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tic of these great men that have not of thanks or of explanation from writ

already been published; they will add nothing to what we already know of them. But, on the other hand, they overflow with tender feeling. They all dwell upon the commonplace themes of a bygone day-regrets of absence, vows of friendship, enthusiastic admiration. Are all these sentiments as sincere as the expression of them is vivid? I am inclined to think that the young man was imbued with the sensibility of Jean Jacques, and that he used this sentimental phraseology as Lamartine imitated the verses of Parny. One always belongs to one's epoch, on some side, when one is beginning life. It is only later that one succeeds in detaching oneself from it and becoming a personality.

There is in these letters one particularity which will amuse psychologists. You are no doubt aware how carefully toward the close of his career, Victor Hugo guarded his popularity. All the youthful aspirants to poetic fame sent him their verses, and to all of them he responded with one of those formulas of which Voltaire has given so many models. "Your sun is rising and mine is declining;" "I am the twilight and you are the dawn," etc., etc.

These are polite phrases which mean nothing. Voltaire did not employ them until he was approaching his sixtieth year. Victor Hugo made a study of them from his twenty-fifth year. He made use even then of hyperbolic phrases of encouragement. To an obscure poet, Théodore Pavie, he wrote: "You have the oak within you; let it grow."

He watched the newspapers closely, and never allowed a eulogistic notice to pass without thanking the author, nor an uncomplimentary article without answering it. These were the manners of the times. I knew in my youth the old men of that generation. They examined the public journals carefully, with an anxiety at which we would be amazed to-day. I have received in my time, while I was still an obscure and timid scribbler, letters

ers who had long before reached the height of their fame-from Guizot, from Saint-Marc-Girardin, from George Sand, from Louis Veuillot. I was treated, in them, almost as a confrère. After all, perhaps this excess of courtesy was better than our affectation of disdainful indifference.

What Parisian readers have sought with most curiosity in this first volume is the key to the enigma which has already caused as much ink to flow as that of the Iron Mask. Why did Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, who for several years had been SO united that they could not live without each other, one fine day quarrel publicly? Was it a woman who separated them? Did Sainte-Beuve, who undoubtedly endeavored to gain the affections of his friend's wife, succeed? Was Victor Hugo aware of it? How far did things go?

These questions remain unanswered, even after a perusal of these letters. And perhaps it is better that it should be so. What would it profit us if we knew beyond a doubt that the wife of a man of genius had basely deceived him for a false friend who was a man of infinite talent?

We do not wish to rashly condemn Sainte-Beuve, who was perhaps not so culpable as some would have us believe. All that we can affirm, after carefully reading the letters of Victor Hugo, referring to the subject, is that they are as noble as they are painful, and that the supreme letter, that in which he speaks of the final rupture, is superb in its dignity and pathos. Its. concluding lines are admirable. From "The Letters of Victor Hugo," by Francisque Sarcey.

From Lippincott's Magazine. THEATRE-GOING IN ST. PETERSBURG.

Theatre-going in St. Petersburg used to be an art; now it is a lottery. I suppose there are persons in the inside ring

who have reduced it to an exact science under the new laws, as they did under the old, to my certain knowledge. When I first reached the capital, I speedily discovered that no one could get into the theatre or opera (especially the latter) who did not have what is called in America "a pull," and in Russia "protection" or "connections." Unless one got hold of some person connected with the theatrical administration, or the influential friend of such a person, no tickets were to be had. Russians said this to me plainly, and I thought they were exaggerating. I believed it after considerable personal experience. At first I got a few tickets through this Circumlocution Office. Then I experimented with the ordinary plan and the theatre ticket-office. I got nothing. Time after time I was informed, at the hour announced for the opening of the sale, that not a seat was left. This was even worse than the plan of selling the worst seats to the first comers, which is practised in some American theatres. I tired of this after a while, and wrote a complaint to the chief director of the theatres, requesting that seats be reserved for me at certain approaching representations. It was really a bit of bravado on my part: I did not expect that any notice would be taken of my letter. One day, long after, when I had completely forgotten the matter, after making due allowance for the measuring off of miles of red tape, I was told that a man in the imperial livery had demanded access to me.

"Show him in," said I.

In walked a very tall man, with a quantity of fat collected in the manner which an alderman would call "presence"-if he happened to be the owner. "Did you write a letter to his Excellency the chief director of the imperial theatres, madam?" he asked, in a thunderous and, it seemed to me, a menacing voice.

"Yes," I replied, after an effort at recollection, and feeling rather nervous as to the results of my foreign impudence.

"His Excellency has sent you this,

madam. Be so good as to take it, if it suits you, and to pay me for it."

"This" was a solitary ticket for Tchaikovsky's opera "Evgénie Onyégin," in the front row, price seven rubles:1 I had asked for the eighth row, price two and three quarter rubles. The man's size and voice cowed me into taking the ticket, and he looked unutterable things at me and squeezed "teamoney" out of me to boot. I think he had never been sent on such an errand before, and respected me highly for the trouble to which "his Excellency" had put him on my behalf. I also think that some one must have died opportunely, or I should not have received even this scanty answer to my letter.

The press and public had long been attacking this system of selling theatretickets, which excluded every one who had not a yearly subscription to a seat, or "protection," and made theatregoing an art. A new system was established before the next season began. That is the lottery system.

I must explain that the theatres never advertise in the morning papers (there are no evening papers), in American fashion. The newspapers simply publish the names of the plays at the chief theatres for the current day, in the semireading columns, like an American "entertainment directory," with an occasional advertisement of a concert, or something of that sort, inserted by recklessly extravagant managers. If one wishes to know about the entertainments in town, theatres, fairs, concerts, races, plays, prices, actors, hours, change of plays and so on, he must subscribe to the affiche which is published by the management of theatres, on tough tissue-paper, and distributed by special messengers between nine and eleven o'clock in the morning.

The affiche contains full programmes of all the theatres, and one can carry it to the theatre; otherwise he must buy a programme from the theatre attendants in the vestibule.

Under the old arrangement, if one depended even on the advance notices 1 About three dollars and fifty cents.

printed in the affiche, he arrived too late to get anything but the most expensive boxes, and sometimes even those were "sold."

The new, lottery plan is complicated. Ten days in advance, affiche and newspapers publish the list of plays for a week in all the imperial theatres, which are the only ones affected by the system. The would-be theatre-goer then writes on a postal card, with return card attached (no notice whatever being taken of letters or irregularly prepared applications), in a stipulated form, a request for one box, or for seats (the latter not to exceed three), specifying date, theatre, play, and location desired. As much latitude of choice as possible as to location is requested,-for instance, "fifth to seventh row," to insure greater chances of obtaining places.

These applications are sorted, put in a lottery-wheel, and drawn out, none being admitted to competition which arrive after a certain time before delivery day. Then the return cards come back, stamped "Too late," or "None," or bearing name of theatre, date, and seat-numbers for the lucky winners. These cards must be presented at the central office, and the seats claimed, within two days; otherwise they are put on public sale. For this "insurance" of seats an extra charge is made, varying, at the opera, for instance, from a ruble and a half on the most expensive boxes, costing fifteen rubles, to five kopeks on the cheapest seat in the gallery, costing twenty kopeks, or ten cents. The tickets are never taken back and the money refunded for mere change of actors or of a secondary piece; but if the chief piece is changed the money will be refunded, if desired, minus the insurance tax. The news papers asserted that the postmen sold the lucky cards to any one who cared to buy. I do not know that the accusation was true, but it would have been an easy thing to do, since there was no way of identifying the people who presented the cards at the office.

ISABEL F. HAPGOOD.

From The Atlantic Monthly. MAGIC VERSE.

Other poetry is beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, it pertains not to any poet's work as a whole, nor in strictness, I think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical qualitythough here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual limitations-is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets.

The secret of the charm is past finding out; so I like to believe, at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained it would be something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius and our old friend-or enemy-"an infinite capacity for taking pains," so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor is its natural history to be made out by any critic.

The

And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no thought of solving,—a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. wonder over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them, though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final.

We may

Take, then, the famous lines from
Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper:"-

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.

The final couplet of this stanza is a

typical example of what is here meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne's mind when he says of it, "In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;" although my own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in themselves, but depend for their "high quality" upon their association with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am sadly deluded my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials are they composed, and how artlessly put together! Nine every-day words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, following each other in the most unstudied manner-and the result perfection! By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from Shakespeare:

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does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is too commonly estimated. It is musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,so completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either present or absent. The appeal is to the imagination, not to the ear, and more is suggested than said.

In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that future day when all things will be past; a suggestion or picture that brings an instant soberness, reverie, melancholy, what you will, that is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the Wordsworth couplet first quoted,

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faultless beyond even his too meddle- actual fighting in Crete, while the tale

some desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.

And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf nat separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next lower order. Take such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the first that offers itself for the purpose:

The splendor falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

of massacres of Armenians in all parts of the empire is still far from complete. "The Shadow of God" in Constantinople is haunted by a perpetual fear, and he imagines, like most men in panic, that he can best secure his own safety by striking terror. Abdul Hamid embodies in his reign and in the massacres by which its closing days are being marked a great object-lesson as to the real nature of Turkish rule. Without some such demonstration it would have been impossible for us to conceive the popular enthusiasm which launched mediæval Europe on the series of enterprises that we call Crusades. There are many persons to-day who would be very glad to see a new crusade preached for the extermination of the "Infidel,"

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, not because he is an infidel, but because

dying.

Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say that less is meant than meets the ear; but set it beside the Wordsworth couplet, so easy, so simple,

Without all ornament, itself and true, so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials, but divine in its birth and in its effect; the other is made of rare and costly stuffs, but when all is done it is made. Though it sound old-fashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration.

Infinite riches in a little room; From "Verbal Magic," by Bradford Torrey.

From The Review of Reviews. THE STRIFES OF 1896.

No sword has been drawn by one great civilized state against another through the whole of 1896, but the gates of the Temple of Janus have by no means been shut. By far the most blood-stained portion of the world's surface so far as 1896 is concerned is the Ottoman Empire. There has been

he has established assassination as an instrument of government, and replied by massacre to the protests of the conscience of Europe and America. Casting a rapid glance over the world, it is curious to note how much of the fighting has gone on in the islands. On the continents there has been little war; but man has faced man in deadly wrath in Crete, in Cuba, in Madagascar, and in the Philippine Islands. In fact, with the exception of the continent of Africa, and certain of these islands, 1896 has been a year of peace. These, however, are considerable exceptions and neither in Cuba nor the Philippines did 1896 bring any prospect of peace. The struggle on both sides is marked by atrocities of which the civilized world hears a little from Cuba, but nothing much from the Philippines. In Madagascar a French expedition to Antananarivo has placed the French in nominal possession of the island. It is only nominal, for outside the capital the French appear to be obeyed only so far as their guns will carry, and until such time as their guns are removed. On the African continent there has been more serious fighting. Italy suffered a great defeat in Abyssinia, which, however, has been a blessing in disguise, in that it has led to the abandonment of the ambitious scheme of establishing an

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