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his neighbors. Homer was the creator of Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, yes, of the Trojan war itself; he made the whole epic history out of a contest less poetically promising than the present Russo-Japanese campaign, and in doing it he made use of all the religious imagery and significance with which his high-reaching imagination, and that of his compatriots, enriched the bareness of the theme; in short, he "dealt with contemporary conditions." Would the reviewer contend that Shakespeare found in Hamlet or in Lear a human figure which had "weathered the years and taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth"? If he does, let him strip his mind completely of these great tragedies, and look up the childish old wives' tales which served as the poet's point of departure. Shakespeare took a hint from some foolish ditty; from that point he changed plot and characters to suit the convenience of his strictly modern purpose, to make his work express his own feeling, his own time.

I might ask him about certain other masterpieces of art in which the materials, as well as the general theme and spirit, are of the most absolute contemporaneousness. What, for example, of the Book of Job and the Hebrew prophecies? What of the Parthenon, of the Hermes of Praxiteles? What of the Gothic cathedrals, of Don Quixote, of Molière's comedies, of Velasquez' portraits? What of Dante, whose Beatrice and Francesca he did not find in that "dark backward and abysm of time" where our critic and so many others, alas! - would locate the treasury of art? For us, but not for the mighty Florentine, these ladies, and other people, his contemporaries, have "weathered the years and taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth." But it was Dante who gave them to time and men's hearts,

and all that has been said about them since-even to the well-meaning efforts of Mr. Stephen Phillips himself - bas been but echoes of echoes.

Never, with any great poet, was his theme "remote" and "aloof" from his own time. Never has he dealt with anything else but "contemporary conditions." It is only the minor poet who declares himself "the idle singer of an empty day," who finds his age prosaic, and delves forever in the past of old romance, and so necessarily becomes more and more remote, more and more attenuated, in his art. Many a clever and promising poet has gone that way: Mr. Yeats is rapidly taking it; even Mr. Moody is in danger, - may the kind fates turn him back into higher, if rougher, paths! Mr. Phillips has never given evidence of an original or modern mind, but he does not keep his gait along the flowery, artificial path of his choice, - his strut becomes more and more stilted, and his instrument gets qut of

tune.

The academic temperament which speaks in this reviewer and in many another critic strikes at the vitality of modern art. True, such strokes cannot quite be fatal, because no great poet will stop for any critic. But the poet may be cruelly hampered, heavily impeded, by such misdirected efforts of his contemporaries; he may be compelled to spend much of his time and energy in warding off blows. His joyousness may be baffled and whipped into melancholy; his clear vision may be clouded with bitterness. It is much easier for an artist to pluck flowers along the wayside than to labor in the vineyard, especially when a thousand voices are pleading for the flowers. But the flowers wither in his hands, and only the grapes produce the wine of life. Where should our poets be?

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The Atlantic Monthly Advertiser

SPRING BOOKS

I

SCRIBNERS

ELECTRICITY AND MATTER

The Silliman Lectures at Yale University for 1903.

By J. J. THOMSON, D.Sc., LL.D., Ph.D., F.R.S.

Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, Cambridge. 12mo, with 22 diagrams, $1.25 net (postage II cents).

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John Fox, Jr.

Later in the season we shall publish a new book by the author of
"The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come."

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