A Magazine of Contemporary Record VOL. XXII., No. 1 "I have gathered me a posie of other men's flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own."'—Montaigne. JULY, 1897 EDITOR'S SYMPOSIUM An open table-talk round the literary board, whereat any may speak whose art is not too awkward to unite truth and brevity with courtesy and wit I T was in April that we here discoursed for a moment or so on possible methods for meeting largely, practically, beneficently, the "democratic, myriad-voiced, but eminently wise and worthy solicitation, 'Tell us what to read.'" To the Universal Note, just for amusement, how we rounded those remarks to their moorings: "Would any be glad to know how to help in such work?"-wrote"drop a line to the editor of this Fraternity--or Sorosis_magazine; possibly he knows of Systematic Readers some one who will answer it"Of course he knew! Would he have committed himself that far if he did not? Hmm! editors are too cunning for that-they're the shrewdest people in the world! But notice, again, the interrogative part of the quotation. Does it read "Would any be glad to be helped," etc.? O no! Catch an editor in such a corner as that! Look at it: "Would any be glad to know how to help"See the difference! That difference saved the editor from nervous prostration under an avalanche of letters. Nevertheless here are letters enough. Not one of them is unwelcome, understand, but virtually all of them are from people, sometimes solitary, sometimes in clubs, who, very laudably, want to know how to help themselves, bless you! but do not profess any eagerness to help any general brotherhood of man or sisterhood of women. Well, that is probably owing to modesty, and beyond all doubt the editor ought to blame simply himself for this onesidedness of response. Obviously he did not put the question with sufficient emphasis and the ladies in their "all but numberless clubs" appear, oddly enough, to have been talking at the time. Fact, he should have put it somewhat thus: "Would any be glad to know HOW TO HELP in such a work? Drop a line"-etc. Opportunity to drop this line, to great unselfish advantage, is still open. Some men, not a few, and hundreds of women, some of them widely read, highly trained, and others thoroughly capable though without these showy qualifications, are now laying out the programmes of their own literary clubs for next season. Why may they not send such schedules to this magazine to be modified, adapted and published for the grateful guidance of thousands whose inner or outer resources, through no fault of their own, are unequal to a like task. We promise to utilize anything sent us of that sort at its best value. We await your reply. A word to those who have sought our counsel. To one who "for a class of twenty-five ladies" wants "a course of work for the study of current events and the literature of the present century, more especially of the latter half of the century," we would say promptly, draw in your lines; you will get more pleasure, and more profit, with less labor, by a stronger concentration. And yet, we would add, hold to variety; variety is good. To another club of ladies, "Lotus," by name, we must confess we are not "directing a course of reading for a number of literary clubs," and have no "terms, etc."only suggestions, your rejection of which will offend nobody. One such we shall presently drop, which may be of some value to both these clubs, and to another one "of farmers' wives" with "good common-school educations," wives leading-ah! who questions it? "very busy lives"; a club which has already been eyeing current events and reading the lives of its favorite authors, through twenty-four meetings. One small suggestion we will drop, as we say; there being no room at present for two; we may add more another time. Meanwhile we hope yet to print more than one or two wellworked-out reading programmes from correspondents seeking "how to help"-others and themselves. For surely, surely it is as unecessary as it is pitiful that in a land as full as ours of fair, kind, book-lovers willing and glad to widen human happiness, clubs of "farmers' wives-very busy," or of library-starved readers away yonder in Texas, or lone, half-educated young fellows like one who writes us from Boston, having "no one in whom to seek advice regarding it," should have to pay in "terms, etc.," hard money, that is to say, for the mere programme of a season's course of good reading! Send us one-you-you! Here are yet other applications, one from the borders of Kansas, and one from farthest Oregon. Cannot We Pool Our Reading O UR single suggestion of the moment is this: that certain books, whose preparation has required research and whose character requires them to cite the literary sources from which they have drawn, become by their nature admirable programmes of topical reading. Here, for instance, is Professor Moses Coit Tyler's newest work, his Literary History of the American Revolution. Read it. It is rich, stimulating, informing and delightful. And it is not only fascinating, itself, but it is a luminous. guide into the whole abundant, varied and alluring field of our revolutionary literature; poetry, belleslettres, biography, history, travel and crackling con Moses Coit Tyler's New Volume troversy a whole season's reading though you Has it not pleased you to notice how large a pro- There is another class among us, but far smaller and, for the most part, difficult or impossible to identify, which will owe him a gratitude no earlier historian of our revolutionary times has half so fully earned to wit, the descendants of the revolutionary loyalists, grandchildren's children of the long reviled and even still dishonored and disowned "tories." Now, as Professor Tyler reminds us, the colonial tory was neither a rogue, a sneak nor a fool. He was as often a gentleman and a patriot-from his point of view—as his gentlest or deadliest polit-Tree-tops and finds it all very good; making bright quotations for which we wish we had room, and falling into amiable discussion with her concerning Thence our grouper of nature-books turns to Mrs. Olive Thorne Miller's latest work, Upon the ical or military opponent. He had exactly the same right to his convictions; and his children of to-day have the same perfect right to remember him. the shrike or butcher-bird. Mrs. Miller knows of B UT here are other correspondents asking us what to read, and we can neither answer each one separately nor expect one reply to satisfy all. And so, to those who do not incline to history for summer reading-which is often a pity-but who insist upon fitting their reading closely to the season, we assent that this is the time for books which quicken our eyes to the sights and sounds of nature. They are not scarce; "What," asks one of our present company, "is the meaning of this sudden fever for nature-study-this outburst of books on the sub An Arm-full of Nat- loss, make up the outdoor furnishment of our daily life and intellectual intercourse. The odd thing is that this new interest does not with more energy include the rocks and the stars. "Here is Thomas Wentworth Higginson," continues our correspondent, "presenting us to a Procession of the Wildflowers. He has left the realms wherein his vigorous common sense and plain speaking have wrought with such good effect, to tell us of his love for nature and to champion the New England climate, as he does every person or thing that is suffering from injustice or slander. There may be nothing so very new in his book"but his critic nevertheless quotes him with zest, thus: ject?" Begging our questioner not to get excitedmostly it is lovely woman who has caused this explosion, and we believe the fact is due to the continued expansion of her outdoor liberty and of her outdoor companionship with father, brother, lover, husband and children. There is also a new masculine demand-of course-under the circumstances. Besides, science grows every day more democratic, more intelligible to us, "the general," and makes its disclosures with such modest reverence for small things and with such winning absence of condescending airs, that it enriches, as never before, the spiritual value of the things which, without cost or Absence is the very air of passion, and all the best description is in memoriam. As with our human beloved, when the graceful presence is with us we cannot analyze or describe, but merely possess, and only after its departure can it be portrayed by our yearning desires; so it is with Nature: only in losing her do we gain the power to describe her, and we are introduced to Art, as we are to Eternity, by the dropping away of our companions. On one occasion a shrike, which had been shot in one wing, was brought to us, and we kept it in a cage for a few days. When meat was given to him he tried in vain to hang it on the wires of the cage. We realized at last what he wanted, and fastened a twig of thorns in an upright position, when he straightway suspended his game and tore it to pieces with the greatest satisfaction. The presence of the shrike among the small birds, as I have observed it, causes as great a commotion as that of a bluejay, but perhaps they are needlessly alarmed, as they are at a screech owl. One winter day I saw a hairy woodpecker and a shrike playing a queer game. They were in a spruce tree in a neighbor's yard. The woodpecker was dodging about the trunk, the shrike following in the branches. Up and down they went, and round and round, silent for the most part, but now and then, with an excited note from the pursued. Then the woodpecker went down into the bath and the butcher bird onto the fence near by. Finally they rose into a maple tree, and then flew off out of sight, pursuing and pursued, a deep snow preventing my following. I have wished many times since that I knew the outcome of the maneuvering. If it came to a close fight, I should say that the woodpecker's pickaxe was as powerful as the shrike's hook, and the latter was doubtless aware of that fact, so that, though pressed by hunger, he hesitated to attack. Upon the Tree-tops, our friend considers "in no way inferior to other works by the same author." Mrs. Miller's fame, we are told, has not tempted her to relax her vigilance of observation or carefulness of statement for a moment. This kindly critic of Mrs. Miller has abundant praise also for Mr. Baskett's Story of the Birds, “a pleasant introduction to their study and a spur to further investigation," quoting from "a charming chapter on Acquaintance with the Birds." Another pleasant member of our company commends F. Schuyler Matthew's Familiar Trees and Their Leaves with its descriptions and illustrations of more than two hundred varieties, and especially finds it unsurpassed as a hand-book on the evergreens. "The classification in regard to colors is simple enough for the most uninitiated botanist," the illustrations "needing nothing but the coloring to be perfect." The same correspondent finds an excellent country reading-book in The Plant World, its Romances and Realities, a prose and poetical compilation edited by Frank Vincent, M. A., with chapters on beautiful historic gardens, on marine plants, on plant lore, subterranean vegetation, carnivorous plants, and like subjects. Very likely one reason why books on nature have so come into vogue is that our methods of education, more now than formerly, teach us the art of observation. Thus to a far greater number of us than of our uncles and aunts these books become glossaries to nature's own volume, promising, and at times rewarding, the most unpretentious of us, without rude dangers or heavy toils, with the delights of original-or to us original-discovery. A Long Island friend, the sort of man that, each year, is the first in his neighborhood to hear the note of the blue-bird, writes us thus: L IKE the classical pease-porridge, never too good but no worse for the keeping, there comes to our symposium board, perfectly kept since month before last, an invitation, from one of the greatest journals in this or any country, to follow the example of its distinguished editor and litterateur, and try to name the best ten short poems in the English lan guage. Well! Of all the rough and ill-defined challenges that newspaper hurry ever tossed into the arena of literary criticism, isn't this the most so! What is a short poem, any way? How many verses must a poem have to be a long one? If one were asked to confine himself somehow, somewhere, within terrestrial limits, he might find a point from which to draw a few venturesome comparisons. Suppose, for instance, he were required to name the best ten sonnets in the language; sonnets are virtually all of "Best" Poems and Poets one length, at any rate, and are not longer than our great journalist allows, for he heads his list with one of Shakespeare's sonnets and ends it with a poem of eighty-five lines, to wit: Rudyard Kipling's Gunga Din-stop laughing! Don't you suppose Kipling, that truly masterful poet, knows as well as we do, that Gunga Din-though, for reasons, it is fine-is not one of the best ten even of his own poems? About a year or so ago I placed among the trees surrounding our home a few bird-houses. It was my intention to rent these cozy quarters on easy terms-a mere songexclusively to the wrens, but some saucy sparrows-the sparrow, you know, builds earlier than the wren-seeing the vacant apartments, peremptorily took possession, and immediately settled down to housekeeping. The following spring, however, I closed the door of the bird houses against these interlopers until the time, at least, when the wrens began nesting. The wrens took possession; and, evidently in fear of the sparrows, began to fill their houses with twigs until each one became a network of sticks. Through this ran, in each case, a hole just large enough DOES it signify anything more than one man's ec to admit the wren's wee body, and behind this woody barrier they reared their young unmolested by the sparrows thenceforth. centricity, and if so, what, that in this selection of our "ten best short"-to which we promise not to But suppose we were, limited to sonnets. There would be some intelligence in that, and a pleasure in choosing. One would begin, of course, by taking at least five of Shakespeare's-for there's not a word said to forbid us entering as many short poems from one poet as we may choose-inside of ten, that is; we musn't go beyond ten. Still, we should not want to draw upon Shakespeare for more than nine at the utmost, for there is Sir Philip Sidney. Imagine Sir Philip confronted with "standing room only" and Gunga Din—that "limping lump o' brick dust, Gunga Din," grinning at him from a seat among the upper ten. Suppose again, that, not being limited to sonnets, we should include songs; for our distinguished litterateur, "after giving much thought to the matter, has settled upon" three poems that are songs-without counting Gunga Din, which, as its brilliant author certainly and rightly intended, is a howling good clog-dance; that and far more. One of these songs is Burns's Scots Wha Hae. Did Burns never write a better song than Bannockburn? Is that going to outlast-welleven-Auld Lang Syne? But never mind that. An der fa is that none of these three songs, and therefore none of these "best ten short poems in our language," includes Shelley's Lines Set to an Indian Air, or Ben Jonson's Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes. They left out, and Gunga Din included-Why, sir,-oh pshaw ! Need we say what we think of Mr. Kipling as a poet? We think he is not at all best in barrackroom ballads and that even there he is sometimes superb. allude again-only one poem Mr. Howells's Esti Criticized mate of Mr. Kipling and it twice as long as the next longest and only one line shorter than five of the others combined-is from a living author? One thing it inevitably implies; that if this is true critical justice then, as to short poems at least, Mr. Howells is right in calling Mr. Kipling "the chief poet of his race in his time." Ah! well, we are not prepared to say yes, although we gladly confess again Mr. Kipling is a masterful singer; and if we were ready to say no, we should than there is left for the editor at this month's symwant more time to say it so that it should stay said, posium. But now, as host at the board, it is our welcome duty to bid a guest* who mentions the matter speak as he is moved. To take up arms against the critical judgments of so accomplished, graceful and popular a writer as Mr. Howells may seem to many an audacious action. Has not Mr. Howells years? Has he not fame, style, depth, accu * Mr. Calvin Dill Wilson. racy, insight, judgment? What does he not have? Is he not in many respects the heir of our great New England school of writers? Does he not know these writers better than any one else does? Has he not caught their spirit? Is he not the Elisha, upon whom the mantle of all those Elijahs has fallen? And when he speaks, does he not speak with the united authority of Lowell, Emerson, Holmes, and the rest? To run a tilt with this admittedly mighty man seems indeed almost absurd. Yet we must protest that this mighty man seems to us a literary danger; in short a misleader of the people. He is a discoverer of new gods, and occupies himself every now and then in erecting altars, and calling upon all of us to bow down and worship at the shrines he builds. How many altars has he built, anyway? Can any one tell us? The land is thick with them. Hear his Commandments. "Thou shalt worship Tolstoi. Thou shalt worship Zola, Howe, Paul Dunbar and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling." No one can help but admire Mr. Howells' generosity and unstintedness of praise, when he gives at all. He puts the altar right on the mountain top. His gods are all great, or he will have none of them. Surely he is an example of author turned critic with a yet hospitable and unembittered heart. Himself a fine and popular writer, he gives laurels with a free hand, without envy or disparagement. He is a noble-hearted man. But are his literary judgments sound? Is he not given to extravagant and misleading praise of writers who take his fancy, or whose work is in keeping with the cut-anddried literary standard he has adopted? In the March number of McClure's Magazine, Mr. Howells published an essay on Rudyard Kipling, as The Laureate of the Larger England. Does this mean that Mr. Kipling is a better poet than any other English writing poet born outside of England, and within the British Empire? Does it mean that he expresses best in his poetry the greatness and the spirit of that Empire? It means both, and more. Mr. Howells says that Kipling is "the chief poet of his race in his time." Now, there is an assertion for you. A slight familiarity with the history of literary criticisms will enable any one to recall the fact that judgments such as this have been made before. But they have seldom been approved by the wide-reaching good sense of the generations in which they have been uttered. Is it not possible that Mr. Howells, smitten with a desire to prove that our age is too wise to overlook a Keats or Shelley of its own, has gone to the other extreme of discovering that which does not exist? If we were not terrified by the immense prestige of Mr. Howells, we should feel like reminding him that there is a poet still living, by name Swinburne, who as a poet, (however lamentable some of his material,) has shown some right to the claim of being foremost since the deaths of Tennyson and Browning. If it were a mere matter of matching assertion against assertion, we should feel at liberty to place even against Mr. Howells' dogma this, that Swinburne is at this moment the chief poet of the English-speaking race. What has Kipling produced, or shown sign of capacity to produce, to be measured against Atalanta in Calydon? Kipling may be, and probably is, a great writer. But is he a poet of the stature of Swinburne? That is the question. Mr. Howells declares that Kipling is "the English poet who continues the great tradition of English poetry most conspicuously;" "there is no one else (except William Watson) to name with him." How is it possible for any man deeply versed as Howells is in English poetry to claim this? Does Kipling continue the "great tradition" of Shakespeare and Milton? Does he continue the "great tradition" of Dryden and Pope, of Byron, Shelley, Keats? Of Tennyson and Browning? Who can agree to this? Is not this praise gone mad? For what rea son cannot Swinburne be named with Kipling as a poet? There are many supposedly competent critics to-day, who certainly would name him so. Mr. Howells quotes from The Seven Seas the poem An American, in which the American Spirit speaks; and he gives as his judgment that it is "the most important thing intellectually," in the volume. He calls it a "very extraordinary poem," in which the writer has "divined our actual average better than any American I can think of offhand. The American Spirit speaks here as if with the blended voice of Emerson and Ironquill. It gives a sense of his penetration and grasp." Surely Mr. Kipling must have been amused by reading this criticism. The poem shows no original insight into things American. It is as evident an echo of Walt Whitman as was ever put on paper. The knowledge of the American Spirit has all the appearance of having been obtained by diligent reading of Leaves of Grass. The adjectives are Whitman's; the spirit is Whitman's; everything is Whitman's, except the regular metres. How Howells could have blundered in this manner is singular. It is as absolutely certain that Kipling was chock full of Whitman when he wrote that poem, that he was looking through Whitman's eyes, as it is that Kipling is not the greatest poet now writing in English, and that he is not as great a poet as Swinburne, and that he is not continuing "great tradition of English poetry." That he is a poet, a real one, possibly a great one, is quite another matter. But why cannot so strong and bright a man as Mr. Howells gives us calmer literary judg ments. At a later date we hope to speak to this point, but are sure only that we shall have large tribute to offer to the genius that has sung the Songs of Seven Seas and as some one said yesterday, "widened the field of human sympathy." If we never follow worse misleadings than Mr. Howells's we shall at least never stumble into an ignoble view of Men or Letters. But let us return for just a moment to our nature-books. Another reason why nature-books, now that they are so universally intelligible and attractive, find so many readers comes to our mind. For while critics of history are debating as to what is true and critics of romance and poetry are differing as to what is good and right, nothing else looks quite so absolutely innocent as this converse with things so totally unspotted from the blight of "sinful man's" strivings and strayings. And such reading is so restful! Yes, and yet let us not throw ourselves too recklessly into the arms of Nature. "Beware of her," once wrote Emerson to that true lover of man, the naturalist John Muir; "she's a glorious mistress, but an intolerable wife." On the page next this we print a masterly essay of Professor Thomas Davidson which though under a distinctive heading is intended to be regarded as a part, the very best part, of this symposium. In his lucid forth-setting of the true reasons why we seek and bestow education he assigns to nature and our interest in nature their proper place thus: "Man, then, with his intelligence, affections and will, stands over against a world of means and a world of ends-a world of nature, and a world of culture. He must know both as well as he may; he must love both, with affection distributed according to the value of each thing for the ends of [humanspiritual] freedom. . . He must know, love and treat nature as a means; man as an end." But turn to the page and read him. THE UNITY OF EDUCATION * [Editorial Note.-Thomas Davidson, the distinguished scholar, whose paper on "The Unity of Education," and the elements which rightly enter into it here follows, was born near Fetterangus, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on October 25, 1840. At twenty he graduated from the university of his native shire with the Simpson Greek prize and the highest classical honors. He was then for several years rector of the Grammar (Latin) School of Old Aberdeen, after which he studied and traveled on the continent. In 1867 he came to the United States and here, with the exception of a residence of some few years in Italy, he has since lived and worked. His work has been that of a scholar and educator in the highest and best sense. What that sense is may be gathered from his address: education means for him spiritual freedom through rational insight. This idea has given unity to a wide range of scholarly activity that might otherwise appear incoherent. Of remarkable linguistic attainments and vast erudition, he has devoted his life to mastering and expounding the great forces that make for spiritual freedom in the history of human culture. His aim has been to understand in themselves and in their origin the ideas expressed in the literature, the art, the science, the religion and the philosophy of civilized humanity and to so realize these ideas and make others realize them as to develop that rational insight into the existence, the nature and the meaning of the spiritual universe which is the basis of true freedom. With this aim, he has studied, written and lectured much on the cultural elements derived from Greece, from Christianity and the Orient, from mediæval and modern literature and philosophy. Especially thorough is his The Ideal of Education Of the many and crying defects of education at the present day, none is more obvious or more fatal than its want of unity, its want of system. The cause lies in our lack of any clear idea of the end of education, for every department of activity finds its unity in its end, or purpose. Very few persons, indeed, have any definite notion of what result education is seeking to reach. Some will say: "We want to make our pupils good citizens," or perhaps "We want to make them good men and women;" but what constitutes a good citizen, or a good man, is not so easily discovered or stated. "Look," writes a well-known English author, with no reference to American education, but in words almost perfectly true of it: "Look," he says, "how the English people treat their children. Try and discover from the way they train them, from the education they give them, what they wish them to be. They have ceased, almost consciously ceased to have any ideal at all. Traces may still be observed of an old ideal not quite forgotten; here and there a vague notion of instilling hardihood, a really decided wish to teach frankness and honesty, and, in a large class, also good manners; but these, after all, are negative virtues. What do they wish their children to aim at? What pursuit do they desire for them? Except that when they grow up they are to make or or have a livelihood, and take a satisfactory position in society, and in the meanwhile that it would be hard. for them not to enjoy themselves heartily (we should say "they must, under any circumstances, have a good time.") Most parents would be puzzled to say what they wish for their children. And, whatever they wish, they wish so languidly that they en *Original in Current Literature. knowledge of Aristotle and Dante. He was one of the most prominent leaders of the old Concord School of Philosophy, and after that stopped he himself conducted for several years a similar school in Farmington, Conn. This subsequently gave place to the Glenmore School of the Culture Sciences in the Adirondacks. Here in the wilderness, on the foot-hills of Mt. Hurricane, is gathered every summer a goodly company of people, living in cottages or tents scattered over the hillsides, in pursuit of a common ideal of knowledge and freedom. Lectures are delivered in a large hall during July and August. Glenmore, unlike Concord, is too far away for the newspaper reporters, but its unique life, under the genial inspiration of its founder, should make it famous. Mr. Davidson lives now the greater part of the year at Glenmore-in the mountains among his books, probably the finest private library of its kind in America. His publications include, among others, Rosmini's Philosophical System (1882), the translation of Rosmini's Psychology (3 vols. 18841889). The Parthenon Frieze and other Essays (1882), the translation of Scartazzini's Handbook to Dante (1887), Prolegomena to Tennyson's, In Memoriam (1889), Aristotle and the Ancient Educational Ideals (Great Educators Series, 1892), The Education of the Greek People (International Education Series, 1894), the article on Longfellow in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and numerous contributions to the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the International Journal of Ethics, the Forum and other literary and scientific magazines. He is at present engaged on a large work on Mediæval Philosophy. trust the realization of it almost entirely to strangers, being themselves, so they say and, indeed, the Philistine or irreligious person, always is too much engaged. The parent, from their embarrassment and want of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, and it has become necessary to set apart a special class for the cultivation of parental feelings and duties. The modern schoolmaster should change his name, for he has become a kind of standing or professional parent."† Let us try briefly to outline that ideal of education which the modern world, rich beyond all earlier conditions in means to culture, seems to require, and to which the scientific and philosophic study of man's history and nature seems to point, and to make an attempt to show how that ideal may be realized. For, after all, if the world's colossal industry is not a means to the realization of man as man, as a spiritual being, it is of no more value than the industry of ants and beavers. If man is merely an industrial animal, he is the most pathetic object on the surface of the globe. The study of man's history makes it clear that the aim of all human life and culture is the realization of the free, self-directing man, and that in his freedom. lies the unitary principle of all education. In tending to freedom man tends away from bondage in four main forms, (1) bondage to physical needs, (2) bondage to passion, (3) bondage to established institutions, (4) bondage to unseen powThe savage and, to a large extent, the barbarian are compelled to spend most of their time and strength in an often unequal struggle with nature for the necessaries of existence; most of what is left is placed at the service of lust, jealousy, hatred, ers. Natural Religion, by the author of Ecce Homo, p. 128. |