ous.

"Catalog" would only be admissible if the cutting off of the "ue" made the word more like the Greek, but it does not. As for "program," it is formed on the analogy of "epigram"; but there is evidently a further change in store for it. It will follow the example of "grogram" and shorten itself into monosyllabic unseemliness.

The truth is that the orthography of modern English provides, or would provide, a subject for discussion among Englishmen and Americans of established literary reputation which might have valuable results. Nor, probably, would the keenest opponent of Mr. Roosevelt's proposals object to the summoning of an International Conference to consider suggestions for The Spectator.

changes in the conventional methods of spelling English words which might seem sensible or desirable. It would be satisfactory if on certain disputed points an opinion could be expressed which could be regarded as authoritative; more satisfactory still if certain ugly changes were by the same authority set aside. But Mr. Roosevelt's action, unfortunately, will not have the same effect as would the summoning of such a Conference. In America, another President may reverse his decision; and as for England, Mr. Roosevelt would be the first to disclaim any idea either of comforting wearers of dunces' caps or of dictating to philological Professors.

It is about eleven years since Dr. Douglas Hyde published the "Love Songs of Connacht," and explained that these were part of a large collection, only one chapter of a book. The Love Songs were well received; the Religious Songs are not less worthy, and they make one all the more anxious that the whole collection should be published soon. "May your honor live till Dr. Hyde's Songs of Connacht are all printed!"-this would make a good Irish blessing, but we hope to live longer still. The present instalment is certainly something to be thankful for. It is arranged in the same way as the Love Songs-with better type-Irish on one side, English on the other, Dr. Hyde's expository work being given in the two languages. This prose explanation is admirable. It is full of matter, of literary and historical knowledge; more attentive to metrical details, perhaps, than in the

"The Religious Songs of Connacht." Two Volumes (Chapters vi. and vii. of the "Songs of Connacht"). Douglas Hyde. (Unwin. 10s. net.)

earlier book, and not less appreciative of the ideas and sentiments of the poems. The great merit of Dr. Hyde's essay is that it brings out the varieties of religious thought to be found in these Irish poems. The difference between Catholic and Protestant is emphasized in some of the verses, as in the epigram on the renegade priest: -"There's Mahon O'Cleary, and he in madness, drawing hay on Lady Day. That's not the worst, but he took his oath, that there was only a thrall in the Mother of the King of the Universe." But the varieties to be found here go far beyond this simple opposition. On the one hand there is clear, correct artistic verse, reasoning about the Faith:

Thy intelligence once bright,
Borne so light on soaring wings,
Now is clouded; since the will

Takes its fill of worldly things.

"The Poetry of Badenoch." Collected and Edited with Translations, Introduction, and Notes, by the Rev. Thomas Sinton. (The Northern Counties Publishing Company. 218.)

On the other side might be quoted any number of strange rhymes, full of old visions and beliefs. The range of these poems is as great as that between the North of England Lyke Wake Dirge (quoted by Dr. Hyde) and Gray's Elegy. Take for example the Poem of the Tor. It is a dialogue between a man and a ghost, a soul set to do penance for a thousand years on a rock in the sea. The ghost explains:

Twenty years ago last Sunday, The soul parted with the evil-inclined body,

Under rain, under wind;

And if it were not for the blessing of the poor on the world,

I could be hundreds of years more there. . . .

When I used to go to Sunday Mass It was not mercy I used to ask for my soul,

But jesting and joking with young men,

And the body of my Christ before

me. ...

I set no store by my soul

Until I saw the prowess of Death assembling:

On the side of the North, black walls of fire,

On the side of the South, the people of Christ

Gathering amongst the Angels,
The Glorious Virgin hastening them.

There are many old spells and charms, of the sort that were current a thousand years ago in England and Germany, and are not yet altogether disused. Every country has those things in its own fashion, and some of those Irish things are beautiful. "A fragrant little prayer my child taught me myself, my eyes not to be shut in the time of the singing of the birds; going on my knees praying and beseeching the Son of God, remembering the Lamb who is bruised and dead beneath the clay." And the following is one of the 1712

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XXXII.

"And he who would have this vision, and to say it three times on lying down in his couch of slumber, will receive Heaven without foot-moving, and he shall not see cold Hell for ever."

Dr. Hyde's book is not monotonous. He gives, besides the pious songs, a number of old popular irreverenceshumorous stories of St. Peter, and the tale of the tinker who wanted a godfather for his child, and made critical objections to "the King of Sunday" himself. Also, there are some specimens from living tradition of that old debate between Ossian and St. Patrick which is preserved in the Book of the Dean of Lismore and in many other places, including Scott's "Antiquary." Enough has been said to show that Dr. Hyde is more than justified in his labors. It might be pointed out that his book contains some interesting proofs of English influence on popular Irish verse: the poem of Mary and Joseph is from the English Cherrytree Carol:

Joseph was an old man
And an old man was he,
And he wedded Mary,
The Queen of Galilee.

The poem also of the Keening of the Three Marys seems to be more or less in the English ballad manner. Dr.

Hyde is working not for Ireland alone, but for the whole study of traditional poetry in different languages. May he come out soon with the rest of his treasures!

Mr. Sinton's Badenoch poems are of all sorts, and some of them are like the Irish, especially the love songs. Among the songs of Connacht there are beautiful passages that sound almost as if they might be the originals of the loveliest idylls in the world, of Simaetha or Oenone:

I denounce love; woe is she who gave

it

To the son of yon woman, who never understood it;

My heart in my middle, sure he has left it black,

And I do not see him in the street or in any place.

And in Badenoch there is found the song of the lovers, for whom the fates brought nothing but severance; it might be Tristram and Iseult. Seldom, again, has "the innocence of love" been more simply and beautifully rendered than in the "pastoral monody," as Mr. Sinton calls it. "Above Spey Water." There is no room to expatiate on all the Badenoch poetry here; those who read the book will acknowledge Mr. Sinton's skill in arranging and presenting his matter, and will thank him for his Own Gaelic poems interspersed.

It may not be out of place to remember here that the centenary of Zeuss, the founder of Celtic scholarship, has been recently observed at Munich, and to hope that this country will not slacken in the work which is at present being carried on by Mr. Whitley Stokes, Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady, Professor Rhys of Oxford, Professor Kuno Meyer of Liverpool, Professor Strachan of Manchester, and many others, besides the authors of the two books here noted. Celtic studies may naturally attract those whose

London Times.

native language is Welsh or Gaelic; but they have also drawn in many foreigners, French, German, Italian, and English, with the same sort of attraction as was exercised a hundred years ago by Sanscrit, and still earlier by Greek, when Greek was new. The Celtic region in philology (using that world in its ancient, large, and liberal sense) is not merely unexhausted, but has scarcely been surveyed. The catalogue of Irish MSS. in the British Museum has not yet been issued; there is no complete dictionary of medieval Irish or Welsh; the English adventurer has to make his way as best he can. with separate glossaries, native instructors, cribs, guess-work. But there is progress, and the Irish school at Dublin is flourishing, without any revenue, with the simplest organization. with no degrees, no compulsion-a voluntary meeting, hardly an association, of teachers who are glad to teach and pupils, Irish and Welsh, who want to learn and are not panic-stricken at the amazing devices of old Irish grammarsurely one of the most terrific things that ever confronted a student. How rich in interest the old Irish literature is may be seen in many excellent translations by Mr. Whitley Stokes, Dr. Kuno Meyer, and others. The "Voyage of Maelduin," the "Vision of MacConglinne," the Saints' Lives, can be judged in English on the same terms as the Bible and Don Quixote: we can make up for the discredited Ossian of our forefathers out of the "Colloquy of the Ancients," and other excellent things in Mr. Standish Hayes O'Grady's "Silva Gadelica." No one,

in such a world as this, need be ashamed of not knowing those old stories; but it is hardly possible to escape their charm when once they are known. Nor is the beauty of the older literature wanting to the new, the living Gaelic language of Connacht and Badenoch.

"And it were my intentions," said Joe Gargery to Pip, "to have put upon his tombstone that Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember, reader, he were that good in his hart ..., but poetry costs money, cut it how you will, small or large, and it were not done." The real genius of Dickens is nowhere more patently and crisply expressed than in the opening pages of Great Expectations. Everything is admirable in them: you see in a flash straight into a child's mind; a few sentences of compressed English make the scene and the mood of the scene inexpressibly vivid; along with the rollicking humor is given a sense

That says as plain as whisper in the ear,

The place is haunted.

But the dominant note here, as in all the best work of Dickens, is, if not a good heart, at least good-heartedness or comradeship: the boy and the convict are comrades; the friendship of Pip and Joe is of a David and Jonathan. Times and again the friendships in Dickens are between young and old, or between characters that suggest an analogy of youth and age. Pip and Joe, Sam and Mr. Pickwick --Pickwick being the child - David and Peggotty, Barnaby and his mother, Dombey and all his friends, Oliver and Nancy. Dickens seems to meet friendship, along the path of boyhood, of which at its best friendship is the very religion. He loved Christmas for its comradeship. When people read Pickwick now they say how wearisome and disgusting is this perpetual drinking. But Mr. Pickwick in the pound

"Charles Dickens." By G. K. Chesterton, London: Methuen. 78. 6d. net.

gave his name as Milk Punch because, like Wardle and the rest, he found in punch the occasion and stimulus of comradeship. That we become teetotal now is right and proper, for it is a horrible thing to drink when you have lost the power of laughing in the process, or are thinking of Sir Victor Horsley and gout. This comradeship does not usually express itself emphatically except under pressure of calamity, and the most popular calamity is poverty. In default of poverty Dickens went to villainy, and nothing is better in Mr. Chesterton's book than his defence of the villain:

The villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a danger -a ceaseless, ruthless and uncompromising menace, like that of wild beasts or the sea. For the full satisfaction of the sense of combat, which everywhere and always involves a sense of equality, it is necessary to make the evil thing a man; but it is not always necessary, it is not even always artistic, to make him a mixed and probable In any tale the tone of which is at all symbolic, he may quite legitimately be made an aboriginal and infernal energy. . .

man.

And when we consider in cold blood the Quilps, Pecksniffs, Heeps and the rest who hold the threat and evoke the camaraderie, they come to seem 110 longer hyperbolic and in this way inartistic villains to shudder at and to hate, but mere hobgoblins, gargoyles, as grotesque as they are ugly, just horrible enough to be foils but not real enough to spoil the sense of the building. Indeed architecturally, if we may force the analogy, are not the gargoyles monks' caricatures of their own monkish friends? Had they possessed one spark of humanity they would have

had to surrender to friendship, they would have become angels, the piece would have been without a villain, jollity without virtue, and Joe have shown no merit in the epitaph to his drunken father.

The basis of comradeship is character, which depends not on intellect or even any moral attribute. It is to a social man what genius is to an author, an emergent something, always involving independence and loyalty, but beyond both. You see it all at once in surprising subjects. An old shrivelled woman, with a parchment face, discloses it suddenly by a word to her companion in the railway train. The disclosure is so convincing that everyone in the carriage loves the old woman at once. You catch the same in the face of a passing cabby and could find it in you to laugh in his face or beg a chop in his shelter. Most very small children have the look. The poor grow out of it more slowly than the rich; education and prosperity are its enemy, convention and form its death. Dickens was poor, he struggled for a living before Micawber sent him to school. He could recall in age the mind of his childhood with a poigaancy never equalled in literature, and he trailed the clouds of glory to the end. What character and force would be added to most of us if, like Dickens, we had wrestled with life first and been taught about it afterwards. most all Dickens, the good and the bad in him, seems a part of this crying need in a friendless boy for some fraternal spirit. Through it he became the only novelist in England who has written a critic's and a people's book. Every one clamors of Dickens's exaggeration. Mr. Chesterton says that art is exaggeration, a plausible thesis; but this is certain, that if more than one or two people in a story are to have individuality and be remembered, their portraits must be exaggerated. Toole

Al

used to toddle on to the stage aud make the theatre ring by the mere tag, "Tea is served with little lumps of cake." To make his minor characters known thus quickly, distinctly, individually, the novelist's only way is the way of hyperbole. The art of writing has no other equivalent for the voice, form, manner, and presentment of the stage. So in life your inpression of every chance acquaintance is either exaggerated, or it is negative and at once forgotten.

Of course Dickens had what Sir Joshua called "That" : genius, creative, compelling genius. He was author of more beings than any of the genus we call authors. He had the inconsequent hilarity of the Elizabethans. Sir Toby and Wardle are brothers; Quilp is Caliban emerged from superstition. His creatures often break our artistic canons. If to his death he had the intensity of a boy's observation and feeling, he had a boy's gauche and unseeing judgment of women, and a boy's maudlin conception of pathos. All this is confessed. But beyond his genius and his faults he had a sort of humane instinct, a quality not in itself intellectual, and so rated too low by the sort of critic who says that to prefer Dickens before Thackeray shows lack of literary sense. The retort is equally true- though any way the comparison is foolish, otiose and unreal that a preference for Thackeray proves a lack of humanity. The lettered debase Dickens for what he had not; the unlettered exalt him for what he had; and what he had, as René Bazin wrote of a French author, is "le droit à l'épithète de populaire, c'est-à-dire de fraternel." What he had not matters little to them. But whatever his faults he gave the lie to the canon "La littérature et l'art ue sont populaires qu'à la condition d'être médiocres," and we shall not again have a great popular novel till this