BANCROFT LIBRARY THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 62d YEAR VOL. III. No. i THE NEW PRINCETON REVIEW PUBLISHED SIX TIMES A YEAR JANUARY, 1887 I. Victor Hugo ....... JOHN SAFFORD FISKE II. The Present Position of Philosophy in Britain ....... HENRY CALDERWOOD III. Religion in the Public Schools ARCHIBALD ALEXANDER HODGE IV. The Past and the Future of the Irish Question ....... JAMES BRYCE, M.P. V. General McClellan .... PHILIPPE, COMTE DE PARIS VI. The Extirpation of Criminals . CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER VII. E. P. Whipple as Critic ..... JULIUS H. WARD VIII. Vita Strainge ..... GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP IX. Criticisms, Notes, and Reviews The Interview as News The Ethics of Interviewing Lowell on Educa tion Bancroft's Alaska Contemporary Philosophy in France Books Received. n*m\ zS- T> 7 jjleto A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON Hontjon HODDER & STOUGHTOX THE NEW PRINCETON REVIEW FOR 1887. 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For the last twenty years the annual cash dividend has aver aged nearly 150 per cent, of the annual premium, thus making the policy self-sustaining. The dividends of the Mutual Life are larger than those of any other company ; consequently a given amount of insurance is carried at a less cost to the policyholder, or a given premium purchases more insurance than in any other company. THE NEW PRINCETON REVIEW. 62d Year. JANUARY, 1887. No. i. VICTOR HUGO. ARE we right in saying that the dust has already begun to set tle upon the volumes of Victor Hugo on the library shelf, and that the first instalments of his literary legacy* have scarcely broken the silence gathering about his name? The morrow of the death of a public favorite is apt to be severe upon his memory. Modern life moves on with such speed that the enthusiasms of yesterday are left far behind us to-day. But as yet no new-comer has taken the place that for threescore years the great French poet has occupied in the world's eye, and these handsomely printed pages may well tempt us to pause and look back for a while. Between the date of Waterloo and to-day, what a crowd of great men has come and gone upon the theatre of European events ! Turn and turn about, kings and mountebanks, poets, philosophers, pat riots, novelists, dramatists, and demagogues, have had their hour ; but one figure has remained throughout the whole series of exits and entrances, playing on occasion the part of each of the others now poet, now novelist, now, alas ! mountebank growing continu ally in size, like the genius of the Arabian Nights, till his shadow has filled the earth. If he did not literally play the part of king, it was because, according to M. Zola, he did still better: from being a hero in the republic of 1848, he was promoted by Jiis exile to the rank of a demigod. From the day when Chateaubriand did not call him an "enfant sublime" simply because the phrase had already * Thtdtre en Liberty I vol. 8vo. Paris : Quantin, 1886. La Fin de Satan, I vol. Svo. Paris: Quantin, 1886. I 2 VICTOR HUGO. been applied to him by another,* till the time when he was able, as a brother power, to set the Queen of England right as to her duties, without anybody laughing, his career was an almost unbroken suc cess. He revolutionized letters, headed a school, was the terror of the empire, and died the idol of his country. That he was once made a peer of France and a member of the Academy were distinc tions so by the way that we fancy most people never heard of them. His biographers, with Mr. Swinburne to swell their chorus, claim that the nineteenth century will hereafter be labelled with his name, as the fifth B. C. was with that of Pericles. We have lately read,f apropos of La Fin de Satan, that the modern Dante has left an epi logue to the Divina Commedia suited to modern needs. Really, we must take down the earlier volumes of the author, brush the dust from the tops, and see to what extent our opinion of him stands in need of a revision. I. It has been said that Mme. de Stael introduced Romanticism into France with her book De FAllemagne, but, in fact, the doctrines she preached found minds quite prepared for their reception. Indeed, Chateaubriand had been a romantic before the time, and Andre Chenier had already written verse too warm and free for the classic mould. The literary forms of the eighteenth century were dead, along with the spirit that made use of them. If Boileau and La Harpe reigned still, it was because no one as yet had openly de clared their deposition. But there was a great fermentation going on in the veins of youth, and it was gathering force from the study of other literatures German, Spanish, and especially English. The little band, formed about 1820, of which Victor Hugo soon became the acknowledged head, began modestly enough, though confidence in themselves was not wanting among their qualities. The first odes of the young chief differed from other poems of the same time only in showing exceptional skill in the manipulation of language and in a certain freshness of imagination. But new ideas were gradually assuming shape, and one day, in 1827, they were uttered to an as tounded world in the famous Preface to Cromwell seventy pages * Victor Hugo himself would appear to have invented the phrase along with its pater nity. Chateaubriand indignantly denied ever having said such a thing, and at last the entourage of the great poet, loath to give up entirely so flattering a legend, devised the form of it indicated above. f Mr. Swinburne, in the Athenaum of July 10. VICTOR HUGO. 3 of mingled absurdity and commonplace that we of to-day read with a smile, if we read them at all. Not so the men to whom the Preface was addressed. It was a declaration of revolt and inde pendence. It was the starting-point of a new school, of a new lite rature ; it meant a war of extermination against old canons, the overthrow of old idols, and it produced an effect out of all propor tion to its value as a work of letters. The passionate adherence of one party was met by a storm of abuse, prompted by something like real hatred, from the other. The " classics " had not only the Pre face, but the 7,000 lines of the drama to tear to pieces. The work afforded plenty of matter for legitimate criticism, but their rage spared the beauties no more than the defects. It was the virulence of a losing side. The innovators, on the other hand, treated their opponents with scorn, as " fierruques" as " e'piciers" as "philistins" as " bourgeois" in all the joy as well as confidence of youth. The warfare was a long one. Maxim e du Camp, in his Souvenirs litte'- raires (Tom. I., p. 134), gives an amusing instance of the feeling aroused apropos of the Orientates, and another, later, when, as a student, he was put into confinement for four days because a copy of the Feuilles d'Automne had been found in his desk. We may remark, by the way, that the victors have since exagge rated their own prowess and the absurdity of their opponents. There was also a reasonable opposition, which, in its turn, excited hatred. Sainte Beiive has never been forgiven his desertion of the romantic cause, though his pen wrote of it always with reserve ; and Gustave Planche, an admirable fault-finder, who wrote of Victor Hugo fifty years ago what might to-day almost pass as the final word of criti cism, was treated to boundless hatred. Toward such an enemy the adherents of the poet could not, even in the flush of triumph, afford to be generous. In days when our passions are aroused by things of quite another sort, these quarrels over questions purely literary excite wonder. Later in life Victor Hugo stirred up against himself politi cal and religious animosities; but the battle over the Orientales was complicated by no such considerations. The poet's sins were that he distributed the caesura in a manner not sanctioned by the practice of Racine ; that he put a noun in one line and its adjec tive in the next ; that he avoided periphrases, and preferred one direct word to six that reached the meaning " about the bush," so to speak ; that he went back to forms of versification and usages of the 4 VICTOR HUGO. times of Ronsard and the older poets, while adding something in dividual and all his own. We will refer those who wish to know exactly the difference between the technical peculiarities introduced by Victor Hugo and those of the hundred and fifty years preceding him, to the admirable Traite generate de Versification franqaise of M. Becq de Fouquieres. Enough for this place that the poet made good his revolution, that he freed French verse from shackles that had become intolerable, that he found his language a poor instru ment for poetry and left it a perfect one. Add to these qualities a color and picturesqueness hitherto unknown in French poetry, an unexampled power of adapting sound to sense, and always the " grand air " giving dignity to the veriest trifles. All this refers to the mechanism of poetry. Victor Hugo was in these respects marvellously endowed from the beginning ; his man ner, of course, was perfected by practice until it found its complete expression in the first series of the Legende des Sttcles. The lan guage, with its rhymes and its rhythms, had become to such an ex tent his instrument that he wielded it as a juggler his paraphernalia. But, by the fatality that compels a lyric poet to sing even when the song is dead within him, Victor Hugo went on. He rattled all the munitions of his vocabulary, the abysms and infinities and immensities, about the walls of his poor dried brain and heart ; and the emptier and drier they became the more sound they gave out. His vocabulary itself, which, up to the turning-point of his power, had merely kept pace with the splendor of his imagery, underwent with his decadence a process of inflation ; and up to the end the disproportion between the frigidity and thinness of the conceit and the big, pompous words used to clothe it is ever more and more remarkable. In the second posthumous volume, La Fin de Satan, the maximum of sound and the minimum of sense seem to have been reached together. The period of best achievement was of exceptional length, covering thirty years, from the publication of the Orientates in 1829 to that of the Legende des Siecles in 1859. There were very bad things done in this period notably, a great part of the indignant declamation of the earlier years of his exile and there were plenty of good things done afterward, notably, Les Misdrables ; but during all these years, in spite of blemishes that we shall indicate directly, the work done was that of the most magnifi cently endowed lyric poet of our century, not excepting either Goethe or Byron. VICTOR HUGO. 5 Heine, in one of his several mentions of Victor Hugo, has a passage that seems to us, in its way, very much to the point : " Yes, Victor Hugo is the greatest poet of France, and, what is saying a great deal, he might take a place even in Germany among the poets of the first rank. He has fancy and soul (Gemuth), and therewith a want of tact such as you will never find among Frenchmen, but only among us Germans. His intelligence is lacking in harmony, and he is fuller of tasteless excrescences than Grabbe and Jean Paul. The beautiful moderation that we admire in the classical authors is wanting in him. His muse, in spite of her splendor, is weighted with a certain German awkwardness. With regard to his muse, I might maintain the same thing that is said of the beautiful Englishwoman : She has two left hands." * It is true; the poet's taste was a singularly capricious quality: one could never tell when it was going to fail him, and it failed so often that his volumes are full of plump surprises to the sensitive reader. Then, too, grace, lightness, and gayety were charms that, from the beginning, were utterly denied to him. To do him justice, he generally took himself so seriously that he would have scorned such meretricious attractions. The wilfully inserted " grotesque " scenes in Cromwell and his other dramas, merely put there to set off the " sublime " of the rest, show how elephantine were his notions of pleasantry. In the Chansons des Rues et des Bois the lighter poems are simply gross, while in the Theatre en Libertt he manages quite often to be both clumsy and gross at the same time. A more seri ous defect one aspect, indeed, of the crowning defect of his poetry is the repetition in which he indulges, the flood of conceits and words, words, words in which he drowns the slenderest ideas, to the serious injury of many even of his best pieces. For instance, in Eviradnus, one of the two greatest " of all the romantic and tragic poems of mediaeval history or legend," according to Mr. Swinburne, we are told : " Mais ce que cette salle, antre obscur des vieux temps A de plus se"pulcral et de plus redoutable, Ce n'est pas le flambeau, ni le dais, ni la table ; C'est le long de deux rangs d'arches et de piliers, Deux files de chevaux avec leurs chevaliers. Chacun a son pilier s'adosse et tient sa lance ; L'arme droite, ils se font vis-a-vis en silence ; ****** Tous se taisent ; pas un ne bouge ; c'est terrible. ****** Chevaux et chevaliers sont des armures vides." * Franzosische Zustande. Ueber die franzdsische Biihne, VI. 6 VICTOR HUGO. There we have the essential ; but the poet treats us to five pages, nothing less, of conceits, without adding a single statement worth giving to those just cited. He informs us, it is true, " Si Satan est berger, c'est la son noir be"tail. Pour en voir de pareils dans Pombre, il faut qu'on dorme ; Us sont comme engloutis sous la housse difforme ; Les cavaliers sont froids, calmes, graves, arme's, Effroyables ; les poings lugubrement ferme's Si 1'enfer tout a coup ouvrait ces mains fantomes, On verrait quelque lettre affreuse dans leurs paumes. De la brume du lieu leur stature s'accroit. Autour d'eux 1'ombre a peur et les piliers ont froid." And so on, and worse. This may all be magnificent to the true Hugolatre, but to us it appears a bit of perfectly cold-blooded fustian. We see in it the poet trying to lash his Pegasus into a fury, when the beast, left to itself, would indulge in a commonplace trot. The poings lugubrement fermes is delicious, though we cannot fancy its ever having had any meaning, even to the poet himself. By the way, what a subject that hall of armor would have been for Gustave Dore" ! What a mine of subjects the series of Ltgendes ! There was surely a harmony between the talent of the versifier and that of the illustrator, and we hold that it was a thousand pities that the latter, instead of wasting his time over the Bible, and Dante, and Milton, had not given himself to Eviradnus and Ratbert, Zim-Zizimi and L'Aigle du Casque. He might have rivalled, perhaps surpassed, his illustrations to the Contes drolatiques. He and the poet had so much in common ! Fantastic perspectives, inverted proportions, false light and shade, love of the grotesque, contempt for exact detail. Dor6's only difficulty would have been to add anything of his own to the material furnished by his subject. The example just given was not selected we opened the volume at random and it is, unfortunately, far from single. Such redun dancy spoils a great deal of Victor Hugo's best work. Sometimes disguising, sometimes accentuating, a want of real feeling, and some times indulged in for the sake of gratifying his inborn love of what, for want of a better name, we must call a lyrical Jack-in-the-box piling up the pages of rhetoric in order to spring upon the reader at the end a single epigrammatic or antithetic line. Read, for example, in the Orientales, La Douleur du Pacha, in the Feuilles d'Autoinne, La Pente de la Reverie (one of the finest things in the book), in the Ugende des Siecles almost anything in the volume. VICTOR HUGO. 7 We may as well say it at once: the Legende des Sticks, the most perfect rhymed work in the French language, as far as techni cal qualities are concerned, fascinating by the richness of its melody, splendid, too, as manifestation of a brilliant, picturesque, and alto gether peculiar imagination, is also for us the full-blown example of every defect the poet had, excepting only those incident to old age, when feebleness sometimes conspired with bombast to show all that a great writer should not be guilty of. We hardly know where to begin in order to justify our attitude toward a book which, it is claimed, puts its author in the same rank with Homer, Isaiah, Dante, and Shakespeare. Even after summoning the courage of our con victions, we are tempted to begin with the Preface, as usual, the part of the volume which even his friends abandon to the enemy. It is impossible to treat seriously the pretence that these inventions of the Hugonian imagination are the outcome of a serious philosophy of existence, that they are " empreintes prises . . . sur le vif de Vhis- toire" We would not contradict him, however, when he goes on to say they are " empreintes moulces sur le masque des siecles" as the contradiction could be maintained only by somebody who could pretend to an understanding of the phrase. But even such an one would hardly assert that the Mourad, the Eviradnus, the Fabrice of the Legende ever had counterparts in any world save that of the brain of Victor Hugo, where the creatures, by the way, all wear a stronger family likeness among themselves than could be found in the world of real men. Not for a moment would we refuse our tribute of admiration to this series of portraits, if not like the originals whose names they bear, at least gigantic, drawn with a free hand, vigorous and rich in coloring, with a setting that reminds us curiously of that of the pictures of the saints in the old Russian churches gold, embossed in arabesques, and flashing with gems. In spite of an infinite variety of pattern, the general effect is always the same. Indeed, as a whole, the series of the Legende des Siecles may well be compared to the interior of the famous cathedral of the Kremlin, as we first saw it when we were young, in the deepening twilight of a long summer evening. The jewels and gold, married to harmonies of color as sumptuous as themselves, mount up and stretch away until they are lost above and around in a resplendent gloom. Dim figures here and there, prostrate in prayer, or moving about like spectres, vary the scene without disturbing its quiet. Suddenly, from out a dark 8 VICTOR HUGO. corner bursts the superb music of the Russian Church, the only thing needed, and the only thing possible, for completing the mysterious accord of color and splendor with obscurity. We have received a profound impression, and we cannot be quite robbed of it afterward when we discover that the cathedral is not nearly so large as we had thought it, that not all its splendor is real, and that its art is half way barbaric. And we cannot help feeling that the means used in the Le'gende des Sticles to secure effect are as strange to our civilization as is the Russo-Byzantine ecclesiastical art. There is redundance of riches, with rudeness of form ; there is ornament, ill-applied and unrefined in detail. Let us break loose from the metaphor. The first fault of the poems, with few exceptions, is that they would be better at half their length. In Eviradnus there are not only the five pages, already mentioned, of heavy rhetoric about the armor of the hall, but Eviradnus himself, before slaying his two victims, treats them to three pages of eloquence! We shall find the same defect fur ther on, in the dramas. Bivar gives us two pages of talk in order to get two lines of reply out of the Cid. That is a case of Jack-in- the-box. And how they talk in Ratbert ! The bishop talks, the podestk talks, the good Fabrice of Albenga talks all of them for pages together. Indeed, the three pages of Fabrice's lament over the body of Isora go far toward weakening our sense of the wrong done .the old man. Grief, even so voluble, might command sympa thy were it only real ; but it is fatally evident that all this passion is nothing but the poet's delight in stringing one rhyme after an other. His indifference to the sufferings of his characters is Olym pian ; his business is to furnish all the verses possible for their occa sions. Did ever a grandfather, in anguish over the body of his beloved child, the light of his eyes, talk thus : "Est-ce qu'il est permis d'aller dans les abimes Reculer la limite effroyable des crimes, De voler, oui, ce sont des vols, de faire un tas D'abominations, de maux et d'attentats, De tuer des enfants et de tuer des femmes, Sous pre"texte qu'on fut, parmi les oriflammes Et les clairons, sacre" devant le monde entier Par Urbain Quatre, pape et fils d'un savetier ! " When the rage of versifying takes hold of a man to such an ex tent that he is utterly insensible to the passion he would portray in the joy of saying odd things, and measuring and matching syllables VICTOR HUGO. 9 over it, he may beat Cowley in quips and cranks, he may be melo dious as Shelley, he may succeed in embodying the prophetic fury of Carlyle in the happy swing of Byron, but he will never put any life into the personages of his story. Failures of taste as bad as those of which Heine talked, per haps even worse are not wanting in the Ltgende des Siecles. Rat- bert, from beginning to end, is bristling with examples. Its sham me- diaevalism, sham sentiment, sham pathos, and sham horror, wind up, while we are still in disgust over the crowning scene of bloodshed, with the vision of an archangel wiping his reeking sword upon a cloud ! This bit of the grotesque can plead in extenuation of itself only that it is of a piece with a good deal of the. rest of the book; but it is precisely when one is wearied with that rest that such an absurdity is most revolting. If our criticism seem to any one a fail ure in sympathy, we advise him to turn back to the concluding lines of the Jour des Rois, and if he still resist, we compliment him on his stomach. We own, however, that we might bear up against the grosser lapses from taste, were it not for the unceasing outrage committed by the poet's vocabulary in the Legende. There was a time when, on occasion, he wrote simply, but that was in the days when his heart had still something to say, and he was not reduced to making a simulacrum of feeling out of resounding words. It is when one's patience is strained by finding on every page the same immensite, tencbres, ombre y abime, and so on, that one becomes severe against the inevitable infractions of taste. The poet's special vocabulary forms a troupe with about twenty star performers and two or three score faithful comparses, and these are charged with the representation of every role, sacred or profane, grotesque or sublime. Well and good, were they only modest, conscientious actors, but they are terrible ranters, who " tear their passion to tatters," and sadly fatigue the ear. This special vocabulary is largely, perhaps chiefly, used in the service of imagery, the conceits and fancies that crowd the pages of the poet. The imagination of Victor Hugo was astonishingly vigor ous and agile, and trained to perform the most wonderful feats. We are still dazzled by them ; but we confess to ourselves that better than all these gymnastics is any one of many poems of Alfred de Musset, where grace and tenderness are inborn, and where the accent of passion rings true for any heart that lives and has known suffering. 10 VICTOR HUGO. We have at last touched upon our great grievance against Victor Hugo. His egotism the most stupendous and outspoken since Cicero, of which a hundred poems make us the confidant, which early in life alienated from him most of the friends who were unable to be mere satellites of his glory has reacted upon his verse, and has deprived it of that crowning charm that establishes for us a relation ship between the dissolute De Musset and the saint, Francis of As- sisi. No great poet ever had so little of the human in him as Hugo. We say this in the face of the exaggerated humanitarianism he pro fessed in later life, and which made him the champion of many a disreputable cause. Words, versification, imagery sometimes, too, ideas were, aside from his own glory, his great preoccupations. And yet, at given moments, he has touched the chord that vibrates in the inmost recesses of the heart : " La borne du chemin, qui vit des jours sans nombre, Ou jadis pour m'attendre elle aimait a. s'asseoir, S'est use"e en heurtant, lorsque la route est sombre, Les grands chars ge"missants qui reviennent le soir."* There is in those lines the quality which made people sometimes say of certain great singers, that they had "des larmes dans la voix" The quality is so precious in Victor Hugo that we dare not assert that he has kept it even throughout the lovely poem wherein the stanza occurs. Yet it is found here and there in the earlier volumes of his poetry. Be thankful when you come across it, but do not seek it; the search may make you lose sight of the real, undeniable quality of his best work imagination embodied in wonderful verse. The imagination may be responsible for many of the sins of the poet, but it was also his great force his greatest force since those marvellous powers of expression by which it found utterance must, as the mere technical part, be put in the second rank. And from the day when youth first read, and re-read, and dreamed of, and imitated the lines in the Orientates, "Murs, ville, Et port, Asile, De mort, Mer grise Ou brise La brise, Tout dort, ' * La Tristesse d* Olympic, in the Rayons et Ombres. VICTOR HUGO. II to the days when he sang Les Pauvres Gens with something of the imperfection of his perfected manner, it is true, but also with a ten derness and relative simplicity enough to cover many sins, what surprises and what pleasures has that imagination furnished to the world ! Surrender yourself to its charm, not asking of it what it cannot give, and it has a store of pure joys to bestow. Turn over the pages of his various volumes ; in reading whatever attracts, you will surely find plenty to justify the rank accorded to Victor Hugo as the greatest versifier of his country and of our century, who at certain given moments is also the greatest lyric poet. II. Even the unlettered public knows something of the dramas of Victor Hugo. Their action, at least, is familiar to the opera-goer in all lands. Hernani, Le Roi s' amuse (Rigoletto), Lucrtce Borgia, Marion Delorme, Ruy Bias ah, what pleasure have they given us all ! How many nights have we sat, with half-shut eyes, listening to the sweet strains that chanted the most terrible passions, the most heart-rending situations ! It seems hardly credible that they were written to be spoken, and not sung. Excellent as libretti, how are they as plays? Their fortune has been exceedingly varied. The four volumes of the Theatre read like the history of a war; skirmishes in the pre faces, pitched battles at the representations, sieges and prolonged defences in the shape of suits before the law courts. There were disastrous victories and happy defeats. Marion Delorme and Le Roi s amuse were forbidden by the censorship, the former under Charles X., the latter under Louis Philippe, and, naturally, during long years they were greatly esteemed though they were not played. The Burgraves failed utterly on the stage. As for the others, from the night of the famous first representations of Hernani, when " Young France," after waiting at the doors of the Comedie Fran- ^aise from noon till evening, put the classical enemy to rout with great confusion, and, according to the legend, celebrated the victory after the play by dancing around in the foyer to shouts of " Enfonce Racine ! " from that night, in spite of checks, the success grew even more stupendous. This is the story as given by disciples. On the other hand, it is claimed that the success was in reality largely one of a noisy clique, and that the opposition was not composed merely of effete " classics," but also of many men of sense, whose 12 VICTOR HUGO. judgment refused to surrender to a clamor. These had afterward to hold their opinion against the generous enthusiasm that spoke only good things of the exile of Guernsey; and later, when he returned to Paris as a demi-god, the tutelary divinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, against the superstitious devotion that ap plauded the plays as sacred and inspired.* The doubters may well have been discouraged. Their turn, however, came, even before the poet's death. In 1882 the political illusion had somewhat faded, and Le Roi s 1 amuse was revived and fell flat. Last year Marion Delorme was brought out at the Ode'on, and failed even more signally. The audience found that the play dragged. The second act, with its long dispute about Corneille, in which the allusion to Victor Hugo himself was more than suspected, was but an interruption. The third act, with the wilful grotesque of the strolling players and the cheap erudition in forgotten poetry, was another interruption. The fourth act, with the indecisions and ennuis of the king, advanced nothing, and was a third interruption. The fifth act came too late to revive the public from its fatigue. It was then generally discov ered that the dramas, that had been vaunted as continuing Shake speare and Corneille, were dead for our age as dead as the tra gedies of Dryden. Possible exception is sometimes made in favor of Hernani and Ruy Bias ; not that the history is any more history or the humanity any more humanity in them than in the rest, but as if Spain were a land outside of the realm of natural laws, where action might be ruled by the fancy of a romantic poet. The downfall is a sad one, after the tremendous pretensions of Victor Hugo, who asked, in the preface to Marion, why 1831 should not be the epoch for the appearance of a poet who should be to Shakespeare what Napoleon was to Charlemagne ? who repeatedly intimated that he was showing what Corneille might have done had Corneille only been able to wield verse as did he, Hugo. Why, then, has the public refused to sanction the opinion of the author as to these dramas ? We leave Cromwell out of the question ; it was simply impossi ble, even for the makers of opera text. Its preface, however, had importance. Its publication was an event. We said, awhile ago, that it was mingled absurdity and commonplace ; the absurdity was there in abundance, but we should have been more correct * Some of them were put upon the stage in those days, and, indeed, one or two of them had been allowed toward the end of the Empire with what success may be imagined. VICTOR HUGO. 13 with regard to the commonplace, had we added that it did not seem such at the moment of its appearance. It contains the principle of modern drama. The classical tragedy, we are told, gave " abstract types of a purely metaphysical idea." That is, the personages, few in number, exhibited in action of extreme simpli city the essential characteristics of human nature, those which are equally true for all times and in all countries. The modern drama, on the other hand, was as complicated as the tragedy was simple. It aimed at a complete representation of life, it included comedy along with tragedy, it reposed upon reality, and set before us men, not in general, but as they were in all their complexity at a given time, and in given circumstances and surroundings. As a consequence it must go hand-in-hand with history. Scenes, manners, even details such as furniture and costume were to be studied, as well as events, in order that the stage might render a complete and true reflection of nature. Nothing could be better, and it will always be a debt that France owes to Victor Hugo, that he helped to prepare the way for a real modern drama. As for his own practice, however, that reserved a succession of surprises to those who thought the poet should be bound by his own principles, enunciated not only in the preface to Cromwell, but also repeatedly in his other prefaces. In fact, while principles remained, the practice kept constantly diverging more and more from them. To account for this we may advance two reasons. The first was inherent in the situation. In the turbulence of revolt it is easier to throw over old ideals than to bring to perfec tion a new one. Clearly as Victor Hugo had enunciated the main tenets of the new drama, he was yet uncertain in their application. He would have no more of the heroic kings and regal heroes of Racine ; but he did not give up the heroic type ; he only turned it topsy-turvy, and made it more stupendous than ever, after a fashion of his own. His grandest figures are a bandit, a valet, a court fool, an emperor turned beggar, and several harlots. It is " a mad world, my masters ! " The second reason was in the nature of the poet's mind. Evi dently he sees things as he states them ; i. e., as a series of antitheses. Shakespeare was the great model for the modern drama ; in him na ture was represented as Victor Hugo would wish it to be. What was nature? Misled by his faculty of seeing things always as contrasts, he resolves nature into an union of the sublime and the grotesque. 14 VICTOR HUGO. He tried this prescription in Cromwell by the introduction of four buffoons, not wanting in grotesqueness ; but the play is not Shakes pearian for all that, and the sublime is not brought out by the con trast. Moreover, Victor Hugo always, consistently and persistently, saw human nature in the same way. In the preface to Lucrece, the antithetical prescription is plainly brought forth with regard to two plays. "The idea which produced Le Roi s' amuse and that which produced Lucrece were born at the same moment. . . . Take the most hideous, the most repulsive, the most complete physical deformity ; . . . cast a soul into it, and put in this soul the purest sentiment which can be given a man, the paternal sentiment. . . . At bottom, you have Le Roi s'amuse. Take the most hideous, the most repul sive, the most complete moral deformity . . . and now mingle with all this moral deformity a pure sentiment, the purest a woman is capable of, the maternal senti ment ; in your monster place a mother ; and the monster will be interesting. . . . Paternity sanctifying physical deformity, that is Le Roi s'amuse j maternity puri fying moral deformity, that is Lucrece Borgia" The receipt may give a monster indeed, it can give nothing else but it can never produce a human being. And yet the formula never varies. Marion is pure, self-sacrificing love, with corruption ; so is Tisbe. Even the situations are regu lated by the same law : youth is put by the side of age, rank with base estate, purity with vice, grandeur with littleness. Dona Sol, young, is matched with Ruy Gomez the octogenarian ; Dofla Sol, of the noblest blood of Spain, is in love with an outlaw ; Marion, the facile, loves Didier, the misanthrope ; Ruy Bias, the valet, loves the queen. Sometimes the opposition is a little more complicated, as where, in the preface to Marie Tudor, he tells us his aim was " to set broadly on the stage, in all its terrible reality, this dread triangle, which appears so often in history : a queen, a favorite, an execu tioner." It is almost a matter of course that what he did put upon the stage was a terrible unreality. How could it be otherwise when the mania for contrasts, for moral antitheses, is nearly the whole of his science of human existence ? As for the history in these dramas, it is as fantastic as the human nature. The author boasts loudly of his accuracy in the minutest details, and we will not undertake to deny that he may here and there be exact in matters of costume and furniture, though, even then, there is plenty of evidence that his researches have been filtered through an imagination which was one of the most powerful VICTOR HUGO. 15 transforming mediums of modern times.* As for the events, they were entirely of his own fabrication, at least after Cromwell, where he did history the honor to borrow from it certain incidents. Usually he invented his story, combined the antitheses that he chose to call characters, and then applied to them names more or less well known, with a wardrobe more or less exactly studied. There was a Triboulet in history, but he was as little like his namesake in Le Rot s amuse as that is like any man who ever lived. Compare the Charles V. of Hernani, or the Marie Tudor, with the personages whose names they bear ! When it comes to action, his wise men act like idiots, his queens like washerwomen ; we cannot pursue the antithesis, for there is nobody who acts like a reasonable mortal. Of only one thing may we be sure, that, if these characters have anything particularly pressing to do, they will, instead of doing it, stop to talk. Charles V., for instance, when he ought to conceal himself from the conspirators, indulges in a monologue of six pages in length ! It is useless to pretend that such figures are human beings : they are but puppets; they are moved by the hand of the showman, and they speak by his mouth. And that is their one great quality, for the voice is that of a great lyric poet. The monologue of Charles V. is dramatically a blunder, but Mr. Swinburne is right in calling it " majestic and august." The same may be said of other monologues scattered everywhere through these plays; they are magnificent as poetry, but they are fatal blemishes in the works where they are found. They are verses such as nobody save Victor Hugo could write, only, the lyric poet who lets his courser take the bit in its teeth and bolt with its rider has no business to set up as a dramatist. A witty French critic f recently said that the author was continually behind the scenes watching his puppets, and when any thing came into his head that he wanted to say, whether related to the business in hand or not, he rushed upon the stage, put himself in the place of the personage who had been talking, rhymed away for awhile, then, seizing the luckless puppet, that meanwhile had * As a single example of his scrupulousness in accepting evidence, the following from the preface of Lucrece is delightful : " A ceux qui le blament d'avoir accepte sur la mort des maris de Lucrece certaines rumeurs populaires a demi-fahuleuses, il repondrait que souvent les fables du peuple font la ve'rite du poete." We may add that the popular wholly fabulous notion of Lucretia Borgia is largely owing to Victor Hugo's peculiar conception of verity. \ Maxime Gaucher, in the Revue Bleue, April 10, 1886. 1 6 VICTOR HUGO. been standing idle, set it again in movement and let it go on. There is but one genuinely living personage in all the plays, and his fea tures are those of Victor Hugo. It was one piece of the poet's good fortune, in a life singularly full of good fortune, that his dramas were during so many years banished from the stage. Not only did they gain the sympathy of generous minds by the fact of being persecuted, but they were not exposed to the searching glare of the foot-lights, where all the fail ures of construction, the want of reality in the characters, would soon have become evident. They were read by the fireside, and the imagination of the reader, charmed by the harmonious flow of the verse, the picturesqueness of the imagery, the lyric fervor of the poet, was not shocked by the emptiness of the personages. Oh, wonderful power of the poet ! We remember one eminent critic who was present at the failure of Le Roi s 'amuse, and was among the foremost to condemn it, and then went home and read over the play with as much pleasure as ever. (Conclusion in the next number.) THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. THE philosophic problem is the same for all ages ; the treatment of it is special to each age. Whatever is distinctive and novel in form is in some measure an expression of the position reached. It affords some index to the movement of the intellectual life of the race. The thought of the day takes a distinct form, under pressure of the demands recognized as waiting solution ; just as the build of our ships tells the stage of enterprise on the ocean highway. There is, indeed, an obvious analogy between philosophic progress and all advance of human enterprise, notwithstanding the popular belief that philosophy is quite apart from the ordinary walks of men. At times it is suggested that personal influence has more than an ordinary share in determining the successive phases of philo sophic thought. Noted theories bear the mark of distinct phases of individual genius, flashing out with meteoric brightness on the intellectual world, and by and by disappearing below the horizon, when the direct influence passes away. There are many who seem to think this a special and leading characteristic in the history of philosophy. But this is a mistake, fostered largely by the circum stance that the inner detailed history of philosophic thought is lit tle known to the literary public. The wide circle of readers is most impressed by the outstanding names that are being constantly named in their hearing. In reality, there is nothing occurring in the history of philosophy essentially different from the relation of events in the ordinary walks of life. Whether we take ship-build ing, engineering, fine art, or observational science, it will be found that the same laws of progress hold good. Into whatever region we turn for purposes of comparison, we shall find that the laws of progress in the special field at the time contemplated are in reality the laws for the universe. The impress of individual genius is everywhere. An urgent demand rouses genius to action. Indi vidual genius either directly meets this demand, or, as more com monly happens, it attracts to itself and stimulates the intellect of the race ; and the two together supply the momentum which creates the history of progress. This is the key to all enterprise, invention, 1 8 THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. and action. Only as it is the common law of advance, does it hold good in the history of philosophy. The law of progress is one, however diverse the interests involved, or brilliant the genius ap pearing in any field. Applying the principles thus indicated, I propose to consider the present position of philosophy in Britain, not, however, as if British thought were a thing apart, as if our insular position separated us from other nations ; but as a thing sufficiently distinct to have its own history and to make its own contribution to the development of philosophy, with all the special advantages belonging to its historic position among the English-speaking nations. In attempting this, the first requisite is to make account of the forces at work as well as of the prominent historic names, chiefly, at the outset, the great central forces giving direction to history. Attention must be given, though references must be few and brief, to the manner in which our present problems have been shaped, and philosophic thought carried forward to the position now reached. The best landmark by which to restrict the range of observation and secure a ready and easily applied test is to be found in the scep ticism of Hume. With its critical and destructive effects we need not seriously concern ourselves here ; but mainly with its demands, specially as subsequent philosophic thought has endeavored to meet them. These demands may be reduced to a single utterance in the claim for certainty of knowledge concerning the Universe, Self, and God. The meaning of this claim may be indicated by the question, If we trust to experience, can we have certainty as to any one of the three ? If, in looking into the primary elements of our experi ence, and into the laws according to which the different elements are combined, we conclude that all knowledge takes its rise in the sensations which appear for a moment in consciousness and straight way disappear, can we have any certainty beyond the present con sciousness, which is at each moment a vanishing quantity? The difficulty thus presented became the starting-point for a new move ment of thought, Scottish, German, and French. Scotland, as best acquainted with her own son, was first in the field, Germany went more patiently and thoroughly to work, France followed in the wake of the other two nations. The problem was to find the Real, by finding a true philosophy of knowing; to define human certainty, and to ascertain whether it had a realm of any wider THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. 19 extent than the foothold of the passing moment. This is the key to subsequent British philosophy, as represented by Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, all of them Scotchmen ; to German thought, as represented by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ; and to French philosophy, as represented by Cousin and Jouffroy. Our question here is concerned with the history of thought sub sequent to these thinkers, discovering their influence on their im mediate successors, and the traces of more recent intellectual prog ress, in so far as Britain is concerned. The speciality of British thought has been a somewhat closer and readier alliance with physical science than has obtained on the continent of Europe, and in this alliance Englishmen have had a prominent part Scotchmen having clung more closely to the traditions connecting them with a school which turned inward upon mind itself with zest and hope, rather than outward on the field of material existence. Where are now the British Islands in relation to the problem concerning the certainty of human knowledge ? Before a true answer can be given, some reference must be made to the posi tion of science among us. That the British people have in recent years taken their full share in scientific work, and have conse quently gathered their full share of scientific rewards, are facts well known ; and they are facts having an important bearing on the national attitude in relation to philosophy. While pure philosophy has been busy with the more-elaborate and less-observed work of analytic and synthetic study of the conditions of thought, a scientific age has dawned on the nations, a new force has arisen, to influence the whole current of intellectual life. This fact has exerted a mighty influence. For a brief season science may be said to have over shadowed philosophy, and even to have thrown it so deeply into the shade as to have involved the loss of the conspicuous place it formerly held. Some had even expressed doubt whether philosophy would ever again hold the position in Britain which it had done be fore the full blaze of scientific discovery broke upon us. These are passing, and even already remote, phases of national thought, which must, however, be noted if we are properly to understand the pres ent position of philosophy. Some may demur to this account of the present situation. Phi losophy and science may be treated as if they were not only distinct, but quite apart from each other ; and some few may still say that they are antagonistic. But the people who think and say such 20 THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. things are gradually becoming fewer, and soon will be an extinct race. The separation of philosophy from science is an intellectual impossibility. The suspicion of it is only a passing disturbance, in dicating how imperfectly the human mind is prepared for anticipat ing and interpreting its own progress. Science and philosophy can not even be long kept apart. The volume of intellectual life is one, and the unifying of material and mental science is a result toward which the deepest intellectual forces must work. That this is the direction in which philosophy itself has been moving is clear. If proof be desired, it may be found in the fact that Hegel and Spen cer, the two most potent leaders of the period immediately behind us, both have consecrated their best efforts to the elaboration of a theory of existence regarded as a whole. If they have been directly occupied with a theory of knowing, it is always with the object of reaching a theory of being. This is the result of the unity of na tional thought we can, now more than ever, say the unity of inter national thought. It must not be supposed that the approximation of science and philosophy, now becoming apparent, is the result of deliberate agreement on both sides, arising from a desire to come to terms. It is the fruit of necessity rather than of actual preference. Science has made no deliberate attempt to remove metaphysical obstacles or perplexities out of the way. Quite the contrary. Ignoring meta physics and claiming a complete independence in the search for scientific truth, it has travelled along its own path, followed its own methods, and proclaimed its own results. But in doing this it has worked itself into metaphysics. With full confidence in its own methods, it proclaimed that science could do nothing but deal with facts, and a rigidly scientific explanation of them. In this way it lent indirect countenance to agnosticism, denying the possible knowledge of things not presented as facts to observation. But as the result of this legitimate, because logical, result of a stern applica tion of its own methods, it found itself discussing the Unknowable, accepting this as a necessary task for human thought and in doing so it has become metaphysical. One point more. The movement of scientific thought has become not only connected with, but involved in, a theory of evolution. This theory proclaims not only unity of system in the structure of all organism, but unity in respect of actual evolution in history. The world as it now exists is held to be the product of the ages. THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. 21 In this line, also, science has been working toward philosophic conclusions, and in doing so has been unwittingly working out a condemnation, at once, of pure sensationalism in philosophy, and of the sceptical criticism which assailed it. The former it has done by promulgating a distinct scheme of expectation ; and the second by proclaiming that if we interpret all things by the experience of ages gone by we become unscientific, and miss the grandeur of the uni verse. Hume's argument against belief in miracles was based on the consideration that common experience is against them. Science, which has no place for miracles in the whole scope of its thought, declares that the evidence of each generation must be tested on its own merits, for according to an evolution theory every new genera tion of men has something to observe, to believe, and to interpret, of which preceding generations could have had no experience. In these ways, briefly and imperfectly sketched, science and philosophy have been gradually approximating, and the philosophy of Britain manifests in a very marked degree the effect of this. The true position of philosophy is now being recognized, as the continua tion of the thought which science has commenced. While science has, in the way described, been working up toward the advanced lines where it has come to discuss the Unknowable, philosophy has been busy at its own proper work, seeking to elabo rate a theory of knowing which should conduct to a theory of being. In course of this, it has been constantly affected by the stage of scientific advance. The experiential philosophy, otherwise named sensational, which builds on experience alone, and will not allow to intellect anything more than seeing power, through the avenues of the sensory, has naturally connected itself with the evolution theory, and has gained largely in popularity on this account. Whether this popularity will be more than temporary remains to be seen. I am unable to regard it otherwise than as a passing, though prominent, feature of nineteenth-century thought. As to the fact of present popularity, more especially beyond the range of purely philosophic circles, there can be no doubt. If the scientific men of the present day were asked to what recognized system of philosophy they would most readily turn, they would, by a great majority, give their preference for that of Herbert Spencer. Without professing to have had any training for the work of philosophic criticism, they feel that this system lies nearest to them, and can be most readily harmonized with their thought ; whereas, a transcendental theory 22 THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. is hard to interpret, if, indeed, it has any meaning really applicable to scientific facts and theories. What they recognize is that Herbert Spencer has looked with intelligence and patience into the records of science, and has constructed his philosophy in full view of what science has worked out. But this popularity is a mixed thing, partly scientific, partly philosophic ; and, if these be distinguished, more scientific than philosophic ; having a large concurrence of opinion in its favor on the scientific side, with a seriously divided opinion amongst those devoted to philosophy. Taking the experiential theory on its own merits, and apart from the external support now indicated, it seems in recent years to have lost some measure of the hold it had upon the public mind. I would not suggest that its avowed supporters are less clear in their preference, or less decided in their determination to uphold it. But it has not the power in Britain which it once had. It cannot claim the popularity it had in the best days of John Stuart Mill ; it has not made good the promise awakened by the first appearance of Spencer's Principles of Psychology. And this will seem the more striking, when we consider the favorable judgment generally ac corded to certain portions of the work done. There is undivided acknowledgment of the service rendered by Mill in his clear and full exposition of inductive reasoning; and there is admiration of the service rendered by Spencer and other representatives of the school, in the field of empirical psychology. But their latest work is not up to the same level ; it has failed to stir the same springtide of enthusiasm. The ethical division of their philosophy is not distinguished by the same grasp and power to convince ; it does not seem to bear witness as it should to the sufficiency of the basis on which the thought is made to rest. Mill's Utilitari anism is admired as formerly for the clearness of its style, the fine ness of feeling which pervades it, and the noble aspirations which it awakens ; but its logical merit is not equal to these other qualities. Again, if you pass to Spencer, The Data of Ethics is not to be com pared with The First Principles. And, if we take the finest thinker on the utilitarian side I mean Sidgwick he expressly asks a basis in intuition, in order that a beginning may be made with an ethical philosophy, the main part of which will thereafter be an exposition of the true meaning of utility as a rule of life, in view of the shifting relations arising under advancing civilization. These are the main things which explain loss of the old enthusiasm. They all tend to THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. 23 favor a conviction that sensationalism proves insufficient to provide a complete philosophy. The theory moves with freedom in the wide field of physiological observation ; it advances without loss of energy through analysis and development of the feelings ; but when it comes to the higher region of voluntary determination, in cluding all that belongs to the rational life, the step is less certain, and the destination altogether more doubtful. It is this which I think the public mind has come in some measure to recognize, and which accounts for the fact that the tide of thought in Great Britain does not set as the brighter expectations of sensationalism predicted it would. Now we turn upon the rational or transcendental philosophy, thus to complete our view of the historic situation. The distinctive doctrine here may be expressed in the formula, the Rational is the Real. The intellect itself must supply the very conditions of knowledge, in accordance with which it becomes possible for us to attain certainty. In order to know, in any wide and large sense, we must rationalize. The essential requirements for a true philosophy of knowing, and afterward of being, are to be found in the critical study of the conditions and movements of intelligence itself. And this leads into a most intricate and elaborate investigation of mental procedure. On this line, philosophy seems at once to separate itself from science, passing off into an invisible region into which science cannot follow. Accordingly, the transcendental philosophy has never had, and never can have, the same hold on the scientific mind that is readily obtained by a scheme working in visible relation with science, and in closer harmony with it. The rational philosophy does not, indeed, separate itself from the study of the avenues of sense. This it could not do, for it must find the data concerning ex ternal existence given through the sensory. But it is not attracted, arrested, and occupied with the sensory, as the sensational school is. The attraction for the rational school lies in the opposite direction, in discovering what the intellect can do, and on what conditions. But it is impossible to deny that its tendency has been to disparage the sensory, as if the lower power were almost lost in the higher power; as if it were hardly worth while lingering over the testimony of the senses, because we know beforehand that the secrets of phi losophy are to be found deeper. This has robbed the rational philosophy of a considerable amount of influence which the rival scheme has enjoyed. The verdict of public opinion seems, to me, 24 THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. correct here, for the rational philosophy is weak on the side of the sensory. Its lack of power to speak to the scientific mind is charge able against it as a fault. On the other hand, it is able to claim that science is so far from being at variance with the theory which pro claims that to know is to rationalize, and to rationalize is to know, that all science is an explicit declaration of this maxim. For while science has made its beginning in observation, it has really con structed system out of the heap of observations only by rationaliz ing. If, however, it be objected, from the scientific standpoint, that the transcendental philosophy is too intricate, remote, and in many of its aspects abstract, to be attractive to the scientific mind, there is but one answer : Things cannot be made simpler than they are. It is a much easier thing to know, than to construct a theory of know ing. Here no attempt can be successful which will not face things remote from ordinary experience ; the intricacy is lying within the ordinary, wrapped up in the marvels of our own intellectual pro cedure. Granting the loss of popularity which this involves, the rational school must accept the inevitable, as science itself does in order that it may be truly scientific. For science proclaims the im possibility of popularizing itself. The recent history of the rational school in .Britain has been peculiar, and not quite flattering to national sentiment. Reid and Stewart and Hamilton, the great names of our early Scottish phi losophy, when it faced the destructive criticism of Hume, have been at a discount. It is not disputed that there is power in their reason ing and truth in their conclusions. But they have not penetrated into the heart of the problem, as the German thinkers have done. On this account it has happened that British thought favorable to the rational school has within recent years been stimulated by Kant and Hegel more than by native thinkers. This is the true and honest, as well as admiring, acknowledgment that the critical philosophy, in its root distinction between a priori and a posteriori between what is given by the mind (also given to the mind) and what is afterward given into the mind by experience had begun a new era. The consequence, however, has been that the thinkers of the rational school in Britain have, for a considerable time, and of ne cessity, been expounders of Kant or Hegel. Translations, exposi tions, and criticisms have poured from the press, placing German thought in English form, and in a manner suited to the movements of our national thought. The work has been done with consummate THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. 2$ ability, and all parts of the kingdom have had a share in it. Eng land has given us Bradley and Green ; Ireland, Mahaffy and Abbott ; Scotland, Semple, Meiklejohn, Hutcheson, Stirling, Edward Caird, and Wallace. All these have taken part directly in the work of translation, or of exposition and criticism. Kant has been trans lated, expounded, criticised ; Hegel has had his " secret " disclosed by a master philosophic mind ; and Hegelian thought has provided material for powerful assault on the critical philosophy, which has, nevertheless, wonderfully kept its hold. The work described has given to Britain evidence of ample sup ply of native philosophic power. But expositions and criticisms belong to a transition period ; in consequence of the necessary movement of our intellectual life, such a period soon becomes a thing of the past. So it is already, or very nearly so, in Britain. The rational school needs to make a new advance, and we have reason to expect that what is now in preparation will show itself indigenous. The days were and they are not far distant yet when we were treated to doctrines of finality in philosophy ; when we were gravely assured that philosophy ends in Hegel. The prog ress of the ages is too strong for such a thing the centuries do not cease ; intellect does not work a treadmill ; criticism is in its turn criticised, giving rise to a reasonable expectation of something new. That we are on the eve of a fresh advance there appears abun dant evidence to show. The evidence lying nearest us is the felt and recognized insufficiency of the best that the rational school has done in recent years. Speaking here only of the state of things in Britain, it seems to me clear that Hegelianism has reached to the height of its influence, and has passed it. On British soil, in recent years, as on German at an earlier period, the struggle has been be tween Hegelianism and the critical philosophy. " The Dialectic Movement " prepared to swallow up all that had gone before ; but it has not succeeded. In Britain the result is the same as in Ger many ; there is a return upon Kant. The critical philosophy has its " secret," as well as the dialectic philosophy ; and we want both, and something more besides, for we are far from being at the end of the " secrets." This is, to be sure, rank heresy in the ears of enthu siastic Hegelians, of whom we have a goodly gathering ; but prog ress is apt to be heresy for the stage that went before, and that is fading in the rear. 26 THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. We are not breaking with the past ; we are only reading its les sons, and seeking free scope for thought as we try to interpret them and turn them to account. With the lights of the criticism over which Hegelianism has made its boast (and not without good reason, I admit), we are recognizing the defects of the Kantian philosophy ; and in the ability of the Kantian theory to stand the shock, we are detecting the weakness of Hegelianism. The progress of thought is through the wreck of systems. The inexperienced, bewildered by the succession of theories, grow impatient, and call this " see-saw " the weary swing of the pendulum. What they see is only the sur face. A living force is working, breaking up the old frames, to find new and larger form for the energy belonging to it. We are encouraged by this, not alarmed. We are only confirmed in the much-needed lesson, that to know is easy, but to work our way through the intricacies of a theory of knowledge to know ourselves is more perplexing than to construct sciences. This is what is being more deeply recognized by British thought. We admire the critical distinction which Kant has drawn between a priori and a pos teriori between the categories of the understanding and the facts of experience ; but, in harmony with the scientific spirit of the age, while we believe in the rational we believe in the phenomenal, and refuse the dogma that " things-in-themselves " are unknown. Ad mitting that the rational is the real, we read the rational into the phe nomenal, and through the phenomenal into the existing. If we do not know things, but only sensations, the rational philosophy has become sensational, and is little better than the theory it repudiates ; " our knowledge " is not knowledge, and the rational is not the real. Thus advancing beyond the Kantian thought, we find ourselves in the enclosures of the Hegelian, where we are hearing of the unity of thought and being. This is an escape from Kant's position to a vantage-ground from which criticism is easy, but where philosophy is not in any manifest way a gainer. Hume was not answered in the earlier way, neither is he in the later. " Things-in-themselves " are rescued ; but " minds-in-themselves " are vanishing. For the logic of the categories we have to thank Hegel with unstinted praise ; but philosophy is more than categories, and this is the con viction which is carrying philosophic thought beyond Hegel. " Know thyself " means much more than to decipher the dialectic in the movement of the categories. Thus, as I venture to think, the prog ress of British thought will bring us ere long to the rejection of THE PRESENT POSITION OF PHILOSOPHY IN BRITAIN. 2/ both schemes, with acceptance from both of large philosopic results as a permanent addition to the possessions of philosophy. How it happens that this progress in thought involves a return upon Kant will appear by testing the rational school as we did the sensational. Judge Kantianism and Hegelianism by the theories of human life advanced, and Kant is at once recognized as supe rior. His ethical philosophy is the crowning feature in his system, as it is in some sense a rebuke of the weakness in the early part of it. Whereas, what Hegel has to say concerning the evolution of personality and it is admirably said within the forms of the dialec tic is stinted and inadequate, and in most important aspects incon sistent with the earlier and dominant conception, that the evolution of thought is the evolution of being a maxim dialectically good but practically weak. In looking back in this way on the work of recent years we are contemplating the best that has been done, and we are assigning to it high intellectual merit. But we find in the survey evidence that the thought of the nation is in a transition stage, preparing for a new advance ; and when this comes, it promises to be the fruit of all that is best in German and British thought ; and in its nature a fur ther clear advance toward a philosophy of human knowledge a philosophy of certainty. HENRY CALDERWOOD. RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. [This article was the last ever written by its distinguished author. Its solemn warning and earnest plea find additional emphasis in the fact that while uttered in full health and vigor, as the deliberate convictions of a strong mind at the zenith of its power, they are yet a dying legacy. The reader will feel at once what a promise for the future, what a proof of vigorous life, these pages contain. The end was sudden. Doctor Hodge died in the exhaustion which follows great suffering, on Thursday the nth of November last, toward midnight. The tidings of his death were received not only in the immediate circle of his friends, but in the still wider circle where his name and work had always roused the keen est interest in the cities of the Atlantic sea-board, wherever there were members of the great church with which he was identified with a sense of irreparable loss and with the shock of a personal and public bereavement. The general sympathy has already found ex pression in the newspapers and periodicals. But it is only among those who felt his im mediate influence, those who knew him in the common round of every-day life, who came under his charge as a teacher and educator, who were associated with him in the perform ance of public duties, that his real worth can be felt and the importance of his loss be estimated. The first series of this Review was conducted by his famous father, and reached under him the position from which in the last generation it exercised its great influence. Its second series found in the no less famous son a valued contributor ; and this, the third, has enjoyed from the beginning the favor and counsel as well as the substantial assistance which entitle the editor to express, however imperfectly, his feeling of deep sorrow, and to explain how irreparable is the loss to this journal.] THERE is no question upon which there prevails more confusion of thought, and, consequently, difference of opinion among those fundamentally agreeing in principle, than that of the relation of re ligion to the education furnished by our public schools. It is agreed that the perpetuity of a free state necessarily requires the general education of the people. It is also agreed that no agency can so effectually secure this necessary end as a school system supported by public taxation and controlled by the state herself. But if the American principle of the absolute divorce of church and state be maintained, how can the state have any definite religious character? and, if not, how can it administer a system of education which embraces a religious element ? Of all the conflicting systems of religion, repre sented in the national population, how is it possible for the state to select one in order to embrace it in its educational system ? If Christianity be adopted as the religion of the majority, shall it be in its Papal or in its Protestant form ? How can it ever be equitable to take the money of even a small minority of Jews or infidels in order to disseminate a faith which they abhor ? and, especially, how RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 29 can it be endured that their children should be indoctrinated with the hated creed ? The infinite importance of this problem has hitherto failed to be appreciated by the mass of our Christian people, because the inevitable tendencies of our present system of public schools have been disguised during the period of imperfect development. In the East these schools have been kept under local control, in decidedly Christian communities of fixed traditions, and they have been sup plemented and restrained by numerous Christian academies and col leges. But a very wide, profound, and silent change has been rapidly effected. The system has been developed in the newer states from the common school to the state university. In the East the system has been gradually centralized, and local schools have been conformed to the common rule of the State Boards of Control. Congress has been asked to assume the reins by the appropriation of millions for the supply of schools throughout the Southern States and the Ter ritories, and by the erection of a National University. The entire literature provided has been laboriously purged from every theistic or Christian reference. The school Readers of former times, as the Columbian Orator, published in Boston in 1797, the New English Reader, published in 1841, and the McGuffey Readers, so universally used in Ohio a generation ago, were full of extracts from the best Christian classics. These have been everywhere superseded by Readers embracing only secular, non-religious matter. Doctor Guyot's Series of Geographies, the best in the market, was rejected by the School Board of Chicago, after a year's trial, because they recognized the existence of God. A Christian college president said to Rev. H. D. Jenkins, D.D. : "That is my Political Economy, prepared for use in high-schools and acade mies. I sent it the other day to one of our State Superintendents of Education ; but it was returned to me with the note that its first sentence condemned it for use in public schools." That first sentence was : " The source of all wealth is the beneficence of God." For the first time in the world's history a complete literature is being generated from which all tincture of religion, whether natural or revealed, is expurgated, for the education of the youth of a whole nation.* " Non-denominational " used to mean * Ex-President Theodore Woolsey, in his great work on Political Science, Vol. II., p. 414, asks urgently : " Shall it come to this, that not even the existence of the Supreme One is to be assumed in the schools, nor any book introduced which expresses any definite 30 RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. that which does not discriminate between the various Christian sects. Now it means that which does not discriminate between the sects of theists and atheists, of Christianity and of unbelief. A " non- denominationaj " college is a non-religious college. Under these problems, therefore, there lurks the most tremendous and most imminent danger to which the interests of our people will ever be exposed, in comparison with which the issues of slavery and of intemperance shrink into insignificance. We feel sure, moreover, that although an absolute solution of these questions may be very diffi cult, that a comparatively just and safe practical adjustment is clearly within the grasp of our Christian people, if they clear their minds and use their power. I. It is absolutely impossible to separate religious ideas from the great mass of human knowledge. . In many connections, where these are not positively implied they are virtually denied. By " religion " we connote two related ideas : (i) natural theism ; (2) Christianity as a supernatural revelation, whose organ and standard is the Bible. In affirming the absolute impossibility of separating religious ideas from the instruction given in our public schools, we do not mean that it is the proper function of any of them to teach a complete system of Christian doctrine or duties. It is only meant that they cannot suc cessfully ignore that religious element which enters into the essential nature of the subject-matter of their teaching. First. This is proved from the very nature of the case. Educa tion involves the training of the whole man and of all the faculties, of the conscience and of the affections, as well as of the intellect. The English language is the product of the thought, character, and life of an intensely Christian people for many centuries. A purely non- theistic treatment of that vocabulary would not merely falsify the truth of the subject, but would necessarily make it an instrument of conveying positively antitheistic and antichristian ideas. All his tory is a product of divine Providence, and is instinct with the divine ends and order. This is especially true of the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, which is a record of the conflict of religious ideas and forces from the first. It is self-evident that a non-theistic or a non-christian treatment of that history would be utterly superficial faith in regard to Providence or final causes ? " And it has long since come to this that a minister of the Gospel has justified the state, insomuch as he affirms it " proposes to give only a secular education, that would be useful and needful in this life, if there were no God, and no future for the human soul." Religion and the State. Rev. Dr. Spear, pp. 52, 53. RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 3 1 and misrepresenting. It cannot be questioned that morals rest upon a religious basis, and that a non-theistic ethics is equivalent to a positively antitheistic one. The same is no less true of science in all its departments. It ultimately rests upon the ground that the universe is a manifestation of reason. If God is not therein recog nized he is denied, and a non-theistic science has always been and will always be a positively atheistic and materialistic one. The universe can be interpreted only in terms of mind or of molecular mechanics. Wm. T. Harris well says, in the Journal of Social Science, May, 1884, P- 1 3 : " Faith is a secular virtue as well as a theological virtue, and whosoever teaches another view of the world that is to say, he who teaches that a man is not im mortal, and that nature does not reveal the divine reason teaches a doctrine sub versive of faith in this peculiar sense, and also subversive of man's life in all that makes it worth living." It is obvious that the infinite evils resulting from the proposed perversion of the great educating agency of the country cannot be corrected by the supplementary agencies of the Christian home, the Sabbath-school, or the church. This follows not only because the activities of the public school are universal and that of all the other agencies partial, but chiefly because the Sabbath-school and church cannot teach history or science, and therefore cannot rectify the anti- christian history and science taught by the public schools. And if they could, a Christian history and science on the one hand cannot coalesce with and counteract an atheistic history and science on the other. Poison and its antidote together never constitute nutritious food. And it is simply madness to attempt the universal distribution of poison on the ground that other parties are endeavoring to furnish a partial distribution of an imperfect antidote. It is greatly to be regretted that this tremendous question has been obscured and belittled by being identified with the entirely subordinate matter of reading short portions of the King James ver sion of the Bible in the public schools. Another principal occasion of confusion on this subject is the unavoidable mutual prejudice and misunderstanding that prevails between the two great divisions of our Christian population, the Romanist and the Protestant. The protest against the reading of the Protestant version of Scripture came in the first instance from the Romanists. Hence, in the triangu lar conflict which ensued, between Protestants, Romanists, and in fidels, many intelligent Christians, on both sides, mistook the stress 32 RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. of battle. Every intelligent Catholic ought to know by this time that all the evangelical churches are fundamentally at one with him in essential Christian doctrine. And every intelligent Protestant ought to know by this time, in the light of the terrible socialistic revolutions which are threatened, that the danger to our country in this age is infinitely more from scepticism than from superstition. We have, Protestant and Romanist alike, a common essential Christianity, abundantly sufficient for the purposes of the public schools, and all that remains for specific indoctrinization may easily be left to the Sabbath-schools and the churches respectively. We are in the same sense Christian theists. We believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in His fatherly providence and love. We believe in the same divine-human Saviour, and place alike all our hope of salva tion on His office and work as Mediator. We believe in the infalli bility and authority of the inspired Word of God, and we nearly approximate agreement on all questions touching the Sabbath, the oath, the rights of property, marriage and divorce, etc., and with re gard to the religious elements of science, physical and moral, and on all questions in which the state, or the schools of the state, have jurisdiction. Let us mutually agree, as citizens, not as ecclesi astics, upon a large, fair, common basis of religious faith, for the com mon needs of the state and her schools, leaving all differences to the churches, and, thus united, we will carry the country before us. The testimony of the Rev. H. D. Jenkins, D.D., a Presbyterian minister, in the Christian at Work, August 19, 1886, seems to show that our Romanist brethren are nearer this infinitely-to-be-desired position than are most of us Protestants, who are so divided that common understanding and action is in our case more difficult. Doctor Jenkins says : " Permit me to say that I have never in my life examined a series of school-books with more minute scrutiny than I have given to this set, and I have no hesitation in saying that they are truer to the ideal of our fathers " [the Puritans] "than any set of books I know to be in use in the state schools of America. There is a higher lite rary excellence to be found in their Readers than is to be found in those used in our public schools ; than it is possible to find, when from our literature the ethical and religious element is so carefully weeded out. And apart from one or two dog matic books, which are used as text-books notably their Catechism there is not a page in the whole didactic series which I could not freely put into the hands of my own children, or give to the children of my Sunday-school. Not only are they largely composed of extracts from our best evangelical writers, but Protestant and Romanist appear in their pages with equal impartiality. Their Readers pre sent a truer and juster view of the state of literature in America to-day than can RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 33 be gotten from the books in use in the public schools. Their History of the United States, not seeking to ignore all those spiritual factors which gave shape and power to the past, is a far more complete exhibition of the formative elements in the national life than that taught under the patronage of the State. Throughout the entire series there is not taught one single doctrine distinctive of Romanism, or hostile to evangelical truth; not one reference to the mother of Jesus in any terms that would sound strange in a Protestant pulpit ; not one allusion to the invocation of the saints ; not one hint of the existence of purgatory, and not one suggestion of salvation by any other means but by simple trust in Jesus, the Saviour of men." In view of the entire situation, shall we not all of us who really believe in God give thanks to Him, that He has preserved " the Roman Catholic Church in America to-day true to that theory of education upon which our fathers founded the public schools of the nation," and from which they have been so madly perverted. Second. The proposed attempt at erecting a complete national system of public schools, from whose instruction, in all grades, all positive religious elements are to be expurgated, is absolutely with out precedent in the hist9ry of the human race. The schools of China have always been penetrated with the religion of China, such as it is. The schools of Europe of every grade, Protestant as well as Romanist, have, from the time of Charlemagne, been the children of Christianity. The schools of Germany, hitherto the most efficient in the world, provide even for the teaching the whole outline of dogmatic Christianity. The schools of revolutionary Paris alone emulate the agnostic profession and practice of our own system. Third. This new principle of the absolute elimination of the theistic and Christian elements from the instructions of our com mon schools is in direct opposition to the spirit and declared con victions of their founders. At the first, the population of New England was religiously homogeneous. The conflict has been pre cipitated by the unfortunate misunderstandings of Protestant and Romanist Christians, and by the utterly unwarrantable claims of a relatively small but aggressive party of recently imported foreign infidels. For two hundred years after the first colonization of the country every college and almost every academy and high- school was erected with Christian ends in view. Massachusetts established Harvard College in 1636. The president and each pro fessor was obliged to profess " his belief in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments," " and in every year and every week of the college course, every class was practised in the Bible and catecheti cal divinity." Yale College was founded in 1701. The charter de- 3 34 RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. fined its end to be the propagating the Christian Protestant religion. The Assembly's catechism, in Greek, was read by the freshmen ; the sophomores studied Hebrew ; the juniors and sophomores and the seniors, both at Harvard and Yale, were thoroughly instructed in divinity in the admirable compend of Wollebius. Horace Mann was Secretary of the Board of Education of Mas sachusetts eleven years, from 1837 to 1848. He was, more than any other man, the author, expositor, and eloquent defender of the system. He may well be called the Father of the American Com mon-school system, and is able to speak of its original character and intention as an unquestionable authority. The changes he made, in order to render the schools of that state more homogeneous, and available for all classes of the people, necessarily drove many of the old grammar-schools and academies out of the field, and excluded the teaching of the peculiar dogmas of any particular Christian de nomination. This inevitably excited anxiety as to the spirit and ultimate bearing of the system on the essentials of religion held in common by the great majority of the people. In order to remove all apprehension on this score he expressed his views and those of his associates frequently, and in the most emphatic manner, in his annual reports. He says : " Such is the force of the conviction to which my own mind is brought by these general considerations, that I could not avoid regarding the man who should oppose the religious education of the young as an insane man ; and were it pro posed to debate the question between us, I should desire to restore him to his reason before entering upon the discussion." Reports, pp. 710-715, "On Religious Education." He did not depend for this religious instruction upon any agen cies exterior to his own schools. The education he proposed to give the whole people in his schools he defines as " a training of the whole man." Pp. 573-575. " I wish to vindicate the system with which I have been so long and so intimately connected, not only from the aspersion, but from the suspicion, of being an irreligious, or antichristian, or un-Christian system." P. 717. " But our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals ; it founds its morals on a basis of religion ; it welcomes the religion of the Bible, and in receiving it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other sys temto speak for itself." Pp. 729-730. " The Bible is received, therefore it is not un-Christian." P. 735. " Further, our law ex- plicitly enjoins morality, therefore, it cannot be un-Christian." P. RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 35 736. " Our system explicitly calls upon the " resident ministers of the Gospel to cooperate." P. 737. II. This is a Christian country, in the sense that Christianity is an original and essential element of the law of the land. First. This easily demonstrated position does not, even the most remotely, tend to invalidate our cherished American principle of the absolute separation of church and state. Christianity is a super natural revelation of God, recorded in the Bible. It is not an eccle siastical organization, nor essentially dependent upon one. Churches and church officers of every kind are never lords over the con sciences of men, neither have they any authority within the sphere of the state, but they are simple agencies used by God at His dis cretion for the dissemination of the Gospel among men. The state and the church are both divine institutions, having different ends, spheres, laws, methods, and agents, and the officers and the laws of neither have any jurisdiction within the sphere of the other. They are, nevertheless, both equally divine institutions, and the mem bers and officers of each are alike subject to God, and bound to obey every word He directs to either one of them in their appro priate sphere. It is Christianity, or God's revelation to men in the Scriptures, and not any external society or agency, which is de clared to be an essential element of the law of this land. Second. By this assertion it is not meant that the state is directly or indirectly committed to any ecclesiastical creeds or con fessions, or to any interpretation of the contents of Scripture as to matters of either faith or practice, presented by the church or her representative. The state must interpret the lessons of Scripture for herself, as far as these bear upon her peculiar duties, just as the church must interpret them for herself and within her own sphere. The Christianity affirmed to be an essential element of the law of this land is not the Christianity of any one class of the Christian population, but the Christianity which is inherited and held in com mon by all classes of our Christian people. This principle is expressed very plainly in a decision of the Su preme Court of Pennsylvania in the year 1824 : "Christianity, general Christianity, is, and always has been, a part of the com mon law of Pennsylvania ; not Christianity founded on particular religious tenets ; not Christianity with an established church, and tithes, and spiritual courts ; but Christianity with liberty of conscience to all men."* * Sergeant and Rowles' Reports, p. 394. 36 RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS, Chief-Justice Kent, in a decision of the Supreme Court of New York, in 1811, says: " Christianity, in its enlarged sense, as a religion revealed and taught in the Bible, is not unknown to our law." Third. Nor, in the third place, does this affirmation that essen tial Christianity is an element of the law of our land mean that the civil government is bound either directly or indirectly to provide for the preaching of the Gospel, or for the doing anything else in that interest which falls within the sphere of the church. Whatsoever belongs to the church for that very reason does not belong to the state. But it simply means that Christianity, as a revelation, binds all Christian men to obedience in every relation and department of duty upon which that revelation reflects the will of God. The state should obey God in carrying out within its own sphere the will of God, however made known. God has revealed to all men much of His will, through the natural law written upon the heart. No re spectable publicist pretends that this natural revelation of God's will shall be discarded by the state, or that the civil law must ig nore moral distinctions because a class of our free citizens repudiate them. And God has also been pleased to make, through the Chris tian Scriptures, a special supernatural revelation of His will to all men, touching several matters which necessarily fall within the sphere of the Civil law. These are such as the observance of a day ' of rest from the business of the world, the oath, the right of prop erty, capital punishment for murder, marriage and divorce. Hence also, when the state, for her own defence, assumes the function of providing for the education of the rising generation of the whole people, the Christian character of the state requires that, as far as she teaches those branches of knowledge of which Christian theism is an inseparable element, as, e. g., history, ethics, philosophy, science, she should include that element in her teaching also. The evidence of this proposition thus limited and explained is threefold : (i) The a priori necessity of the case. (2) The historic genesis of our common law and political institutions. (3) The present actual facts of the case. 1st. Every state must possess, in the whole range of its act ivities as a state, precisely the intellectual, moral, and religious cha racter of the governing majority of its citizens. The state is no thing else than the people, constitutionally organized, acting in their RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 37 organic capacity through the machinery of law. If the people are morally righteous their action upon all questions possessing a moral character must be righteous. If the governing majority of the people believe in God as the Creator and moral Governor, and in the authority of the Bible as His Word, then organic action must express personal belief, and in all cases conform to the will of God, whether revealed in the light of nature or in the text of Scripture, as the majority understands them. If the citizen disbelieves in God and His Word, he does not believe in them at any time or in any relation, but if he does really believe in them, then he must act in conformity to them at all times and in all relations. It is simply absurd to say that a single believer must individually obey every indication of God's will, and that a multitude of believers collectively may, if they please, shut their eyes and ignore his voice. It is purely absurd to say that a believing man, on Sunday, must recognize and obey the voice of Christ speaking in his Word, and directing belief and action in the sphere of the church, and that the same believer, on Monday, sitting in a State or the national legislature, may disregard the same voice explicitly commanding his obedience in matters coming within his control as a legislator ; as, e. g., marriage and divorce, the Sabbath, or education. The thing is simply impossible. If attempted and pretended it is monstrous treason. Neutrality is absolutely impos sible. If we are not for the King we are against him. If we do not acknowledge we deny him, if we do not obey we rebel. If the state acts under the light of nature, and without the light of supernatural revelation, it is certainly non-Christian, but it will be either theistic or atheistic. But if it act under the clear light of the Bible in the hands of all the people, it must be either Christian or nt.', * * : - The one ; his manner of working it out shows a thorough"Slu4j l r^>f jflft subject, and an with the whole range of English poetry * * . * critically examined. The student thf book worthy oi' exhaustive _study." Philadelphia Inquirer. ults are the most important ones yet attained in its department, and, we believe, the most valuable." tbe. . . ' : _,.. ; ute, interesting, aitd brilKant piece of work. * * POET $1 "The author's pi astonishing fa: of literatun "Its re Boston G " An a praise. If every poetic aspirant could learn by heart, th and the'amount of poetry increased by ti larger ratio. As a whole, the essay deserves unqualified amount of versifying might be reduced by a half, It applies the test under whose touch ttie dull nd the amet: . ne fails. It goes farther than this, and furnishes the key to settle the vexed questions as to moralizing didactic erse, and uv of ne dangerous terms on which sense and sound meet in verse." New York Independent. " A LIFE Iff SOJJ6. i6mo, cloth, extra,- $k-. 25. By GEO. L. RAYMOND " An age-wArn poet, dyfng aWiS sYr^figef'^n tt*liTini^fiK'inlg, i l i eH i e < * tne-record ofhi-life in a pil ' manuscript poawsr These ate claiiued by a. fiieinl unJ companion, but at the request otb&cotlaqers he r them over before taking them away. * * * This is the simple but unique plan. * * * The author attMipted to put an American modern life before us. _* * * sees poetry and living poetry where the most of men see prose, * * * The objection * * * tliat form outweighs the thought cannot be urged in this instance, for the poems, of frof."Rayrnond are full of keen and se':trchin.^ cprnnu--ftt,s 'Upon life. Neither can the ^e urged of the * lack of human element.' ' A Life in song * isjiot only dramatic in yjndency, but is . ' A Life in Song' is not onl\ . ._. . singularly realistic and acute. * * * The volume will appear to ^a'Targe" clnss'"of'readers 4 ^y reason of its clear, musical, flexible verse, its pure thought and its intense human interest." Boston Transcript. " Mr. Raymond is a poet with all thatthe name -implies. He has the true fire^-there is no disputing jji*it. * * * There is thought of an elevated character, the diction is pure,, the versification true. * * -3 1 Nor only does ' A Life in Song ' offer consolation hv the quiet twilight hour . * * * but also affords innumerable important quotations to-fortify and instruct one" for ihe struggle of life, and a book that is. of this value is not ;m ordinary one. * * * We could wish it universally read." Hartford Post. _" The versification throughout is graceful and thoroughly artistic, the imagery varied and spontaneous, the tout- high, earnest, and appealing. The book is ote to-be read in a thotrgtrtftifmed; BO probajiw before being fully and finally accepted. The individ uality of the handsome new magazine" 'fif d&tm'c't. ''ft is an imitation of none of its coi3A^ffnSf,3M itAt on a level with the best of them**oth in the merit of its general scheme and in the det^|ls of workmanship. This, we believe, will be the verdict of the intelligent reading public on the new Scrionfr's Magazine." CONTENTS OF JANUARY NUMBER GAMBETTA PROCLAIMI PUBLIC OF FRANCE,," ?. Drawn by HOWARD PYLE. FRENCH. REMINISCENCES OF THE COMMUNE OF PARIS. First Downfall of the Empire. By E. B. ex-Minister to France. With illustrafions, portraits and documents in Mr. WasHBufne^s possession, and from drawings by Tutffc&iq&W} MEEKER, REICH, and others. ^ D ; 1 Den92 SETH'S BROTHER'S WIFE. Chapter '.-Y^ HAROLD FREDERIC. THE STORY OF A NEW YORK I. H. C. BIINNER. Illustrated by A. B. FR F. HOPKINSON SMITH, and G. W. EDWAR SONNETS IN SHADOW. ARLO BATES. Captain U. S Engineers. With maps, ske EENE, tcKel, OUR DEFENCELESS COASTS. F.V. GREEN, Captain U. S I and diagrams. IN A COPY OF THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK. AUSTIN DOBSOX. IN MEXICO. A Story. THOMAS A. JANVIER. THE BABYLONIAN SEALS. WILLIAM HAYES WARD. With illustrations from seals in the author's collection, and after DECLERCQ, PINCHES', and others. GLIMPSES AT THE DIARIES OF GOU- VERNEUR MORRIS. Social Life and Char acter in the Paris of the French Revolution. First Paper. ANNIE GARY MORRIS. With portrait engraved by G. KRL'ELL, from the painting at Old Morrisania. SOCIALISM. FRANCIS A. WALKER THE NEW YEAR. MAYBURV FLEMING. A VIOLIN OBLIGATO. A Story. MARGARET CROSBY. Remittances should be made by check or money or der. All subscriptions now sent will begin with the f.rst number. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 743 & 745 Broadway, N. Y. I2 THE NEW PRINCETON REVIEW. Mew and Important Books just published by A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON, 714 Broadway, New York. NEW AND ATTRACTIVE WORK ON CHINA. jOJragon, 3magc, anfr JJcmon; Or, the Three Religions of China CONFU- CIANISM, BUDDHISM, and TAOISM giving an account of the Mythology, Idolatry, and Demonolatry of the Chinese. By REV. HAMP- DEN C. DU BOSE 14 years a Missionary in China. With 188 ILLUSTRATIONS- ENGRAVED IN CHINA. Crown octavo volume. Beautifully bound. Cloth, beveled boards, full gilt side, etc. $2.00. " The writer has drawn his water from native wells, the facts being mostly gathered from Chinese sources. The pen is not held by one seated in a professor's study, but by a plain man, who daily walks to and fro among idolaters, and testifies of what he has seen and heard, written in a plain style, so that the young as well as the old may understand it." Author's Preface. A NEW WORK BY REV. WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D. parables of (Pur 0airiour. EXPOUNDED AND ILLUSTRATED. By WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D., uni form with same author's "Limitations of Life," and "Contrary Winds" and other Ser mons. I volume, crown octavo, cloth. $1.75. "In adding another to the number of works on this subject I can claim only such originality as may be fairly accounted for by what astronomers have called the ' personal equation '; and the result may be a further illustration of the many-sidedness of these exquisite stories. To Archbishop Trench, who more than any Other English writer has brought patristic lore to bear upon the illustration of the parables, every later author must express his peculiar obligations ; but the recent works of Prof. Bruce and Siegfried Goebel have broken new ground in this department, and my aim has been to turn their fruitful suggestions to good homiletical account. The little volumes of Dr. Dod's only the first of which was in my hands when these discourses were prepared are full of richest nuggets; and the Expositions of William Arnot are characterized by the masculine sense, rich Christian experience, and striking illustrations for which he was so remarkable. But the present work, while indebted in different respects to all these authors, w;ll be found to be in others independent of them all." From Author's Preface. Cegenfrs anfr Papular Sales of tljc Basqite By MARIANA MONTEIRO. With full-page ILLUSTRATIONS IN PHOTO- GRA VURE. By HAROLD COPPING. Small quarto volume. Tastefully printed and elegantly bound in cloth. Illuminated cover from original design. Price, $3.75. (A small number of copies on large paper. Price, $7.50.) 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