the Frost. It is "Nay, but hear, O white man!" "Ay!" "Well did I know it.. "I had no heart for anger nor belly for stout words . . ." and so on in the jargon, from beginning to end; but in three, at least, of these stories, "The Law of Life," "NamBok, the Unveracious," and "The Master of Mystery"-in the last-named above all the subject is so interesting and the treatment so powerfully simple and sincere that the picture stands out clear and flawless, and one is instantly impressed with a sense of something solidly achieved. "The Law of Life" recounts how an old man, deserted by his tribe as a member of usefulness outworn, is left to die. His mind runs back and he recalls what was stirring and important in his life; among other things, recurs the vision of a moose that he saw pulled down by wolves; as soon as his scant supply of firewood is burned the wolves will have him, too. In the texture of his dreaming is woven the picture of the moose and the wolves, and it touches him, not with horror, but simply as a fact. As a fact, too, the narrative touches the reader-as a commonplace of life; and it has power, therefore. "Nam-Bok the Unveracious" offers another revelation of the naïve self-sufficiency of these people of the Alaskan forests, and of their calm reliance on the wisdom of the tribe. Nothing hinders here the just appreciation of the reader; the incredulity greeting Nam-Bok, the wanderer in far countries; the frowning reception of his impossible account; and the conclusive casting back of him into the sea out of which he came-these things are true, are authentic, are just as much existent as the attitude of a New York policeman toward the reform party, or as the mental state of one of Mr. Howells's Boston ladies. The strangeness, or rather the conventionality, of the talk drops from one's mind, because of the note that is genuine and familiar, the note of life. In "The Master of Mystery" Mr. London develops a theme less amiable, for the story deals with the rivalry of two "shamen," the soothsayers of the tribes, and it ends with the savage triumph of one and the pitiless stoning to death of a victim. The material is fresh, and it is handled with such conciseness and vividness that the effect is brilliantly striking; the subject is less interesting and subtle than the subjects of some of the inferior, cruder tales, but in this story Mr. London shows his special effectiveness as a writer. Of the other stories in the book not so much can be said in praise; the first one, "In the Forests of the North," with its cheap effects and hackneyed drama, is unworthy, certainly, of its author, forming a bad introduction to the volume, belonging rightfully with the plentiful work of the many purveyors of harsh, fierce life in foreign parts. Some of the others, much more worth while and lacking the claptrap, are still tainted with this ostentation, and perhaps spun out by it. One may readily believe that the Romance of the North and of savage, unvisited peoples may become strong enough to overcome at times a writer's natural sense of fitness. And when what is good is so rarely good, landing with a bold home thrust of the imagination, one wonders again if it is not possible for some writer-for this writer, perhaps-in writing of savages to drop for good and all that unimpressive language of the pow-wows and to tell his tale, not in the blatant person of his hero, but in his own straight English, so that we may get, at the worst, something besides the blatancy, and, at the best, nothing diluted. III. Carl Hovey. THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING. There are undoubtedly a great many people without any knowledge whatever of the facts of the case, who believe that to be a literary genius a young man has only to be unkempt, to disregard the amenities and the decencies of life, and noisily to profess scorn for what is referred to vaguely as "the commonplace." These are the people who foster the affectation of eccentricity. If a young man calls himself "a poet," and shows himself fresh and ill-mannered in the bargain, they point to his freshness and ill manners as unmistakable and indisputable evidence that he is a genius. It was to trade upon the ignorant gullibility and the misdirected sympathy of these people that The Journal of Arthur Stirling was published. The book is an offence; and we have not been able to find one extenuating circumstance. In the first place, we do not believe that Arthur Stirling ever existed or that he wrote any such journal-though on this point we may be quite wrong. We believe it to have been concocted out of the whole cloth, as a direct result of the large sale of The Story of Mary MacLane. There is not a line that does not ring hollow and insincere. If, on the other hand, the Journal is genuine, its publication is still more offensive-it is not only an indelicacy, but an indecency, and it would not be easy to find words to express an opinion of "S," the alleged editor of the work, who, after his profession of friendship at the beginning of the book, exposes to the public gaze the egotistical and silly maunderings of "his friend's" distorted and diseased mind. The book would have you believe that Arthur Stirling, having written a drama in blank verse, called The Captive, and finding it impossible to dispose of it to a publisher, committed suicide by drowning in the Hudson River, in the twentysecond year of his age. The suicide story is supported by a clipping which is said to have appeared in the New York Times for June 9th, 1902. During the time that he has been going about in New York seeking a publisher, he has supported himself as a waiter in a Sixth Avenue restaurant, and afterward as a clerk in a wholesale paper house, and devoting his evenings to writing in his idiotic journal. Here is a sample: They have rejected The Captive! They have rejected The Captive! In God's name, what does it mean? They have rejected The Captive! I stare at the paper in blank consternation! I couldn't realise the words. I couldn't understand what they meant. Such a thing never occurred to me in my wildest moments. What is the matter with them-are they mad? Great God, that any human creature! And without a line about it! "We have carefully considered the MS. which you have kindly offered us, and regret that we are not advised to undertake its publication. We are returning the MS. with thanks for your courtesy in submitting it." That letter came to me like a blow in the face. I have spent hours to-night pacing the street, almost speechless. Fools! But I will not let such a thing disturb me for an instant. Yes, they are a great publishing house-but such things as I have seen them publish! And they "regret." Well, you will regret some day, never fear! JUNE 19. The manuscript arrived this morning. I took it upstairs and sat down, trembling, and read it all again. I wish that I could see the man or woman who read that poem and rejected it—just that I might see what kind of looking person it is. Oh, the wildness of it, the surge and the roar of it! The glory of it! I cannot afford to waste my time worrying over such things. I only say: "Fools!" At another publishing house the manager reads to him the opinion upon the book that has been written by one of the house's readers. He read me that criticism-great God, it made me writhe! It was like a review of the Book of Revelations by Bill Nye! That my work should be judged by such men! The But enough of it. We have not selected those passages which irritate us most because through many of them there runs a nasty vein of blasphemy. Journal of Arthur Stirling is an outrage against every man or woman who is honestly trying to win money or reputation with his or her pen. Many young men of talent have met with failure at the beginning of their literary careers. Some even have have felt the pangs of actual want. But none ever kept a journal like that of Arthur Stirling; and this book is designed to make them all appear as whining lunatics to people silly enough to read it seriously. In the opinion of the present writer, The Journal of Arthur Stirling is the most vulgar and impudent humbug that has been perpetrated for years. But it won't work. Arthur Bartlett Maurice. AN AMERICAN EDITION OF PETRONIUS* One of the best things accomplished, when American scholarship broke with English classical traditions and gave the German influence full play, was the broadening out of our students' reading, especially in Latin. English Latinity, ever since Milton's day, has been ruled by those canons which were established when the intensely Ciceronian spirit of the early Renaissance prevailed in Italy. In the strong reaction against the mediæval schoolmen who had reduced the Latin language to a grotesque jargon, the Italian scholars, such as Bembo and Laurentius Valla, sought from their studies purity of style above all else. They would employ no word, no phrase, no turn of speech or form of sentence, unless it could be definitely stamped as Ciceronian; and they did, in fact, attain an absolutely Ciceronian elegance. Form with them was more than substance; the casket was prized above its contents. Only let the periods move on with rhythmic smoothness and in cadences that charmed the ear by the sonorous music of their golden words, and no one would have the heart to criticise potential poverty of thought concealed beneath that splendid flow of harmony. Thus arose the Italian school of Latinity—a school, as has been said, concerned with diction first of all. The foremost representatives of this Ciceronianism did admirable work in restoring all the classical traditions and in cultivating with a passionate enthusiasm the classical ideal of beauty and of grace. But, very naturally, and because of their particular preferences, they took a somewhat narrow view of the great body of Latin literature which the energy of Poggio and others had recovered from its mediæval prison-houses. They seized with won derful avidity upon whatever ministered to the cult of style; they cared far less about those Roman authors whose language was not that of the Golden Age. Having acquired elegance of diction and having revived a Latinity that was absolutely faultless, they feared lest in studying or reading any other form of prose, *Petronius: the Cena Trimalchionis. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by William E. Waters, Ph.D. Boston: Benjamin H. Sanborn and Company. their own purity of style might be affected. It is even told of one of these illustrious purists that he would not permit any less accomplished scholar to speak to him in Latin, for fear that solecisms might be uttered in his presence. Of course, this devotion to an ideal standard could not possibly prevail in other lands. It must be remembered that with the Italians a thrill of patriotic pride intensified their scholarly enthusiasm for antiquity. In reviving the intellectual splendour of ancient Rome they felt that they were recovering in part a noble heritage which was theirs by right of birth and blood. Rome was no longer the capital of a united, conquering race; yet the classical Renaissance was making her, though in another way, once more the mistress of the world. Her stately speech, her rich and varied literature, and the unforgotten magnificence of her past, seemed to assure to her a new and wider glory, in establishing her as a mighty central source of civilising, humanising influence for all the earth. Such was the unspoken thought of many an Italian in those marvellous years when the long night of mediævalism ended amid a sunburst of intellectual light and freedom. And so it was, that devotion to a form of speech which had received the final touch of its embellishment when Rome still reigned supreme was not a scholar's fad or a linguistic eccentricity. It was the expression of an ardent patriotism, and not at all the pretentiousness of pedantry; and it was to find a parallel centuries after in the fervour of the neoGreek, Koray. But outside of Italy, the case was otherwise. Erasmus represents a transition from the Italian strictness of Latinity to the freer, looser usage of the German school. This man, the greatest of all the humanists, as he was the most fascinating personality of his time, threw the weight of his influence and example on the side of a Latin style which neglected Ciceronian precision in order to gain in flexibility and raciness; and though the elder Scaliger thundered at him and even covered him with foul abuse, Erasmus wrote and spoke and thought in the Latin which best suited his own temperament a fluent, pungent, vivid Latin that was, indeed, the only language which he really knew. This was the end of Ciceronianism on the Continent outside of Italy. There was still no lack of individual purists; and one of them, Marc Antoine Muret-that dissolute, brilliant Frenchman-exercised an enduring influence upon classical learning by his superb orations which were actually studied in the schools down to the middle of the eighteenth century, so eloquent were they and so faultless in their diction. Yet in general it may be said that the stricter canons were neglected in Germany and France; and the so-called Triumvirate Casaubon, Lipsius and the younger Scaliger-established a Latinity which was something less than classical. In England alone did the Italian example find acceptance. At first this acceptance was more theoretical than practical. There were no great British Latinists before the time of George Buchanan (1506-82), and the example of Erasmus, who resided and taught at Oxford and at Cambridge, did not encourage scrupulosity of style. Again, after the so-called Reformation, English youths of promise no longer, as before, spent a part of their tirocinium at the universities of France and Italy, but visited the Protestant seats of learning, such as Utrecht and Leyden, or else remained at home. Hence, it was not precisely the influence of Italy which made England's Latinists so like the Italians in their devotion to a pure Latin style. Even Milton, whose Italian journey was a delightful episode in his life and who knew personally many of the Italian litterati, wrote Latin which must have made some of these purists gasp and stare. It was vigorous, individual Latin; but the verse took liberties with the laws of prosody, while the prose had in its phrasing an unmistakable savour of modernity. How did it come to pass, then, that the English universities in the end came to cultivate as finical a feeling for mere style as ever marked the teachings of a Valla or a Muret? The true cause is to be found in the gradual isolation of academic England from the university life. and thought of the Continental countries. More and more the English drew into their shell, losing the cosmopolitanism which was once a national trait and be coming the insular, self-sufficient race that they have since remained. Down to our own time, English scholarship has gone its own way, fatuously ignoring the immense strides which have been made by investigators in other lands, and quite content to tread the beaten paths that were laid out in centuries gone by. The sketch which George Eliot drew of Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch gives us in reality an incarnate type of English learning in the nineteenth century. Mr. Casaubon's Key to All the Mythologiesthat pathetic, pitiful attempt at an epochmaking work prepared by a man who did not even know what the Germans had discovered in his own field-how illustrative is it of the kind of learning which produced Greek-play bishops and which still writes sylva, Sylla, cœna and Caius, and reads Max Müller's Science of Language with reverential admiration! Thus it befell that the English classicists, having shut themselves away from intellectual contact with their foreign brethren, worked a limited field in a laboriously thorough fashion. They sought to find out nothing that was new, but they resolved to master what was already theirs. They did not attempt creation and discovery; they set their hearts instead on erudition. Even when a great original genius, such as Bentley, arose among them a scholar whose brilliant ingenuity and critical acumen made his name immortal in other lands-his own countrymen never more than half appreciated him; and to this day they recall more readily the memory of Porson, that uncouth, drunken monster who drank in facts as greedily as gin, and whose prodigious learning gave nothing to the world beyond some scattering notes and commentaries, and a few grotesquely ludicrous bits of personal memorabilia. And so, in time, the English conception of a classicist, on the side of Latin, was narrowed down until it meant simply one who had a few famous authors at his fingers' ends, who could write Latin prose with elegance and ease, and who could knock you off a set of smoothly sinuous elegiacs without a moment's hesitation, and in the very words and cadences of Ovid. For these English dilettanti, with their facile gift for making classic tinsel and imitating gems in paste, at last found even Vergil lacking in perfection of ar tistic workmanship, and sought a model in the Palignian poet of light love. Cicero for prose and Ovid for verse-and all the rest impossible! When the present Pope, some years ago, published a little book of charming Latin poetry, redolent of the past and instinct with the grace and loveliness and warmth of a truly classic inspiration, these English hammerers at longs and shorts picked half his lines to pieces because, forsooth, they showed the freedom of Vergil and the easy negligentia of Horace. Vergil and Horace were good enough for Augustan Rome, but they could not always pass muster before the keen gaze of a master at Eton or Shrewsbury or Harrow! Even Ovid himself was open to occasional criticism, as falling at times below his own high level; for the English maker of elegiacs is plus royaliste que le roi. It is related of Shelley that once, at Eton, he handed in a set of Latin verses among which was the pentame ter: Iamiam tacturos sidera celsa putes. This drew down the scorn of the master; but, as it turned out, Shelley had conveyed the line bodily from Ovid. Mr. Charles Astor Bristed tells of an examiner at Cambridge who in like manner insisted that the expression freno non remorante dies was an impossible one, on finding it in the work of a candidate for a place in the Tripos; yet this phrase also is Ovidian. This almost morbid sensitiveness over the anise and cumin of mere phraseology gradually restricted the reading of the typical English scholar to the Latin of one particular period, and made him a devotee of preciosity. shut him out to a great extent from an enjoyment of the great body of Latin literature as a whole-and especially from an appreciation of the later masterpieces of that literature in which the modern spirit begins to filter through the severe and stately forms of earlier composition, like sunshine sifted through the dense foliage of an antique grove. The Oxford don could heartily enjoy the eloquence of Cicero, the noble lines of Vergil, the mellow philosophy of Horace, and even Livy's lax but lovely prose; but he dared not let himself admire with out reserve the magnificent rhetoric of Lucan, or the urbanitas of the younger Pliny-much less the piquant pages of Suetonius, the curiously oriental fancies of Apuleius, or the sensuous feeling for nature which thrills in some of the lines of Ausonius and in the minor poetry of the later centuries. Mr. Cruttwell's popular book on Latin literature affords a very interesting example of this deficiency of breadth in the cultivated Englishman. When he writes of Vergil or of Horace, he writes with the sure sympathy which comes from intimate understanding; but what he says of the archaic poets and of the later ones, such as Statius, for example, shows not only lack of critical appreciation, but even inadequacy of knowledge. And even so accomplished a scholar as Professor Tyrrell, in his Latin Poetry, speaks in a casual way of the faulty Latin of Petronius -which is as though he were to call Thackeray's English bad because Captain Costigan speaks with a rich Irish brogue and Harry Foker in the language of the stables and the prize-ring. A very convincing proof of the narrow range of reading, self-prescribed by the general run of English Latinists, is found in the conspicuous absence of good English commentaries upon many of the most famous Roman writers when these happen to lie beyond the limits of the Golden and Early Silver Ages. Thus, until within a very few years, no Englishman had made a scientific edition of Tacitus, or even of any part of Tacitus. Even now there is no English edition of the whole of Livy. The younger Pliny has been edited only in selections. Martial, as a whole, still remains without an adequate interpreter, and so also the two Senecas, Statius, Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, and Ausonius. Even of Quintilian's Tenth Book there was a good American commentary in use at least twenty years before any modern Englishman thought of annotating this famous piece of ancient criticism. Americans, indeed, have shown a much more liberal appreciation of Latin literature than have Englishmen; for they have made accessible to schools and to undergraduates in college some of the Roman authors who lie wholly outside of the usual range of the reading done in England. A striking illustration of this |