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thing absolutely new for him, and why should you desire to do again what has been done already? If it be a poem, the reviewer's head already rings with the whole gamut of the world's metrical music; he can recognize any simile, recall all turns of phrase, match every sentiment; why seek to please him anew with old things? If it concern itself with the philosophy of politics, he can and will set himself to test it by the whole history of its kind from Plato down to Henry George. How can it but spoil your sincerity to know that your critic will know everything? Will you not be tempted of the devil to anticipate his judgment or his pretensions by pretending to know as much as he?

The literature of creation naturally falls into two kinds: that which interprets nature or phenomenal man, and that which interprets self. Both of these may have the flavor of immortality, but the former not unless it be free from self-consciousness, and the latter not unless it be naïve. No man, therefore, can create after the best manner in either of these kinds who is an habitué of the circles made so delightful by those interesting men, the modern literati, sophisticated in all the fashions, ready in all the catches of the knowing literary world which centres in the city and the university. He cannot always be simple and straightforward. He cannot be always and without pretension himself, bound by no other man's canons of taste in saying or conduct. In the judgment of such circles there is but one thing for you to do if you would gain distinction: you must "beat the ' record;" you must do certain definite

literary feats better than they have yet been done. You are pitted against the literary "field." You are hastened into the paralysis of comparing yourself with others, and thus away from the health of unhesitating self-expression and directness of first-hand vision.

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we could make correct analysis of the proper relations of learning-learning of the critical, accurate sort - to origination, of learning's place in literature. Although learning is never the real parent of literature, but only sometimes its foster-father, and although the native promptings of soul and sense are its best and freshest sources, there is always the danger that learning will claim, in every court of taste which pretends to jurisdiction, exclusive and preeminent rights as the guardian and preceptor of authors. An effort is constantly being made to create and maintain standards of literary worldliness, if I may coin such a phrase. The thorough man of the world affects to despise natural feeling; does at any rate actually despise all displays of it. He has an eye always on his world's best manners, whether native or imported, and is at continual pains to be master of the conventions of society; he will mortify the natural man as much as need be in order to be in good form. What learned criticism essays to do is to create a similar literary worldliness, to establish fashions and conventions in letters.

I have an odd friend in one of the northern counties of Georgia, - a county set off by itself among the mountains, but early found out by refined people in search of summer refuge from the unhealthy air of the southern coast region. He belongs to an excellent family of no little culture, but he was surprised in the midst of his early schooling by the coming on of the war; and education given pause in such wise seldom begins again in the schools. He was left, therefore, to "finish" his mind as best he might in the companionship of the books in his uncle's library. These books were of the old sober sort: histories, volumes of travels, treatises on laws and constitutions, theologies, philosophies more fanciful than the romances encased in neighbor volumes on another shelf. But

It would be not a little profitable if they were books which were used to

being taken down and read: they had been daily companions to the rest of the family, and they became familiar com panions to my friend's boyhood. He He went to them day after day, because theirs was the only society offered him in the lonely days when uncle and brothers were at the war, and the women were busy about the tasks of the home. How literally did he make those delightful old volumes his familiars, his cronies! He never dreamed the while, however, that he was becoming learned; it never seemed to occur to him that everybody else did not read just as he did, in just such a library. He found out afterwards, of course, that he had kept much more of such company than had the men with whom he loved to chat at the post office or around the fire in the chief village shops, the habitual resorts of all who were socially inclined; but he attributed that to lack of time on their part, or to accident, and has gone on thinking until now that all the books that come within his reach are the natural intimates of man. And so you will hear him, in his daily familiar talk with his neighbors, draw upon his singular stores of wise, quaint learning with the quiet colloquial assurance, "They tell me," as if books contained current rumor, and quote the poets with the easy unaffectedness with which others cite a common maxim of the street! He has been heard to refer to Dr. Arnold of Rugby as "that school-teacher over there in England."

Surely one may treasure the image of this simple, genuine man of learning as the image of a sort of masterpiece of Nature in her own type of erudition, a perfect sample of the kind of learning that might beget the very highest sort of literature; the literature, namely, of authentic individuality. It is only under one of two conditions that learning will not dull the edge of individuality: first, if one never suspect that it is creditable and a matter of pride to be learned, and

so never become learned for the sake of becoming so; or, second, if it never suggest to one that investigation is better than reflection. than reflection. Learned investigation leads to many good things, but one of these is not great literature, because learned investigation commands, as the first condition of its success, the repression of individuality.

His mind is a great comfort to every man who has one; but a heart is not often to be so conveniently possessed. Hearts frequently give trouble; they are straightforward and impulsive, and can seldom be induced to be prudent. They must be schooled before they will become insensible; they must be coached before they can be made to care first and most for themselves and in all cases the mind must be their schoolmaster and coach. They are irregular forces; but the mind may be trained to observe all points of circumstance and all motives of occasion.

No doubt it is considerations of this nature that must be taken to explain the fact that our universities are erected entirely for the service of the tractable mind, while the heart's only education. must be gotten from association with its neighbor heart, and in the ordinary courses of the world. Life is its only university. Mind is monarch, whose laws claim supremacy in those lands which boast the movements of civilization, and he must command all the instrumentalities of education. At least such is the theory of the constitution of the modern world. It is to be suspected that, as a matter of fact, mind is one of those modern monarchs who reign, but do not govern. That old House of Commons, that popular chamber in which the passions, the prejudices, the inborn, unthinking affections long ago repudiated by mind, have their full representation, controls much the greater part of the actual conduct of affairs. To come out of the figure, reasoned thought is, though perhaps the presiding,

not yet the regnant force in the world. In life and in literature it is subordinate. The future may belong to it; but the present and past do not. Faith and virtue do not wear its livery; friendship, loyalty, patriotism, do not derive their motives from it. It does not furnish the material for those masses of habit, of unquestioned tradition, and of treasured belief which are the ballast of every steady ship of state, enabling it to spread its sails safely to the breezes of progress, and even to stand before the storms of revolution. And this is a fact which has its reflection in literature. There is a literature of reasoned thought; but by far the greater part of those writings which we reckon worthy of that great name is the product, not of reasoned thought, but of the imagination and of the spiritual vision of those who see,

writings winged, not with knowledge, but with sympathy, with sentiment, with heartiness. Even the literature of reasoned thought gets its life, not from its logic, but from the spirit, the insight, and the inspiration which are the vehicle of its logic. Thought presides, but sentiment has the executive powers; the motive functions belong to feeling.

"Many people give many theories of literary composition," says the most natural and stimulating of English critics, "and Dr. Blair, whom we will read, is sometimes said to have exhausted the subject; but, unless he has proved the contrary, we believe that the knack in style is to write like a human being. Some think they must be wise, some elaborate, some concise; Tacitus wrote like a pair of stays; some startle us, as Thomas Carlyle, or a comet, inscribing with his tail. But legibility is given to those who neglect these notions, and are willing to be themselves, to write their own thoughts in their own words, in the simplest words, in the words wherein they were thought. . . . Books are for

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various purposes, tracts to teach, almanacs to sell, poetry to make pastry; but this is the rarest sort of a book, a book to read. As Dr. Johnson said, 'Sir, a good book is one you can hold in your hand, and take to the fire.' Now there are extremely few books which can, with any propriety, be so treated. When a great author, as Grote or Gibbon, has devoted a whole life of horrid industry to the composition of a large history, one feels one ought not to touch it with a mere hand, - it is not respectful. The idea of slavery hovers over the Decline and Fall. Fancy a stiffly dressed gentleman, in a stiff chair, slowly writing that stiff compilation in a stiff hand; it is enough to stiffen you for life." After all, the central and important point is the preservation of a sincere, unaffected individuality.

It is devoutly to be wished that we might learn to prepare the best soils for mind, the best associations and companionships, the least possible sophistication. We are busy enough nowadays finding out the best ways of fertilizing and stimulating mind; but that is not quite the same thing as discovering the best soils for it, and the best atmospheres. Our culture is, by erroneous preference, of the reasoning faculty, as if that were all of us. Is it not the instinctive discontent of readers seeking stimulating contact with authors that has given us the present almost passionately spoken dissent from the standards set themselves by the realists in fiction, dissatisfaction with mere recording of observation? And is not realism working out upon itself the revenge its enemies would fain compass ? Must not all April Hopes exclude from their number the hope of immortality?

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A MODERN MYSTIC.

THE Memoir of Laurence and Alice Oliphant, by Mrs. M. O. W. Oliphant,' has been eagerly expected, both on account of the social standing and great personal popularity of that extraordinary pair and the literary repute of one of them, and because of the restless curiosity, half sympathetic and half scornful, of the public mind concerning the novel form of mysticism with which their names are associated. The most interesting of all persons to his fellow-creatures to-day is the man who professes to have caught that lost clue. to the unseen for which so many are anxiously groping, and still to shape his course along this increasingly difficult life of ours by faith and not by sight. There is a passage in the life of Darwin by his son which every reader of the book will remember; and a good many, it would be safe to say, will long and clearly remember that passage only. It is where, in his latest years, the great naturalist confesses, with the candid humility which became him so nobly, to that progressive and finally almost complete atrophy of the æsthetic and spiritual perceptions which had accompanied the intense concentration of his faculties upon the business of scientific observation and induction. Once he had loved music and the plastic arts; once he had believed in a personal God and a future life. Now he found himself powerless to love and believe thus; but why, he indirectly suggests, should a private incapacity, for which he can see a perfectly natural and sufficient cause, affect in any way the existence of a transcendent objective reality? This last word of the gentlest of unbelievers, whose daily life had exemplified with peculiar beauty almost all the accepted "fruits

1 Memoir of the Life of Laurence Oliphant and of Alice Oliphant, his Wife. By MARGARET

of the spirit," seemed to reflect light from an unexpected quarter upon the helpless bewilderment of some who were suffering from a like disability, without perhaps having attained to a similar state of grace. There is, alas, no doubt as to the prevalence of the disease in question, and little as to its contagious character. But if it be in truth a disease, and not a lasting destitution, it may well be susceptible of cure, and Laurence Oliphant commands our attention as one of those who claim to have found a remedy.

There is no need to do more than briefly review the extraordinarily picturesque career of incessant change and adventure which brought Laurence Oliphant, at the age of thirty-five, to the seeming goal of all his worldly ambitions, -a seat in the British House of Commons, and an assured position in that fine world of London where he had hitherto shone merely as a passing visitor. He was born in 1829, at Cape Town, Africa, where his father, Sir Anthony Oliphant, was then Attorney-General. His pedigree was good, but not specially brilliant. He came, as his kinswoman and biographer gracefully says, "of one of those plain Scotch families in whose absence of distinction so much modest service to their country is implied.” When about ten years old Laurence went with his mother to England, and was for two years in the private school of one Mr. Parr, at the end of which time he was provided with a private tutor in the person of a clever youth fresh from Oxford, and sent to his parents in Ceylon, his father having been appointed Chief Justice there. He was not yet thirteen, but his formal schooling was over. He had lessons in Ceylon, after OLIPHANT W. OLIPHANT. New York: Har per & Brothers. 1891.

a desultory fashion, along with the sons of Mr. Moydart, a Scottish neighbor at Colombo; and from these and the good society he saw he learned all that a gentleman's son absolutely needs to know. But the fact cannot be too strongly insisted on, whatever bearing it may be thought to have on his wonderful after career, that of mental discipline, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, he had simply none. Moral discipline he had, for his father and mother were both evangelical pietists of the old-fashioned Scottish type; not gloomy and severe, but strict and earnest, doing all in their power to stimulate in their only child the activity of a naturally tender conscience. The boy was very responsive to their appeals, bold and high-spirited, but artless, confiding, and affectionate, with that native grace of bearing which no teaching can better, altogether, then as always, a most lovable creature. His relations with his parents were delightful, but especially so with his mother, whose incessant preoccupation about the soul of her brilliant son created no barrier between them; whom afterwards, in the fullness of his manhood, he seems easily to have drawn along with him into the strange paths which he elected to tread; and who was always more like an elder sister than a parent, for indeed, as Laurence himself used fondly to say, “there were only eighteen years" between them.

There was talk, when Laurence was about seventeen, of having him prepared for Cambridge; but his father got a holiday at this time, a part of which he proposed to spend on the continent of Europe, in one of those leisurely tours in a big traveling carriage which move the thrall of the locomotive to hopeless envy; and the indulgent pair, having been assured by their sapient son that such a trip would be far more advantageous to him than the university, decided to take him along: so that then and there, as it proved, vanished his

last chance for an academic course. He made a fitting début the next year in Rome (it was the memorable winter of 1847-48) in a far more congenial and less hackneyed career. He was in the thick of the mobs which drove the monks out of the Propaganda, tore the arms from the front of the Austrian Legation, and compelled the Princess Pamphili Doria to descend from her carriage and set fire to the symbols of despotism heaped up in the Piazza del Popolo. From these and similar adventures his good luck delivered the eighteen-yearold revolutionist without serious consequences; and he returned with his parents to Ceylon, became his father's private secretary with appointments to the comfortable amount of £400 a year, and was so far associated with him in his legal business as to be able to boast in after time that he had been engaged in twenty-three murder cases before he was as many years old. He was the life of the colonial society, being a special favorite with the feminine portion thereof; and he also found grace in the eyes of a native Indian prince, who halted at Ceylon on his way back from a visit to England, and took Laurence in his suite for a tour through India, introducing him almost first among Europeans to the wild joys and unusual perils of an elephant hunt, which the youth describes with great gusto in his letters to the home circle in Ceylon. But he finds room even in these to answer his mother's anxious inquiries about his spiritual state, remarking with admirable naïveté that "it is not easy to practice self-examination upon an elephant, with a companion who is always talking or singing within a few feet; but it is otherwise in a palkee, which is certainly a dull means of conveyance, but forces one into one's self more than anything."

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He returned to England at the close of 1851, and began "eating his dinners " in Lincoln's Inn Hall, while society opened wide its arms to the well

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