THE BOOK BUYER is published on the first of every month. Subscription price, $1.50 per year. Subscribers in ordering change of address must give the old as well as the new address. HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE HERE is no teacher in America to TH day who has a bigger class, a more attentive hearing, or a better lesson, than Mr. Mabie. Through the editorial page of The Outlook he carries on a college of correspondence every week with hundreds of thousands of students. In the lecturehall, in almost every part of the United States this side of the Mississippi, he finds a large audience ready to listen to him with sympathetic interest. When the young men and women who have been studying in schools and colleges, under other teachers, have finished their courses, and are ready to graduate, they send for Mr. Mabie to give them a Commencement Address, which shall interpret the significance of education and illuminate the relations of literature to life. This is his department. This is the subject which he has chosen to study and to discuss, and in regard to which he has something very positive and valuable and convincing to say. Ever since he kindled the light of My Study Fire in 1890, and all through that delightful series of books which have followed those first essaysShort Studies in Literature (1891), Under the Trees and Elsewhere (1891), Essays in Literary Interpretation (1892), My Study Fire, Second Series (1894), Nature and Culture (1897), Books and Culture (1897), Work and Culture (1898)-through all his literary life he has been working out his favorite theme with a fine loyalty of purpose and a noble breadth of application. Culture is a word that appears very frequently in his writings. It is a word that has been often overworked and underfed. What he wishes to do with it is to fill it with a more generous, catholic, manly meaning, to humanize it, so that it may stand for a real element of power in human life. Culture, as Mr. Mabie believes in it, and commends it to all men, is at the farthest possible remove from a mere process of intellectual or æsthetic adornment. It is not a thing which may be bought and put on, like a diamond breast-pin or a mantle of peacock's feathers. It is a clearer light in the eyes, a keener hearing in the ears, a more vivid color in the imagination, a quicker, freer movement in the mind, a deeper, warmer interest in the heart. It is the result of entering into life's discipline awake, instead of passing through it asleep. It is a man's coming to himself. Copyright, 1899, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. All rights reserved. In thought, it means emancipation from the slavery of prejudice and from the imprisonment of ignorant conceit. In society, it means elevation above the vulgarity of fashion and entrance into a broader sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men. In religion, it means a new birth into the life of the Spirit. Mr. Mabie does not believe that this kind of culture is intended to be a monopoly. He believes that every man is capable of getting some of it, and that life has some of it to give to every man. Work educates. Nature is a university. Books live because they minister to life. The aim of schools and colleges is not to separate a learned class from "the common herd." It is to send out men who shall be able to utilize the undeveloped forces of culture, in every region, for the benefit of all mankind and the production of a noble manhood. This is the keynote of Mr. Mabie's teaching. Let him tell us in his own words what it signifies: "The essence of culture is not possession of information as one possesses an estate, but absorption of knowledge into one's nature, so that it becomes bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It means the enrichment and expansion of the personality, by the taking into ourselves of all that can nourish us from without. Its distinctive characteristic is not extent, but quality of knowledge; not range, but vitality of knowledge; not scope of activity, but depth of life.) It is, in a word, the process by which a man takes the world into his nature, and is fed, sustained, and enlarged by natural, simple, deep relations and fellowship with the whole order of things of which he is part." artists who love their art not for its own sake only, but also, and still more, for man's sake. Mr. Mabie is one of the men of letters who acknowledge to the fullest extent the claims of the common life. He has an active interest in all sorts of practical affairs and good causes, the kindergarten, the hospital, the trainingschool, the relief of the poor, the education of the colored people, and is ready to do a double share of work for them. It is surprising, (and almost discouraging,) to see how much he accomplishes. But his energies are not dissipated by all this variety of work. They are enriched and intensified. He comes to his writing with a wider sympathy and a deeper purpose. He interprets Dante, and Shakespeare, and Burns, and Wordsworth all the better, because he knows something about the slums of New York and the "black belt " of the South. His books reflect the man. But they do not reflect the whole man. For one thing, there is a rich fund of humour in him which does not often come to the surface in the printed page. His speaking style is livelier and more varied than his written style. On the platform, and at the dinner-table, when the coffee-cups have come in, he is full of amiable discourse, brilliant anecdote, and genial eloquence. No man presides at a banquet or a board-meeting with a readier wit or with. finer tact. But then, on the other hand, the restraint, the sobriety, the temperate dignity with which he writes, give to his essays a peculiar charm of elevated and equable movement. He writes quietly because he thinks calmly. His books show that tranquil intimacy with the loftiest thoughts of which Joubert speaks when he says: "The fine sentiments and beautiful ideas which we wish to display effectively in our writings should be very familiar to us, in order that the reader |