rator. Not domitable courage and never-failing readi- tion, and to his entire confidence in the narness of resource. The time and manner of - Tom Sylvester, a Novel, by T. R. the story will, of course, suggest compari- Sullivan. (Scribners.) It is hardly so sons with Dumas ; but while the author can- much in incident or character as in the not rival the master, he proves an excellent total impression of scenes and phases of second. The narrative is exceedingly well life that the value of this book lies. constructed, and till the end is reached it is that it is ill conceived or executed as a not certain that the Sieur de Marsac will novel; on the contrary, it is put together win his way through the dangers encom- with skill, especially of the sort that bepassing him, and gain his heart's desire. speaks the constructive work of a writer of Without affectation of style or obvious ef- plays. The passing of a New England boy fort, the book has the spirit of the time; from quiet village life into the whirl of and though it is a story of adventure, the work and pleasure in Paris, where he suf adventurers have character and life. Fore- fers hard knocks, and his return to his namost among these is the brave, modest, and tive land, which he looks upon with changed loyal Huguenot gentleman who in telling and wiser eyes, give an opportunity for a the tale unconsciously depicts himself, while careful and interesting study, and the opporthe historical personages introduced, the tunity is taken. —A Book of Strange Sins, two King Henries, Rosny, and the rest, are by Coulson Kernahan. (Ward, Lock & sketched with a touch at once vigorous and Bowden, Limited, London.) After all, these true. The Wheel of Time, and Other "strange sins are merely the novel-readStories, by Henry James. (Harpers.) The er's old friends, drink, lust, murder, suicide, other stories are but two, and Collaboration and so on through the catalogue of crimes. and Owen Wingrave are their titles. On The short stories of which the book is made the whole, it is Collaboration which makes up are a series of studies in criminal fiction, the keenest impression of the three. This so to call it without any purpose of quesmay be merely because it comes so soon tioning the author's innocence. Here and after The Lesson of the Master, and by a there are touches of vigor and originality, new example of the sacrifices the children but on the whole one cannot feel that Mr. of art are capable of making for art's sake Kernahan adds materially to one's underquickens an impression already produced. standing of the motives and sufferings of the In order to collaborate with a German mu- criminal. Marked "Personal," by Anna sician, a young French writer gives up his Katharine Green [Mrs. Charles Rohlfs]. vehemently Gallic fiancée; and where in (Putnams.) A sensational novel, pure and the previous story the irony of the sacri- simple, wherein the author shows her usual fice was made very bitter, it is merely sug- skill in constructing an ingenious plot, pergested here in the intimation that in the vaded by a mystery not to be solved till end the German wins the love the French- the last pages are reached. In this inman had abandoned. One might almost stance, it is the case of two apparently exbe cynical touching the coin in which art emplary gentlemen, who are summoned, pays her children back. Twenty Years at one from Washington, the other from BufSea, or, Leaves from my Old Log - Books, falo, to meet in a house in New York, and by Frederic Stanhope Hill. (Houghton.) there simultaneously to commit suicide in When one considers that Mr. Hill recounts the presence of the sender of the messages. an experience in the merchant service, taken They escape for the time, only to be shadup in boyhood, followed by an interval of owed by Revenge, and brought to account business, and then by an engagement in at last. Of course the characters exist some of the exciting events of the war for merely as necessary agents in carrying on the Union, in the naval service, it is easy to the story. The Copperhead, by Harold see what stuff he had out of which to weave Frederic. (Scribners.) Mr. Frederic has his yarns. The best of it is that the story told a story of war times in the Mohawk has been told simply, strongly, and with Valley before. In this book, as the title keen spirit. We regret only that, by re-. indicates, it is the civil war which provides course to a semi-fictitious form, Mr. Hill him with his theme. The story's interest has robbed the book a little of that appeal lies mainly in the clear picture it draws of which fact makes to the reader's imagina- the feeling of country people who stayed at home, the feeling, when a "copperhead" was involved, which divided houses against themselves, and neighbors against one another even to the shedding of blood. In the form of fiction such phases of the war are best brought out, and Mr. Frederic's story may be taken as a telling contribution to the history of the period. - Polly Oliver's Problem, by Kate Douglas Wiggin. (Houghton.) Mrs. Wiggin is at her best in this story, for it enables her to throw herself by imagination into the life of a young girl just opening into womanhood, and to busy herself with a problem which more and more confronts the young girl, namely, how to find genuine expression of herself, and at the same time retain all that makes womanhood essentially different from manhood. Without any consciousness of a mission, the book does contribute toward the solution of the problem. -Two Soldiers and a Politician, by Clinton Ross. (Putnams.) This very small book is defined as a study in portraiture, and the three subjects who have sat to the painter are General Wolfe, Talleyrand, and an imaginary British officer in our own Revolution. The miniature stories in which these characters figure are moderately, not supremely successful; and when so little of quantity is given, one feels the more justified in looking for a maximum of quality. -The Watchmaker's Wife, and Other Stories, by Frank R. Stockton. (Scribners.) There is always an access to honest pleasure when a fresh volume of Mr. Stockton's stories comes out. He scatters his separate tales so in the magazines that some parts of every volume are sure to be new to his most faithful readers, and a new story by Stockton is always new. Never did one keep the same manner so unchangeably, and yet vary the incidents so widely. It is interesting, by the way, to note how frequently this writer adds to the effectiveness of his stories by making the storyteller one of the characters. It is an affidavit of the credibility of the tale, which the tale sometimes requires. — Drolls from Shadow Land, by J. H. Pearce. (Macmillan.) The best of the little tales in this book are bits of Cornish folk lore, or what may easily pass for it, even if the author's invention is their true source. Most of the other Drolls are allegories of life and death, and, falling short of supreme excellence in their way, are only as satisfactory as the shadow dance that fills the time between acts. - Truth in Fiction, Twelve Tales with a Moral, by Paul Carus. (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago.) We had almost written Twelve Morals with a Tale, so evidently is the tale in each case a somewhat clumsily constructed cart for carrying moral burdens of greater or less value. Truth on the title-page, also, does not mean truth to nature in the stories, but simply the author's conception of this or that phase of truth which he has tried to illustrate by fiction. O Fiction, Fiction, how many crimes are committed in thy name! Rachel Stanwood, a Story of the Middle of the Nineteenth Century, by Lucy Gibbons Morse. (Houghton.) A spirited story, full of that subtle reality which is incommunicable by books or documents, and comes only from a participation in the life itself. The abolition society of New York, with its infusion of Quaker blood, is admirably presented, and the humor as well as the tragedy involved springs naturally from the author's use of her material. Since our last mention of Magazine Books, Stories of Italy have been added to the series of Stories from Scribner, and Short Stories to Harper's Distaff Series. Education and Textbooks. If any one wants his German declensions simplified and symbolized, so as to make their acquisition rapid and permanent, let him send to the publisher (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y.) for Mr. William A. Wheatley's little treatise on the subject. To the list of Literature Primers (Macmillan) should be added Chaucer, by Alfred W. Pollard, a sensible little volume, though we could wish the author had troubled himself less about the poet's rank, for that is one of the most unprofitable of exercises. History of the Philosophy of Pedagogics, by Charles Wesley Bennett. (Bardeen.) This title and thirty-seven small pages ! THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB. THE thanks of all readers are The Country School Over due to the gentle Contributor Again. who, in a recent number of The Atlantic, so daintily set forth the charms of the old-fashioned country school. It may not be unwelcome news to her and many others that the educational world is now going through a most wholesome reaction in favor of precisely the principles which underlay that venerable institution. Not that any one in those days thought much about principles in education, - far from it. The old "district school " and "academy" were not built upon theories. They were the simple expression of the will of a sturdy community to give its boys and girls a chance, as good a chance as the community could afford to pay for. They sought their teachers where these could best be found, in the ranks of vigorous youth who were earning their way through the colleges of New England. They took in all the pupils who cared to come, of all ages and at all stages of progress, and sorted them out as best they could, in a terribly unscientific but thoroughly effective fashion. They had no curriculum, no notions of "time allotments" and "harmonious development" and "logical sequence " and the rest of it, but only a simple and direct way of getting children to read, write, and cipher at a very early age, and to be ashamed if they did it badly. Then - and here was the great unconscious principle that the country school was demonstrating - wherever any pupil had a point of individuality to work upon, some taste or some talent, there the teacher found his opportunity. The college youth, himself just waking up to the charm of literature or the fascination of scientific experiment, was led instinctively to pass on to his inquiring pupil some spark of the divine fire of original study. The close personality of the relation gave a power to the teaching which no mechanical system could ever attain. It was the method which the experience of the world, from Socrates down, has shown to be the only effective one, the method of direct impact of one mind on another. Under this system, which was no system, the mind of the pupil blossomed out into the most vigorous growth of which it was capable. It never got the ruinous notion that a machine was going to do its work for it; there was no machine. If the teacher had anything in him, it was called out by the fresh, unspoiled enthusiasm of the scholar. There was no such thing as "getting through" the country school. The pupil went there term after term, year after year, simply demanding, as did the pupils of ancient Greece and those of the fair early days of the mediaæval universities, whatever new the teacher of the moment had to give. There was no "course," because there were no limitations of subject or of time. In that procession of active youth coming from the larger life of the college there was sure to be, sooner or later, some representative of every subject of study. The strain on the personality of the teacher was immense, -no reader of Elsie Venner can forget that, and it produced a response. Individual answered to individual, and out of this give-and-take came originality. Then there was a change. All this was found to be unscientific. The method must be made conscious of itself. M. Jourdain must be made to see that he had been speaking prose all his life, and to realize what a fine thing it was to speak prose. There arose a being whose shadow has since darkened all the land, the "educator." To be simply a teacher was no longer enough; we must have educators, and that quickly. This hodge-podge of pupils of different ages must be broken up into "grades." Every pupil belonged in a grade, and there he must go and stay; if at the given time there were no grade into which he precisely fitted, so much the worse for him; away with him into the outer darkness! The graded school became the idol of the educator. It commended itself to all that race of men who are captivated by organization, and to whom a system is a precious thing. Give us only a system good enough, and enough of it, and the individual may be swallowed up in it without fear of harm. No matter whether teacher or pupil has anything particular in him; the system will do the business. So for a generation we have had the graded school in all its beautiful symmetry, and what is the result? Our community wakes up suddenly to the conviction that the youth of to-day, the product of the educational mill, is not better than his fathers. He has heard of more things, but he is no better able to take hold of a thing and do it than his grandfathers were. There is no intelligent college professor to-day who would not rather have to do with a rough-finished, sturdy lad, who had tumbled up somehow by his own wit and energy in the irregular give-and-take of a country academy, than with a youth of equal natural parts who has been taught to rely upon the machine to give him what he is to have. Let any one study the recommendations of conventions and committees for remedying present educational ills, and he will see that they are all in the line of a return to the methods of the country school. Halfyearly promotions, liberty to "skip a class," some freedom in the choice of studies, the widening of the roads leading to college, more time to be given to the individual pupil, a chance for the teacher to take a year off for further study, less unreasoning repetition of work already done, that dull pupils may be pulled along while brighter ones are kept back, all these things remind us precisely of the conditions of the country academy a generation ago. Another sign is the rapid growth of private schools, where the similarity is often still greater, and whither boys are sent in the hope that they may escape the mechanical process of the city public school. Everywhere we are meeting the demand for a more general recognition of the individual. The institution, it is being seen, will not do the work. After all, it is the teacher who affects the pupil, and we are coming more and more to learn that the teacher, like every other artist, is born, not made, least of all, made by machinery. Let us give the old country school its full share of credit in bringing about this healthier tone, for it lives still, and long life to it! Inhuman - It is genial Robbie Burns Documents. who takes time from his merry war with Dame Fortune to lament over "man's inhumanity to man," but little did the handsome poet divine the refinement of cruelty to which that inhumanity was yet to be carried. Why does not some philan thropist incorporate a society for the protection of the gifted, an organization for the defense of poets, musicians, explorers, and inventors against patent devices for deliberate and protracted torture? Was it not enough that they should be pilloried in newspaper cuts; that their most private and sacred affairs should be posted at the cross-roads, their fine frenzies of imagination accepted as a frank unveiling of inner life, and their triumphs of creative genius declared to be veritable autobiography? Nay, verily, but modern journalism invents a new method of inquisition, digs down through the strata of history in search of paleozoic remains, and sets them up to show the hero in every stage of development. "Insatiate monster! would not one suffice?" Most of us have these specimens of early art hidden away in safe recesses of cabinets and bureau drawers, cherished in spite of their grotesqueness, and brought out occasionally at family festivals to the diversion of the youngsters. It used to be a solemn thing to "hev yer picter took," and solemnity hung like a pall over the finished result. Having survived the first stage of the process, you looked with trembling expectancy at the wet, glistening thing carefully held for your inspection between the thumb and finger of the wizard, only to feel your heart sink to fathomless depths at the image which confronted you. An excellent likeness, the artist (!) assured you, how could it be otherwise when it was simply a reflection of yourself ? — and with a shuddering recollection of what you had read about the mysterious power of the sunbeam to pierce beneath the surface and reveal the inner nature, you accepted the caricature and hid it away, hoping you might not be arrested on its evidence as a hypocrite and deceiver. You even gathered courage to repeat the experiment, with better results, as the years went on and the processes of art were perfected; but while you do not deny your antecedents, you are not proud of them; you look upon them as a record of the development of art rather than of personal history. The man may be able to smile at the goggle-eyed baby, whose pulpy figure is bolstered up for the occasion by the maternal arm, or the imbecile creature, with absurd pinafore and ruffles, staring blankly from his perch in the high-chair, but he would like to blot even from his own memory that self-satisfied, unlicked cub of fourteen. Then why, after study and thought and achievement have shaped and chiseled his face into a dignity and character that make it the expression of the man himself, should these preliminary studies be put on exhibition, and an idle public called in to see how a poet was made? It is a clear case for the Anti-Vivisection Society, and they should take it up if only to protect us from the greater evils with which we are threatened. For does not one's brain congeal at the thought of what may be waiting just around the turn of the century, when a great electrician sees though "dimly," thank Heaven! - the possible perfection of a machine "for the registration of unwritten, unspoken thought, and its reproduction at any indefinite time afterwards"? Forbid it, merciful powers! What would become of trade and politics, of society and friendly intercourse? Who but idiots and babies could safely venture abroad? Nay, how would any one be sure, by day or by night, that he had not been surreptitiously attached to a machine, and was thinking into the city office of the Public Investigator? If the poet and the novelist choose to sit down and gossip before a phonograph, so letting us into the secrets of inspiration, we will not complain. It is soothing to our irritated. feelings to learn that the great promoter of hesitancy did not himself know whether it was the lady or the tiger. But let us at least be able to keep our unspoken thoughts to ourselves, and guard the privacy of our own brains from the desolating foot of the interviewer and exhibitor. roundings. But at dusk, at night, by lamplight, or under the white, insinuating moonbeams, the mirror assumes a distinctive and uncanny character of its own. Then it is that it reflects that which we shrink from seeing. Then it is that our own eyes meet us with an unnatural stare and a piercing intelligence, as if another soul were watching us from their depths with furtive, startled inquiry. Then it is that the invisible something in the room, from which the merciful dullness of mortality has hitherto saved us, may at any instant take sudden shape, and be seen, not in its own form, but reflected in the treacherous glass, which, like the treacherous water, has the power of betraying things that the air, man's friendly element, refuses to reveal. This wise mistrust of the ghostly mirror is so old and so far spread that we meet with it in the folk lore of every land. An English tradition warns us that the new moon, which brings us such good fortune when we look at it in the calm evening sky, carries a message of evil to those who see it first reflected in a looking-glass. For such unlucky mortals the lunar virus distills slow poison and corroding care. The child who is suffered to see his own image in a mirror before he is a year old is marked out for trouble and many disappointments. The friends who glance at their reflections standing side by side are doomed to quick dissension. The Swedish girl who looks into her glass by candlelight risks the loss of her lover. A universal superstition, which has found its way even to our own prosaic time and country, forbids a bride to see herself in a mirror after her toilet is completed. If she be discreet, she turns away from that fair picture which pleases her so well, and then draws on her glove, or has some tiny ribbon, flower, or jewel fastened to her gown, that the sour Fates may be appeased, and evil averted from her threshold. In Warwickshire and other parts of rural England it was long the custom to cover all the looking-glasses in a house of death, lest some affrighted mortal should behold in one the pale and shrouded corpse standing by his side. There is a ghastly story of a servant maid who, on leaving the chamber where her dead master lay, glanced in the uncovered mirror, and saw the sheeted figure on the bed beckoning her rigidly to its side.. |