plete secularization of our society by the complete victory of the lay spirit over the clerical spirit; in the second place, the reform of our military organization, and the reduction of the duration of the service to two years; in the third place, the introduction into our financial legislation of imposts upon the revenue as corrective of the inequalities and injustices of our fiscal régime; in the fourth place, the passage of laws for the assistance of the workingmen and the establishment of old-age pensions for them,-aims which have been always understood, and which have been in a sense the object of all the laws, projects, and propositions of laws of social order, which have secured or retained in the last fifteen years the solicitude of the republican assemblies."

The first of these items has been so materially modified by the temperate attitude of M. Rouvier as to have become almost a dead letter, as has been seen above.

The second item is practically an accomplished fact, both chambers having already voted for the army bill.

The third item is likely to go through at no very remote date, though M. Rouvier confesses himself lukewarm with regard to the matter.

The fourth item scems likely to wait a long time for its acceptance; not because there is any very formidable opposition to it on principle, but because the cost of it is greater than the state seems likely to be able to bear in the near future, -the increase in funds from the probable withdrawal of the subsidies to the churches being counterbalanced by the increased. appropriations necessitated by the replacing of the suppressed schools of the monastic orders by public schools.

The strengthening of the Franco-Italian entente; the maintenance of the peace of Europe and the status quo in the East, and the arbitration of the Dogger Bank incident, thanks in a large measure to the

steadying influence of the Anglo-French entente; the definition of the rôle of France in the north of Africa; and the calm. dignified, but determined response of M. Delcassé to the German Emperor's boutade at Tangiers, have marked the year in diplomacy.

The honoring of Mistral with a Nobel Prize by the Swedish Academy: the welcoming of Barrett Wendell to the Sorbonne; the reversion of several distinguished writers (notably Anatole France and Jules Lemaître) to literature, after they had squandered several years on politics, have marked the year in letters.

A further development of the tendency already noticeable in 1903-04 to improve the literary tone of the popular theatre: a worthy revival of the poetic drama; and an adequate, if novel, interpretation of King Lear by Antoine, have marked the stage year.

An awakening to the need of technical training has marked the year in education. A trade-union movement for Sunday rest has marked the year in social betterment. Two successful crossings of the English Channel in airships have marked the year in applied science. The partial vindication of Dr. Doyen's cancer theories and treatment has marked the year in medicine.

These and several other things, in these and several other departments of life and thought, would call for a detailed presentation in this letter, had they not been overshadowed by the great socio-religious conflict centring about the attempt of M. Combes to secularize French society from top to bottom.

A well-known publicist characterized this conflict the other day as the gravest crisis France has known since the period of the great Revolution. The writer believes the estimate of this publicist to be just, and this is the reason that he has practically ignored all the other events of the twelvemonth.

THE literature of the past half century appears to have been a product, or resultant, of two principal forces, or rather impulses: the impulse toward a freer exercise of the romantic imagination, and the impulse toward an extreme development, in science of material effectiveness, and in art of sheer technical skill. These impulses are obviously independent, if not hostile; they have sometimes neutralized, often deflected, each other, and it would be hard to name an instance in which their action has been perfectly complementary. Not seldom, to be sure, they have worked side by side, if not altogether to mutual advantage: they have jointly, though not harmoniously, and by divers methods, irritated the productive nerves of creators, inventors, and art-for-art's-sake men. Their somewhat jarring coexistence should suggest a point of attack in dealing with not a few of the more pressing questions of current criticism. To our mind, at least, several recently published books of criticism are of especial significance for the light they, consciously or unconsciously, cast upon the interplay of these impulses in modern fiction, poetry, and drama: the pursuit of virtuosity and the pursuit of il

lusion.

Of the pursuit of illusion, Mr. WattsDunton is one of our most eminent critical champions. It is significant that he

1 Theodore Watts - Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic. By JAMES DOUGLAS. New York: John Lane. 1905.

Studies in Prose and Verse. By ARTHUR SYMONS. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1905. Iconoclasts: A Book of Dramatists. By JAMES HUNEKER. New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. 1905.

Dramatists of To-Day: Being an Informal Discussion of their Significant Work. By EDWARD EVERETT HALE, JR. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1905.

1

should have been not only the valued friend of Rossetti and Morris, but also for many years the housemate and companion of Swinburne, greatest of modern poetical virtuosi. "The Renascence of Wonder," is the phrase which Mr. Watts-Dunton connects with that movement toward a freer exercise of the romantic imagination which he considered the important movement in modern art. "As the stormwind is the cause and not the effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the movement in question was the cause and not the effect of the French Revolution. . . . The phrase, the Renascence of Wonder, merely indicates that there are two great impulses governing man, and probably not man only, but the entire world of conscious life: the impulse of acceptance, - the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are, and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder."

By wonder, it is further explained, the critic means, "that poetical attitude which the human mind assumes when confronting those unseen powers of the universe who, if they did not weave the web in which man finds himself entangled, dominate it." Romanticism, as a term that is feeble in itself and debased by usage, cannot for him express that attitude. "Not all the romantic feeling to be found in all the French romanticists (with their theory that not earnestness but the grotesque is the life-blood of romance) could equal the romantic feeling expressed in a single picture or drawing of Rossetti's, such, for instance, as Beata Beatrix or Pandora." Of Pandora he says in another place: "In it is seen at its highest Rossetti's unique faculty of treating classical legend in the true romantic spirit.

The grand and sombre beauty of Pandora's face, the mysterious haunting sadness in her deep blue - gray eyes as she tries in vain to reclose the box from which are still escaping the smoke and flames that shape themselves as they curl over her head into shadowy spirit-faces, gray with agony, between tortured wings of sullen fire, are in the highest romantic mood." This is to give Rossetti a high place indeed; since, according to the further generalization which completes the foundation of Mr. Watts-Dunton's structure of criticism, "Other things being equal, or anything like equal, a painter or poet of our time is to be judged very. much by his sympathy with that great movement which we call the Renascence of Wonder."

upon

Here, then, is what appears at first glance to be, if not a reliable, a pretty comfortable vade mecum for the observer of modern letters. It has been seized as such by not a few of the younger English critics, with the result, among others, that certain terms like Renascence of Wonder and Natura Benigna are in the way of declining from respectable catchwords to the mere cant of a coterie. Mr. Watts-Dunton has, however, by the employment of such phrases, and by the expression of the critical attitude for which they stand, done not a little toward bridging the gap between a rigid classical criticism, on the one hand, and a flighty pseudo-romantic criticism on the other. That he has persistently refused to collect, revise, and bring into unity those (in the proper sense of the term) essays in criticism, which maintain an obscure, if not precarious, existence in the files of the Athenæum and the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica, is a fact which he explains in these terms: "I had for years, let me confess, cherished the idea that some day I might be able to take my various expressions of opinion upon literature, especially upon poetry, and mould them into a coherent, and, perhaps, into a harmonious whole. This alone would have satisfied me. But year

by year the body of critical writing from my pen has grown, and I felt and feel more and more unequal to the task of grappling with such a mass. . . . I am not so entirely without literary aspiration as not to regret that, years ago, when the mass of material was more manageable, I neglected to collect them and edit them myself. But the impulse to do this is now gone.... Owing to the quite unexpected popularity of The Coming of Love and of Aylwin, my mind has been diverted from criticism, and plunged into those much more fascinating waters of poetry and fiction in which I used to revel long before."

One cannot doubt the ingenuousness of this; nor can one fail to see in it a confession of limitation. Corollary to his insistance upon imaginative spontaneity is an insistence upon spontaneity of expression. To apply this principle has been, for himself, to practice improvisation; patently that in his critical writing, essentially that in his verse and fiction. "To define any kind of style," he asserts,

66

we must turn to real life. When we say of an individual in real life that he or she has style, we mean that the individual gives us an impression of unconscious power or unconscious grace, as distinguished from that conscious power or conscious grace which we call manner. The difference is fundamental. It is the same in literature; style is unconscious power or grace, manner is conscious power or grace." This theory of style, admirable as it is, fails to prescribe that infinite painstaking which is a sine qua non for all, at least, under the first order of genius. And, Aylwin and The Coming of Love to the contrary, Mr. Watts-Dunton's own minor genius, or major talent, should have found its constructive or creative expression through criticism. He is a lesser, though considerable, poet and novelist; he might have been a really great critic. To many minds he is that: Mr. Swinburne, in his generous way, has called him "the first critic of our time, perhaps the largest-minded and surest-sighted of

any age." His achievement, whatever it may have been, is, we understand, due to his success in breaking away from tradition, and in "always dealing with first principles."

What school of criticism does not pride itself on its unique addiction to first principles? - a phrase capable of as ready appropriation and varied interpretation as the Return to Nature which provided Sir Leslie Stephen with so suggestive a text. In the dedication of his Studies in Prose and Verse, Mr. Arthur Symons has this paragraph:

"If there are any names here that do not interest you, disregard them, or read other names in their places. I am interested only in first principles, and it seems to me that to study first principles one must wait for them till they are made flesh and dwell among us. I have rarely contrasted one writer with another, or compared very carefully the various books of any writer among themselves. Criticism is not an examination with marks and prizes. It is a valuation of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction. It is concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned with force only, in its kind and degree." The first principles, or forces, with which Mr. Symons occupies himself are not altogether identical with those which have employed Mr. Watts-Dunton. In wonder as the saving element in human nature the younger critic has complete faith; but he is by no means confident that we are just now on the road to salvation. Our rebirth of wonder has been attended, and sadly jeopardized, by a monstrous new birth: the worship of fact. For much he holds responsible "that nameless thing, the newspaper, which can be likened only, and that at its best, to a printed phonograph.... Facts are difficult of digestion, and should be taken diluted, at infrequent intervals. They suit few constitutions when taken whole, and none when taken indiscriminately. The worship of fact is a wholly modern attitude of mind,

and it comes together with a worship of what we call science. True science is a kind of poetry, it is a divination, an imaginative reading of the universe. What we call science is an engine of material progress, it teaches us how to get most quickly to the other end of the world, and how to kill the people there in the most precise and economic manner. The function of this kind of science is to extinguish wonder, whereas the true science deepens our sense of wonder as it enlightens every new tract of the enveloping darkness."

Upon the question of style (and there is no article of the literary creed which more definitely places a critic) these two devotees of wonder part company, in practice as well as in theory. His theory Mr. Symons expresses with a good deal of vigor: "Every writer of good prose is a conscious artificer; and to write without deliberately changing the sequence of words as they come into the mind is to write badly. There is no such thing, speaking properly, as a 'natural style;' and it is merely ignorance of the mental processes of writing which sometimes leads us to say that the style of Swift, for instance, is more natural than the style of Ruskin." Certainly this is far enough from the "unconscious power or grace" which to Mr. Watts-Dunton means style. Mr. Symons in his pursuit of illusion declares that we require of the great artist "a world like our own, but a world infinitely more vigorous, interesting, profound; more beautiful with that kind of beauty which nature finds of itself for art. It is the quality of great creative art to give us so much life that we are overpowered by it, as by an air almost too vigorous to breathe: the exuberance of creation which makes the Sybils of Michelangelo something more than human, which makes Lear something more than human, in one kind or another of divinity." That kind of beauty which nature finds of itself for art. Yet Mr. Symons's own work, both creative and critical (if we must make such a distinction),

would on the whole stand as an art-forart's-sake utterance, as the best possible word to be said for that illegitimate offspring of the Wonder-renascence which we have had to style ungraciously "decadence."

We ought not, perhaps, to have said "illegitimate," since opposed to the "impulse of acceptance" is not only "the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder," but the impulse to produce whatever is superficially unconventional, whatever may be likely to make people's eyes stick out in a kind of physical wonder. At all events, it must be reluctantly admitted that, excellent critic as Mr. Symons is, given his premises, those premises in themselves seem to offer a somewhat insecure foothold. Strange gods indeed are some of those to whom, in the present volume, he has erected shrines. Of an Oscar Wilde one should have heard enough, and of a Hubert Crackanthorpe one can hardly hear too little: why, at worst, inflict upon us the paltry reminiscences of an Ernest Dowson? "I have never known him when he could resist either the desire or the consequences of drink. . . . He drank the poisonous liquors of those pothouses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious [why curious?] disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much of him one summer, he discovered strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest for what was most sordidly riotous in it." Yet "A soul unspotted from the world, in a body which one sees visibly soiling before one's eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the per

sonal charm underlying it remained unchanged." Here is "indifference to direction," and no mistake: the true pathetic fallacy of decadence. All honor to the cad and the ne'er-do-weel: they are not to be stalled in any slough of respectability. Villon and Verlaine never to bathe

and always (if possible) to get drunk; and to record the omission and the commission in impeccable verse: so, among other ways, wonder may be worshiped; so one may register one's resistance against the impulse of acceptance.

This is, of course, a bald and shallow putting of the case, but one cannot help regretting keenly that so rich, and in some respects so exquisite, a critical faculty as that of Mr. Symons should seem to exhaust itself in the judgment of work often exquisite, but seldom rich, seldom of the first order according to any recognizable criterion. Mr. Symons's mind, indeed, with all its delicacy of behavior, is irresistibly moved by the appeal of novelty in the studied expression of emotion. Conformity is so abhorrent to him as to make even deformity not altogether intolerable to him: deformity of mood veiled, that is, by some kind of new elegance of manner. What he says of the (it would seem) unspeakable hyper-æsthete of the past generation may be applied without undue strain to that whole movement to which the unkindly label of "decadence" has affixed itself: "The unbiased, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing desirable left in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality in the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who, having thought themselves weary, have made the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own incalculable expense." In defining decadence, Mr. Symons does not spare his