fraternal spirit

again runs riot. Thackeray was great because he made puppets, for men are puppets. Dickens was great because he begat children; and what matter if his children, as Mr. Chesterton wittily says, are "spoilt children." Boys are terribly well-drilled now, and go to school to matriculate as puppets at five.

Mr. Chesterton should excel himself as a critic of Dickens. He is, we understand, though we have heard nothing of the scheme lately, organizing a League for the Defence of the People's Pleasures. It may be expected to recommend the stocks of merrie English days for teetotalers with a compulsory diet of milk punch, and an examination in the Christmas Carol for all admirers of Mr. Hardy or Gorky. The world is thinner, more serious than it was, and pessimism its besetting sin, especially in reformers.

It is evident, in short, why even those who admire exaggeration do not admire Dickens. He is exaggerating the wrong thing. They know what it is to feel a sadness so strange and deep that only impossible characters can express it; they do not know what it is to feel a joy so vital and violent that only impossible characters can express that. They know that the soul can be so sad as to dream naturally of the blue faces of the corpses of Baudelaire; they do not know that the soul can be so cheerful as to dream naturally of the blue face of Major Bagstock.

We shall consider Dickens in many other capacities, but let us put this one first. He was the voice in England of this humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging of anybody to be anything. His best books are a carnival of liberty, and there is more of the real spirit of the French Revolution in Nicholas Nickleby than in The Tale of Two Cities. His work has the great glory of the Revolution, the bidding of every man to be himself.

Mr. Chesterton, probably unconsciously, is adopting Victor Hugo's defence of himself and his school in the immortal preface to Hernani, the very hub of modern criticism.

Le romantisme, tant de fois mal défini, n'est que le libéralisme en littérature. La liberté dans l'art, la liberté dans la société viola le double but auquel doivent tendre d'un même pas tous les esprits conséquents et logiques.

By all means let us welcome democracy in our authors; but Victor Hugo never made the absurd mistake of supposing that enthusiasm for man in the Rousseau manner has anything to do with one party in politics or one form of literature. The most revolutionary novelist that England has rad is Mr. Meredith. He has hilarious hopes, a wind-in-the-orchard energy, a riotous delight in the people's pleasures, even a Dickens relish of the grotesque. But his greatest characters are gentlemen, his style a precious thing that only the highly educated can understand and the thoughtful value. Mr. Chesterton rates Sir Walter Scott - a democrat because he preached the dignity of man-because he was on the other side in politics. The thing is beside the mark. Mr. Chesterton, like Mr. Belloc,

plumps for beer, a good cheery republican drink. His party is made melancholy by the news of a good yield of hops. Mr. Chesterton exults in island individuality. His party is cosmopolitan. He preaches the necessity of dogma to co-liberals whose delight is in imaginary axioms about nothing in particular. He will have it that the great men are just ordinary men writ a little larger; but when he comes to instances he excepts Cæsar, who should have provided an admirable illustration of the thesis, and instances Napoleon, whose physical health was as abnormal as his mind. In all Mr. Chesterton's work there is this abrupt fall when he steps down from generalization to the floor of fact. Every one should thoroughly enjoy the lecturer's early chapters. They throw out fascinating theories, they are full of suggestion, the paradoxes titillate: you at once grant interests while you withhold judgment. The sign-posts had attractive names, but where were the roads? In reading them we felt like Pip, bating the fear, when he was called upon to fight the pale young man who knew all there was to be known about the theory of prize-fighting down to the sponge and towel. We thought, like Pip, that we recognized the master hand, the preliminary challenges, the dodgings backwards and forwards, the appalling dexterity of the antics impressed us. In the immortal words of Pip

He had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance,

The Outlook.

but the blow was not planted, and worse, the sparrer tumbled on the back of his head. Almost all the detail in the book is unconvincing. Among the novels Barnaby Rudge is ludicrously underrated; and let all who feel with Mr. Chesterton first read Poe's criticism on it. A childlike extravagance of delight is expressed in chance and irrelevant things, such as the Sapsea epitaph, the word "skypilot," the French phrase l'école buissonnière for which, by the way, a parallel may be found in οὐρεσίφοιτος, translated somnewhere as "going to school on the mountains." The generalities prove too much, the detail too little. Half, for instance, that is said of Dickens would fit Browning, and half that is said of anybody would fit nobody.

As in all Mr. Chesterton's critical work the value in this book lies in the nuggets. He stumbles on suggestive things and deviates into brilliance. In his Browning he kept the stumble till the last page, but that page had in it' something very like genius. The deviations here are not so great as that one, but they are more frequent. We bow to vigor and a point of view, and the book does something to suggest that we are reaching the curious stage in literature when criticism seeks to be creative and novel-writing is content to be imitative. But the force of creative criticism as of creative literature is in detail; you cannot chew the cud till you have cropped the grass, however much you work a busy mouth.

Mr. Arthur Symons has completed a new anthology upon which he has been engaged for some time, and the volume, which is to be entitled "A Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry," will be published shortly. The range of selection is exceptionally wide, the limits being Spenser and Herrick, and Mr. Symons aims at giving in full all that is best within that wonderful period. His arrangement is not chronological, but according to subject.

The publication of Mrs. Craigie's last completed novel, "The Dream and the Business," followed her recent sudden death almost immediately. The author had high hopes of the success of this book, which she believed would be pronounced an advance upon her previous work. The problem of divorce enters into it, as into so much current fiction, and also the conflict of ideals between Roman Catholicism and English Nonconformity.

Commenting upon the literary output of the summer season, The Academy remarks:

Examination of the lists of the past season shows, that this is not a great age of imagination. It is not an age of poetry, of poetic drama; it is not an age-we venture to think-of fiction. And we venture to think so in spite of the long lists of novels that clamor at us from the "Books Received" columns of the past six months. Out of all these hundreds, how many could an honest and a sensible man declare to be really worth the reading? How many show anything more than a passable knowledge of the technique of the art and a narrow view of life? The number that could be sincerely declared to have anything approaching greatness in them is still smaller.

A fascinating book upon a fascinating country is Mrs. Arthur G. Bell's volume on "Picturesque Brittany," for the adornment of which her husband furnishes twenty-five illustrations in color. The trip through Brittany, which is here described, was made last year, and Mrs. Bell brings to the description of it a full knowledge of Breton legends and history, which gives breadth and color to her descriptions. The illustrations are of scenes aptly chosen for presenting the most picturesque features of Breton scenery and life, and they are produced with a vividness yet delicacy which are calculated to disabuse the prejudices of conservative folk who still shrink from illlustrations in color. E. P. Dutton & Co.

That veteran journalist, Dr. Moncure Conway, has written a new volume entitled "My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East." In his recent successful autobiography Dr. Conway barely alluded to his experiences in Hindustan. The route he took round the world ran through Salt Lake City, San Francisco, the chief cities in Australia, and thence to Ceylon and India. The bulk of the book relates to his memories of and conversations with leading Buddhists, Brahmins, Parsees. Moslems, and others in India, his impressions and observations of the country, and his saunterings among ancient shrines. There are also some interesting memories of Joseph Jefferson, Ingersoll, and John Bright. The book will be profusely illustrated with portraits and facsimile letters, and will be issued in a uniform style with the autobiography.

Apropos of the somewhat angry dispute over the question of spelling re

form, special interest attaches to the following letter from Professor Skeat, published in the "Scotsman" of August 31:

I find that times have changed since the days when the University of Edinburgh honored me with the degree of LL.D. for my services to English literature, and to Scottish literature in particular. Just because I know enough of the history of spelling, as regards our language, from the year 750 to the present day, to have the grace to perceive that our present spelling leaves much to be desired, I am treated to ignoble attacks . . . I leave (with what regret!) this beautiful city of Edinburgh to-day, and expect to see no more Scotch newspapers for many days to come. Those who find their pleasure in abusing me can do so to their heart's content; I shall not know what they say.

The Academy admits that there may be doubts as to whether or not Carlyle is holding his own, but it reports that there is no falling-off in the number of pilgrims to the Carlyle shrines at Chelsea and Ecclefechan. During the last twelvemonths Cheyne Row has had as many callers as in any corresponding period since the house was publicly opened, and there has been a larger number of Americans than usual. Arch House, Ecclefechan, in which Thomas Carlyle was born, has been open to the public for a quarter of a century and for a long time past some one thousand three hundred strangers have each year found their way to the Dumfriesshire village. The latest addition to both houses-and the Carlyle relics are more numerous in the London house than in his birth

place is a large framed photogravure of Whistler's famous portrait, the property of the corporation of Glasgow; but the lettering on the tombstone of the Chelsea Sage, the centre one of three, is somewhat dimmed, from the circumstance that, unlike the two others, the stone, by Carlyle's express desire, is plain and its face letters unpainted.

Ethel Wedgwood's new English version of "The Memoirs of the Lord of Joinville" carries the reader back from the twentieth century to the thirteenth, and introduces him to a most noble company, that of the knights and barons who took part in the seventh crusade, and especially of the good king St. Louis, with whom most of the writer's recollections are concerned. The Lord of Joinville wrote in a style of soldier-like directness and simpliccity, and the translator, to a singular degree, has succeeded in preserving not only the quaintness of the narrative but the very atmosphere of the times. Far better than the reading of a latter-day historical romance with its queer blending of the ancient and modern is it to browse through these tempting pages and read what Lord John, writing in his old age, had to say of the days of his youth and the virtues and words of his royal master whom he idolized. The book is curiously refreshing, perhaps because the times and the gallant personages who lived in them are so remote. The illustrations are copies of the thirteenth and fourteenth artists. E. P. Dutton & Co.

work of

century