romantic legend, produced at the Norwich Festival, and "Signa," the opera brought out at the Dal Verme Theatre in Milan.

THE COMPOSER AT HOME.

Alluding to Mr. Cowen as a conductor, Miss Klickmann writes: "Calm and concise in every movement, nothing but his face reveals the fact that his whole being is on the alert and strung to the highest possible tension. His memory is apparently inexhaustible.

"At home (Miss Klickmann continues) he looks many years younger than he does on a platform. Of medium height and slightly built, one can readily credit the many stories that are told of his wild mountaineering exploits. A very firm will, and a fixed determination to have his own way, are among the open secrets written on his face.

"In the study, books are on the walls and in every nook and corner. Intellectual, refined, they cover a tremendous range of reading; the humorous element is also well represented. His most engrossing hobby is the pursuit of first editions, and he certainly has a magnificent collection, representing most of our great authors. In many instances he possesses complete sets of their works."

The article is illustrated with portraits of Mr. Cowen at various ages, and a few pictures of his house.

THE WANDERER'S EVENING SONG.

"VE

ELHAGEN" has an article on the Commu. nity of Gabelbach, by Herr A. Trinius. Though it is vain to search in atlases and State handbooks for any reference to Gabelbach, the spot has a fame which many another community must envy. In innumerable songs and pictures it has been celebrated; in occasional verses its fame has resounded; and its first poet was one of the most popular with the German people-Viktor von Scheffel.

THE GOETHE-HOUSE ON THE KICKELHAHN.

The wooden house in which the community holds its meetings stands in the midst of fine, proud pine trees, and we cannot visit it without being touched by the charm of German poetry and the silent thought of him who, with his being and his songs, has endeared to us every foot of the ground-Goethe. Gabelbach is indeed founded on classic soil, for Ilmenau, Gabelbach and Kickelhahn are all closely associated with the name of Goethe. He often took refuge here, especially when his feelings and his thoughts were centered in Frau von Stein. He lodged in a tower-like house of wood, two stories high, on the top of the Kickelhahn. In 1870 this building was burnt down, but four years later a faithful reproduction of it was substituted. It was in this curious house that Goethe wrote many of his poems, and from this high place that he addressed his effusions to his beloved, assuring her of his love, and depicted the beautiful scenery of the neighborhood.

66 UEBER ALLEN GIPFELN."

The retreat on the Kickelhahn has another special interest. It was in this house, on September 7, 1783, that Goethe wrote the charming little "Wanderer's

Evening Song," beginning "Ueber allen Gipfeln." The words were traced in pencil on the wooden wall of his room, and thirty years later, while on another visit to the place, he retraced the writing, which had meanwhile grown pale and indistinct, and confirmed what he had done by adding "Ren. 29 Aug. 1813." The eve of his last birthday found him once more in his lofty retreat, and when he was looking out into the evening glow, his eye again fell on the words of his song. Now he was deeply moved, the tears rolled down his cheeks, and his lips whispered softly, "Ja, warte nur, bald ruhest du auch !" ("Yes, wait a little, and you too will be at rest!")

AND THE TRANSLATION.

Just four years ago the question of an English translation of the lyric cropped up, and many were the attempts made to give an adequate rendering of it. The late Mr. J. A. Symonds, e.g., "saw that its unapproachable literary excellence depended upon its divine spontaneity in the peculiar, instinctive tact with which Goethe had transmitted a certain felicitous mood of emotion into the simplest language, the most wayward rhythms, the most natural rhymes; all governed by a predominant sense of music, compelling the seeming artless verse to take the inevitable form which belongs to some product of nature-shall I say a frost crystal spread across a window-pane which has been breathed upon-or a film deposited on glass by musical tone acting on a fluid?" Mr. Symonds made three versions, all of which he regarded as failures. Longfellow, Miss Constance Naden, Sir Theodore Martin, Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, and many more, have tried their hands at it; yet the lines still seem untranslatable.

CAN MUSIC DESCRIBE SCENERY?

How far music is capable of suggesting scenes

which the composer may wish to represent, or of assisting the imagination to realize scenes which may be described by words, is the interesting question discussed by "W. H. T." in Macmillan's. The writer is disposed to answer in the negative. "It appears that there is a similiarity between the effects of sight and of sound, but it would seem probable that, as the bodily organs of the two senses are distinct, so there are corresponding mental and spiritual faculties appropriated to each which cannot be affected by the other."

He is prepared to grant "that a conventional language could be invented, or might grow up by degrees, by means of which a great variety of ideas might be described by music;" but he is concerned with "the present state of the art.' "For my own part," he says, "I do not think that the mind is capable of enjoying to the full simultaneously the beauties of sight and those of sound. . . In contemplating such a scene as that of the Jungfrau the entire attention is absorbed, and one could not while fully taking in its loveliness, at the same time fully appreciate the finest music; and in the same way, when listening to perfect music, one's faculties are too much occupied to be capable of at the same time fully appreciating such a scene of beauty."

The inquiry ends with advice to the musician to satisfy himself with the limits naturally marked out for his art. Surely the most ambitious musician has scope wide enough to exercise the fullest powers of his genius and his imagination. Let him be content to leave to the painter and the poet the description of sunny lands and starlit skies, of placid lake and rugged mountain, of peaceful meadow and stormy ocean. The attempt to depict such scenes by musical sounds must fail in the present state of his art, and can only be successful in the future at the cost of genuine musical expression."

These generalizations of "W. H. T." seem to overlook differences in temperament. There are some men to whom the best music is also the mental vision of nature in its various guises. A nocturne of Chopin's affects them almost as precisely as does one of Wordsworth's "Evening Voluntaries."

THE BERLIOZ CYCLE.

is still without chomik in his oven

country. An eminent musician like Mr. Cowen has had to go all the way to Milan to get his new opera, "Signa," produced; and Berlioz, one of the greatest musical glories of France, seems to have found his Bayreuth in Germany! Early in November, Herr Mottl, to whom indeed is due the chief credit for the undertaking, gave a performance in chronological order of Berlioz's operas at Carlsruhe, and to Carlsruhe the pious French have made their pilgrimages in order to be present at the performances of the German versions of their composer's dramatic works, "Benvenuto Cellini," "Béatrice et Bénédict," and "Les Troyens," besides a miscellaneous concert devoted to Berlioz. The Revue Bleue of November 18 and other magazines publish articles on this subject. "Les Troyens" has had to wait thirty years for anything like adequate performance, " Béatrice et Bénédict" was first heard at Baden-Baden in 1862, and "Benvenuto Cellini," through well known in Germany, has not been heard in France since 1838.

Very appropriately the November number of Music includes a translation of an article by M. Camille Saint-Saëns on Hector Berlioz. He describes his countryman as a paradox made into a man, and says that if there is one quality we must concede to his works, it is the prodigious coloring of the instrumentation.

THE very pressing problem of the teaching of ethics in schools is treated by Mr. John Dewey in the Educational Review for November. He strongly protests against the assumption "that if you can only teach a child moral rules and distinctions enough, you have somehow furthered his moral being. The inculcation of moral rules is no more likely to make character than is that of astronomical formulæ. In any right study of ethics the pupil is not studying hard and fixed rules for conduct; he is studying the ways in which men are bound together in the complex relations of their interactions."

JONAS LIE.

cover to cover, devoted to Jonas Lie, and, be

HE November number of Samtiden is, from

sides being a graceful tribute to the genius of the great writer, is a welcome and valuable contribution to the magazine literature of the day, giving as it does a perfect portrait of the man who, with Björnson and Ibsen, forms for all time an Orion's belt in Norway's literary firmament. The first study of Lie -for there are several-is given by the eminent writer Herman Bang. In character and person he is Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann-as large of heart, as genial of thought, as broad minded, as blind. Whoever knows Stockmann knows Jonas Lie. And, save for its mistress, the house of Lie is as the house of Stockmann, too.

By request of the editor of Samtiden, Jonas Lie himself gives in the same number the portrait of his helpmate, and an intensely interesting portrayal of her exquisitely womanly character and intellectual gifts. They are of the same age, were betrothed at nineteen, married at six-and-twenty, and have lived for three-and thirty years an ideal life of love and sympathy together. Like John Stuart Mill, he ascribes all that is best in his writings to his wife : "With the exception of Nordfjordhesten,' 'SlagterTobias,' and a few Adventures, I do not know the book in which she has not been my trusted guide as regards style and, so to speak, my fellow-worker through every chapter, erasing all extravagance, desiring this or that to be written and, under necessity, even writing it herself. It has passed through her sieve; from an artistic point of view my creative powers were undeveloped, and I depended rather on mere chance than on keen and certain sight. That my sea-novels received solid shape is owing to her more intense and developed artist-feeling and clearer artist-eye. The plot of 'The Pilot and his Wife 'I had from her. . . . She might well have had her name on the title-pages of my books as my collaborateur. It was, however, not a thing for a Frue' of our times to take her rightful place in publicity-her unswerving taste was to content herself with her own consciousness that she was her husband's spiritual equal. . But, now that we are entering on our sixtieth year, it seems to me it is time I told that, in all that is finest and best I have written, she has her part."

HOW "KVAERN-KALLEN" CAME TO BE WRITTEN Among the many vividly interesting articles in this Lie-number is one by Erik Lie, telling how his father came to write "Kvaern-kallen." It was in the month of November. They had just arrived at Rome, and had housed themselves at 52, Via di Capo le Case. Gray, dirty, sleet-weather, cheating and vexations of all sorts had combined to render the first impression particularly disappointing. Inside the house," says Lie, "we were plagued by fleas-not such little miserable country fleas as we know here in Norway-no, great, fat, shining beasts of prey that grunted like little pigs when one dragged them by the ears to the

washbasin. And not one or two or ten, but regiments. More than once while writing I heard a little pat on my paper, and, looking up, beheld sitting staring at me, believe me, just such a monstrous horrid bloodsucker! Outside in the streets a swarm of jeering, importunate beggars pursued one with prayers and threats alternately, like regular creditors; yes, and the dissatisfied drivers followed one, street up and street down, till one was tempted to appeal to the police. But, worse than fleas and beggars and drivers, was an old witch of a servant, named Lovisa Sorentina. She was a genuine Roman hag, with one solitary fang in her gums, and hands like claws. She was lazy beyond all measure, and so slow in everything that we had at last to have our boots cleaned by a street shoeblack."

To cut the story short, and forego the temptation to give the whole of it in Erik Lie's own fascinatingly vivid style, this charming old lady, who was a pitiless thief and a confirmed drunkard into the bargain, one lucky day fell downstairs and disabled herself, and the overjoyed Lies instantly seized the opportunity to get rid of her. But the old witch got life in her then, and, on hearing that she was discharged, flew up at them like a fury, and hurled a Niagara of round fat curses over their heads. She stormed and thundred, not in ordinary fashion, but in majestic Italian, with eyes agleam and her claws in such swift motion that her fierce gesticulations could only be rivaled by the flood of abuse and menace that gushed and foamed and hissed from her lips. She was magnificent in her rage. Her attitude, her gestures were splendid as those of some glorious tragedy-queen; and, long after the door had been locked upon her, her guttural lash. ing invective rose from the stairway like some awful decree of damnation. Jonas Lie was deeply and almost morbidly impressed.

It was a night some time later that he was roused from sleep by a strange, horrible song. He rose and looked out of the window. It was two o'clock, and the wineshop over the way had long been closed. But, in the middle of the dark, deserted street stood a solitary being with a turned-down felt hat and a pair of long arms fiercely gesticulating up at the sky. And this being was singing in a rusty giant voice, raw with wine-was "screaming his heart's blood into his mouth," wildly and more wildly yet, horribly, terribly, and more and more satanically in the stilly night. Jonas Lie listened with all his senses, fascinated; there was a gigantic majesty over the man. He was almost on the point of waking his wife, but refrained. The lamps in the street had been extinguished-no soul was about save this creature, whose wild song bellowed forth hate. He had been sent by that old witch of a servant to confirm her curses, and Jonas Lie was to be put to death, pierced, tormented, burnt-hau, hau, hau !-scourged, broken limb from limb; his people cursed to the ten thousandth generation, and evil given for good through all eternity; he was to be flayed alive and, in the biggest kettle of hell fire, boiled in burning oil-hau! hau! hau !—the kettle boils! the kettle boils! the kettle boils! Jonas

Lie paled where he stood. It might be a forewarning of death, this! Ten minutes more of blood curdling curses, and then the mystic being vanished like a shadow round the corner, and peace reigned once more. The morrow came, and the next, and yet another, and Jouas Lie lived on. The days flew by in merriment-now an evening spent with Arne Garborg, now an evening with the artist Ross, and so on. "Winter passed as through a sieve, and our nine months' stay in Rome was marked only by stronger and stronger flea bites!" But on the night before their departure, lo! the peaceful slumber of Jonas Lie was once more broken by the weird song of curses, and there in the deserted street stood that mystical ally of the witch, with colossal scorn and menace in his throat! But this time triumph mingled with the abuse and threat-triumph that the foreigner was leaving. was leaving the place-going far over the mountains to the people whose blood is green, and whose God is Satan! Branded like a slave, he was fleeing from Italy's sunshine, and the Romans would see him no more before their eyes-would see him no more-would see him no more-ho! ho! ho! ha! ha!

ha!

The next morning the Lies left Rome, and traveled homewards, and some two months afterwards there grew out of the witch's curse and other Roman reminiscences the story called " Kvaern-kallen."

THE MOST POPULAR NOVELS.

N the December Forum, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie

statistics the publishing

firm of Messrs. Tait & Sons have collected in regard to the novels most often called for at the public libraries of the United States, and the editor of the Outlook analyzes and argues from these data to find out the character and standard of literature which really appeals to our public taste. The results are far more encouraging as to the true instincts of that popular taste than one would think. Among a list of the one hundred and fifty most popular novels, judged on this basis, "David Copperfield" is first, "Ivanhoe" is second and "The Scarlet Letter" third.

Among the first eleven Mr. Mabie finds that eight are novels of the highest literary workmanship and artistic quality, indeed among the greatest in all literature. A further analysis of the statistics shows, by comparing the popularity of different works by the same author, that the public prefers dramatic force and freshness of feeling and touch, among the abstract qualities of literature. Among the whole list of one hundred and seventy-seven Mr. Mabie finds that no less than seventy-six are books of very high or of the highest order of literary quality. He notes a remarkable absence of foreign names, and that neither Tolstoi, Turgenieff, Gogol nor Dostoyevski are found there, and what is much stranger, neither Balzac, Daudet, De Maupassant nor Zola. Of the surprises among the English and American novels, Mr. Mabie considers the greatest surprise that Thomas Hardy, "the most. powerful and most artistic writer of the former" is un

recognized. He attributes this omission of the popular taste to the themes, unproductive of cheerfulness, which Mr. Hardy chooses, and he explains the absence of Mr. Kipling's name on the theory that Mr. Kipling is a writer for men, and that, as Mr. Howells has said, "the readers of books in America are women."

CRUMBS FROM THE "AUTOCRAT'S" TABLE.

RE

EV. H. R. HAWEIS chats very pleasantly in the Young Man on his personal acquaintanceship with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He tells of threeand-a-half hours spent, during his English visit in 1888, in the "Autocrat's" company, along with Bishop Ellicott and Dr. Samuel Smiles: "The talk wandered freely over all sorts of fields-literary and scientific and social-until it got entangled inevitably in "occultism "-ghosts, double psychic phenomenaon all which questions the Bishop keeps a singularly fair and open mind. Talking of brain waves, Oliver Wendell Holmes went off in his best style. I think we are all unconsciously conscious of each other's brain waves at times; the fact is, words and even signs are a very poor sort of language compared with the direct telegraphy between souls. The mistake we make is to suppose that the soul is circumscribed and imprisoned by the body. Now the truth is, I believe, I extend a good way outside my body; well, I should say at least three or four feet all round, and so do you, and it is our extensions that meet. Before words

EMERSON AT LONGFELLOW'S BIER. A touching story of Emerson in his latest days was told by Dr. Holmes. "After Longfellow died, he was laid in the chapel on a bier, his face was exposed, and numbers of his friends went in to take a last look. Emerson was at that time failing-his memory was almost gone-but as he had been so intimate with us for so many years I thought I would take him into the chapel. As we were both silently contemplating our dead friend, Emerson turned to me and said,That is the face of a very amiable gentleman, but I don't know who it is.' This," remarked Holmes, was very interesting, as well as very touching. It showed that, although his memory was gone, his perceptive and intuitive powers and a certain instinctive judgment of character, all remained unimpaired to the end."

66

Walt Whitman, on being told this incident, did not think it sad. He said: "Emerson's decline always seemed to me quite harmonious. This slowly sinking back into the arms of Mother Nature when one's work is done and well done-it is like the decay and slow decrease of fruit-bearing capacity of an old apple tree in a great orchard; at last the old tree crumbles away and sinks naturally into the soil from whence it sprang."

MR. BALFOUR AS CRITIC OF IDEALISM.

PIONEERS OF CULTURE ON THE STUMP. Having heard Mr. Haweis lecture at Boston, Dr. Holmes gave a glimpse of the infancy of the American institution of lecturing, which sheds interesting light on his younger days: "You star lecturers,' he added, 'who come over here now and pocket your hundreds and thousands of dollars, little know what we poor fellows, the pioneers of art and letters in America, had to go through. I assure you, when I began, and Emerson and Theodore Parker, there were places in the States, calling themselves civilized, that did not know what was meant by a lecture. I have arrived at a schoolroom or hall on the night, and found it empty, and we have had to send out and whip up an audience; and so we went up and down the land, trying to get a hearing for poetry, literature, art, science, tramping on foot, too, when we could not get a conveyance. Well I remember arriving at a lone, forsaken place after traveling all day, and at last walking across fields in the mud to get there in time, and finding it was the wrong day. Another time the committee waited on me at the close, the attendance having been uncommonly thin, and asked me to lower my fee. Well, those were good days all the same; we were young then; and then, when you did get your fee, the joy and content of sitting in the sanded parlor of the village or town inn with your feet on the mantel-piece, and rattling the dollars in your trouser pockets, so hardly earned.'"

R. A. J. BALFOUR contributes "a criticism of current idealistic theories" to this month's number of Mind. He describes the exponents of transcendental idealism as "a metaphysical school, few indeed in numbers, but none the less important in matters speculative." Its central position is that of "a mind (thinking subject) which is the source of relations (categories), and a world which is constituted by relations a mind which is conscious of itself, and a world of which that mind may without metaphor be described as the creator." It claims thus to free us from skepticism, to make reason the essence, cause, origin and goal of the world, and to secure the moral freedom of self-conscious agents.

Mr. Balfour is sorry to object to a theory promising so much: "We may grant without difficulty that the contrasted theory which proposes to reduce the universe to an unrelated chaos of impressions or sensations is quite untenable. But must we not also grant that in all experience there is a refractory element which, though it cannot be presented in isolation, nevertheless refuses wholly to merge its being in a network of relations, necessary as these may be to give it 'significance for us as thinking beings?' If so, whence does this irreducible element arise?"

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS "I."

To Mr. Balfour it “certainly appears" that transcendental idealists are not warranted by their own essential principles in making mind the sole creator of experience. Their analysis of experience leads them to the conclusion "that the world of objects exists and has a meaning only for the self-conscious ‘I'

(subject), and that the self-conscious 'I' only knows itself in contrast and in opposition to the world of objects. Each is necessary to the other; in the ab

MR. GOLDWIN SMITH'S VIEWS ON OUR HISTORY.

then can we venture to say of one that the other is its product? And if we say it of either, must we not in consistency insist on saying it of both?"

The universe is as much or as little the creator of the self-conscious principle as the self-conscious principle is of the universe. "All, therefore, that the transcendental argument requires or even allows us to accept is a 'manifold' of relations and a bare self-conscious principle of unity, by which that manifold becomes inter-connected in the field of a single experience." Mr. Balfour then proceeds to view the bearing of this result on theology, ethics, and science. The combining principle, which, apart from the multiplicity it combines, is only an empty abstraction, and which is only real in its relation to that multiplicity, cannot be God, who by hypothesis distinguishes Himself from Nature. Just as little can the combining principle, taken together with the multiplicity, be other than non-moral, because it holds in its all-inclusive universality every element, good and bad, of the knowable world. The "unifying principle can as such have no qualities, moral or otherwise." Lovingness and equity belong to the realm of empirical psychology, and Mr. Balfour does not see "how they are to be hitched on to the pure spiritual subject."

THE IDEALISTIC THEORY.

The freedom ascribed by idealists to the selfconscious "I" is metaphysical, not moral; for it belongs only to the subject "in virtue of its being not an agent in a world of concrete fact." Mr. Balfour comments on the "difficulty which exists on the idealistic theory in bringing together into any sort of intelligible association the 'I' as supreme principle of unity, and the 'I' of empirical psychology, which has desires and fears, pleasures and pains, faculties and sensibilities; which was not a little time since, and which a little time hence will be no more. The 'I' as principle of unity is outside time: it can have, therefore, no history. The 'I' of experience, which learns and forgets, which suffers and which enjoys, unquestionably has a history. What is the relation between the two?"

It will not do to make the latter a phase or mode of the former which is then identified with God or an eternal consciousness: for, argues Mr. Balfour, the idealistic theory pressed to its furthest conclusions, precludes us from supposing that either the eternal consciousness or any other consciousness exists save only our own.

Similarly with regard to science, Mr. Balfour endeavors to make out that the transcendental "solipsism," which is the natural outcome of such speculations, is no more valid or reassuring than the "psychological, or Berkeleian form of the same creed." He concludes: "I am unable to find in idealism any escape from the difficulties which, in the reign of theology, ethics, and science, empiricism leaves upon our hands."

gives a searching and pretty severe criticism of the recently published outline of American political history by Mr. Goldwin Smith. Mr. Wilson finds that Mr. Smith's personal view gives a cynical and impracticable quality to his book; that the treatment of the American Revolution gives evidence of the British nationality of the author, and that Mr. Smith's reading of our own historians does not give sufficient weight to the newer and more scholarly canons of historical criticism now obtaining.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

As to the Englishman's view of our Revolution, in which he saw few elements of greatness and merely the necessary outcome of a relation radically false from the start, Mr. Wilson writes: "The claim to representation, though it may have no legal basis, had a very substantial historical foundation. The American demand was, that the colonists be allowed to act through their representatives, whether in Parliament or in America, as they had always done hitherto, according to a principle lying deeper in the English constitution, as they conceived, than even the privileges of Parliament or the powers of the Crown. If this was in effect a claim to independence, that is why a war for right so suddenly became a war for separation. There had been virtual separation in matters of this kind all along; if it could not remain virtual, it must be made real. That was the revolution; and it is vain to cry Woe!" The direful spirit of civil war did all the rest, that was not just, but bitter and shameful. The cause itself was great, if the spirit of English liberty is great; and Mr. Smith differs from the greatest English historians, not only, but also from most informed and liberal Englishmen of our day, in not perceiving that it was really the authentic spirit of English liberty that moved in the Revolution. No other outcome was conceivable, except by us who sit at this cool distance. Mr. Wilson seriously objects to that view of American history which dwells mainly on "The Expansion of New England," and the clash of Virginian sentiment and principles with those of the Yankee. Our history, says Mr. Wilson, "is far from being a history of origins. It is just the opposite: it is a history of development," and it is in this connection that one is bound to give more attention than Mr. Smith has given to the importance of the Middle States.

THE TYPICAL AMERICAN.

Readers of Mr. Smith's outline will remember that he found a great deal that was approvable in the character of Washington, but looked somewhat askance upon the more rugged and native heroes of our national struggle. Mr. Wilson does not wonder that a search through our history for correct English gentlemen of a modern university and cultured stamp is somewhat disappointing. "We may wish that the typical Americans of the past had had more knowledge a more cultivated appreciation of the value of