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the national banks are. There might be issued three classes of securities something like the following: One-third the valuation in four per cent first mortgage bonds, one-third in six or seven per cent preferred stock, and one-third in common stock with profits limited to ten or fifteen per cent as interest rates are limited. Then let the common stockholders run the roads and let them have the profits and make them pocket the losses. Then enforce a schedule of equal rates for the same service under similar circumstances. There would be infinite details like allowances for difference in density of population per one hundred miles of road and other variations.

Whatever may be the faults of the present railway owners and managers there is a large item to their credit in their account with the American people. They have developed a fabric of transportation out of compare with any other in the world. It is not only magnificent in its proportions, but the freight rates are lower than in other countries, the inequality being the item of their deficiency. Possibly complete publicity might show this fault to be much less than is generally believed. Such reorganization of the interstate railways of the country with full examination of accounts, liberal regulation and publicity would restore the confidence of the people. At present distrust on both sides is an important factor of disturbing influence. Restoration of confidence would alone be a giant asset.

Pending the accomplishment of the more comprehensive reform there would seem to be need of careful conservatism in all execu

tive and judicial actions on the one side and of railway management under the State laws on the other side. Meanwhile the movement towards the comprehensive reform by national control should not be forgotten or neglected.

There could be no more delightful railway situation than one where the published reports showed good profits and where the question was whether to spend a surplus in improved depots, tracks and rolling stock, or to reduce rates. I believe the people would always put betterment before reduction of rates.

Ferdinand Brunetière

BY OTHON GUERLAC

Assistant Professor of Romance Languages in Cornell University

Death, which to us always seems untimely, was especially rash when, without fair warning, it cut off a man like Brunetière. He was not yet sixty and he had not finished his task. His desk was loaded with copy that thousands of his readers were discounting. The latest batch of books that the boat had brought over from France contained a collection of his last articles. It was called "Timely Topics," but might just as well have kept the title of his earlier pamphlets, "Discours de Combat," for his fighting mood had not abated. He died in the saddle as he lived-a fighter; by temperament, by calling, by preference he was a fighter and a fighter he remained to the end.

One could not see his stooping and slender figure, his dark and feverish eyes, his nervous and trepidating manners, hear his shrill and imperative voice, accompanied by that familiar cutting gesture of the hand, without feeling that he had been built by nature for the militant life. His whole machine, with all its wheels, straps, and pulleys, was in perpetual motion-always under pressure, in readiness-ready for action, ready for fight.

What he fought for during the last thirty years can be summed up in one word, which embraces literature, philosophy, politics, and religion, and that is, Authority.

The principle of authority with its corollary, the respect for tradition, received in our times and is receiving every day telling and painful blows.

Brune tire took up the cudgels for this hoary and much abused bugbear of our age of rebellion. It gave him a special pleasure and he took particular pride to appear in the arena as the selfappointed avenger of the fallen god.

From the first day his name appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes (April 1, 1875,) to the last book that he published, he stood up as the stern and aggressive apologist of that age of intellectual absolutism, the seventeenth century. "We shall speak this year about the great century-I mean the eighteenth," said once a lecturer of the Collège de France.

To M. Brunetière there was only one great century-the seventeenth. He was priding himself last year on the space that period was to occupy in his general history of French literature (that now will never be completed)—three volumes out of five. Those authors alone really interested him. Indeed he measured everything and everybody by their standard, the standard of Corneille, Racine, Boileau, Pascal, Bossuet, especially Bossuet. His admiration, his worship for Bossuet was a subject of common pleasantry. In him he found every quality and every virtuebeauty of style, depth of thought, nobility of character; no qualities were denied him by Brunetière, not even those that he actually possessed. Seventeenth century literature gave Brunetière his canons of criticism. He judged, approved, or censured them in proportion as they agreed with or departed from those canons. Like Boileau he believed that there is a law of literary and artistic perfection that can be formulated and almost enforced.

There are works that are beautiful in se-in spite and regardless of passing opinions and ephemeral tastes. Criticism has no objective value and the critic has a right-nay, must as a duty pass judgment without appeal. "There is," he said somewhere, "a definite way of thinking about Corneille and Racine." No one has more persistently tried to spread among the public that way of thinking.

The arguments of the impressionists of the Lemaitre and Anatole France kind have found him unassailable and to him the axiom that there can be no disputing of tastes seemed fallacious and impertinent.

He spent his life disputing about them and thundering against people who followed their own. His first entrée in literature was by an article attacking the realistic school whose taste was to paint the crudities and horrors of life. He went on brandishing his whip over the heads of all the writers, living or dead, whose conceptions of art were at variance with his own, romanticists or impressionists, "Baudelairians" or decadents. It almost seemed as if, in his periodical articles of criticism he condescended to leave off his praise of the classics only long enough, to give the lash to some writer, modern or not, be he Zola or Labiche, Victor

Hugo or Baudelaire, Voltaire or Rousseau, who had somehow refused to bow before the dictates of Boileau.

These articles of criticism-the last of which appeared a few days before his death on the first of December, 1906-aggressive and sometimes unjust as they were, had several marked characteristics. They all bore testimony to his wide and accurate knowledge of literary history-which, especially on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was well nigh infallible.

They all contained brilliant and often misleading generalizations full of novel and illuminating points of views. Read in this connection his papers on the "Essential Character of French Literature," or on "The Latin Genius." His very last article has a few paragraphs on the "Salons" that are in his best vein, full of information, and rich of suggestions.

Such articles more than any other of his literary productions illustrated the clear, logical mind of M. Brunetière. Obviously he could think only in syllogism. Every subject presented itself to his mind in the form of a thesis that had to be proven. And to support it he would gather arguments carefully numbered and classified, select from his well stored memory striking illustrations and apt quotations. He marshalled his ideas as a general marshals his troops, and he would throw them in dark and irresistible masses against his supposed enemies with an impetuosity and a furia francese that carried with them his readers astounded and helpless if not convinced.

And all was expressed in a style that has been accused of heaviness and incorrection, but is, for all that, vigorous, nervous, and energetic to a degree. It has been for years a familiar sport with students of literature to imitate his archaic diction, his seventeenth century syntax, his long and intricate periods with their rough contexture of relatives and conjunctives, their heavy artillery of adverbs, their pour ce que, parce que donc que, si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi, which always made his writings recognizable among all others.

Indeed more than a writer Brunetière was an orator. His articles were orations and had the careful structure, the close knit logic, the movement of an argument in court. He always craved a platform. When, in spite of his remarkable dearth of university degrees (he was only an A. B.), he became lecturer at

the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the great seminary for university teachers, he was not satisfied. He wanted the larger public and the more conspicuous rostrum of the old Sorbonne. So this critic succeeded in doing what none of his predecessors could have done to the same extent-keeping hundreds of hearers spellbound under his magisterial eloquence, while he was expounding with the dry and severe austerity of the teacher, and none of the graces of the matinée lecturer, the history of the French theatre, the evolution of French lyric poetry, and the works of Bossuet as a historian, a philosopher, a preacher, and a writer.

In these lectures delivered either at the Sorbonne or the Odéon theatre, as well as in speeches addressed to provincial audiences, M. Brunetière was at his best. Thanks to his clear and vigorous delivery, his oratorical skill, his action, his voice, those long periods of his which seem ponderous to the reader were, on the contrary, powerful, direct, and remarkably effective.

I once heard M. Brunetière acting as his own lawyer in a suit brought against the Revue des Deux Mondes, and while his opponent, a professional, awkwardly read a carefully written argument, the critic, like an experienced barrister, pleaded his case with a cogency and force that would have done credit to any old lawyer. He entertained the judges if he did not convince them; for he lost his case.

If eloquence is something more than the power of "speaking alone and a long time," to use La Bruyère's definition, if it must be actuated by strong convictions and deep emotions, there is not far to go to find the motor of Brunetière's oratory. It is in the central idea of all his criticism, namely, that every work must have an aim and that aim must be the betterment of man, the strengthening and purifying of society.

"Literature is not an amusement of idlers or a pastime of mandarins, it is a means of moral improvement." This was his leit motive expressed and developed in a hundred articles and speeches. That is why he has written so scathingly about those who practice the theory of art for art's sake, and that is why he has praised or condemned writers and books according to a standard of his own.

He was a man of action before being a man of theory. A French philosopher, M. Darlu, who did not like him, called atten

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