ist, and Anatole France would have proclaimed him, for they both held that beauty was the touchstone for worth. Judged by his contribution to literature, he was a man of culture and he had illumination and understanding. I can understand that it interests physicians, especially psychiatrists, to investigate the ancestry and study the conduct of men who agitated the waters of their time; but I cannot understand what bearing heritage or behavior has on their contribution to literature. How does it concern the seeker of emotional solace or intellectual sustenance to know that Poe and Verlaine were drunkards, that Rimbaud and Baudelaire were inverted genesically; that Hearn's father was an Irish rake devoid of parental responsibility, his mother an Ionian of composite ancestry profoundly psychopathic who married a Jew? Mr. Tinker says, "Hearn's peculiarities and mental affinities were entirely the result of idiosyncrasies of ancestry and youthful environment." Well, is Hearn any different in that respect from the whole world? Does Mr. Tinker aim to do what Mr. White recently attempted to do for Woodrow Wilson: allot his cardiac virtues to the Wilsons and his cerebral gifts to the Woodrows? I suppose he would attribute his bulimia and illassible sexual cravings to Charles Bush Hearn; his tenderness for cats and his desire to create beauty to Rosa Tessima; his Jesuit phobia to the strain of English blood; his penchant for gastronomics to the Turk strain; his Wanderlust to an ancestral Arab; his passion for personal cleanliness to a gypsy forebear who had learned that there are few more pleasant experiences than those of bathing; his pride to a remote Moor; but his sensitiveness came from his wall eye all his friends say that. Mr. Tinker thinks "his warring inherited instincts were to have a large part in moulding his life, for they made of his soul a battleground. Frank Oriental sensuousness was shamed, but not curbed, by Anglo-Saxon self-control. Gallic expansiveness tried to break through Arab impassivity, and all the while, Gypsy lure of the road and love of new location lashed his life to restlessness; in short, what one set of inherited impulses bade him do, another inhibited, until all constructive action was paralysed." ery high sex bend the knee Well, there would deny Lafcadio Hearn's soul as it has been revealed to me from a long intimacy with his writings is not my idea of a battleground. Undoubtedly his instincts had much to do with shaping his life. They have in shaping the life of anyone who amounts to something. Lafcadio Hearn had a coefficient and he did no to church and convention. are others, and I fancy th that their souls are battlegrounds. And this paralysis of constructive action, how does that show itself? Certainly not in New Orleans, more certainly not in Japan. Perhaps in Martinique? The heat and the atmosphere there make for lassitude that is tantamount to paralysis. We are perhaps on safer ground in attributing it to them than to warring impulses. I need scarcely add that I do not admit Hearn's "paralysis of constructive action". Mr. Tinker's book is a wrong picture of Lafcadio Hearn, but it is not the author's fault. It is Hearn's fault. He should not have philandered with Althea Foley; he should have spurned Dr. Gould's advances; and knowing Denny Corcoran's record he should have avoided him; and we can never forgive him for not wearing stylebuilt clothes by Smart, Daffner & Harx. Had he done so he would not have had Krehbiel's door slammed in his face, nor would the great musical critic have had occasion to write the letter, Cæsarean in brevity and Nelsonian in construction: "Dear Hearn, you can go to Japan, or you can go to Hell." Suppose Mr. Tinker were to get drunk and stay so more or less for a week, and that I should shadow him with a camera and notebook. Does anyone think that my record of his conduct and my picture of him would be correct or adequate? I do not. It might do him a great injustice. (This is the first of a series of three articles on contemporary biography and autobiography.) OUTLINES By John Erskine R. WELLS made the outline life must leave out something, every MR. popular, or at least he discovered in the reader of today the unsuspected thirst for outlines. We have had "The Outline of Science", "The Outline of Art", "The Outline of Literature", the "Wonders of the Past" (an "illustrated survey of the marvels of antiquarian research in all parts of the world"), "The World of To-day" (a survey "of the things every intelligent person would like to know of the various countries and peoples of the world"), and doubtless other admirable series less familiar to the present writer, and they have all come, as it seems, in the wake of the famous "Outline of History". Though these works vary in excellence, they are all so good, so informing and so entertaining, that it need not surprise us to find them, or at least one of them, in almost every home where books are bought at all. But why are they called Outlines? What is the difference between an Outline of Art and a History of Art? Can an Outline of History be anything more or less than-history? This magic word "outline" will bear some looking into. The dictionary says that an outline is the line which marks the outer limits of an object or figure. An outline of history, therefore, would give us in succession those events which the outliner thought the high points or the outer limits of history. Would any historian pretend to do otherwise? From any outline, as the word implies, something is omitted. But all human accounts of intelligible story is a selection of essentials, and even the portrait which is at the furthest remove from a sketch will go to the heart of the subject, as we say, or get under its skin. The dictionary also says that an outline is a preliminary sketch or a plan, but this meaning hardly colors the present consumption of outlines. Mr. Wells, to be sure, suggested that his outline would be revised and readjusted from time to time, but most readers seem to think their copy of his book is final; and the later outlines in other fields are of a satisfying fulness. So far as the general public is concerned, the "Outline" in these titles probably means nothing very subtle; to them it probably ministers the enticing hope that the books won't be hard to read - like the "Simple" or "Short" or "Easy Method" that encouraged and deluded us on the front page of our school arithmetics. When you buy an outline of something, you have reason to think that much of the difficult subject will not even be mentioned; and except for a few intransigent intellectuals, we all at times are brightened in the search for truth by the assurance that we are finding a part and not the whole. We want information, but not too much of it, and not at too high a price. The advertisement in the newspaper warns us that if we have not read enough to keep conversation going, we shall not be asked out to dinner, and the other young man, who wisely reads his ten minutes a day, will win the favor of the girl we like. But not too much information, of course, and not too thorough; we have heard of scholars who for social purposes were dull. Some such meaning is in the word for the most careless patrons of Outlines, and perhaps even the more thoughtful readers accept without demur the description of Outlines which usually appears on their cover jackets, promising conciseness and protection from scholarly blight. "In this new addition to the Outline series, there is no attempt to cover all the details of the history of Art or to indulge in learned argument or criticism. The main purpose is to reproduce as many as possible of the great pictures in the world and to say enough about their painters for the reader to understand what are their peculiar characteristics, and what are the qualities of the work that make it beautiful and inspiring. The Outline of Art is not intended for the critic and the expert, but rather for the general public wishing for guidance to the great art treasures of the world." Such a description would not be worth quoting if the work in question were inferior in plan or execution; what holds our attention for the moment is the advantage the work enjoys with certain numerous readers just because it is an Outline and not a History of Art. Elie Faure has given us a History of Art, illustrated like the Outline, with sufficient discussion to make the masterpieces intelligible, and put into language which anyone who cares for art at all can understand. For the moment it is not a question whether Elie Faure or Sir William Orpen has given us the better account of art. The question is why one book is called a history and the other seductive name! an outline. er among the more competent is convinced that the experts, because of desperate and selfish impulses to add value to themselves, have surrounded their subject with unnecessary difficulties, irrelevant disciplines, technical jargon; and an Outline seems to give hope that any sane intelligence may cut through the pedantry and liberate the subject. Whether or not the experts are so bad, and whether an Outline is the cure for them, at least the idea is current and must be reckoned with if we wish to account for all the allurements in the word. The illustration is on the cover of Professor J. A. Thomson's splendid "Outline of Science". "This work gives the intelligent student-citizen, otherwise called 'the man in the street', a bunch of intellectual keys by which to open doors which have hitherto been shut to him, partly because he got no glimpse of the treasures behind the doors, and partly because the portals were made forbidding by an unnecessary display of technicalities." The display of technicalities, then, as we men in the street suspected, has been unnecessary? We are free at last. Let us have a look at this science (four octavo volumes, 1,220 pages, 800 illustrations), and see what the professors and historians have been keeping from us so long. The reader who is attracted by “Outline" in his titles might be surprised if he knew what the books really give him, if he knew what it is in them that really fascinates and compliments his intelligence. His Outlines are histories under an easy name, but their charm is that they are less fact than interpretation, less history than philosophy. The dictionary forgot to tell us clearly, whatever it implied, that an outline is a philosophy. We delighted in Mr. Wells's book because he boldly The scholarly blight. Many a read- interpreted the world for us. We have delighted in Professor James Harvey Robinson and in Hendrik Van Loon for the same reason. Such writers, of whom the number grows, differ in scope and quality, but they all bring a clarifying philosophy of one kind or another after decades of thick-accumulating fact. We were led to believe that modern life was so complicated that no one man could understand it all. In a sense it is true that no one man can know it all, and for that inability there is little regret. But the suggestion that no man can understand his world has never been popular and never will be. There is too much to see and hear in detail, but we may rise above it all in our imagination and take a balloon view of the landscape even while we remain the humble man in the street; and we have never doubted that the noble and serious among us might look once more from Pisgah, and understand what our lengthy pilgrimage is all about. "History", says Mr. Van Loon in his fine preface, "is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done." There it is. Our Outlines give us the benefit of the full view. There were no elevators before, but the Outlines now serve for a lift. It is almost the best intellectual sign of the times, that books which confer a strong meaning on life have been so popular. Not all of us have approved the particular philosophy of each Outline; sound historians have thought Mr. Wells quite wrong, and philosophers have smiled at him. But they have neglected to give us instead their own outline of history; and until they do so we shall read him, for some out line we must have. Too much of science and scholarship has been merely defensive preoccupied with the cult of method and the fear of making a mistake. mistake. Good qualities, but the essence of motion is not in them. "The thoughts of these men", as Mr. Santayana said, "are like the Sibylline leaves, profound but lost." We are not willing to go to the grave without some guess as to the whole drama enacting about us at least a guess, if nothing more, a hazard which will have the appearance of light and will be harmonious with itself. No need to tell us that there are plenty of philosophies and religions already; we know too well that they all are partizan against each other, and to some extent at war with themselves. Perhaps in our religious moods we wish to be partizan. But there is another yearning of the mind which only the broad Tower view will satisfy. Our desire to see life in outline meets, of course, with unequal success. "The Outline of Science" is perhaps the best effort in this kind, probably because the scientists have been working for the last sixty years or so on one general hypothesis. No matter then how widely the schools of science differ, nor how deeply the hypothesis may often have seemed smothered by the phenomena, it is not surprising that a competent scientist with a gift for exposition should be able to tell us clearly, when we are ready to hear, just what the world means to him. In the account of archæological remains ("Wonders of the Past") the success is less in the outline than in the information; here are these interesting remains, the world over, all speaking of lost civilizations. Civilizations sooner or later are lost or displaced; beyond this simple philosophy there is little to say, and we turn our curious gaze from one |