as were the munificent donations to our new Medical School. Harvard will not let dilatoriness in this provision belie her character of Teuton promptness in right doing.

Aptly enough the week of Prince Henry's coming brought us another Teutonic event, the Danish concert. Again the University had to thank a loyal friend for the opportunity of learning something about one of the Teuton races that went to make the English and American breed. The greater part of Mrs. Hammer's gift has gone to the building up of a Scandinavian library at Harvard; but a portion has twice been given to providing a free concert, first of Norwegian, then of Danish, music. The value of these concerts was not only in making us acquainted with unfamiliar national forms of art, but in reminding us that music itself, the only vitally active fine art today, has received its greatest advancement, in composition and execution, at Germanic hands. To the donor and the performers of the concert we are grateful, as we were to Herr Conried and his company, for enabling us to learn at first hand something of native Germanic arts.

Looking back on the activity of such a week, it seems that Dr. Schofield's conviction, that "the Scandinavians, their languages and literatures, their history and culture, will no longer be unremembered at this representative American seat of learning," is certain to prove true not only of Scandinavian but of all the Teutonic interests whose hold on us has been strengthened by the visit of Prince Henry.

Book Notices.

"AMERICAN TRAITS." From the Point of View of a German. By Hugo Münsterberg. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.

Flattery and prejudiced disparagement from a foreigner who attempts to criticise American society, civilization, or government are equally displeasing to readers of good sense and self-respect. Absolute sanity, sincerity, and clearness, such as Professor Münsterberg has shown in his new book, tinged as they are with a genuine courtesy that makes their tone human rather than scientific, are qualities most welcome to all Americans who have an intelligent desire to see themselves as others see them and to profit by their outlook from the new point of view. Professor Münsterberg has done a very difficult piece of work better, perhaps, than it has ever been done before. Certainly he has given in American Traits five essays, dealing with important phases of our national life, which combine the cool insight of a trained psychologist, the literary instinct of a born writer, and the noble idealism of a German. Any one of these articles is food for more than one day's thinking, and the book as a whole calls for a volume of reply, comment, and appreciation. One essay in particular, however, that on "Scholarship,"-which Professor Münsterberg says in his preface holds a central place in his discussions, seems peculiarly pertinent to an academic audience, and deserving of especial notice at the present moment.

Productive scholarship in America, Professor Münsterberg finds, has not attained the commanding power it holds in Germany because the American universities are not properly differentiated in spirit from the colleges. The German gymnasium, to whose higher classes our college corresponds, distributes knowledge already collected; the German university, to which we have no exact counterpart, teaches method, criticism, and the independent

investigation that produces new knowledge. Original publication is the test of university success in Germany; but since the time and energy of our university scholars is dissipated in the routine of college teaching, we have little original publication. Not that we ought to separate the college and the university externally, but that we ought to recognize and develop the intrinsic difference in the temper of their work. The reason why our universities lack the scholastic ideal is that the community does not regard the scholar's life as a profession of high honor and social dignity. As long as the most brilliant and capable minds are not drawn to university posts by adequate pecuniary, social, and aesthetic rewards, so long American productive scholarship will not exert upon the world's thought the moulding influence that it ought to exercise.

The fundamental criticism to be passed on this conclusion, which is gospel truth as far as it goes, is that it does not go quite far enough: it fails to explain fully why the scholar's profession is not currently held in high esteem. One reason Professor Münsterberg has correctly found in America's dominant commercialism. As a people we are too busy, or think we are too busy, pursuing money and pleasure, to devote any of our best energy to discovering new scholarly truth. With the establishment of wealth and the growth of a leisure class able to look to higher enjoyment than mere transitory recreation from exacting labor, this cause will disappear. Two other causes, however, which Professor Münsterberg does not explicitly mention, still remain, and will require far more potent conjuration to break their spell. One of them lies in the nature of productive scholarship itself, the other in the temperament of the American people.

The term "productive scholarship" is in danger of misleading, because it really includes three distinct kinds of scholarship.—descriptive, constructive, creative. Descriptive scholarship is that which ascertains and states new individual facts. It is by nature discursive, sporadic; its products have the value of isolated, not of organic truth. It easily degenerates into unreasoning avidity for discrete pellets of knowledge, into mere "source-hunt

ing," as ignoble as the feverish thirst for money. It is this kind of “original research" that has cast discredit on productive scholarship, and made successful physicians, lawyers, and merchants despise the scholar because he is petty, narrow-minded, not a man of the world. Scholarship first becomes a liberal profession at the constructive stage when the transmuting touch of coordinative explanation connects bare facts into a system. History, economics, and the sciences are the most fertile fields for this kind of work: it is there that we find our Mommsens, our Mills, and our Darwins. Creative scholarship differs from constructive in that it is not so immediately dependent on descriptive truth. Facts must be behind it, of course, but far the greater part of its work is spun out of the scholar's own brain and personality. It does more than discover truth that always existed unknown, or explain known truth in a fresh way; it creates new truth out of the very stuff that thought is made of, truth which, but for the individuality of the scholar, could never have existed. Its field, then, is primarily in arts, letters, and philosophy. Now this complex nature of productive scholarship has kept the scholar's profession from being highly regarded by the community at large. For constructive and creative thought has been so little active in America that productive scholarship has become identified in the popular mind with degenerate descriptive scholarship.

We have still to explain, however, why there has been such paucity of constructive and creative thought among us. It is due to the second of the above-mentioned causes, the temperament of the American people. As a race we have no leisure. With our restless Elizabethan nature, made still more nervous by the infusion of French thought at a critical period of our nationality, we have a pathologic activity, both in work and in play, that leaves us no ripening repose for contemplation and formulation of theory. And the persistence of such activity through generations has been making us more and more constitutionally incapable of profound scholarship, till superficiality is today the curse of our education and of our university thought. No one realizes or laments this more than scholars themselves. They feel themselves

drawn into the maelstrom of unscholarly indeliberation, but under existing conditions are almost powerless to resist. What is to remedy those conditions and change our over-strenuous American character is the ultimate problem about productive scholarship. Perhaps as our civilization matures we shall get an adult seriousness and solidity that will make constructive and creative thought possible. Then productive scholarship will be respected of all and take its place in America as an ennobling profession.

One further comment seems worth while as throwing additional emphasis on this professional ideal. Always above its purpose for the distribution of knowledge, the American college has the duty of forming manly character. This end is just as vital in the German gymnasium; but we, with our scanter respect for learning, think that, after all, if we turn out good men it matters little how much they know or how thoroughly. Our fault lies in carrying the same spirit into the graduate school. There scholarship should be the dominant ideal. Of course a bad man cannot stay there, but it is not the function of the school to make him good. It has a right to assume that he is good by the time he has advanced so far, just as the college has a right to assume that its Freshmen can read and write and spell. The graduate school should be professional, as much so as the schools of law, of medicine, of divinity. Only such a professional ideal in the university will lift productive scholarship to its native height.

That such an ideal is growing one is inspired to believe when an American University can claim a scholar like Professor Münsterberg. To him we owe the latest leaven from the land that has given so much of its noblest and best to crude America.

R. M. G.

"EDWIN BOOTH." By Charles Townsend Copeland. The Beacon Biographies. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company.

The last instalment of the series of Beacon Biographies, Mr. Copeland's Edwin Booth, fulfils admirably the requirements of short biography. To