THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by check, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished en application. All communications should be addressed to THE DIAL, 315 Wabash Ave., Chicago.

Donaldson's The Growth of the Brain.- Wundt's Human and Animal Psychology.- Külpe's Outlines of Psychology.-Stanley's Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling.-Hoffman's The Beginning of Writing. RECENT FICTION. William Morton Payne

Hardy's Jude the Obscure.-Meredith's The Amazing Marriage.-Crockett's A Galloway Herd.-Crockett's The Men of the Moss-Hags.- Mrs. Steel's Red Rowans.-Lee's John Darker.-Boothby's A Bid for Fortune.-Hope's The Chronicles of Count Antonio. -Lang's A Monk of Fife. - Weyman's The Red Cockade.-Harte's Clarence.- Harte's In a Hollow of the Hills.- Townsend's A Daughter of the Tenements.- Ford's Dolly Dillenbeck.— Garland's Rose of Dutcher's Coolly.- Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.- Mrs. Phelps's A Singular Life. - Miss Dougall's A Question of Faith.- Drachmann's Paul and Virginia of a Northern Zone.- Galdós's Doña Perfecta.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS.

Imaginary portraits of Sir Thomas More and his family. Additional poems by R. L. Stevenson.— A new life of the German Emperor.- Idyllists of the Country-side. Some literary portraits by D. G. Mitchell.-Life and influence of John Knox.

73

76

81

83

84

86

86

THE YOUNG PERSON.

It is a well-known principle of pathology that interference with the normal activity of an organ results in functional perversion. The atrophy that follows upon the disuse of one organ may have for a concomitant the excessive development of others, with some form of degeneration as a consequence; or the overstimulation of one may be accompanied by a weakening of all the others, leading in the end to dissolution. In either case, whether the disturbing physiological factor take the shape of a forced activity here or a suppressed activity there, the result is some development of distinctly morbid type. Now the analogies between the organism of the individual and the larger social organism are always instructive, if philosophically dealt with, and the thought of the past thirty or forty years has been particularly fruitful in applications of this method of comparison. The whole modern science of sociology, for example, may be described as an expansion of this fundamental idea, and gets its most trustworthy results from the intelligent discussion of these analogies. It is our purpose just now to apply to one aspect of literary activity the method in question, and to ask if it may not have some instruction for the critic of contemporary literature.

That reverence is due to the young is one of the most venerable of critical maxims. It has been knocking about in literature ever since its embalmment in one of the satires of Juvenal, and perhaps for longer than that. It has very noticeably influenced the literary production of the present century, but it has not always been wisely apprehended and applied. Let us take a moment to see what has been done with this precept in the case of the two greatest literatures of our time-the French and the English. In both instances there has been at work a sub-conscious instinct that has sought to keep from the contemplation of youthful minds certain parts of human life and certain phases of human emotion. But the instinct has worked itself out in curiously different ways. French books have become sharply differentiated into books for the Young Person and books for the full-grown man or woman. English books, on the other hand, have nearly

all been written, until very lately, with the Young Person carefully in view, and, it would often seem, without any consideration for any other class of readers. These two theories, carried to extremes, have been productive of the most ludicrous results, exemplified, in the one case, by the school-girl editions of "Télémaque" which carefully substitute amitié for amour; in the other, by such an anecdote as has recently gone the rounds of the newspapers, revealing the fact that a popular magazine of wide circulation in this country does not permit any mention of wine to be made in its pages. And both of these theories, even when kept within bounds, seem to us to have led to an abnormal condition of things in the literatures that have respectively practised them.

We all know Matthew Arnold's hard saying about the French people that they have devoted themselves to the worship of the great goddess of lubricity. This remark was never meant to be taken without qualification, as many passages of Arnold's critical work show plainly enough. It may be sufficient to instance his be sufficient to instance his judgment of George Sand, pronounced upon hearing of her death. "She was the greatest spirit in our European world from the time that Goethe departed. With all her faults and Frenchisms, she was this." The warmest admirers of that woman of genius will feel that something more than justice is done her by this bit of eulogy, but they will also feel that the man who uttered it must have had strong grounds for what harsh things he at times felt bound to say about modern French literature. That literature doubtless gives undue prominence to one particular form of passion, and doubtless sins against the proprieties more frequently and more conspicuously than any literature ought to do. To revert to the pathological figure of our introductory paragraph, French literature seems, in its treatment of the relations of the sexes, to have suffered a sort of fatty degeneration, and erotic pâtés de foie have entered too largely into the daily diet of its consumers. It seems to us quite clear that one of the causes of this abnormal development must be sought for in an unnatural separation of books for the Young Person from books for the Gallic adult. Since (in theory, at least) the Young Person is never supposed to see the books written for his elders, there is no need of writing them virginibus puerisque, and all restraint and all reticence are thrown to the winds.

The English theory, of course, has been as

far removed from the French theory as possible. Taking for granted that the Young Person is quite as likely as anybody else to read a book of any sort, all books (broadly speaking) have been written with his needs and limitations in view, and the result has been an emasculated literature, from which discussion of certain subjects has been excluded by as effective a taboo as was ever practised among the South Sea Islanders. Newspaper cant and the censorship of the circulating libraries have so narrowed the scope of nineteenth-century English literature that the future student of Victorian manners and morals will have to go outside of literature to get the facts in proper perspective. These remarks apply with equal force to the English literature produced upon our own side of the Atlantic. The suppression of natural literary activity thus indicated has been correcting itself of late, and in the usual violent way. Unless atrophy has gone so far as to prove fatal, nature usually contrives to reassert herself, and throws the whole organism into disorder by so doing. The last few years have brought realism and plainspeaking back into English literature, and with a vengeance. The dovecotes of hypocrisy have been fluttered by ominous birds of prey, and the sober-minded, who have all along viewed with apprehension the attempt to keep English literature in a strait-jacket, have stood alternately amused and aghast at the antics with which it has celebrated its newly-acquired liberty.

The problem is certainly a vexatious one. The example of one nation shows us the bad effects of ignoring the Young Person; the example of another furnishes an instructive lesson in the consequences of deferring to him overmuch. Unbounded license is an unquestionable evil; the cramping of ideals, on the other hand, leads to a reaction almost equally evil. Whether the one course be pursued or the other, freedom of literary expression will find its stout champions, as it has already found them in both countries, from Molière to Mr. Swinburne. We do not want a revival of eighteenth century grossness. teenth century grossness. Mr. Gosse says, in a recent critique, that with Mr. Hardy's latest novel "we have traced the full circle of propriety. A hundred and fifty years ago, Fielding and Smollett brought up before us pictures, used expressions, described conduct, which appeared to their immediate successors a little more crude than general reading warranted. In Miss Burney's hands, and in Miss Austin's,

the morals were still further hedged about. Scott was even more daintily reserved. We came at last to Dickens, where the clamorous passions of mankind, the coarser accidents of life, were absolutely ignored, and the whole question of population seemed reduced to the theory of the gooseberry bush. This was the ne plus ultra of decency; Thackeray and George Eliot relaxed this intensity of prudishness; once on the turn, the tide flowed rapidly, and here is Mr. Hardy ready to say any mortal thing that Fielding said, and a great deal more too."

Fortunately, we are not yet forced to take "Jude the Obscure" as typical of our century and literature, although atrocious faults of taste displayed by that book do not stand alone to represent their class. And we cannot agree with Mr. Gosse in saying that to censure such outspokenness" is the duty of the moralist and not the critic.' If criticism has any most imperative duty, it is precisely the one so airily disclaimed by this self-constituted spokesman for the craft. And there is not much palliation for such an offence as Mr. Hardy's in the prefatory danger-signal which describes the book as "a novel addressed by a man to men and women of full age." This is the French theory over again, and might be used to cloak all of the French excesses. It seems to us that the real solution of the problem presented by the Young Person must take the form of a compromise, and that a compromise is possible that shall mean neither a loss of virility in literature nor the of the immature to exposure corrupting influences. We need, first of all, to clear our minds of cant on the subject of the supposed ignorance of the Young Person. The Frenchman knows perfectly well that his theory does not work, and that boys and girls read the books they are not supposed to read. The Englishman knows equally well that his theory works no better, and that boys and girls who do not get a knowledge of life from literature get it in other and usually worse ways. Why should we not admit right away that our education is not as frank as it ought to be? With this admission we might couple the plea, on the one hand, for less prudishness than we have been accustomed to put into books likely to fall into the hands of the Young Person; while sternly insisting, on the other hand, that all literature should be clean, that grossness is a thing unpardonable in itself, and not merely for its degrading influence upon a certain possible class of readers. Some such middle ground

as this should be found safe for all the interests concerned; it should result in a literature both strengthened and purified, not losing from view the needs of the Young Person, but rather according them a more rational consideration than they have had hitherto.

TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, DRAMATIST. (After having read Henrik Ibsen, dramatist.) Forgive me, ample soul, in whom man's joy Finds room for laughter, as his grief for sighs, If e'er I leave thee for an hour's emprise Where live but souls made sick with life's annoy. I bartered Time's best coin without alloy, And sailed with him within an inlet's rise Where stricken ghosts, with tragic voice and guise, Made thy world seem a dire fantastic toy. O Ocean, take me back to thee, and fill My sails once more with elemental breath With wind that haunts thy choric world-wide spell; Some truth may say, "All's well," or "All is ill," But on thine azure line 'twixt life and death The whole of truth speaks clear: "All shall be well." F. W. GUNSAulus.

row.

CLASSIC SLANG.

It is a matter of current observation and remark that the slang of to-day is orthodox literature to-morBut it is not so commonplace that modern slang can often "point with pride" to most aristocratic lineage away back in classic Greek and Latin. Literature repeats itself, as well as history, and everything else; for they all come from the human soul, itself an eternal unity of variety. This bond between past and present may be illustrated by a few examples out of many.

We moderns are not the first to find things which "make us tired," for Virgil, speaking doubtless from a rich personal experience, complains that "Juno makes earth and Heaven tired." His description of a city riot, in which he says "rocks fly," is twin brother to the reportorial railway strike, wherein coupling-pins always "fly."

Cicero might have been a Roman from Cork, when he speaks of "a power of silver and gold"; and he is forever "t'rowing Cataline out" (of the city).

Cæsar says that Ariovistus "had taken to himself such airs that he seemed unendurable."

Our word "business," which is so convenient to piece out conversational poverty with more or less legitimate uses, is a prime favorite with both Cicero and Cæsar. The following phrases are quite Chicagoese: "An opportune time for finishing the business" (of destroying the enemy's fleet); "What business had Cæsar in Gaul?""They undertook the business" (of arresting the Allobroges), etc.

66

Xenophon gives us in Greek the same phrase as Cicero in Latin, for he says, Tissaphernes threw out others" (of the refugees from the city). He seems like an elder brother when he declares, "I made a find," and "They were like to wonder."

R. W. CONANT.

The New Books.

JUSTICE TO THE MODERN JEW.* Mrs. Frances Hellman's English translation of M. Leroy-Beaulieu's " Israel among the Nations" will doubtless be widely read in this country. The fame of the original work as the best, because the fairest, most searching, and most critical, study of what is vaguely styled and more vaguely known as the Jewish Question has preceded and paved the way for Mrs. Hellman's admirable version; and there are just now obvious reasons why Americans especially should wish to understand this Jewish Question, and to qualify themselves to judge of its possible bearing upon their own present and future. The main conclusion, probably,

that the American reader will draw from M. Leroy-Beaulieu's book is the comfortable one that there is for us no Jewish Question-the conditions which gave rise to that question and tend to perpetuate and inflame it in the Old World not obtaining here. Antisemitism and Jewish particularism are the outwardly dissimilar but really cognate blossoms of a tree foreign to our soil, and unable, when transplanted, to flourish in our social and political atmosphere. The Jew's troubles in the Old World and the chronic "Question" concerning him have been and are rooted in and bound up with his peculiar statusa status primarily thrust upon him from without, and secondarily of his own creation. In every land in which for the past fifteen centuries the son of Jacob has pitched his tent he has been perforce the man without a country, the intruder, a stranger within the gates of the Gentile, in fine, the man of a race and a religion distinct from the dominant ones about him. Always isolated, usually threatened, and often persecuted, he has naturally tended (to quote an expression of Tolstoi) to curl back upon himself and retreat into the shell of his own exclusiveness. Given these conditions, and the Jewish Question arises of itself. In America the Jew is placed in a new environment. For the first time since he began his wanderings, he finds himself at home -actually in a country he can call his own unchallenged, where his claim to citizenship is flawless, and where his blood and faith are naturally matters of relative indifference to a

* ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS: A Study of the Jews and Antisemitism. By Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. Translated from the French by Frances Hellman. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

mixed and cosmopolitan community. Our national bond is neither racial nor religious, but the broader and humaner one of national consciousness; and we have hitherto freely extended the right of citizenship, with all that the he Jew or Gentile, bond or free-and says, as term implies, to whomsoever comes to us-be Ruth said to Naomi, "Thy people shall be my people." This the Jew has done; and that he now comes to us largely a suppliant, with his hereditary gabardine rent and tattered by bitter blasts of race hatred and persecution, should not constitute his least claim upon our hospitality; nor should the fact that he alone, of all our transplanted fellow-citizens, may in general be said to have left no fatherland behind him, and brought no ancestral patriotism with him,

constitute the least warrant of his whole-hearted

acceptance of his adopted country. A soil that has never been darkened by the walls of the Ghetto may well be doubly dear to him. For the oppressed Jew of Europe, the promised land lies no longer Jordanwards; he turns his wistful gaze to the far West, to the shores of the new Canaan beyond the Atlantic, at whose portals stands Liberty with flaming torch lighting the way for the oppressed of all nations. And this new promised land once reached, why should he need much time to become attached to it? "It would not surprise me," says M. Leroy-Beaulieu, "if, on disembarking, those Jews were to feel like pressing their lips to the ground, as did their forefathers on reaching the Holy Land." If there is ever to be a Jewish Question in this country, it must be primarily the result of our own apostasy-of our failure to maintain those sublime humanitarian principles which it is France's greatest glory to have first proclaimed to the world, and which the founders of the American Republic, touched with the optimism of their era and nerved by its faith in the intrinsic virtue and high terrestrial destinies of mankind, stamped freely upon their institutions and confidently left to the guardianship of posterity. Generous France, the France of Turgot and of Condorcet, first bade Ahasuerus "Rest"; despotic Russia, at the close of our nineteenth century, bids him take up his wanderer's staff anew. Pelted by the pitiless storm of a new persecution, he bends his steps westward; and his almost pathetic readiness, when he reaches our shores, to be of us, to be like us, to master our ways and our tongue, and to respond like other men to the fusing influence of universal liberty and tolerance, indicate that an American Jewish Ques