A "FLOOD OF GOLD" AND ITS EFFECT. WILL ILL nature come to our aid in the attempt to solve the money question, so perplexing to economists and statesmen? According to several independent forecasts, an enormous increase in the world's supply of gold is in sight, and this is believed by some to involve a rise in the price of silver, a general industrial revival, and the automatic establishment of a "natural bimetalism." An English financier, writing in the London Bankers' Magazine, speaks of the development of new fields in South Africa and elsewhere, and predicts such a glut of gold as will necessitate the suspension of free coinage and the limitation of the legal-tender quality of gold. Mr. Preston, the director of the United States Mint, also refers, in his last report, to the impending increase in the gold output and draws some very optimistic conclusions. In an interview, he is reported to have said: 'When you have an increase in the production of gold you will surely have an increase in the money of the world. Gold is the same as money the world over, for you may take a gold dollar and put it into the furnace and melt it down, and still it will retain its value, unaided by any other security. The more gold produced, the more money we will have in circulation. . . When there is an abundance of money in circulation prosperity prevails. The more money we have the more we spend. That is the common practise as it applies to the average person throughout the world. If the United States has an increase in the production of gold, the result will be that there will be an increase in the volume of investments. The more gold we have the more valuable become our securities, and foreign investors will not be slow in seeking investments for their capital. The same conditions apply to the world at large, so that I sincerely believe that we are about to experience a 'flood of gold' that will improve business and help to solve the financial problem." Those who do not accept the "quantity theory" of money criticize these hopeful views as extravagant, and declare that the increase in the gold output will but slightly stimulate business. There are some writers who predict great disaster and commercial disturbance from the anticipated glut of gold. We append comments giving expression to these different views: We May See Silver at a Premium.-"Gold having appreciated relatively to silver because of the greater production of the white metal, there were two ways in which our silver dollar might be made equal in commercial value to our gold dollar without altering either. The first was a decrease in the production of silver; the second an increase in the production of gold. "The second way was believed to be impossible, owing to the theory that not much more gold could be got out of the earth. So pessimists persisted in declaring that the silver dollar must either be wiped out of existence or made to contain more silver. They thought their logic was inevitable. "But Nature laughs at human logic. To-day there is a prospect of such immense additions to the world's visible supply of gold that, barring out all prospect of legislation by our national Congress, within the next twenty years we may see the silver dollar at a premium. In that case it would be amusing to note the anxiety the creditor classes over the world would show to maintain the silver standard. Like Guinevere, they 'needs must love the highest when they see it.' Perhaps enlightened selfishness is, after all, the most effective factor in human progress.' The Recorder, New York. Bright Prospect for Bimetalism.-"The whole tendency in the discovery and increased output of the precious metals is in the direction of gold. At the time silver was so generally demonetized its production seemed to be almost illimitable, while the gold mines were showing signs of contraction. Great deposits were known to exist, which defied the science and skill of mining enterprise. But now all has changed. There is no silver bonanza, but gold mines have come to the front by the side of which relays of bonanzas would seem cheap and poor. The money kings are being beaten at their own game by their own metal. "The world's money is about half silver and half gold. The attempt, now partly accomplished, to throw out one half the money of the world could not fail, Mr. Preston himself being judge, to cause hard times. The most bigoted goldite can see the logic of contraction and expansion, except when his pet theory of finance is at stake. "Fortunately the United States is rich in both money metals. The output of gold this year is sure to be much larger than the output of last year, and by the close of the century it is likely to be not far from as great as that of the British Empire is to-day. "In proportion as the prospect of a corner in gold becomes remote the prospect of a return to bimetalism brightens. Events are shaping themselves in the direction of a return to the full and fair use of both money metals."—The Inter Ocean, Chicago. Gold in No Immediate Danger. "There is no doubt that the largely increased gold production, which now exceeds all previous records in the world's history, is exerting a powerful influence on business. Whether the flood of gold will operate to increase prices through an actual depreciation in the worth of the metal itself is a question that is receiving no little attention, and some rather plausible statistics have been published to show how the world's stock of gold will be augmented until a point is reached where the present ruling price can not longer be maintained. This, however, is mere conjecture, and no accurate computations are possible in estimating to what extent prices will be affected by the increased output of gold. The standard of value at present maintained throughout the world will not change for years to come. "The immediate future of the gold-mining industry in the United States seems unusually bright. That means also that the sections interested in gold production will prosper and the whole country will indirectly feel the effect of this activity.”—The Financier, New York. A Simple Transition to Bimetalism.—“The desideratum of a money supply which increases with the increase of business demands will be more or less nearly achieved before any international agreement on coinage is reached. If it happens that the stimulated gold production is sufficient to bring the two metals anywhere near together commercially at the old Latin Union ratio of 15% to 1, the transition to bimetallic coinage will be simple; and the producing classes may hope that all the nations will be wise enough to seize the opportunity-will secure a money supply which for all future time will be equal to the enlarging wants of the people.”~The Republic, St. Louis. A Novel Situation Fraught with Grave Possibilities.-"In a current report issued by the United States Treasury it is shown that the value of the total gold coinage of our mints from the beginning has been three times greater than the value of the silver coinage. It is further shown that the proportion of the total gold product used for coinage is about two thirds, while the proportion of the total silver product used in the same way is less than one third. These figures will doubtless be used by the silverites to substantiate their favorite theory that it is impossible to make gold the sole monetary standard for the commercial world, as the total product of the mines of the world will not furnish a sufficient supply for this purpose. Per contra, attention is attracted by a remarkable article in the London Bankers' Magazine on the dangers to the financial systems of the commercial world involved in the coming flood of gold, which threatens to extend beyond all limits heretofore regarded as within the range of the possible. The annual output of the gold mines of the world is now far beyond any previous record; but, great as it is at present, it still goes on increasing and threatens to increase even more rapidly in the immediate future. A careful review of all the facts bearing on gold production leads to the conclusion that there is no imaginable limit to the future output of this precious metal. The golden stream has but started to flow in, and the full force of its rising tide is yet to be realized. The demands of the commercial nations adopting the gold standard have so stimulated production in every part of the world that the paying mines are becoming more and more numerous and more prolific every day. "Never before in the history of the world has there been anything like such a gold product presented for consideration. The first thought with regard to such an overwhelming accumulation is that we shall not know what to do with it, how to use it, and how to make it available as a monetary standard without breaking down existing values. The financial world has no experience that would be of use under these novel circumstances. No existing monetary system ever contemplated such an embarrassment TE 5 t et of riches, being founded on the opposite assumption that gold is necessarily and always must be a scarce commodity. What new and unlooked-for effects may proceed from such an unexpected turn of affairs no financial wisdom can now predict. Gold has played so large a part in the operations of modern commerce that the entire output has always been absorbed without exciting attention, except as to possible scarcity. Should a point be reached when neither its monetary nor its industrial uses would afford an outlet for the current supply, the novel situation might be such as to cause serious disturbances."-The Telegraph, Philadelphia. Roman Catholicism and the W. C. T. U.-A lively controversy has sprung up in the Women's Christian Temperance Union on the subject of the proper attitude of the organization toward Roman Catholicism. The resolution passed by the recent convention, at the instance of Miss Willard, favoring affiliation with Roman Catholic and Jewish women, called forth a vigorous protest from the Boston branch of the W. C. T. U. It is addressed to Miss Willard and reads in part as follows: "While we recognize the breadth and wisdom of fraternizing with all whom may honestly desire to abolish the saloon, and do away with the drink traffic, yet we view with alarm the inroads which Romanists are making in our ranks, preventing freedom of speech and action, and we believe that great care should be taken lest they do serious undermining work. "We beg you in your investigation, which covers so wide a scope, to investigate the doings of the Jesuits especially at Washington. After thorough candid investigation, we believe you will be convinced that our action as a national body must be exceedingly guarded toward this most dangerous class in our community." Miss Willard, in an elaborate reply, meets the points raised in the protest and winds up with this passage: "Let it be remembered that the Women's Christian Temperance Union is not a church. It is a temperance union. It has no creed, but it has a declaration of principles. It stands for 'total abstinence, total prohibition, and a white life for two,' and among its rally-cries are these: 'No sectarianism in religion, no sectionalism in politics, no sex in citizenship.' Its motto is, 'For God and home and native land,' and it proclaims not only in this but every nation that only the gospel of the golden rule of Christ can bring the gladness of the golden age of man.' If Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile will come to us as fraternal messagebearers, or as working-allies upon this sacred platform, let us not only clasp their friendly hands, but go more than half-way to welcome them to the broad outlook and blessed fellowship of a union that has the home for its watchword and the happiness of all for its heaven-appointed goal." The press generally sympathizes with Miss Willard and condemns the action of the Boston branch as bigoted and unchristian. The Springfield Republican says: "It may be observed that if women desire to prove their political wisdom, in anticipation of the extension of suffrage to them, they will do well to follow Frances E. Willard rather than the other party. What they should have done was to expunge this protest from their records, or place thereon an ample apology." greater regard for the rights and interest of the workers, stops many advantages from being taken of them, and, as has been demonstrated, such defeats teach a lesson by which in future the cause of defeat can be avoided. This is looking at the question from the unfavorable side, but how about the numerous strikes that are won in which the increased wages gained leads to further increases, etc., for an indefinite period? . . . All these advantages gained by the wage-earners mean a higher standard of living, larger purchasing capacity, stimulation of business, and infuse a feeling of confidence and independence among the wage-earners which is bound to stamp itself upon the future. Another important point: Many strikes in individual trades really do not cause a loss of time, as the length of the slack season is often shortened thereby." Strikes from Labor's Point of View.-The statistics relating to strikes and lockouts recently published by Col. Carroll D. Wright were widely discussed in the press (THE LITERARY DIGEST, November 2), and the general deduction drawn from them was that strikes are unprofitable as a rule and ought not to be resorted to. The trades-union organs dispute this deduction as misleading. Thus The Garment Worker, New York, says: "The number of strikes that are won or compromised can be determined accurately, and also the number of people involved, but when it comes to reckoning the material gain resulting from contests between employers and employees, you might as well ask what has been the cost and the material gain of the American Revolution, of the abolition movement which brought about our Civil War, or any movement for reform or struggle against injustice. It was generally conceded that the results of such events, even when lost, are highly beneficial to the progress and elevation of by instilling a more wholesome public spirit, and eventually the human race, by improving the standards of right and wrong, establishing conditions that make a greater prosperity and happiness possible. Resistance to wrongs prevents servility, prevents greater injustice from being done, and leads to the eventual overthrow of such conditions. Likewise in the movement of labor, even granting that many strikes are lost, such strikes create a TOPICS IN BRIEF. How different are these Congressmen, As in review they pass; For some will rule with tongue and pen, While some blow out the gas. -The Star, Washington. JOHN SHERMAN intimates that he has reached a point at which he would rather write than be President.- The World, New York. AT the moment of going to press our coast defenses consisted of a large gun at Fort Hancock and Senator Chandler.-The Tribune, Detroit. STATESMAN: "I hardly know how to deal with my people on this money question." His Secretary-"That's easy; when they tackle you, don't deal, but continue to shuffle."-The Journal, Indianapolis. "WHAT means this W. C. T. U., -The Tribune, New York. IT takes a bad man to be a good politician.-Puck, New York. WE have finished the turkey. Now for the Turk!-Recorder, New York. "THE Bible's written for the men (So she indicts it), And then she calmly takes her pen And rewrites it. LETTERS AND ART. INTERESTING GLIMPSES OF HALL CAINE'S MR. R. CAINE'S friend, Robert Harborough Sherard, gives an interesting sketch of the novelist's life from his earliest days down to the present. Omitting biographical data which are generally well known, we quote from this article (McClure's, December) some entertaining parts, first as to Mr. Caine's childhood at the Manx cottage of Ballavolley: "Hall Caine's impressions of his life at Ballavolley are vividthe old preacher at the church, the drinking-bouts of 'jough'. beer by the gallon among the villagers, the donkey rides upon the curragh. But what it best pleases him to remember are the times when, seated in the ingle-nook, he used to listen to his grandmother telling fairy stories, as she sat at her black oak spinning - wheel, bending low over the whirling yarn. 'Hommybeg'-it was a pet name she had given to him-'Hommybeg,' she would say, 'I will tell you of the fairies.' And the story that he liked best to listen to, tho it so frightened him that he would run and hide his face in the folds of the blue Spanish cloak which Manx women have worn since two ships of the Great Armada were wrecked upon the island, was the story of how his grandmother, when a lass, had seen and knew no greater delight all. There are seasons, too, of strife and hurricane, of titanic forces battling in the air, when vehement and irresistible winds burst forth to make howling havoc on the bleakest heights-so they seem then-that man's foot ever trod. There are times when not one harebell nods its head in the calm air, not one seed falls from the feathered grass, in the tender serenity of a quiet world; and there are times, too, when Nature aroused puts forth her terrible strength, so that man ventures abroad at his great peril, and ropes must be stretched along the roads by which the unwary wanderer may drag his storm-tossed body home. In Hall Caine's work we also find these extremes of tenderness and its calm, of passion and its riot." At about the age of twenty-four, having removed to Liverpool, Mr. Caine's lecture on Rossetti won him the friendship of that poet and artist, with whom he afterward lived. Rossetti died in "" AND "THE MANXMAN.' his arms on Easter Day, 1882. It was Rossetti who encouraged Mr. Caine to become 'the novelist of Manxland." In 1892 Mr. Caine went to Russia, under the auspices of a Jewish committee, to write up the persecutions of the Jews in that country. When he returned to Cumberland he attempted a story which was to be called "The Jew," but he soon realized the impossibility of competing in their own field with the great Russian novelists, and on going back to the Isle of Man he turned his Jewish story into a Manx story, and “The Jew" became "The Manxman." the fairies with her own eyes. KIRK MAUGHOLD, WHICH FIGURES IN "THE BONDMAN Mr. Caine says that he He was a precocious lad, (By courtesy of McClure's Magazine.) thinks he knows his Bible as few literary men know it; that all the strong situations in his books are taken from the Bible. "The Deemster" is the story of the Prodigal Son; "The Bondman" is the story of Esau and Jacob, with sympathy attaching to Esau; "The Scapegoat" is the story of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel as a little girl; and "The Manxman" is the story of David and Uriah. It is said that in all his books the central motive is the same. gives Mr. Caine's own testimony on this point, as follows: than to read. The first book that he remembers reading was a bulky tome on the German Reformation, about Luther and Melancthon, which he had found. He spent weeks over it, and, staggering under its weight, would carry it out into the hayfield, where, truant to the harvest, he would lie behind the stacks and read and read. One night, indeed, his interest in this book led him to break the rules of his thrifty home-where children went to bed when it was dark, so that candles should not be burned-and light the candles and read on about Luther. He was found thus by one of his aunts as, pails in hand, she returned home from milking the cows. Her anger was great. 'Candles lit!' she cried. 'What's to do? Candles! Wasting candles on reading, -on mere reading!' He was beaten and sent to bed, bursting with indignation at such injustice, for he felt that candles were nothing compared to knowledge. He was a bookish boy, wanting in boyishness, and never played games, but spent his time in reading, not boyish books, indeed, but books in which never boy be. fore took interest-histories, theological works, and, in preference, parliamentary speeches of the great orators, which he would afterward rewrite from memory:" Mr. Gladstone has from the first been one of Mr. Caine's warmest admirers, and in fact was an early business patron of the novelist, whom he appointed to the stewardship of one of his Lancashire estates. Mr. Caine's first writings were done in the Isle of Man at the house of his uncle, the schoolmaster at Kirk Maughold, which place is described by Mr. Sherard as follows: "A visit to Kirk Maughold will afford to the observer the best insight into Hall Caine's literary temperament. The spirit of the place expounds his spirit; its genius seems to have entered into him. There are seasons when this headland height lies serene and calm, wrapped in such loveliness of light on sea and land that the heart melts for very ecstasy at the beauty of all things around, the glowing hills, the flowers that are everywhere, the sea beyond, the tenderness, the color, the native poetry of it Mr. Sherard "It is,' he says, 'the idea of justice, the idea of a divine justice, the idea that righteousness always works itself out, that out of hatred and malice comes love. My theory is that a novel, a piece of imaginative writing, must end with a sense of justice, must leave the impression that justice is inevitable."" Many persons are interested in knowing all about a great writer's methods of work. In this connection Mr. Sherard lets Mr. Caine speaks for himself, as follows: I then labor years, "I don't think that I have sat down to a desk to write for I write in my head to begin with, and the actual writing, which is from memory, is done on any scrap of paper that may come to hand; and I always write on my knee. My work is as follows: first get my idea, my central motive, and this usually takes me a very long time. The incidents come very quickly, for the invention of incidents is a very easy matter to me. like mad in getting knowledge. I visit the places I propose to describe. I read every book I can get bearing on my subject. It is elaborate, laborious, but very delightful. voluminous notes. Then begins the agony. Each day it besets me, winter or summer, from five in the morning till breakfast time. I awake at five and lie in bed, thinking out the chapter that is to be written that day, composing it word for word. usually takes me up till seven. From seven till eight I am engaged in mental revision of the chapter. I then get up and write it down from memory, as fast as ever the pen will flow. The rest I then make That of the morning I spend in lounging about, thinking, thinking, thinking of my book. For when I am working on a new book I think of nothing else; everything else comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or ride, thinking, thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up and down my room constructing my story. It is then that I am happiest. I do not write every day-sometimes I take a long rest, as I am doing at present-and when I do write, I never exceed fifteen hundred words a day." FRENCH WOMEN AND THE FRENCH NOVELIST. THE HE romance-writers of France are not fond of picturing the Frenchwoman as a good wife and mother. This being the case, foreigners may be pardoned for supposing that in the French novel they see reflected the natural type of woman. This the French vehemently deny. We have lately heard Max O'Rell rail against the English and American idea of French morals, and we now have M. Hugues Le Roux affirming (in La Figaro, Paris, October 30) that French novelists owe apology and reparation to their countrywomen. In the first place they have pictured not the Frenchwoman but the Parisienne; and secondly, the Parisienne of their books is not French at all, but a distortion of some one or other of a bevy of twenty foreign professional beauties who have domesticated themselves at Paris. Says M. Le Roux : "Every day I suffer more from the opinion that foreigners have formed of our women and our young girls. They believe, or they pretend to believe, that every fireside has its gallant. If you venture to protest, they have a decisive argument to shut your mouth. They declare: 'We invent nothing. We repeat but a small part of what your French novelists say daily of their wives and their sisters.' "Once I did repel this calumny publicly. It was at Christiania, in a lecture at a students' club. Half the audience was composed of women and girls. I said to them: "You are determined to judge French women by the cases published in the Gazette des Tribuneaux and by the lurid pictures of our romancers. Ah, well! For my part, I have come to your country to see whether the Norwegian women and girls really live like Ibsen's heroines.' "There was a protest and a laugh. I had the credit, for at least an hour, of telling the truth. I do not pretend that this little seed took root; too many hands are daily sowing tares among the grain. "These thoughts, which come to me often, assailed me with greater force than usual to-day, here in Germany, when I write these lines. I was walking in the classic shades of Bonn with a university professor. Suddenly my companion opened his paper, glanced at the news, and said: "Gustave Droz is dead. The Frenchwoman and the French family have lost in him one of those rare romancers of their race that have respected them. And yet, do you know how we look at her this worthy woman of Droz-'Madame,' the wife of 'Monsieur,' the mother of 'Bebé'? She seems to us (excuse my frankness)-she seems to us to have the manners of a woman of bad reputation."" But the characters of Droz, M. Le Roux goes on to explain, date from the end of the Second Empire, when vice was fashionable and when every one was more or less tinctured with its manners, if not with its morals. The trouble with him and with other French romancers, says M. Le Roux, is that they mistake Paris for France, and that when they draw the Parisian woman they draw the woman who makes the greatest stir in Paris—the cosmopolite, a mixture of Russian, American, and Frenchwoman. He quotes the opinion of his German professor as follows: pays, in the good opinion of the world, for the looseness of the Parisienne."" And he adds: "My face burns every time I hear the name 'Parisienne' applied to the cosmopolitan woman who has installed herself at Paris and who is surrounded by a crowd of snobs and do-nothings. Read in the fashionable papers the list of those elegant persons that now form 'all Paris.' They are emigrants from the two Americas, ladies on a vacation, wives and daughters of cosmopolitan financiers. This bevy of beauties have not a drop of French blood in their veins. They live outside of our domestic and religious traditions. They share not one of our patriotic feelings or of our social prejudices. They imagine that they are Parisiennes because they go to the Opera, the Français, the Sorbonne, and the great dressmakers. They even make us believe it, for with their woman's gift of assimilation . . . they give us the illusion of French culture. They pay court to the writers; they persuade them that they alone are interesting. They have obliged the novelists to take them as models. There are twenty women, as well known as actresses, who for ten years have posed for the romance-writers. "What has the real Parisienne of Paris to do with all these lawntennis parties-she whom Alphonse Daudet alone, perhaps, in these twenty years, has seen and loved, this Parisienne who performs the miracle of conducting her house perfectly without turning into a housekeeper, of educating her children without becoming a pedant, of remaining attractive without falling into frivolity? "I told all this to my companion on the garden bench at Bonn. I pleaded with the ardor of one who defends his fireside. My friend was willing to be convinced, but he said: "If you have such a treasure as that, why hide her from the rest of the world? It would be a new field for the writers to work!' "In fact, after having defamed those that we love, why not say something good about them? French novelists owe reparation to the Frenchwoman."—Translated for THE LITERARY DIGEST. How Longfellow Wrote Some of His Poems.-Hezekiah Butterworth has a chatty article on Longfellow in The Ladies' Home Journal (December), giving from memory a conversation he once had with the poet in the latter's house. Longfellow told as follows how he wrote certain of his poems: "I will tell you first how I came to write the 'Psalm of Life.' I was a young man then; I well recall the time. It was a bright day and the trees were blooming, and I felt an impulse to write out my aim and purpose in the world. I wrote the poem and put it into my pocket. I wrote it for myself; I did not intend it for publication. Some months afterward I was asked for a poem by a popular magazine; I recalled my 'Psalm of Life;' I copied it, sent it to the periodical; it saw the light, took wings and flew over the world. "I wrote 'Excelsior, "" he continued, "after receiving a letter from Charles Sumner, at Washington, full of lofty sentiments. In one of the sentences occurred the word 'Excelsior.' As I dropped the letter that word again caught my eye. I turned over the letter and wrote my poem. I wrote the 'Wreck of the Hesperus' because after reading an account of the loss of a part of the Gloucester fishing fleet in an autumn storm, I met the words 'Norman's Woe.' I retired for the night after reading the report of the disaster, but the scene haunted me. I arose to write, and the poem came to me in whole stanzas. was "My poem entitled 'The Bridge, "" he said, in effect, written in sorrow, which made me feel for the loneliness of others. I was a widower at the time, and I used sometimes to go over the bridge to Boston evenings to meet friends, and to return near midnight by the same way. The way was silent, save here and there a belated footstep. The sea rose or fell among the wooden piers, and there was a great furnace on the Brighton hills whose red light was reflected by the waves. It was on such a late solitary walk that the spirit of the poem came upon me. The bridge has been greatly altered, but the place of it is the same." SIR HENRY IRVING ON THE VILLAINY OF MACBETH. THE HE generally received opinion regarding Macbeth has been that of a good man who went wrong under the dominating influence of a wicked wife. Sir Henry Irving does not share that opinion. In a lecture on 'the character of Macbeth, given in Columbia College on the 20th of November, he began by saying that this tradition was mainly due to the powerful rendering of the character of Lady Macbeth by Mrs. Siddons, whose personality lent itself to the view of an essentially dominant woman, and as the play was not given often, the tradition flourished without challenge, save now and then some scholarly comment which practically never reached the masses. We quote briefly from the lecture at this point: "Shakespeare has in his text given Macbeth as one of the most bloody-minded, hypocritical villains in all his long gallery of portraits of men instinct with the virtues and vices of their kind. It is in the very text that, before the opening of the playbefore the curtain rises upon it-Macbeth had not only thought of murdering Duncan, but had even broached the subject to his wife, and that this vague possibility became a resolute intention under stress of unexpected developments; that altho Macbeth played with the subject, and even cultivated assiduously a keen sense of the horrors of his crimes, his resolution never really slackened. Thus we find that the very first suggestion of murder comes from him on the occasion of his meeting with the witches: 'Why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair, My thought whose murder yet is but fantastical?' We will not follow Mr. Irving in his minute analysis of the play, but will confine ourselves to his more concrete views of the character of Macbeth, such as the following: who designates him by the majestic figure 'that Bellona's bridegroom.' It is to his moral qualities which I refer when I dub him villain. He bears witness himself at the close of Act III., when he announces his fixed intent on a general career of selfish crime, and this to the wife whose hands have touched the crown, and whose heart has by now felt the vanity of the empty circlet: 'For mine own good All causes shall give way: I am in blood "How any student, whether he be of the stage or not, can take the above passages, and, reading them in any light he may, can torture out a meaning of Macbeth's native nobility or honor, I am truly at a loss to conceive. Grapes do not grow on thorns, or figs on thistles, and how any one can believe that a wish for and an intent to murder—and for mere gain, tho that gain be the hastening to a crown-can find lodgment in a noble breast, I know not. Let it be sufficient that Macbeth-hypocrite, murderer, traitor, regicide--threw over his many crimes the glamour of his own self-torturing thought. He was a Celt, and in every phase of his life his Celtic fervor was manifest. It is not needed that we, who are students in our various ways of an author's meaning, should make so little of him as to lose his main purpose in the misty beauty of his poetic words. 'A poetic mind on which the presages and suggestions of supernatural things could work; a nature sensitive to intellectual emotion, so that one can imagine him even in his contemplation of coming crimes to weep for the pain of the destined victim; self- torturing, self-examining, playing with conscience so that action and reaction of poetic thought might send emotional waves through the brain while the resolution was as grimly fixed as steel and the heart as cold as ice; a poet supreme in the power of words with vivid imagination and quick sympathy of intellect; a villain cold-blooded, selfish, remorseless, with a true villain's nerve and callousness when braced to evil work, and the physical heroism of those who are born to kill; a moral nature with only sufficient weakness to quake momentarily before superstitious terrors; a man of sentiment and not of feeling. Such was the mighty dramatic character which Shakespeare gave to the world in Macbeth." SIR HENRY IRVING. "It is quite possible that Macbeth led his wife to believe that she was leading him on. It was a part of his nature to work to her moral downfall in such a way. His hypocrisy runs throughout the play. There is no stronger instance of it than when in the presence of his wife he pathetically pictures the aspect of the murdered king and the innocent attendants, whose faces he and his 'dearest partner of greatness' had smeared with blood. This is certainly a little too much for the lady-for she faints and is carried away. He was a poet with his brain-the greatest poet that Shakespeare has ever drawn-and a villain with his heart, and the mere appreciation of his own wickedness gave irony to his grim humor, and zest to his crime. loved throughout to paint himself and his deeds in the blackest pigments, and to bring to the exercise of his wickedness the conscious deliberation of an intellectual voluptuary. All through the play his darkest deeds are heralded by high thoughts told in the most glorious word-painting, so that after a little the reader or the hearer comes to understand that the excellence of the poetic thought is but a suggestion of the measure of the wickedness that is to follow. Indeed, he conveys the hypocritical idea set forth by Mr. Lewis Carroll in 'The Walrus and the Carpenter,' when that skilled laborer was dealing with the oysters: 'With sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size. He "In one point I wish no one to mistake me, that is, as to Macbeth's bravery. Of this there can be no doubt either historically or in Shakespeare's play. Indeed, Shakespeare insists throughout on this great manly quality, and at the very outset of the tragedy twice puts in the mouths of other characters speeches couching their declarations in poetic form. Thus the bleeding Sergeant says: The brave Macbeth, well he deserves that name.' "The next witness to the valor of the Thane is given by Ross, Why Non-Copyright Books are Reprinted.-The New York Evening Post says: "Reprints of non-copyright books-especially of non-copyright fiction-continue to be a marked featureof the publishing year. The practice was explained in 1893 as a. result of the hard times; book sales were greatly restricted, publishers had nothing to give to authors, and so had recourse to writings on which copyright had lapsed. But 1894 saw no diminution in the reprints, tho the 1893 explanation no longer held. The number of new editions of Scott put out within two years is. a thing to marvel at, and with him have come Fielding and Defoe in modern costume, with Miss Austen, Miss Ferrier, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Brontë in dress as various as their feminine exigencies required. It began to look as if the guests at the year's literary feast were smacking their lips over this old wine in general agreement that it was better than the newer vintages. But the thing has gone on this year, with little or no abatement, and now comes a London publisher to give the true explanation of it. He says it is a result of the greed of authors, inflamed by the hotheads of the Authors' Society. They insist upon doubled or trebled royalties, he says, and the publisher is driven to the works of writers comfortably dead forty years before the Authors' Society was born. There is the whole British Museum to fall back upon, Mr. Laurie adds, and he thinks that latter-day authors will be starved into surrender before the end of that pile of books. is reached. |