there happen to be three of them, we shall have the law of the unrecognised psychopathic origin of cutting lectures in Romance languages.

"A Southern Girl of '61."

Mrs. D. Giraud Wright, who is the original of A Southern Girl of '61, is a Baltimore woman, who has had a very interesting career. Her father was Senator Wigfall of Texas, the intimate friend of Jefferson Davis and the other leaders of the Confederacy. She had the good fortune to spend her girlhood amid stirring and dramatic times. She belongs to the school of Southern women that includes the vivacious Mrs. Clay of Alabama-A Belle of the Fifties. Mrs. Wright is the wife of Judge Wright of the Supreme Court of Maryland, and she has taken an active part in the affairs of the Daughters of the Confederacy. She is president of the Maryland branch. Mrs. Wright is an outspoken Southern partisan. It is interesting to state here that Mrs. Wright's father was the Confederate who risked his life in making an adventurous trip during the bombardment of Fort Sumter, to persuade Major Anderson to surrender. Mr. Wigfall was then a colonel on General Beauregard's staff. Mrs. Wright is a prominent figure in Baltimore society, and entertains lavishly.

The London Spectator condemns Mr. Chesterton's Heretics (reviewed else

"Heretics."

where in this number) for irreverence in calling St. Peter a "snob," and warns the essayist that his books will be excluded from respectable homes. It also objects to Mr. Chesterton's practice of standing on his head. We infer from the tone of the article that the writer's discovery of these vices spoilt his pleasure in everything that Mr. Chesterton had to say. That seems to be the way with many of his reviewers. Now any one who enjoys the writings of Mr. Chesterton is fully aware of the author's determination to cause astonishment, and of the simple, boyish and tiresome means

MRS. D. GIRAUD WRIGHT

he sometimes employs for that purpose. The reader who is not bored by Mr. Chesterton sometimes does not appreciaate him at any time. There are pages written with no other purpose than that some old lady should call him incorrigible. rigible. There are long barren stretches of what is at present called cleverness, consisting of mere bald counter-propositions, wherein he, personally, does no thinking at all, but only inserts negatives into what he supposes are other people's thoughts. But there are other pages, and they are never far away, where his fancy is free and his wit untormented and their humour does not consist in practical jokes on other men's angels, and their unexpectedness has nothing to do with standing on his head. These are the passages in which he has forgotten his vow to set the river on fire, and precisely the sort which exchange editors do not quote. Were there only half so many of

them they would still give his books their vitality. Two good lines have been known to keep a dull poet alive for two centuries. Mr. Chesterton is still frequently to be found right side up, and the pleasure that he gives on these occasions more than offsets the fatigue of waiting through his intervals of cleverness. He is one of the few who can bring back new reports of outworn things, prove, even, that there are no outworn things, but only stale eyes looking at them. He has the wit of insight and the wit that turns on petty subversions, and it is an unlucky reader that can discern only the latter sort and exclaim, "Paradox, paradox!" Our own reviewer is not of that class.

This is also true, in a measure, of his favourite heretic Mr. Shaw, upon whom, however, it would be a pity to add a word of comment, for there is at present a thick growth of parasitic literature on everything that he writes. We shall content ourselves with quoting from a poem in Collier's Weekly:

CRANKIDOXOLOGY

(Being a Mental Attitude from Bernard Pshaw) By WALLACE IRWIN

It's wrong to be thoroughly human,
It's stupid alone to be good,

And why should the "virtuous" woman
Continue to do as she should?

(It's stupid to do as you should!)

I'm the club-ladies' Topic of Topics
Where solemn discussions are spent
In struggles as hot as the tropics,
Attempting to find what I meant.
(I Never Can Tell what I meant!)

For it's fun to make bosh of the Gospel, And it's sport to make gospel of Bosh, While divorcés hurrah

For the Sayings of Pshaw And his sub-psychological Josh.

In Dramatists of To-day Mr. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., writes in a pleasant, free-and-easy way of six

A Book of Dramatists.

or

seven modern playwrights, taking them as he finds them, bothering his head very little with messages and problems and troubling the reader with no strong convictions of any sort. They are the impressions of a very well-read and moderately thoughtful man, who has a fear of seeming academic and writes in a loose way that is not always expressive and sometimes borders on shiftlessness. He is not excitable or combative; neither is he didactic or dry. He accepts things chiefly at their face value, but he describes them so accurately and agreeably that he recalls vividly to mind the plays we have seen and the pleasure we have found in them. He says few things that any one could quarrel with, but here is one against which we may mildly protest. He is speaking of the necessary over-emphasis of the stage, of the heightened colour, obviousness, and loudness, and says that some of the "things about Mr. Pinero that we do not care for are necessary for the right effect across the footlights." He adds:

And as to the other things-the delicacies, the quiet touches, the delightful half-toneswe must be content to miss them at the theatre. Of course, we may mourn that these things cannot be on the stage, that they can go no farther than to be realised by the kindly imagination, that they seem to lose character and colour when incorporate in flesh and blood. We may mourn at all this, but it will be withOur keenest pleasure, our most delightful thrills, do we really wish to share

out reason.

them with the multitude? The stage is still a public place. It is not outdoors and boisterous as it was with the Elizabethans, but still it is not exactly a place for intimacies. Let us be content to have our poetry as we want it, to ourselves at home, and on the stage to have what the stage can give us, effective figures which will live in our minds, effective situations which will sum up whole developments, effective actions which will typify whole experiences.

Here he falls in with those dreary critics by the rule of thumb, who from the observation of plays as they now are determine what they always shall be. They are forever insisting on the limitations of the stage, when the chief fault of the playwright to-day is his failure to take advantage of its elasticity. In the present dearth of fine things and in the present failure to use the theatre for half the purposes it is able to serve, they toil away at fatalistic definitions and draw up lists of the qualities we must not expect. Any man of talent will do things with his tools that are regarded beforehand as highly improbable, and as to a genius, no critic has ever yet been able to guess in advance what he would be up to. Any good play in future will achieve what all sober critics of the stage to-day would say it is silly to attempt. It is not the limitations of the stage that account for the modern playwrights but the playwrights that impose the limitations. It is not the presence of a crowd or the allowance for the "right effect across the footlights" that gets us so soon to the end of Mr. Pinero, but the stinginess of Nature at Mr. Pinero's nativity. A different sort of Pinero might venture many "intimacies" and "delicacies" without afflicting the majority. A crowd is not unhappy even when a fair number of good things are wasted on them, and the greater dramatists have often indulged themselves in metaphysics, theology, wit, poetry and literature, holding the many while they talked to a few men or one man or the men of the next century. And of all times this is the worst for urging us to ask for little and to think only what a clumsy tool the

theatre is. It is reasonable to expect the unexpected ways of talent and to demand. the hitherto unachieved and, meanwhile, not to blame the footlights and the crowd merely because our playwrights had no fairy godmothers. Without these things there cannot be a good play, and should there ever be another good play, it will be found that the writer is a law-breaker in the land of humdrum and that the current theories of the stage have left no room for him.

Change of Heart.

There was a time, not very long ago, when writers, and especially young writers, took pleasure in boasting of the rapidity with which they did their work. "Dashed off that novel in less than six weeks and never retouched a line," or, "Oh! that yarn in Magazine! Did it in a morning. You know I can't revise." This was the usual strain of the talk one heard in the company of the story spinners. But in the last two or three years all that has changed. The average writer no longer wishes to impress upon you the ease with which he has done a certain piece of work; he wants you to appreciate the vast amount of labour and patience expended before he was willing to let his manuscript go to the printers; he takes an honest and commendable pride in showing the pages of typewritten copy with the infinite. erasures and "writings-in" which bear evidence of genuine and conscientious toil. Nobody wants to be classed with the "Four-in-Hand Novelists" nowadays. These remarks are à propos of a paragraph in an esteemed contemporary, purporting to come from Mr. George Barr McCutcheon, to the effect that he believed three months to be ample time to write a novel. As a matter of fact, Mr. McCutcheon does not believe any such thing. He said that he had written Brewster's Millions in three months. That was all. It took him two years to write The Sherrods, a year to write Beverly of Graustark, and almost two years to write Nedra.

HILE the Wilson Bill was dragging its slow way through Congress, and while the fierce struggle against the railways in the West was being fought out to the bitter end, another highly controversial question had arisen to plague the President and to widen still further the breach between him and the majority of his party. Throughout the whole four years of the second Cleveland administration, the sensitive nerve of the Government was the condition of the Treasury; and it throbbed painfully in response to every event of serious import, whether this related to domestic politics or to international affairs. Here, again, the makeshifts and compromises of the past broke down completely, and the President was forced to take upon himself the whole burden of a responsibility which his predecessors had managed to evade. The events that are now to be narrated are those concerning which the sharpest difference of opinion existed at the time. They obscured in the mind of the people all the other acts of the administration. They stirred millions of Americans to a pitch of acrimonious frenzy for which there are few parallels in our history. And in the end they shivered and rent the Democratic Party until it cast aside its old traditions and, while retaining its historic name, stood forth transformed into the champion of new causes and new political ideals.

It has already been mentioned in these pages that the Treasury gold reserve of $100,000,000 was intended to protect an outstanding issue of notes which, by the end of 1893. amounted to nearly $500,000,000. This gold reserve had proved adequate in the past, until the

operation of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 gradually shook public confidence in the Treasury's ability to meet its steadily increasing obligations. The repeal of this act under pressure from President Cleveland, as already described, had, to be sure, absolved the Secretary from buying two tons of silver every month and paying for it in gold; yet in matters of finance, distrust when once aroused dies hard. In June of 1893, when the hoarding of gold was at its height, the Treasury's gold redemption fund had for the first time fallen below the hundred-million mark, and the circumstance had sent a shiver through the business world. Some had quickly seen in it an opportunity for making money. For the true peril of the Treasury, from the standpoint of conservative finance, lay not so much in the discrepancy between its obligations and its gold reserve, as in the fact that under existing laws, no sooner was a government note presented at the Treasury and redeemed in gold than it must immediately be reissued, to become again a new obligation. The situation was admirably and forcibly described to Congress by Mr. Cleveland in several of his later messages. Thus, speaking of the gold reserve fund, he said:

"Even if the claims upon this fund were confined to the obligations originally intended,* and if the redemption of these obligations meant their cancellation, the fund would be very small. But these obligations when received and redeemed in gold are not cancelled, but are reissued and may do duty many times by way of drawing gold from the Treasury. Thus we have an endless chain in operation, constantly depleting the Treasury's gold, and never near a final rest."t

*I.e., "greenbacks."

† Message of December 3, 1894.