The Coming Literary Revival

II.

A FAIR warning was given at the outset that the question of literary revivals and of the advent of genius is one for the man of science rather than for the literary essayist. This warning may be renewed now in the presence of the harshest aspects of the problem. Reasons more or less cogent have been adduced why the world should not look for genius of the highest order without a conflict, and why it should not look for it at all in a nation which, like the United States, gives no adequate thought to philosophy.

It has been suggested that the most obvious task for the great poet of the future is the fusion of Eastern and Western thought in a well - balanced unity. If to be in touch with the Orient were all that is necessary, the United States would have an advantage over all the other Western nations except England. But England’s position at the head of an Oriental empire has not yet put her in sympathy with the philosophy of the East. She hardly understands her own language from the pen of Max Müller, contenting herself rather with what its academic votaries are pleased to call neoKantianism, a beautifully rounded product with the hall-mark of Hegel upon it. In its shapeliness and in its smug perfection this is an admirable counterpart to the literature of the Victorian era. The critical verdict on both a century hence may be very different from the one pronounced to-day. It were too curious to speculate on the possibilities three hundred years hence, but the fear is upon us that the poets of the middle Victorian period will be represented in England and America by In Memoriam, The Biglow Papers, and Hiawatha, and this for reasons apart from all questions of technical excellence.

The slow criticism of years is a different thing from the criticism of contemporaries. It is above all eminently practical. We know, however each of us may wander in some favorite by-path of old literature, that we read, as a rule, what we are obliged to by the tradition of the ages. The men of the future will have no other rule than this same practical one to guide them. For example, they will not have recourse to the books of the nineteenth century for what they can do better than the nineteenth century has done. Hence the mark of neglect, if not of oblivion, may be drawn through everything of classical — including the present writer’s own dearest favorites— or mediæval inspiration. The cherished Idylls of the King are not exempt from this peril. Conceding willingly all that has been said in praise of these poems, and more that can be said, one finds against them the criticism which cannot be made good against any of the long - accepted masterpieces of European literature, namely, that they are fragments which, even when joined together, do not make a whole. A later poet, overcoming this defect, though otherwise he should make a poem merely of equal merit, would stand the chance of supplanting Tennyson, just as Tennyson himself has caused forgetfulness to fall upon his predecessors in Arthurian romance.

In fact, Tennyson has illustrated in another domain — a domain of special concern to this writing — what changes come over the aspects of a literary problem attacked by a succession of poets from time to time. No one incident in the history of modern literature has been more effective than the translation of The Arabian Nights Entertainments. The work has tyrannized over the mind of the West in all things pertaining to the Orient. Its reign began in England with Addison’s version of the story of Alnaschar for The Spectator, and culminated in the excessive popularity of Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Beckford’s Vathek. Southey’s Thalaba and various other pieces marked a turn of the tide toward other literatures of the East besides the Arabian and its parent Persian. The momentary success of this new vein of poetry in all its branches was such that Byron, whose muse rarely ventured beyond the Levant, satirized the “ Grecian, Syrian, or Assyrian ” tales, in which were

In later days this sentimentalism gave place to religion, and the world has been treated to wisdom from the Orient in almost every stage of maturity or the lack of it. Fortunately, the translation of the more serious literature of the East has at the same time furnished a criterion by which to judge the imaginings of the poets and romancers. Tennyson marked the change that occurred in his lifetime, first by his early poem on Haroun al Raschid, and in his last days by Akbar’s Dream. The one is full of the romance of Byron’s day ; the other recognizes the graver aspects of recent thought about the East. In both there is a suggestive brevity which implies that the field really belongs to coming poets, and that now it is possible only to mark the tendencies of the age. If it were needed, the Akbar might well be cited — not only for what it says, but especially for what it avoids — as proof of how little permanence there can be in any imaginative work upon the East until the material is more fully gathered and digested. It is conceivable —in the light of new knowledge already in hand — that, in the mind of coming genius, Tennyson’s favorite legend of Arthur may become the means of uniting the thought of East and West, just as the legend of Faust enabled Goethe to link classical and mediæval with modern life. And in general it only requires a glance over the literature of the last generation to see how much of the work of even the foremost poets must give way to the merely mechanical processes of improvement, or to radical changes in the aspect of the distant past as it must appear to the imagination of the future. The poets of the nineteenth century may content themselves with knowing that they have contributed more than any who went before them to that completed ideal of classic life and modes of thought which will be within the grasp of their successors; that they have helped to correct the superstitious animosity toward the Middle Ages, and have given new directions to popular curiosity about the East.

Another field in which the long poem of the Victorian period has luxuriated is that of contemporary life and manners. It is here that the melancholy of the poets, overwhelmed by the prosperity and peace and gross materialism of the times, has received its most marked expression. From Locksley Hall to Locksley Hall’s sequel there is a lifetime filled with the gradual decay of a hope which at its best was rendered brittle by impatience. The poet legitimately and justly made his consciousness of defeat as to his loftiest aims the consciousness of a world distracted by a million cares and idle thoughts, and untouched by any of those things which make life sublime. There is something pathetic — and it will seem more pathetic as the age falls into its proper place in the long perspective of history — in the efforts of the poets to find grandeur in a life that was only comfortable and prosperous, to waken their own muse by transient and infrequent episodes of heroism, to make out for national life a unity which did not exist. They reflected as in a mirror all those introspective miseries which human nature turns to when it has no greater difficulties. Themes which in times better for poets had been left to the prosaic hand of the moralist were now expanded in beautiful verse. Good poetry has been for years nearer the level of the prose essay than, it is to be hoped, it will ever be again.

There is no need of quarreling with the tendencies of the time, with socialism and utopianism and what not. They must work out to their allotted conclusion, whatever that may be. But it should be obvious now, after a half-century of experience, that the world is not large enough to hold these absorbing yet distracting influences, and to have a great poet at the same time. If they are to help in the making of genius, it must be by bequest; for while they are pressing and active, even the born poet falls short of his rightful heritage. This has literally happened to the three masters of Victorian verse in England. When the world of the future comes to look back from a suitable distance upon their work and their surroundings, it will also gradually begin the task of choosing the one work of theirs which gives fullest expression to the dismay and doubt and difficulties by which they were hampered. Indeed, this process is already begun, and it is by observation of it that one singles out In Memoriam as the elaborate poem by which the age will be recognized a few centuries hence. There are other poems which give a better view of parts of the main theme, but there is not one which so well suggests the whole of it, and makes it a thing to be felt and to be understood in feeling as well as in the clear light of the intellect.

It was characteristic of English poetry on both sides of the Atlantic that it dealt, disguised or openly, with the most intimate thoughts of the time. Some of the poets felt more for other nations than for their own. Interesting as their verse may have been to their contemporaries, it has the defects of exotic study. The fate of poetry of this sort, no matter what its artistic merit, has been too often exemplified in the past to leave any doubt as to the future. Even the great theme of Italian unity cannot save the poems written upon it by those to whom it was only a matter of romantic sympathy. We imagine that our reader of three hundred years hence — not by any means so unlikely a character as Macaulay’s New Zealander — will be as oblivious of them as if they had never been written, unless he can be convinced that they are of broader scope than they seem to be; that under the cover of a minor struggle of humanity they convey a deeper thought, one that concerns the race at all times. But from that point of view they seem to betray aspiration rather than achievement, a consciousness of the highest function of poetry without the capacity of fulfilling it.

In the light of these things The Biglow Papers deserve to be considered. They were not exotic. They grew right out of the soil upon which the struggle culminated that had absorbed the activities of the whole English-speaking race. They are as real to one member of that race as to another. Just for the reason that in the midst of a civil conflict with its factional and dispersive tendencies the highest flights of poesy were impossible, the poet was artistically right in turning back to the ways and language of common life. He has given the passion as well as the humor of his time. He enables his readers to live over again a period which, when it can be seen in its entirety, without the distractions that were merely incidental to it, will stand out as the characteristic part of the nineteenth century, embodying in its results all those individual and national aspirations which were hardly more than words when the century began. Whoever returns to the study of that period will find the details wherever he may, but he can always vitalize them with the breath of Lowell’s poem.

Again, while learning is apt to shorten rather than to extend the life of an elaborate poem, the case is different when the position of the poem gives it a unique value, when even greater talent cannot replace it. This is possibly the case with Hiawatha. It will always be easy to deal with Indian character as it appears to the ordinary white man, in romantic sympathy or malignant hatred. But in most cases the Indian will be only an impersonation of the ideas of his creator.

An illustration on a large scale is not wanting to show by contrast precisely the value of Longfellow’s poem. Southey was doubtless his peer in verse-making skill, and we have the expert testimony of Mr. E. B. Tylor that Southey knew a great deal about savages. Madoc itself attests his learning. But well as that poem is constructed, it has no aboriginal quality. Its savages are devoid of racial character. They might as well be called ancient Gauls or Britons, save for some external features of rites and customs. What was impossible for Southey once on a time is now impossible for everybody. In spite of daily additions to the knowledge of Indian lore, the Indian of the forest, as he was, has forever escaped from his conquerors. Nevertheless, the world will always turn back to the figure of the North American wild man with curiosity. It will dwell on the pathos of the Indian’s defeat in the struggle for existence, and muse with melancholy interest on what he might have become. This is the opportunity of Hiawatha. It happened to Longfellow to depict the Indian at a time when it was still possible to know him as he had been at his best; to realize that he was capable of fine ideals, and that these were not wholly impracticable. Thus he has done what can never be done by anybody else.

But it will be said that this is no estimate of the writings of Tennyson or Lowell or Longfellow as poetry in the highest sense of the word. The fact is that there is no room for any such estimate, if the poets are to be put in comparison with the greatest writers of the past. The works which have been named as candidates for immortality are such, not by reason of their rank in the scale of genius, but simply because they fill a place that can never be filled without them. A higher opportunity must have been met by a greater work.

It was not accidental that what has sometimes been called the Victorian Renaissance ran its course parallel to the exotic Hegelianism of the English universities ; for Hegel’s system was from the outset the counterpart in philosophy of the political movement that followed the disturbances at the close of the eighteenth century. The era of disorganization, having violently wrought its own cure in the form of revolution, was followed by restoration everywhere except in America, and in America the result was nearer restoration than was thought at the time. It was, in fact, restoration with the mere accident of royalty, and so of personal loyalty to king or queen, left out. But restoration after a tempest so vast was necessarily conciliatory and peaceful. It required material prosperity in order to maintain itself. In England only were the conditions fully realized. The placid restfulness after Napoleon’s exit has hardly been disturbed by such minor episodes as Chartism, the distant Mutiny, or the hardly less remote Crimea. Two generations of English poets have been treated to a steady stream of peace, prosperity, and dullness. The result is obvious in their works. A gradual decay of hopefulness is to be seen in the poets of the last generation, marked also by the fierce outburst of Lord Tennyson in his old age. The progress of science, with its doctrine of long life to the strong and speedy death to the weak, did not retard this movement of the poets toward pessimism any move than the scattering vagueness in religion, or the changes in philosophy from the first throbs of neo-Kantianism under Coleridge’s waistcoat to the full bloom of Huxley’s agnosticism.

As unfolded by Mr. Spencer, this evolutionary agnosticism, vast as it is in its survey of details, seems morally and metaphysically only a chapter in a scheme which was unfolded earlier in Germany by Schiller and Schelling and Schopenhauer. For an outlook on the world as it is, and as it is likely to be in the next age, commend us to these three men, not, perhaps, the greatest thinkers of their time, but far and away the most sensitive to the hidden currents of life in the nineteenth century. It is in Schopenhauer that the most significant thought of Schiller and Schelling is wrought out as part of a system, which, transient as it must be, since it is only transitional, is still of very wide import. It is not necessary to discuss the question whether Schopenhauer was right in his philosophy or not. It may even be granted that he was wrong. The repute of the Frankfort sage does not hang upon his infallibility, but upon the accuracy with which he impersonates the age to which he belongs, and upon the attractiveness of his writings in point of style.

Not so long ago people were horrified by Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To-day the only question about anybody is what particular shade of pessimism he affects, and the attempt is gravely made to classify whole populations by this criterion alone. Even the professed optimist is more addicted to telling how things ought to be than to congratulating himself on their actual condition. There have been moments of factitious or real contentment in the life of every nation since Schopenhauer’s time. These moments of satisfaction only serve to emphasize the fact that, on the whole, the modern world has realized Schopenhauer’s anticipations. Pessimism was merely a secondary aspect of his system, inevitable in the historical development of his main thought, which, it must be observed, was not. his own by right of discovery. Long before, in the mysticism of Boehme, the declaration was made that nothing has reality except the will, and this was reiterated by Fichte, and far more decidedly by Schelling. But until the notion was brought into contact with modern materialism it was hardly a fruitful one. It happened to Schopenhauer’s teacher, Bouterwek, to bridge this chasm. For him the old antithesis of mind and matter, subject and object, became that of will and resistance. Practically, this was a mere restatement of the mechanical doctrine of force ; metaphysically, an important addition is made by the use of the word “ will,” with its double physical and mental connotation. Interpret this in the light of Fichte’s identification of Me and Not-Me (an identification which Goethe chuckled over when students broke Fichte’s windows, but which always must be reckoned with in thoroughgoing idealism), and you have a glimpse of Schopenhauer’s universal will forthwith. With this principle Schopenhauer anticipated modern monism, the farthest reaching of all devices at the present day for a materialist solution of the universe. His phrases are adopted by the monists, frequently with an apology for using them. But they are adopted also by the antagonists of monism. In short, the world is gradually becoming reconciled to the conception of itself as will, and it finds in this the simplest expression of its complex activities. The truth of the conception does not concern us here. What interests us is merely the fact that the prevalence of pessimism in popular thinking, and of monism in the more recondite thought, is precisely what Schopenhauer anticipated.

A confessed advantage of Schopenhauer’s monism was that it could be explained in the language of common life without borrowing a word from the stilted jargon of the schools. But its affinity to materialism was shown by his definition— and he a professed idealist — of the world as “phenomenon of brain.” Such an expression was novel in his time, but it has become so common since that it may almost be called a characteristic of the nineteenth century. The confusion of thought which it indicates belongs no more to him than to the age of which he is the philosophical interpreter, and it was unavoidable for the man who sought not to think out a system so much as to weave one from the threads of life as he saw it. Not only was his irrationalism part of his own experience ; it had also an historic background. Mankind once believed in what are now called myths. They looked upon their own struggles as really the conflicts of supernatural powers. But these powers, when investigated, were found to have no reality outside of their names. Schelling merely reversed the process of this mythical humanism to discover in the working out of men’s ideas about deity the real evolution of deity. It is needless to point out how this one thought has moulded all the theories of mythological science from that day to this. A step beyond Schelling in another direction relieved Schopenhauer at once from the task of accounting for the divine existence. His idealism left only an obscure potency, which in its persistent, unconscious effort to manifest itself became for him the will to live, purposeless striving, that, as soon as it attained self - knowledge, was convicted of its own misery. This notion, besides its vogue as a philosopheme, has tinged a large field of lighter literature. It fell in harmoniously with all those sad reflections on the struggle for life which were an obvious result from the theory of evolution. Nature red in tooth and claw ; the gloomy yet grotesque forebodings of those who saw man become bald, toothless, the victim of intellectual development. ; the cruel prodigality with which life is wasted, — all these fancies of recent times were latent or expressed in the peculiar atheism of Schopenhauer.

The modern naturalist has his own answer to these misgivings. He amuses us, for instance, by explaining that the prey of a carnivore feels no such pain as we imagine. It satisfied Kant to know that all the progress of the species was made at the expense of the individual. But the modern man, as a rule, is farther from the self-sacrificing spirit of Kant than from the self-indulgent æstheticism of Schiller. Here again Schopenhauer is the prototype of modern life. Almost the only work of Kant with which Schopenhauer did not find fault, after he had completed his own system, was the Transcendental Æsthetic. His searching, and one may say militant criticism of Kant, filled though it be with notes of admiration, is a psychological failure, since it never attains Kant’s own outlook. In the light of this negative fact, it is fair to think that Schopenhauer, above all an adherent of Goethe even when Goethe was wrong, could have really understood Kant only on the side which a supremely artistic nature — that of Schiller, who also idealized Goethe — made plain to him in a way suited to his own purpose.

It was in the nature of things that Schiller should take as a centre what was only a corner in Kant’s scheme ; but having planted himself on Kant’s æsthetics, he found it easy to describe a new circle in which all philosophy was figured in Kantian outlines on the horizon of a poet. Kant stopped, with the scruples of a Puritan, at the antithesis between inclination and duty. Schiller, with the self-indulgent morality of Shaftesbury to read, and the self-indulgent personality of Goethe as a living model, solved this problem. Ideal human nature is for him a work of art; when it is perfectly proportioned as viewed from the æsthetic centre, it will also be ethically perfect. This ideal human nature is free just because it is in harmony with the law of its own existence. It plays, said Schiller. It is relieved from the dominance of the ever hungry will, said Schopenhauer. Thus the highest moments of life, for the latter, bordered closely on the ascetic denial of the will to live which he praised as the only worthy aspect of religion. In this he was at one with important tendencies of life around him. It is not easy to see any difference between his æsthetic asceticism and the sensuous asceticism which actuates modern efforts to restore mediæval religion, not in painful torture of mind and body, but in traditional observances and expanded ritual, symbols of a self-denial which has departed. His ideas receive stage presence and a voice in the musical drama of Parsifal. His censures upon sleek, well-fed, optimistic Protestantism can be read in words not his from books less obnoxious than his to a conservative taste.

A glimpse of the history of Schopenhauer’s work will help to ascertain the environment to which he belongs. His thought was awakened by the Napoleonic upheaval. But it lay for decades unheeded. In his old age Schopenhauer suddenly found himself the most popular philosopher in Europe. A new generation of revolutionists looked upon his system as contrived especially for them. This belated popularity is the best evidence that could be given of the anticipatory quality of his thinking. Those years in which his books gathered the dust of neglect were marked by the rise of modern naturalism, particularly the science of biology. Schopenhauer was one of the first among metaphysicians to see the revolution of thought that was impending. Advancing science helped him to rid himself once for all of the notion of design in nature, and he in turn developed his conception of the universal will, until his system presupposed all those phrases about natural selection and survival of the fittest favored at a later day. A perusal of the histories of philosophy shows that even with observers to whom he is hateful he has already taken his place as the indispensable link between Kant and Darwin.

This happened because, in addition to the transcendentalism in which he had been trained, he aimed to see the world just as it is. The phrases which he used have flown in all directions, and are hospitably entertained by the philosopher, the scientist, and the writer of popular fiction. His doctrines are echoed by men of the world and by men of the study, — not merely professed disciples, but also men who claim to be theists or monists or positivists, — by the realists in fiction, by anthropologists and experimental psychologists; they confessedly furnished inspiration to the creative spirit of Wagner, and so must be reckoned as an important factor in modern music ; while modern socialism, so far as it is a denial of individuality, — and most of it is a denial of individuality in fact, if not in name, — is Schopenhauerism pure and simple.

Though these particulars show the influence of Schopenhauer, or rather his susceptibility to influences that were only latent in his lifetime, they afford no apology for his opinions. No pretense is made here of defending him. If he is wrong from that absolute point of view which was ridiculed by Pilate in the mocking inquiry, What is truth ? then the support he gives to the present argument is all the stronger ; for it shows that, in spite of the dictates of genuine philosophy, there has been an overwhelming tendency in the direction which he indicated. Some features of the environment which he outlined have been mentioned, but there is no doubt that one could go further, and from a base-line in the analysis of his writings could make out a plausible scheme for the historical development of the last three quarters of a century. If philosophy in any form is an index to the growth of an environment suitable to genius, such a portent as Schopenhauer must have its significance. Now, it is to be added to all that has been said that Schopenhauer anticipated the work of the nineteenth and probably of the twentieth century in a field which for literature is more important than any before mentioned. This, too, is just the field where, as has been remarked, Kant failed to penetrate. The case stands exactly as if Schopenhauer had set himself consciously to fill the gap in Kant’s system ; yet that was certainly the last thing in his thoughts. Schopenhauer knew all that was to be known in his time about the religions and the wisdom of the Orient. What is still more remarkable is that his original thought, apart from books, had an Oriental cast. When he became conscious of this, he exaggerated it, but without giving up his claim to the first outline as purely his own.

A glance at the last half - century shows how prophetic his instinct was. Schelling, also, in his later years, felt the same tendency, the philosopher’s premonition of coming things. Von Hartmann, Schopenhauer’s most popular disciple, has predicted — one must think him fanciful — a syncretism of Christianity and Hindooism in the religion of the future ; but, with his sardonic anticipations for literature, he has abandoned the lines which, as a child of his age, he should have defended. In circles learned and unlearned the awakening to Oriental ideas has been a remarkable incident in a remarkable century. One only need recall to memory what has happened in the field of Indo-European languages and literatures since the days of Sir William Jones, what has been achieved in the Euphrates Valley since the explorations of Layard, what has been done in Egypt since the time of Champollion, to be convinced that the world is moving toward an awakening of learning and genius similar to the greatest literary revivals of the past, but of more magnificent promise than any. Look back to the time when the treasured Greek manuscripts of Constantinople were carried to western Europe by the men of letters who fled from the Turks. Picture the vivid pleasure of the few who could read those manuscripts, and the eagerness with which they pored over each one in the hope of recovering the literature of ancient Hellas in its entirety for the modern world. Remember, also, the unexpected and far-reaching effects of their activity.

Their hopes in too many cases have been dispelled by the certainty of irreparable loss. But these hopes once existed, and now they revive in another realm of learning, The discoveries in Mesopotamia and Egypt have as yet, and are likely to have for many years to come, the charm of constant expectancy. If the latter has only new additions to make to a list of works in art and letters already classified, the former still gives promise of a library more valuable to the historian of human ideas and institutions than the manuscripts acquired by the scholars of the Renaissance. Sanscrit and its literary monuments are already felt to be classical because of their direct relation to Greek and Latin. The literatures of the Pali language, — rich in a religious sense, at least, — of the Tamils, the Bengalese, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Japanese, even the treasured lore of those races that transmit their romance and their wisdom by word of mouth, are rapidly becoming familiar to the Western world. To those who live while the work of editing, translating, explaining, and publishing these books of the East is going on, the process seems slow. But there will come a time when, the task nearing completion, men will contemplate, the results as if they had all been achieved at once. The whole body of Asiatic literature in all its languages will be accessible to a single mind. It is easy to imagine that the present years of labor will then stand forth like the epoch of the Renaissance. It will be possible to estimate the effect of these Eastern records on Western civilization. If they influence letters and philosophy as much in the next century as they have influenced the last generation of thinking men, then surely Europe and America will have reached a new era in the history of thought. The world was once Hellenized. Is it now to be Orientalized ?

The tendency of what, after Goethe and Herder, may be called world-literature must be in the other direction. We are beginning to know what the books of the East are, and have ascertained that whatever else they may teach, they cannot give any grace of style. The lesson of form, of exactness in word and thought, of moderation, — the μηδὲν ἄγαν of Theognis, — which the ancient Greeks taught, has sunk deeply into the Western mind; all the more deeply since it was enforced by the legal and military precision of the Roman rule and the Latin language. The world cannot go back to the chaotic mysticism, the limitless exaggeration, the irrepressible loquacity, of Oriental literature. It will take what is good, the practical meaning hidden in a cloud of words, the happy turns of thought and expression which are sure to intervene with Eastern writers in moments of self-forgetfulness. The West has to some extent been oppressed by the thought that a profound mystery underlies the magniloquence of the East. Perhaps it looks for an answer to the enigma of religion. One suspects this on seeing some Oriental platitude on parade in pretentious Western books. Schopenhauer, in his old age, descended to this twaddle. His Tat twam, asi is almost as wearisome as the creak of a Thibetan praying-machine, or the incessant om — om of the prayers themselves. But this disposition of mind cannot last even with the half - educated. Human nature, the real mystery at the bottom of all the artifices of mysticism, will be revealed on lines where the raw material of Eastern thought and fancy can be made amenable to the precision of Western literary forms. At the same time, the Eastern mind will see how to put new life into Western forms without destroying them.

The open question is whether the genius to accomplish this task will be native to the East or to the West. The case of Japan makes the student of literature and literary possibilities pause. Compare the situation of this empire with that of England in the time of the Tudor sovereigns. The likeness is noteworthy. All the influences of civilization from West and East are focused, so to speak, upon a political and social organism which is not only wonderfully receptive, but which also displays the capacity of reaction in its own original elements. Looking back at the history of genius, and seeing how largely it belongs to the people as distinguished from what may somewhat irreverently be called the blooded stock of a nation, one feels like inquiring how deeply into the substrate of human life in Japan the alien influences have penetrated. When these reach the depths where folk tradition lurks and the popular imagination slumbers, then the world may well look for a reaction in which the nation will show all that it is capable of in literature. Meanwhile, observe, by way of presage, that two of the most striking literary phenomena of the present day are Rudyard Kipling, with his overlay of Hindooism on English human nature, and Lafcadio Hearn, with his varied experience, patiently inquisitive about everything Japanese. Finally, whether the successor of Dante and Goethe rises from Asia or from the West, all the light of the past shows that he will speak, not the thoughts of a nation, but of a worldwide culture ; that he will at last unite the divided thought of humanity, and combine in one view two civilizations that have been in antagonism for thousands of years.

J. S. Tunison.