early editions were shockingly mishandled by pirates, and very little has been done to remove the traces of their handiwork. Even where zealous efforts have been made to restore the purity of the text, the plays have been left unnoted, though bristling with references to bygone customs, persons, and places, which require explanation to the Spaniard of to-day as much as to the foreigner. But bad printing and bad editing would not prevent the Spanish dramatists being popular. However badly Calderon was edited, he would be widely read if he possessed one half the great qualities which A. W. Schlegel professed to have found in him. Nor is it necessary to be a Spanish scholar in order to gain at least an approximate idea of his genius. Many of his works have been translated; and part at least of the "Mágico Prodigioso" is to be found consummately rendered in all the more complete editions of Shelley. It is probably less read than any other part of the poet's work.

The fact would seem to be that injudicious friends have done the object of their praise their usual ill office. Schlegel persuaded a great many people that Calderon was another and perhaps greater Shakespeare. But a little acquaintance with the writers for the Spanish stage will dispel any idea that they belong to the class "that sees quite through the deeds of men." Mr. G. H. Lewes, a very competent judge, was at first persuaded into believing that they did, and ended by deciding that they were only playwrights, and that Calderon in particular was a very overrated playwright. This writer's indignation against Schlegel, who had for a time imposed on him, made him a little unjust to the German critic's favorite, whom he handles in a somewhat disrespectful manner; but in the main he was right. And this habit of judging them by the standard of Shakespeare has lowered the Spaniards in the estimation of their most favorable critics. Ford, who knew his "Don Quixote " by heart, wrote in the most superficial manner possible about the stage. His article on the subject is full of misplaced pedantry, and enthusiasm about the dances. Even Lord Holland, who had gone the length of reading more than fifty of Lope's plays, and who wrote a work on him and on Guillen de Castro, introduces them to his reader almost as if he felt ashamed of them. He stops to tell us that we must not expect from Lope "deep reflections on morals and government," or "a philosophical view of the nature of man and of the construction of society."

But Lope had no intention of being philosophical. He wrote his plays to please the vulgar who paid, he tells us in as many words; and he fully gained his object. His example was in the main followed by other dramatists; and the

reader who is content to look only for amusement may open their works with full confidence that he will be amused. But he must be prepared to look for his satisfaction entirely to the plot and the variety of incidents. As a work of which the interest consists in development of character, "Don Quixote" stands alone in Spanish literature. In every other work the interest is centered in the plot. The characters are fixed by custom, and serve all writers alike. The Spaniard of the middle ages and of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was essentially a man of action. War and pillage were his favorite means of gaining wealth. When the people wished for the type of a prosperous man they found him in the soldiers of Cortes or Pizarro. A grant of land in the New World, or a commandery of a military order, was the aim of a gentleman's ambition, and his way of gaining it was to serve for it in Flanders. As for thought, meditation, or the careful weighing of motives and characters, there was no room for them in his life. The Church defined for him with hard and fast rules what was right and what wrong. It classified his sins and his virtues, assigning to each its exact equivalent reward or punishment. The Inquisition undertook to argue with all who demurred to the Church's teaching. At the play, therefore, or in his novel, the Spaniard wanted to see something going on; he was indifferent to the characters of the actors. No books in the world present less variety of type than the novelas picarescas. From the "Lazarillo" down to the "Gran Tacaño " we find the same hero at work. Low-born or base-born, impudent, thievish, and cowardly, but good-natured and sincerely Catholic, he goes through endless exciting and improbable adventures, to end his life reflecting on the vanities of the world in the galleys, or perhaps settling down with the proceeds of his rogueries as a church-going citizen. The Spaniard read these books with never-failing delight, as he had done the monotonous tales of chivalry, and asked for no greater variety than an occasional change of sex in the principal character. The fact that the female rogue had nothing distinctively feminine about her, but was only the male rogue in petticoats, troubled him little. The rogue himself is no doubt a type of a whole class, and is pictured with no small vigor; but that was by the man who wrote the first picaresque novel; his successors copied him exactly, and the type having been once created became as conventional as the figure of a saint.

As it was with the novel so it was with the stage. There must be an intricate plot and an abundance of incident; the dramatis persona are merely quantities-forces like the figures on a chessboard, crossing one another and clashing

in the endless complications of the intrigue. Rest is given from this confusing movement by the tirades, hundreds of lines long, which some of the dramatists put into the mouths of their characters. These harangues are full of conceits and hyperbole. The sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies, flowers, jewels, seas, sky, and earth are laid under contribution for metaphors to be poured out with the profusion of treasures in a beggar's dream. And the Spaniard seems to feel the same pleasure in seeing all this magnificence rolled out before him as the miser in Horace did to see his heaps of gold. At times these tirades are not merely ornamental, but contain a rapid summary of the plot-an occasionally indispensable aid for the due understanding of the more intricate plays—and were printed separately in broadsides for the convenience of the public. As in the picaresque novels again, the world of the plays is a half-fantastic one. The players are dressed like Spaniards, the scene is laid in Spanish streets and houses, but the ad

ventures transacted there are the adventures of fairy-land. The player was not asked “to hold the mirror up to nature" or the playwright to be true to life. What the spectator expected from them was a representation of that ideal life of movement, love-making, fighting, and moneygetting which he would like to lead himself. Just as much probability must be given to the events of the play as will prevent too great a gulf existing between them and the dull world of reality. They must take place in the world the Spaniard saw before his eyes, and the actors are to be himself and his fellow men, not represented with any precision of detail or fineness of shading of individual character, but by a certain number of well-defined types, which appear in the earliest dawn of Spanish dramatic literature, and remain almost unmodified to the end. The comedy of cloak and sword continued to give to the last the adventures of the very set of characters which first appears in the "Celestina " of Rodrigo Cota and Fernando de Rojas.

Pall Mall Gazette.

THE DILEMMA OF A CONNOISSEUR.

A

FEW weeks ago the daily papers, in announcing the death of Mr. Louis Dürr, a merchant of New York, informed their readers that Mr. Dürr had bequeathed his collection of paintings "to any public art-gallery in the city of New York" that would consent to keep the pictures together, and designate them as the Dürr collection. His executors were instructed to select two hundred and fifty of the most meritorious of his paintings; to sell the remainder, and employ the funds arising therefrom in the purchase of other paintings, to be added to the collection. No one seemed to know much about the character of Mr. Dürr's pictures, excepting that they were mostly by earlier masters; but people generally ventured to assume that the collection was a good one, and congratulated each other upon this accession to the art-treasures of the city. For our selves, we were taking this hopeful view of the matter, when we were rather discomfited by the report in the "Evening Post" of an interview with a wellknown art-connoisseur, who thought that "any public gallery of art in the city of New York that should accept Mr. Dürr's gift would be liable to become the repository of what would be an injury rather than a glory." This gentleman disclaimed any intention of giving a judgment upon the worth of Mr. Dürr's pictures, because he had never seen them, but he nevertheless felt there was danger in the air. The

TABLE.

interview is interesting enough to quote nearly in full:

"Mr. Dürr's will," he observed, "directs that the most meritorious' two hundred and fifty of his pictures shall be selected from his collection and presented to some public institution But who is going to make the selection ?"

"The will says the executors." "Yes, but a matter of this kind requires the services of experts, and there are no experts in this country."

"You mean to say that there is no person in America who is competent to decide whether or not the Dürr collection contains valuable 'old masters ?'"

"I don't know of any one. Certainly there is no such person in this city."

"It is possible, then, that, when the executors have performed the task assigned them, the pictures which

they have chosen may not be worthy of a home in a pub

lic gallery of art."

44

'Certainly. A long course of special training is requisite for the successful performance of such a duty. Who has had this training in this country? I don't know of anybody who has. I don't know of any person who could go into Mr. Dürr's gallery and say, 'That picture is a Rembrandt,' or 'That is a Titian,' or 'That is a Veronese.' Consequently, when the selection has been made, and the pictures have been labeled, how is one to know that the latter really are what they profess to be?"

"You believe, then, that there is danger that the proposed gift, if accepted, may become a trial and a burden to the gallery that houses it?"

"Precisely. The will provides that the accepted pictures shall be kept in a room to be called the Dürr Gal

lery of Paintings; but if the paintings are not what they claim to be, if, in a word, they are unworthy of the honor demanded for them, why, no institution would care to own them. But, whether they are worthy or unworthy, is a question that no person in this country is able to answer."

"They might be by other than the old masters, and yet be desirable old pictures ?"

"Undoubtedly. The true principle of selection would be that of artistic merit, rather than of mere names. Are they useful for purposes of study?—that is the important point. But, again, who is capable of deciding whether they are or not?"

The most skeptical questioner of the pretensions

of old art could not for the life of him have more

effectually demolished those pretensions than this

"well-known art-connoisseur" has done.

If we

grant what he says to be even no more than approximately true, then the claim put forth for old art is the veriest piece of charlatanry in the world. Let us follow a few of this gentleman's assertions to their logical consequence. We are assured that, amid all the artists and art-students in this country, amid all the connoisseurs and amateurs, all those who have repeatedly studied the works of the old masters in the galleries of Europe, there is not one person "competent to decide whether or not the Dürr collection contains valuable old masters." There is no person who "could go into the Dürr gallery and say, That picture is a Rembrandt, that a Titian, that a Veronese.'" Now, if among all the instructed artclasses in America there is no one who can do this thing, what in the name of wonder does it matter whether the pictures are genuine or not? If every characteristic, every quality, every element of worth in a Rembrandt, a Titian, or a Veronese, can be so successfully copied that no one can tell the difference, then, for every practical reason and every artreason, copies are exactly as good as originals. we want to know that a painting is an original," says some one. Why? If a painting is to go into a museum as a relic, as a memorial, distinctly as something rescued from the past, then we want to know that the relic is genuine. But in an art-gallery the case is very different. Here pictures are collected for the pleasure they give, the sentiments they awaken, and as a means of instruction in the principles of art; and each of these results all copies that can not be distinguished from originals must inevitably produce as effectually as originals. There is no disputing this conclusion. If the "well-known art-connoisseur" is right, everything that is really valuable in old art may be transferred to new canvases with entire success, and the great works of the past be repeated in every gallery in the world.

"But

But this is not all. The art-connoisseur goes on to say that the principle of selection with the Dürr pictures should be that of artistic merit, rather than by names. "Are they useful for purposes of study? that is the important point." Having asked this question, he declares that even here there are no competent judges-no one capable of deciding whether these paintings have artistic merit or not.

That is to say, no one here can discern between a genuine old master and a copy, and yet no one can tell whether a painting by an old master, genuine or not, has any artistic merit-which means that old art has such occult qualities that no one can detect them, and yet anybody can imitate them! Old art, as thus presented by one of its best friends, would seem to a wholly ignorant person about the sorriest humbug and emptiest piece of pretension on the surface of the globe.

But, of course, this presentation is not true. It is simply impossible for a copyist to reproduce any picture so successfully that it can not be distinguished from the original-impossible even to do this with any picture of to-day, let alone one of the past. A master himself even can not make copies of his own pictures that will be of equal quality. It is mentally and physically impossible for an imitation ever to express every quality of an original; and hence a very little knowledge of a master ought to enable one to detect counterfeits, however well executed. If counterfeits can not be easily detected, it is simply because the originals possess no individual quality, no method of expression peculiar to the painter. As to the charge that no one in America can detect the artistic merit of the paintings under consideration, this is as wild as all the rest. The old masters do not exhibit anything more than art itself exhibits, and art is universal in its principles. Principles do not change with place or period; a colorist must know color wherever he sees it; and the laws of drawing and composition are the same to-day as they were in the past. It is thus wholly certain that, if one can detect artistic merit in one set of pictures, old or new, he can detect it in any other set of pictures, old or new-a principle which effectually vacates the final allegation of our "wellknown art-connoisseur.”

MENTAL APTITUDES.

IN a recent article bearing the title of "Health in Education," Dr. B. W. Richardson, who has recently made himself an acknowledged leader in hygiene and kindred things, deplores the plan which now prevails of treating every boy and girl as if every boy and girl had the same nervous construction and mental aptitude. He says:

As it seems to me, there are as distinctly two grand divisions of mental aptitudes as there are two grand divisions of sex, and any attempt to convert one into the other is a certain failure. The two divisions I refer to are the analytical and the synthetical, or, in other words, the examining and the constructive types of mind.

In our common conversation on living men with whom we are conversant in life we are constantly observing upon them in respect to these two qualities of mind. We say of one man that he has no idea or plan of looking into details; he can not calculate accurately; he can not be intrusted with any minute labor of details; but he can construct anything. Give him the tools and materials for work, and he will build a house; but, if he had to collect and assort the tools and materials, he would

never construct at all. We say of another man that he is admirable at details, and can be intrusted with any work requiring minute definition, but he has no idea of putting anything together so as to produce a new result or effect.

Moreover, we assign to these different men distinctive services in the world. We understand them perfectly, and by an unwritten and, I may almost say, by a spontaneous estimate we reckon them up and give them their precise place in the affairs of life with which they are connected. It is as if by design of nature these classes of men, and it may be of women also, exist as pure types of intellectual form, have always existed and are always being repeated. In other words, it is as if they are definite families, and that out of them, as out of a dual nature, that human organization of thought, which we call history, is educed.

The elements of the analytical and synthetical minds appear on a large scale in the pursuits which men follow. The mathematician is analytical, and he, in whatever science his powers are called forth, is always working on the analytical line. He may be an astronomer, a chemist, a navigator, an engineer, an architect, a physician, a painter; but, whatever he is, all his work is by analysis. We often wonder at his labor, at his accuracy, at his fidelity. We may say of him that he approaches Nature herself in the magnitude and perfection of his results, but we never say of him that he is inventive or constructive. From him much that is quite new comes forth, but it is always something that he has hauled out of the dark recesses he lays his treasures at our feet, and we are content to admire and wonder. We may be entranced with our view of the produce of this man, but he very rarely kindles our enthusiasm for him as a man, and very often we find that no credit has been given to him as himself deserving of it. We praise only his industry. The poet is, as a rule, synthetical. This does not always follow, but it usually does, and I think we may fairly say that every man of a purely constructive mind is a poet, albeit we may not be able to say that every poet is constructive. But in whatever particular phase of life and action he exists he shows his synthesis distinctively. His tendency is naturally to drift into such labors as are inventive and constructive. Frequently he avails himself of the labors of the analyst whom he unconsciously follows, believing meantime in himself alone. He makes for us romance in literature; mechanical instruments in handicraft; pictures in art; tunes and melodies in music; plays and epics and songs in poetry; strategies in war; laws in Parliament; speculations in commerce; methods

in science.

The two orders of men are often as distinct in feeling as they are in work. They do not love each other, and they admire each other little. Jealousy does not separate them, but innate repulsion. The analytical looks on the synthetical scholar as wild, untrustworthy, presuming, hasty, dangerous. The synthetical looks on the analytical with pity, or it may be contempt, as on one narrow, conceited, and so cautious as to be helpless; a bird that has never been fledged, or, being fledged, has not dared to stretch out his wings to fly.

It has in rarest instances happened that the two natures have been combined in one and the same person. It is, I think, probable that this combination has been the reason for the appearance of the six or seven greatest of mankind. As a general fact, however, the combination has not been fortunate. It has most frequently produced startling mediocrities, whose claims to greatness have been sources of disputation rather than instances of acknowledged excellence.

These orders of mind, distinctive of the distinct, are in their primitive forms so essential to the course of progress that it is difficult to assign priority of value to either. The analytical mind seems to be most industrious and soundest in practice: the synthetical, the most brilliant, and, when on the right track, the most astounding, in the effects it produces. The analytical is the first parent of knowledge, the synthetical the second-both necessary.

To apply this reasoning to our present argument, I maintain that, as the child is the father of the man, so in every child there is always to be detected, if it be a child of any parts at all, the type of mind. I will undertake to say that every experienced teacher could divide his school into these two great analytical and synthetical classes. He might have a few who combine both powers, and he would no doubt have a residuum, a true caput mortuum, that had no distinctive powers at all; but he would have the two distinctives. He would have the scholars who could analyze as easily as they could run or walk, and to whom the mathematical problem and all that may be called analytical is as easy as play, but who have little inventive or constructive power. He would have the scholars whose minds are ever open to impressions from outer natural phenomena, who have quick original ideas, who have, it may be, the true poetic sentiment, but who can not grasp the analytical and detailed departments of learning at all. . . .

The moral I draw from these outlines of natural fact is that in teaching it is injury of mind, and thereby injury of body, to try to force analytical minds into synthetical grooves, or to try to force synthetical minds into analytical.

It must be admitted that Dr. Richardson has

great theoretical and practical knowledge of the subjects which he discusses, and that he is generally wise and discriminating; but assuredly in the passage quoted above his generalization is much too broad. There are, it is true, just such distinct characteristics of mind as he describes ; but we imagine that, instead of being commonly manifested in two distinct groups of individuals, they generally are more or less effectually combined in the same person. Perhaps it would be better to say ineffectually combined, for the majority of mankind appear to have neither analysis nor synthesis, but live on with a minimum of intellectual force. In all cases, when clearly separated, where the individual is distinctly either analytical or synthetical, he becomes conspicuous for his successes and his failures, for the mistakes he makes in one direction and the achievements that crown him in another. This separation gives us what the world so much delights in-the man of individuality, of strong likes and dislikes, of narrow but vehement purpose. The aptitudes of such individuals are too manifest for any mistake as to their character of mind; and we may well believe that, if people generally fell into two such obvious tendencies, education would long since have been adapted to their manifest needs. But the average human mind is far too complex to admit of such easy diagnosis. A great majority of people seem to have no vocation whatever, and fall readily into whatever groove circumstances may place them; with others, analysis and synthesis dispute for sovereignty, leaving it difficult to determine which tendency is the most marked.

The points of contact and sympathy are, as it is, few enough, but if the world were generally divided into two opposing groups, such as Dr. Richardson describes, social life and coöperation would be almost impossible. No one would love poetry but poets, no one be in sympathy with art but artists; there would be no students of philosophy but philosophers; a line of demarkation would exist more distinct even than that of race, for races do commingle, while these two mental forces would always stand hostile or dead to each other. Fortunately, our mentality is catholic enough to bring us all within, at least, a measure of appreciation.

There is one other consideration. If it were true that the human mind is separated into two such distinct classes, then ought not education endeavor to correct this one-sidedness rather than administer to it? It would be unwise, doubtless, to teach mathematics to one absolutely incapable of mathematics; but commonly it is not so much incapacity as distaste that afflicts the person, and education would perform its very best purpose if it succeeded in developing that person's latent powers, and establishing a balance and harmony of intellectual forces. Power of analysis is exactly what the synthetical mind needs in order to fit it for the world's work; why, then, should not education endeavor to strengthen the constitutional defect? And, of course, the same principle is true of the exclusively analytical mind. The masters of education have not been so blind as Dr. Richardson implies. No doubt the curriculum of the schools is commonly too rigid, and there are probably, now and then, individuals wholly unfitted by mental constitution for the studies there set down; but, inasmuch as the real purpose of education is to develop powers, bring forth latent talents, and produce harmony and balance of parts, the system pursued has not, as a whole, been altogether wrong.

WESTERN TORNADOES.

THE destructive tornadoes that occur now so frequently in the West open the question whether a very serious mistake has not been made in the style of building in that section. The West, for the most part, has in its houses followed the example of the Eastern States, without regarding the modifications that difference of climate and other changes of conditions require. In the East the country is un

dulating and generally well protected, but in the West the open plains, over which fierce winds sweep at frequent intervals, show that a style of house well adapted to one section is wholly unsuited to the other; and yet we find commonly the same kind of structure in both. In earthquake-countries houses are built with the danger to which they are exposed kept specially in view; and now the liability of the West to tornadoes indicates the necessity of a similar adaptation of architecture. So far, indeed, from there having been any modification to meet the peculiar danger to which they are liable, the Western houses are generally peculiarly slight in structure, being constructed of boards on light frames that are merely pinned to their foundations. With rightly constructed houses we should scarcely hear of such destructive work as occurred recently in Missouri, where a whole village was nearly destroyed and many lives sacrificed. Low houses with broad walls, and with their roofs weighted after the manner of the Swiss with heavy stones, would, we should judge, resist even tornadoes with success. But, of course, the best method can be arrived at only after a due examination of all the facts; and such material must be selected as can be readily obtained.

But

The West is subject, as we all know, to great extremes of heat and cold, as well as to terrible winds; and yet houses are ordinarily constructed with no idea of adequate protection against heat, cold, or wind. The summer suns pierce the thin clapboards and turn the interior into an oven, while the winter cold as readily penetrates the slight screen which it encounters. He would render that section a great service who devised a house that would adequately protect its inmates against each of these evils. Houses with open, interior courts, after the manner of those in use in tropical countries, would give comfortable domiciles in the summer season. thick walls are the main thing for summer as well as for winter, for resistance against the rays of the sun as well as against blasts of wind and the insidious approaches of frost. To secure these might not earth be employed, especially in sections where stone is scarce and bricks are costly? All that we can do, however, is to urge upon the attention of our Western friends the necessity of some radical change in their architecture; and, once this is fully realized, it is certain that suggestions will abound, and properly conducted experiments be entered upon in order to secure the desired result.

THE

HE orderly and consecutive publication of the successive parts of Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy" has been so often deviated from of late, that with the appearance of each new volume it is necessary to explain its proper place in the general scheme and the relation which it bears to the other portions of the exposition. The newly

published "Ceremonial Institutions," then, is the first division of the second volume of the "Principles of Sociology," and belongs to an earlier place in the

*Ceremonial Institutions: Being Part IV, of the Principles of Sociology. (The first Portion of Vol. II.) By Herbert Spencer. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo, pp. 237.