as to the limitations of self-consciousness. But whatever its cause, the idea strongly affected the poets, and animals, birds, plants, and insects were given human attributes, or were made to symbolize all kinds of abstractions. 'Christabel,' 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' and many of the political poems such as 'The Destiny of Nations' and 'The Raven,' are evidence of the attraction this notion possessed for Coleridge.

"It apparently suited as well Poe's mystical turn of mind. 'The Raven' is, of course, the most conspicuous instance, and in the 'Philosophy of Composition' Poe assumes that a talking bird is the most natural thing in the world. In his so-called 'Juvenile Poems,' printed about 1831, thirteen years before 'The Raven' was published, he already makes use of birds as symbols of Nemesis or Destiny, and many of the passages are nearly identical in thought with some of Coleridge's lines. That Poe was familiar with the writings of Coleridge at that time is shown by his eulogistic reference to him in the preface to this early edition of his poems. The special influence which Coleridge had upon Poe relates to the development of his own poetical genius, and, to be understood, requires a short digression from the main subject.

About 1773, Gottfried August Bürger, a poor student at Göttingen, wrote a ballad under the title of 'Lenore.' The composition of this ballad was due to Herder's famous appeal to the poets of Germany for the development of a national spirit in poetry. Lenore was modeled upon the ancient ballad forms as Bürger found them in the collections of Bishop Percy, Motherwell, and Ossian. From these and other relics of folk-songs, as well as from the study of Shakespeare, he evolved a theory as to the requirements of a poem which should endure-a poem, in short, which should possess a universal, and therefore a national interest. The ballad was written in strict accord with the theory, and its success justified its author's conclusions. It was sung and recited by all classes throughout Germany, and its author,

The

according to Mme. de Staël, was more famous than Goethe. poem was translated into nearly every language. In England it had seven different translators, among them Sir Walter Scott and Pye the poet laureate. It was set to music in many forms, and is said to have inspired 'The Erl King' of Schubert. To the artists it was equally suggestive. Ary Scheffer and Horace Vernet both painted pictures which had for their subjects some episode in the poem, while two of the greatest illustrators of the day, Maclise and Bartolozzi, found it worthy of their best efforts.

"Nor did the poets escape its influence. In England, Keats, Shelley, Southey, Coleridge, and Wordsworth either imitated or were inspired by it. Coleridge and Wordsworth were of all most deeply affected by its influence. From the evidence at hand it is apparent that the two poets based their famous new departure in poetry upon Bürger's poetic theory, which had been formulated in the preface to the second edition of his volume containing 'Lenore' also, that Coleridge's greatest poems, including 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' were its direct result.

It is this theory which is the foundation of Poe's 'Philosophy of Composition,' and Poe was the third poet to be made famous by the careful application of it to his work. It is a striking confirmation of these facts that the productions in which Poe most faithfully conformed to the rules laid down by Bürger are of all his writings those which have been considered by the critics as best worth preserving.

"The famous theory whose effects have been so far-reaching is extremely simple. It is based upon fundamental principle of esthetics, that art, to endure, must deal with experiences common to all men. Simplicity of phrase, the narrative form, the refrain, and particularly the use of the supernatural, are the ancient and essential means for the accomplishment of this end.

'Bürger's poems were well known in this country before 1840, but Poe undoubtedly received his knowledge of the theory from Mme. de Staël and from 'The Lyrical Ballads.' This, it will be remembered, is the volume of poems whose publication in 1798 marked the apostasy of Wordsworth and Coleridge from the classic models. In the appendix to the second edition their reasons are set forth at length, and Bürger's ideas are referred to with enthusiasm. It is this explanation which Poe quotes in the introduction to his 'Juvenile Poems.' The succession, therefore, is uninterrupted: Bürger formulated his theory in the essay prefixed to the edition of his poems published in 1778; Coleridge and Wordsworth applied it and quoted it in 'The Lyrical Ballads' in 1800; while Poe, in his turn, quoted it, as adopted by Wordsworth and Coleridge, in the preface to the edition of his poems in 1831, and finally by its complete application made the chief success of his life.

"It is clear from this that Poe was far from being the literary mountebank he is generally pictured. From his earliest youth he seems to have been actuated by a unity of purpose, an unswerving application of proven means to a desired end, which indicates in him the possession of qualities that are even Philistine, so respectable are they. As for Poe's weaknesses, some day, perhaps, they may find a critic such as François Villon found in Stevenson, and Coleridge in Walter Pater, who will judge them together with his genius as alike the expression of a nature too keenly responsive to the exigencies of life."

GEORGE ELIOT'S ETHICS.

S a great mountain, from which one has had wide and entrancing views, remains fixed in the memory, and is, if accessible, frequently revisited, so a superior author attracts mental pilgrimages, and at each return of the visitor gives some new or enhances some old impression. Under the title of "George Eliot Revisited," Mr. G. W. E. Russell, writing for The Contemporary Review, after traversing the familiar ground of the make-up of her various novels, proceeds to analyze some of the leading characteristics of George Eliot's mind and teaching. He places first among the subjects of this analysis her religious thought, saying that one who was her intimate friend has told him that, tho not formally, she was essentially and profoundly a Positivist. Another friend writes:

"That the mind of her who penned these novels was profoundly religious, no reader can doubt. When, however, we attempt closely to define the

religion in which George Eliot rested, our task is difficult. We find in her the most marvelous power of putting herself in the position of the holders of all creeds, so deep was her sympathy with every form in which the relig ious instincts have expressed themselves. The simple faith, half pagan, but altogether reverent, of Dolly Winthrop; the sensible, matter-of-fact, and honorable morality of Mr. Irwine; the aspirations of a modern St. Theresa; the passionate fervors of Dinah, were understood and reverenced by her. All that was most human, and therefore most divine, most ennobling,and most helpful, was assimilated by her. The painful bliss of asceticism, the rapture of Catholic devotion, the satisfaction which comes of self-abnegation, were realized by her as tho she had been a fervent Catholic. But the ground-tone of her thought was essentially and intensely Protes. tant. She could not submit herself completely to any external teacher."

Whereupon Mr. Russell remarks:

"For those to whom the faith of Christendom is as vital air, the history of George Eliot's religious thought is preeminently painful. Very early in life she broke away from the Evangelical beliefs in which she had been educated, and before her first volume was published she was no longer a Christian. Yet who can read her description of Dinah Morris's preaching on the green, her prayers and entreaties, 'written' to quote George Eliot's own words, 'with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind,' without the deep conviction that the author had once known the intensity and the power of a fervid faith? This impression is even deepened when we follow her in the beautiful words of the prayer, too sacred for transcription, with which Dinah melts and heals the broken heart of Hetty in the condemned cell; or when she claims our love and admiration for the heroic courage of the young preacher in 'Janet's Repentance,' battling at once with religious intolerance and physical decay; or, when again, she thrills our hearts with the Baptist-sternness, the Christ-like tenderness of Savonarola's message to guilty Florence.

"Still, as we follow in order the gradual development of her mind as expressed in her works, we find ever less and less recognition of the truth and power of the Gospel; ever more and more of the substitution of moral duty for religious faith; ever an increasing sense of darkness and hopelessness and impending annihilation, in the prospect of death.

"The most painful feature of the history is that, with the loss of belief in a personal God, came the loss of belief in a personal immortality. And in this 'eclipse of faith' George Eliot died. Not even a gleam of sunset light was permitted to irradiate the gloom. I have heard that when Sir Andrew Clark entered the sick-room he found that she had already sunk into the final stupor, without even realizing that she was dangerously ill. From that darkened chamber of bereavement and anguish we turn away with the words which she herself has put into the mouth of Rufus Lyon:

"Tho I would not want only grasp at ease of mind through an arbitrary choice of doctrine, I can not but believe that the merits of the Divine Sacrifice are wider than our utmost charity.'

Turning from George Eliot's religious thought to its necessary complement in her ethical system-her sense of duty-Mr. Russell says:

"No novelist, and scarcely any professional moralist, has dwelt with more insistence or more varied force on this ennobling theme. Her sense of duty includes in its imperious purview every relation of public and private life. The duty of the landowner, of the politician, of the parish-priest; the duty of parent to child, of brother to sister, of the young man to the woman of his choice, of wife to husband, of husband to wife-these are the favorite themes of each different tale. Each succeeding agony or sorrow in the long and often complicated chain of misfortune is traced home with relentless pertinacity to its source in some failure of moral duty. Nor are the demands of duty satisfied and its consequent blessings attained by a mere discharge of mutual obligations. George Eliot's sense of duty was that higher and completer one which includes our duty to ourselves. Our warfare with the foe within, the necessity of self-mastery and selfcontrol, the blessedness of self-forgetfulness and self-surrender —these are her chosen themes. Nor, again, is the ideal of duty attained by abstinence from those glaring and palpable breaches of it which grate upon the common conscience, and only require to be stated in order to be condemned. George Eliot's special value as a moral teacher lies in the stern insistence with which she makes us see our own hidden and less obvious vices; our pettinesses, our selfishnesses, our sins of harshness, of coldness, of unsympathy; and forces us to recognize in the ruin of another's happiness the handiwork of some little fault of character or action

which was concealed from all outside, and, till she revealed it, only half-known to ourselves. Of course, so high an ideal of duty involved a correspondingly high notion of the beauty of sacrifice. To live for others in the humble offices of common duty; to die for others in the flames of martyrdom, or the less heroic pangs of domestic drudgery and unrequited love, forms her ideal of the truly enviable fate. The same absolute selfforgetfulness, seeking no reward here or hereafter, colors even her conception of that impersonal immortality to which alone she permitted herself to aspire

'O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence: live In pulses stirred to generosity,

in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self." "Surely, even in this vulgar age of Mammon-worship and selfpleasing we may esteem the teacher of so sublime a creed at least as truly one of our great benefactors, as tho she had invented new facilities of communication, or amplified, by a fresh discovery, our means of physical enjoyment.

"In George Eliot's philosophy of life two or three ruling ideas are manifest. In the first place, she was as conspicuously as possible the reverse of a fatalist. She believed absolutely in the freedom and responsibility of the individual will. She held that we fashion our own characters and lives, and was much less disposed than many thinkers to attribute their determining qualities to the force of circumstances. She herself has said:

'Our deeds shall travel with us from afar,

And what we have been makes us what we are.'

"Again, she had a melancholy conviction of the irreparable nature of human experience. She believed with all her heart the stern truth that in the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins. Again and again we have the same note of quiet sorrow over the irrevocable fixity of the past. For example:

"O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affections we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!'"

We are tempted to make one more extract-the following:

66

George Eliot's belief was that even the most commonplace lives are underlaid with tragedy. On occasion she can heighten the interest of a dramatic scene by invoking the more sublimely tragic powers-the destructive energy of angry Nature, or the even deadlier wrath of human hatred. But these situations are rare.

The majority of her tales derive their tragedy from the hidden sufferings of wounded hearts; from the fruitless pangs of unrequited love, or the gnawing remorse which dogs successful sin. Her genius combines the powers of the telescope and microscope; it sweeps the wide horizon of events and forces which have moved the world; it directs our gaze to the teeming life beneath our daily feet, and reveals the microcosm of a single water-drop. George Eliot has taught us to sympathize with the great movements of humanity which have upheaved empires, and changed the face of religions, and have raised up generations of heroes for their accomplishment, and have scattered abroad their seed in the blood of martyrs. But even more faithfully and beneficially has she led us to recognize the unnoticed tragedy which lies around our every-day path, which is the product of events not strikingly impressive, but insignificant and even vulgar; and to which each day we live we may perhaps be unconsciously contributing."

WE

JOSEFFY AND BRAHMS.

HEN Joseffy allowed year after year to pass without playing for any one but his neighbors in Tarrytown and his select pupils at the National Conversatory, his friends and admirers began to fear that he was going to follow the example of Liszt, who practically closed the lid of his piano, as far as the pub as concerned, thirty-nine years before the end of his life. The phen ys the critic, Mr. Henry T. Finck, in The Lookerintere oneJoseffy changed his mind, and altho he reappeared in Dader ork under rather unfavorable auspices, handicaped by a

Brahms concerto and Mr. Damrosch as accompanist, he won a triumph acknowledged by the whole press without a dissentient voice. As a Brahms player he has no superior, tho Brahms plays his own works differently (with less elegance). I have also heard Joseffy play certain pieces by Schumann and others of the romantic and classical schools better than any other pianist has ever played them in my hearing (and I have heard all the great pianists from Liszt to the present day).

"What I can not understand in Mr. Joseffy is his love of the austere, ascetic Brahms. I can only account for it on the ground that persistent indulgence in the sweets of Chopin, and those who followed Chopin into the regions of pianistic euphony, has so cloyed his appetite that he now seeks relief in doses of quinin, quassia, vermouth, and other bitters. I feel convinced that after he has cured his nerves, he will again prefer music that sounds well and is written in the Chopinesque, arpeggiated style which alone enables a piano to reveal its full beauty of tone.

"My esteemed friend and colleague, Mr. James Huneker, thinks I haven't 'grasped the fact that Brahms is the composer for the day, that his very austerity and reticence in orchestral colors are signs of his sanity.' I admit that a composer may sacrifice sensuous beauty for dramatic characterization (Wagner often does that), but I can find neither dramatic characterization nor sensuous beauty-nor emotional warmth-in most of Brahms's works. What I do find is themes in place of ideas, and I care very little for the contrapuntal ingenuity with which these themes are developed. Ideas are what I look for in music-ideas, and not mere erudition and clever workmanship, especially if the orchestral colors are 'austere and reticent.' I have never yet been surfeited by the sight of beautiful women or the sound of beautiful music, and I suspect that in these things most musiclovers are as insatiable sensualists as the Oriental Théophile Gautier. Women and music should be beautiful, cordial, einotional, not 'austere and reticent.' Asceticism will never take the place of estheticism. However, if Mr. Huneker likes musical quinin and quassia-prosit !"

DANIEL DEFOE'S JOURNALISTIC TOUCH.

THE

HE author of "Robinson Crusoe" will probably ever be looked upon as a "single-book" man, yet, as is well known, his bibliography is quite extensive. A puzzle to the critics of English literature, from Charles Lamb down, is the fact that of all Defoe's romances and other works, but one became popular, for his style is the same, or very nearly the same, in all. Writing for Book Reviews, Mr. H. Morse Stephens makes a study of Defoe's literary style, and comes to the conclusion that it was in the constant practise of daily writing, sometimes in pamphlets and sometimes in news-letters, corresponding to the work of a modern journalist, that he gained the easy style and the faculty of always avoiding tiresome dulness which made him the prince of English narrators. We quote:

"Professor Minto in his volume upon Defoe, in the 'English Men of Letters' series, has remarked that the author of 'Robinson Crusoe' was essentially a journalist, but neither he nor Defoe's numerous biographers and critics have ever pointed out that Defoe owes his characteristic merits and demerits to his journalistic training. If an experienced journalist of the present day, whose duties had lain in the collection of the ordinary facts of daily life as a newspaper reporter and in the writing of timely editorial articles, and who had never been employed in any purely literary capacity, were asked at the age of fifty-eight to draw upon his recollections of the men and things he had seen and to build up a romantic story, he would probably produce fiction of the same genre as the works of Defoe. It must be premised also that the said journalist should have sprung from the same grade of society as Defoe and should not have had the advantages of a college education. It is absolutely startling to compare a few pages taken at random from any of Defoe's romances with the descriptive reports which fill the pages of the New York newspapers. The literary method of the reporter of modern days and of Defoe is identical. Allowance of course must be made for the difference in point of view between the early days of the eighteenth century and these latter days of the nineteenth, and of