Let us strive Let the latent

in the process shall be to us one of panic joy! to become what we have it in us to be. become patent. Let us furthermore strive to make others realize the idea they are capable of representing; making it for them, by all good means at our disposal, a conscious ideal. And lastly, if we can do more to advance the divine creative work by death than by life, let us cheerfully die, or, what is more painful, endure ostracism, obloquy, scorn. The present type views variations as, what they usually are, for the worse. The fortunate variations (spiritually) must therefore expect to incur suspicion. He that is ahead of the But after van will seem a laggard, rearmost of the rear. misunderstanding, unfair treatment, disgrace, comes the discovery of what the martyr was. The army of heroes is still being recruited, the army of those who are numbered with the transgressors because enlisted in the service of the Cap

tain of Salvation.

In a word, our practical religion will be: become, cause others to become, die that one better than ourself may come.

Now all that has been here hurriedly jotted down by way of suggestion, for space allows nothing like formal statement, is only figurative language. But if anthropomorphism be allowed a fraction of an inch, who shall forbid it an ell-nay, a mile-provided the results be edifying—that is, liberate energy for the development of the believer? The only justification of any conception of God whatever is after all that it ministers to what is noblest in man.

Two points only require brief mention with reference to Mr. Fiske's definition of religion: immortality of the soul and the unseen world. To postulate the former as an article of faith, is to vitiate the virtue of heroic sacrifice. To yield my life for the realization of God's idea which is to me an ideal dearer than personal felicity-what is it but a stage trick if I know all the while that I shall survive disembodiment? And strange to say, the ancient Christian doctrine, if we be not sorely mistaken, is no immortality of the soul, but resurrection of the body. The materialist who denies the soul apart from the body prepares for the reëxamination of

the Catholic doctrine. The ghost-survival, usually called immortality of the soul, is the child of superstition, and of a confusion of thought, whereby because my mental image of a thing may outlast it, therefore it is supposed to outlast itself. Ghost-survival for man, to be logically held, must be extended (as theosophists have done) to all beings whatsoever, and signify not merely postexistence but preëxistence. Because I cannot think of my soul as at one with the inanimate world, am I therefore sure that it is immortal? If I can think of death for others, I may infer that others can think of it for me; and probably each looks at the other's case more impartially than at his own. The Christian doc

trine means practically a new creation, a reproduction of a body of which the spiritual resultants shall be me, raised perchance to a higher power. That may be a blessed hope; and if it proves in the increasing severity of competition between the fit, a means to survival, will it not some day seem as credible to the higher mankind as that 2+2=4? As for the unseen world, for the very reason that it is unseen, it cannot be made to supplement the defects of this. To argue from the seen to the unseen, means to presume likeness betwixt them. Because this seen world is so bad, therefore the unseen is good? Surely a pathetical but also an absurd species of reasoning! Religion must begin by a worship of the seen world ere it can venture to include the unseen. For, after all, the God whom a man worships is always only a symbol, and is no part of that unseen world, but the life to him of the seen, whom having loved in this world he trusts for and in that world which he has not yet the senses to realize. To him the temple of God is ever the sensible world, and his own sentient and intelligent life. To him the God of that temple is One whose image he has fashioned, not after his own likeness, but after what he feels within himself at his noblest hours, an intolerably fierce desire, or a hopeless ache of yearning to become. And if mankind be not the greatest work of God, at all events the idea of Him shall ever continue to be the sublimest creation of the poetic spirit of man. WILLIAM NORMAN GUTHRIE.

THE LATE PROFESSOR BASKERVILL.1

DEATH claimed at least four professors of English in three adjoining Southern States in the summer of 1899. It is my purpose here to say something of the best known of the four, William Malone Baskervill, of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., who died on September 6, 1899.

He was but in his fiftieth year, at an age when most scholars, and it was particularly true of him, are beginning to give the results of their study and reflection to the larger class room of the world. There is thus something peculiarly sad in the thought that not even a few years more could be apportioned him for the rounding out of this new phase of work begun. The perfect round, however silently and quietly drawn, seems always much more finished than the broken arc. Hardly two years ago appeared his first volume on Southern Writers. He had grown up and was contemporary with the movement; he knew personally and intimately the writers of this period both by visits in his home and by correspondence; and if nothing else had been planned by him, the failure to complete this undertaking, the first serious critical attempt to fix the value of this distinctly vital movement in the mul

1 Sometime since I asked Prof. Henneman to review at length Prof. Baskervill's "Southern Writers." He kindly consented, but was obliged to defer the task from time to time. Now he and I feel that a paper on Prof. Baskervill and his work is a tribute that should be paid his memory by a REVIEW in whose fortunes he was always interested. Such a tribute must be also necessarily a contribution to the educational history of the New South, and is therefore an appropriate pendant to the article entitled "The Study of English in the South," which Prof. Henneman contributed to this REVIEW in February, 1894. It was Prof. Baskervill's lot to grow up in a transitional period, and it is the usual fate of workers in such an epoch to have their labors ignored by successors who have profited therefrom. Such a fate should not befall the gifted man about whom Prof. Henneman has written with so much fullness of knowledge and sympathy. Apart, however, from all consideration of what the future has in store for his fame or for those who mourn his premature cutting off, it is at least a present pleasure to me to publish a tribute to a Southern scholar with whom I maintained for a decade most cordial relations. W. P. TRENT.

tiple forces in our American literature, must be regarded as deplorable.

I do not pretend to have known Professor Baskervill as intimately as others who have a better right to speak of the man. But I had the privilege of being one of his earliest pupils when he organized perhaps his first class in English upon his return from Europe; he was, besides, at that time, a frequent visitor in the home of my father, with whom he would talk over his German experiences; I was possibly influenced by him consciously and unconsciously in the choice of a university career as well as of a profession; for the last six years of his life we were colleagues in charge of the same department in neighboring institutions in the same State; and I served with him on committees in both Southern and national associations. I thus had many opportunities of knowing him both personally and professionally. It is because of a sincere feeling of esteem and this personal knowledge of his life and its worth, because of a sense of unreserved regret that he was cut down before he could complete what he had mapped out for himself and what we had a right to expect from his performance and his power, that I feel impelled to put into words these thoughts. A sketch of the formative influences in his life, and some reference to his environment and his work as an educator will be necessary; for, it will be seen, all lead up to his most individual and representative work, the volume on Southern Writers.

Professor Baskervill himself has told us the few simple facts of his early life in the page of the inevitable “ Vita" appended to his Leipzig dissertation eighteen years ago. There is something very characteristic of the man in the directness and even abruptness of the language used. Tennessee was his native State, and it was with distinct feeling of patriotism and pride that he returned to it for his life work. The father, a clergyman in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was of a wellknown Virginia family, and himself a Virginian; the mother, from whom he derived his middle name, of a family no less well known. Born in Fayette County, in the western part of Tennessee, in 1850, he was of such impressionable age during

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the four years of war that these left ineradicable traces upon his imagination. The explanation of his later insight into the spirit of those Southern writers in the strictest sense his contemporaries, can be traced back to this period. The members of this new generation of writers were born before the war, were children during the war and witnessed the conflict, saw the old change into the new, and were themselves workers in building up the waste places. He, too, could easily remember, and had not merely heard of," the old; while at the same time he belonged to the new. He grew up with this struggling of varied forces and was a pioneer in the new literary and educational movement that had to pass over the Southern States at this time, if the new phases of life were to find expression. It was his good fortune, besides, to have his work allotted him at one of the two new universities, Sewanee and Vanderbilt, both in Tennessee, which, without trammels of older traditions. and through their peculiar foundations, were leaders in this spirit of the new. In the study of these forces lies the significance of this movement in Southern life, Southern education, and Southern literature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; and from this point of view it may be regarded as of peculiar interest that the life and work of the subject of our sketch should have terminated virtually with the closing of the period.

However stimulating and exciting otherwise, the four years of war must have disturbed seriously the opportunities for sound education. Nevertheless, in the above-mentioned. "Vita " he states, "I was at school almost without interruption till I was fifteen years old," and "from my teachers I got a smattering of Latin and Greek and of the usual English studies." With the well-known character of the Methodist preacher of the day, his father determined that the boy should have an education, even if nothing else should be be done for him. Peace had hardly been restored, therefore, when the lad's schooling was eagerly discussed by the parents. In 1865, at the age of fifteen, he was first sent to a Methodist institution north of the Ohio River, probably because there