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"Pater's prose is obviously not Attic prose. Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, among the Victorians, came nearer to that, and how different they are from Pater! Nor is it Asiatic; it has little of De Quincey's florid luxuriance, his Ciceronian rhythms, and Persian pomp. To keep to the figure for suggestion rather than definition, Pater's style is African in its flavour. It is a characteristic product of an Alexandrine society, too urbane ever to be grandiloquent, yet too curious in its scholarship, too profuse of its sympathies to be quite content with simple, Addisonian clarity."

In pages like these Mr. Greenslet not only betrays the secret of Pater's charm for the Paterian, but brings his author into such clearly apprehended relations to the great world of letters that the very infirmities of Pater's style and the defects in his scheme of things are discreetly manifested. It may be possible, after a score or two of years, to write more positively than Mr. Greenslet has done concerning Pater's influence upon his generation, but Pater will be fortunate if he finds another critic of such catholic scholarship and such affectionate intimacy of interpretation.

B. P.

THERE could hardly be a more curiA Novel Ex- ous expression of the modern periment in Poetry. scientific spirit than is afforded by the preface of Mr. Shaler's recent work.1

In youth he has, he admits, loved poetry and written verses. Thereafter he has been more and more completely diverted from such addictions by enthusiasm for scientific studies. Shakespeare has long since become tedious to him, and he “has not willingly visited a theatre for forty years." Nevertheless, he believes that his imagination has continued to ripen by exercise upon scientific themes. He believes that a scien

1 Elizabeth of England. A Dramatic RoIn Five Parts. By N. S. SHALER, Professor of Geology in Harvard University.

mance.

tist's progressive indifference to literature (he naturally cites the case of Darwin) is due not to loss of faculty, but simply to preoccupation. This belief, which the lay intelligence might be willing to let stand as a conviction, Mr. Shaler has wished to put to the proof, for his own satisfaction. Coming to the conclusion (with the advice, as he says, of "those well-informed in the matter ") that the Elizabethan dramatic form would be best for his purpose, he has produced the present "romance." After some experimenting with prose "the writing began to take shape as heroic verse, which at once proved to be an easier and more sustaining mode of expression than prose." At this point we come to one of the most interesting details of the transaction. The romance was written at odd intervals, but "it soon became evident that the composition was, in a way, continued from day to day in the region below the plane of consciousness, appearing only when attention was directed to it."

This is a sound doctrine of literary composition, and has, no doubt, a true analogy in the processes by which important advances in science are made. But it is not quite clear that Mr. Shaler's long exercise of the scientific imagination has directly affected his present exercise of the poetic imagination. Despite the reliable assurance that the author has made little conscious preparation for the work, by way either of special research or of practice in writing blank verse, one cannot take the product as that of a literary novice. Mr. Shaler's instinct for poetic expression was early aroused, and has been developed by a perfectly normal, though sub-conscious or "subliminal" process. His knowledge of life, his general efficiency, have been increased by experience, and his sense of literary form has been singularly tenacious. From these unusual conditions we cannot be Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1903.

surprised that an unusual product has emerged. That absorbed application to scientific study need not prevent the partial development of a preëxistent literary faculty is abundantly proved by this experiment.

We say "partial development," because it is evident that Mr. Shaler's natural faculty for poetic expression might have been further developed by conscious and continued effort. In structure it is evident that this study does not proceed from the hand of a writer practiced in dramatic composition. The parts of the romance, though they are given the five-act form, cannot be called in any strict sense plays. They lack the compactness of dialogue, the rapidity of action, and, what is more important, the organic structure, of real drama. Mr. Shaler has, he tells us, omitted something like one third of his material as it stood in the original manuscript. What remains might still, under the influence of a controlled as well as spontaneous creative faculty, be advantageously subjected to further compression. Much of his poetic matter is yet in solution, and would be greatly more effective if, by that right touch which only experience can confer, it had been fairly precipitated. But the experimenter does not profess to be an accomplished poet, and is right in supposing that his work possesses, though not a supreme, a genuine poetic quality. The fourth part, The Death of Essex,

most nearly approximates the form and the substance of a veritable drama. It has greater unity of action, and a more effective climax. Its verse is more pregnant and stately one might have said more studied, if the author had not assured us to the contrary. One finds it, indeed, not a little difficult to read a speech like this of Elizabeth's as the improvisation of a person unskilled in the poetic craft, unaware of any resemblance between his manner and that of the great period of English poetic drama:

"But he's a man

With noble gentleness to move all hearts.
He strides not with his fellows, for his feet
Are winged with eager thoughts. The ancient
hills,

The common mount with panting, are to him
But stepping stones which space unnoticed voids
That part him from his goals. So on he goes,
An Atlas seeking for some world that waits
His might to stay its fall, or else to hurl
Some blessed orb to ruin. For such will
There is no place within this balanced realm
Where might needs ward of reason."

Of the lyrics with which the dialogue is interspersed it can only be said that they betray more readily than the blank verse that method of improvisation which the author has not hesitated to avow, even

to insist upon. As a most interesting exercise in a somewhat irregular form of dramatic composition, this work can hardly fail to be read with attention; and more than this its author does not ask of us. H. W. B.

SOME BOOKS ABOUT CITIES.

It is no longer a national virtue to mind one's own business. The globetrotter, it seems, has not trotted for nothing, nor the white man carried his burden in vain. We feel a neighborly concern not only in the earthquakes and famines, the wars and rumors of wars of

Dan and Beersheba, but in their little domestic privacies. Yet with this inquisitiveness as to the holes and corners of creation, our main interest is reserved for the typical cities. Expansion is a beautiful word, but the force which we actually count upon to advance the spe

1

cies is centripetal. A great city, moreover, cannot long be a congregation without becoming a personality. That connoisseur in subtle emotions, Mr. Arthur Symons, is among other things a collector of cities, and has just brought together a series of papers dealing with the more important treasures of his collection. His standard of choice has been personal and exacting. "I have come upon many cities," he says, "which have left me indifferent, perhaps through some accident in my way of approach; at any rate, they had nothing to say to me: Madrid, for instance, and Vienna, and St. Petersburg, and Berlin. It would be impossible for me to write about these cities: I should have nothing to say. But certain other cities, Rome, Venice, Seville, how I have loved them, what a delight it was to me to be alive, and living in them!... Moscow, Naples, how I have hated them, how I have suffered in them, merely because I was there; and how clearly I see them still, with that sharp memory of discomfort!" The writer of these sentences is not quite an English D'Annunzio, but one cannot deny that he possesses that abnormal form of susceptibility which is always on the fearful edge of satiety. To such a nature even a city may be an object of voluptuous pursuit, and the record of its adventures will not be free from an element of almost pathological interest.

Mr. Symons has not been unconscious of the perilousness of his chosen method. He has "tried to do more than write a kind of subjective diary, in which the city should be an excuse for his own sensations." In this attempt he has succeeded quite as well as we should care to have him, for he is, at best and at worst, an individuality. Moreover, he is not at all a person of die-away intelligence. The present book has plenty of vigorous passages, the product of that sound critical sense which Mr. Symons

1 Cities. By ARTHUR SYMONS. New York: James Pott & Co. 1903.

has so often shown in another kind of work. And in seizing upon the salient element of appeal in his chosen cities, he by no means confines himself to a record of vague emotions. "Everything in Rome," he says, for example, "impresses by its height, by an amplitude of adjusted proportions, which is far more than the mere equivalent of vast space covered, as in London, invisible for its very size. The pride of looking down, the pride of having something to look up to, are alike satisfied for the Romans, by what nature and art have done for Rome." The chapters on Rome, Venice, and Seville, records of fond enthusiasms, are, in the nature of things, pleasanter to read than the rest; they are, perhaps, more profitable, as love is more profitable than hatred. A sentence or two from the paper on Moscow will serve to suggest the pictorial quality of the author's descriptions, and the acute discomfort to which his sensitiveness makes him liable: "Colours shriek and flame; the Muscovite eye sees only by emphasis and by contrast; red is completed either by another red or by bright blue. There are no shades, no reticences, no modulations. The restaurants are filled with the din of vast mechanical organs, with drums and cymbals; a great bell clashes against a chain on all the trams, to clear the road; the music which one hears is a ferocity of brass. The masons who build the houses build in top-boots, red shirts, and pink trousers; the houses are painted red or green or blue; the churches are like the temples of savage idols, tortured into every unnatural shape and coloured every glaring colour."

The other books about cities which have recently come to hand happen to deal with material altogether different from that with which Mr. Symons concerns himself. Their method is less personal, therefore less literary; it ranges all the way from the journalistic to the sociological, and from the sociological to

the historical. Mr. London's latest book has to do professedly with one of the ugliest results of the centripetal tendency. His picture of London slum life is appalling enough, painted with plenty of vigor and not a little coarseness; but it is not strikingly fresh. There is something needlessly exacerbated in the perennial astonishment with which students of sociology rediscover the horrors of urban vice and poverty. The evils are there, and we ought never to cease hearing of them; but not seldom the social Jeremiah seems to have insufficiently assimilated the facts with which his somewhat hasty observation has acquainted him. The indignation with which he speaks is more savage than righteous; the book is unfortunately deficient in the firmness and dignity of mood and touch which might have made it literature. One is likely to lay it down with the feeling that one has been reading a long and reasonably sensational newspaper story.

Thirty Years of Musical Life in London 2 ignores the "submerged" society of the East End no more thoroughly than the commercial and drawing-room circles of the West End. Its busy professional air is not tempered by amenities, literary or other. It has to give, in a simple and personally modest way, certain reminiscences of the London experience of many of the greatest musicians of the nineteenth century. The book contains much good anecdote and not a little interesting criticism. A fact which it makes surprisingly clear is that Englishmen have persisted in resenting the preference for foreign musicians which the English public has unmistakably felt. One imagines that in America the preeminence of European musicians, whether composers or players, is pretty generally recognized. The present reviewer recalls hearing, some years ago, an American violinist of merit re

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mark, somewhat wearily but not resentfully, that there was only one American in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. We do not understand that the organization. of musical labor which has just advertised itself so widely has made a distinction against the immigrant; it could ill afford to do so. Yet in Dr. Klein's book we find so prominent a man as Sir Arthur Sullivan gravely protesting against the appointment of Hans Richter as conductor of the Birmingham Festival: "I think," he says, in a letter to the author, "all this musical education for the English is vain and idle, as they are not allowed the opportunity of earning their living in their own country. Foreigners are thrust in everywhere, and the press supports this injustice." As Richter was one of the great conductors of the day, the point of injustice does not seem quite clear. Sir Arthur Sullivan was, according to Dr. Klein, "England's greatest musician; " yet how little he stands for in world-music! The present volume owes its interest largely to the foreign composers, conductors, and players who have been inevitably in the foreground of English musical life. Nevertheless, it is an important phase of life in nineteenthcentury London which the book records. And the treatment of special phases is, apart from the personal literary method, the only fresh method of dealing with metropolitan life to be hoped for.

People who are fond of "fashnable fax and polite annygoats" will find it worth while to glance, at least, into the latest book which is made up of this sort of material. It is always a relief to come upon an English book about Paris which succeeds in keeping clear of the boulevards and the Latin Quarter. These letters were written during the Second Empire by a French attaché. The fact that they were originally contributed to

3 Gossip from Paris. Selected and Arranged by A. R. WALLER. New York: D. Appleton

& Co.

1903.

an English newspaper would be more surprising if one did not see at once that the political allusions are of the most general nature. In fact, the writer is all for high life. He has no end of sprightly gossip about court functions; he has an excellently, light touch in the description of places and persons; and there is much amiable chatter about the pedigree, social achievements, matrimonial concerns, of the fashionable set in which he moves. He writes always with grace and animation, but superficially, as a talented correspondent rather than a person who wishes to produce literature. The letters are perishable stuff; they yield at best a suggestion of faded elegance, an odor of forgotten trifles; they are not alive, they have simply been restored for a moment to the light. It is fortunate that the editor has retained only one twelfth of the material at his disposal; and it is doubtful if even that deserves more than a momentary audience at this time. So much it does deserve.

Some years ago a book on Egypt was published which has proved to be sufficiently important to deserve revision.1 The writer's aim is simple. He does not attempt, he says, "to solve the riddle of the Sphinx," but merely to furnish "a discursive budget of information and comment, social, political, economic, and administrative." He is successful in doing just this. The book has no literary graces, but those who wish to know something about the irrigation, women, cigarettes, bazaars, and rulers of Egypt may find, as Mr. Penfield says, "something and not too much" in this well-made, well-illustrated, and pleasantly written volume.

The two books 2 among our number which deal with American cities are his

1 Present Day Egypt. By FREDERIC C. PENFIELD. New York: The Century Co. 1903.

2 Boston: The Place and the People. By M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

torical in substance, but literary in treatment. They do not profess to be based upon original research, but rather to present a readable and reliable interpretation of material which has been accumulated by other hands. The comparatively recent work of such writers as Mr. Fiske has done much to deepen our sense of the value of the historical interpreter as distinguished from the historical investigator.

For variety, for picturesqueness, for richness in the elements of romance, the annals of Old Boston can hardly rival those of Old Quebec. The present narrative begins and continues in a style of vigor and "pace." Its character as a story is never compromised by the introduction of minor, or, rather, insignificant detail. It is no small triumph for the authors to have succeeded in producing an "assimilation of the generous data" as to the history of Quebec which have now become common property. Due credit is of course given to Parkman, the only American who both as investigator and as interpreter stands in the first rank among historians.

The style of Mr. Howe's Boston is less fluent, more anecdotal and descriptive. It possesses some of the qualities of a handbook; all of them, if we give the word its best possible sense. For the general reader it is the best compact work on Boston which has yet been produced.

Professedly historical as these books are, it is plain that neither writer has failed to develop a sense of intimate acquaintance with one city or the other as a living personality. "The venerable fortress on the tidal water," say the authors of Old Quebec, in drawing to a close, "ever was, and still remains, the noblest city of the American continent. There still works the antique spirit which

Old Quebec: The Fortress of New France. By GILBERT PARKER and CLAUDE G. BRYAN. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1903.

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