any outward ear, has this tireless and deathless spirit found its way to millions of human hearts that will ever love him and cherish his memory.

There is a conflict in the music-as in what music is there not?-always the two centres of its elliptic orbit, the storm centre and the centre of repose. He who in his youth "breathed the Orient and lay drunk with balm" encountered the fiercest blasts of hatred that blew in his time, even as in the valley of the Nile "the wind and cold hovered, awful, upon the edges of dreaming." His love of goodness and beauty was a passion. He would fain have seen that all was fair and good, and he strove to find it so; finding it otherwise, he strove to make it so. Thus, with no heart for satire, yet the discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods, and through his whole career as a writer he was often compelled to don the habit he was most loth to wear. Not thus unwillingly did he take up arms against the dragon wrongs which assailed the nation's heart-for he was the best knight of our time, a genuine crusader. Unwaveringly he met the bitter scoff of the discomfited foe whose disguises he had penetrated and the jeers of the censorious partisan. There was no uncertain sound in the clarion notes of his challenge to battle. But he was a lover of peace, and the retirement of his library and of his Ashfield home was dearer to him than the applause of the Senate Chamber or the triumphs of diplomacy as minister to the most stately of European courts. And yet he sacrificed the ease of many years to meet an obligation which to many honest men would have seemed to rest upon a too fastidious sense of honor.

They

As he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound. If the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?"

There were some shining days which are especially commemorated by the Easy Chair, made luminous by enthusiasms whose rapture is communicated to his readers with charming frankness. Such was the day when he met the Brownings in Florence. Oh, happy day!" How characteristic of him is the unreserved delight with which he so often reverts to the singing of Jenny Lind— "an unwasting music which has murmured and echoed through a life"; and how pleasant to us is his pleasure to remember that when she came forward to sing her farewell to America she bore in her hand the flowers he had sent her—a bouquet of white rose-buds, with a Maltese cross of deep carnations in the centre! The happiness of one we loved is so dear to us that we would gladly linger over all the felicities of a life that was not without its shadows and chastening sorrows: the years of youthful travel in the East, and of leisurely sojourn in Italy with Kensett and Hicks, in Switzerland and Germany and England; the earlier companionship of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dana, Ripley, and Margaret Fuller at Brook Farm; and the later friendships of his growing manhood, including the best and greatest of his contemporaries; the heroic moments of his country's triumphs, in which he was so great a part; and the unmarred pleasures of his home.

Such grace of fortune crowned his summer, which was so bountiful of grace to us. But, as he sang many years ago in the closing lines of his poem "The Reaper,"

"Though every summer green the plain,
This harvest cannot bloom again."

THE reader, after perusing Mr. Richard Harding Davis's story in this number, "The Boy Orator of Zepata City," need not be told the difference between the formal, elaborate expression which is the result of training, and that which springs from a real feeling, resting wholly upon the reality for its effectiveness. This is all told in the contrast between the sententious appeal made by the ambitious young attorney to the jury, and the artless plea of the prisoner at the bar. Zepata City is very proud of its civilization, of its new court - house, and of its boy orator, who has so flatteringly shown how far the struggling town has lifted itself height upon height above the rude wild life of its early days, leaving the prisoner, who belonged to that life, stranded behind, an outcast, with no longer an excuse for existence. Yet a few words from the prisoner, and the nobby town with its showy court-house and all its other brand-new splendors suddenly has vanished, and the Aladdin's lamp whose magic has wrought all these wonders seems somehow to have been stolen for a season, and now to have been gotten back by its proper Genius, who is work ing a spell of his own, after an old, old fashion-as old as Nature herself.

The magic spell is only too potent, and our neighbor the Study shows how in much of recent fiction it has lost its legitimate charm, becoming an unnatural touch-a power to blight and consume what it was meant to conserve.

Of natural realism, pure and simple, there is no better example than has been furnished by Miss Wilkins's work. No thing in the history of literature stands so entirely by itself as the career of this demure New England maiden, whose portrait is given in this number, with the concluding chapters of her first novel, "Jane Field."

Sometimes our attention is arrested by the work of a mere child, and we are attracted by its freshness, quaintness, and originality. We do not call it precocious, for it does not seem to us like what her elders are in the habit of doing. We are inclined to say that her elders have got too far away from her in their progression rather than that she has anticipated them. If we do not meddle with the child, suggesting models or insisting upon con

formity to well-established rules of literary composition, she will perhaps still listen to the gentle spirit that whispers in her ear and go on writing these wonderful things. These are the genuine unfoldings of genius.

This is really the story of Miss Wilkins's beginnings in literature, if we may call that literature which has no likeness to anything else that is so denominated, which is the spontaneous expression of a quality simply human and natural, but nevertheless distinctly personal, not to be defined except by saying what it is not. It is an exceptional quality in Miss Wilkins's case; it is so in all cases, but especially it seems so in hers because we are permitted to see it without any adulteration or sophistication. From the circumstances of her life she had the good fortune to be without tutors or advisers until her own peculiar culture had become a habit. She was also fortunate in that her early contributions fell into the hands of Miss Mary L. Booth, the first editor of HARPER'S BAZAR, who did not tell her to write like other people, but who saw the value of her singular gift, and kept her in the living lines she was following.

Miss Wilkins's method is as peculiar as her work. She does not transfer the material of every-day life, as observed by her, to her stories. These tales come to her as a series of pictures that flow from fancy's own inward suggestions, as ballads took shape before there was poetry in any other form. Because of their genuine human reality these sketches have humor, and that sympathetic touch which makes her pictures of life seem so like Millet's paintings.

To one who submits to her leading in this way Nature gives her own graces. Miss Wilkins's genius has given birth to an art all its own. In her later work the excellence of this art is apparent, and especially in the novel just concluded. But there has been no surrender of that personal quality which characterized her earliest tales, nor is there any mixture of conventional patterns with those of her free fancy. Long may she sit at her loom, our Lady of Shalott, and weave this rare rich tapestry, ever remembering

"A curse is on her if she stay

To look down to Camelot."

L'

I.

ITERATURE cannot escape its responsibilities. The literature of a people is largely the creator of the moral atmosphere of that people. From the word to the deed is but a step; from the printed suggestion to the unlawful act the way is as straight as the flight of an arrow. In our excessive concern for the absolute freedom of utterance and of publication, as well as freedom of thought, this responsibility of literature has been overlooked, and the relation of the written word to the moral sanity of society has not been calculated. In this time of increasing lawlessness; of impatience at the restraints of law; of the disposition of employers and employed, and of evildoers, and of communities suffering by evil-doers, to take the execution of the law into their own hands, or rather to substitute individual suggestions for legal enactments; of growing laxness as to social obligations, in regard to marriage, and as to condonation of known rascalities in business; of public confusion of mind as to right and wrong in so many cases in which a properly instructed conscience ought not to hesitate, such, for instance, as a man's duties to his family and to the state-it is imperative that we should look for the causes of demoralization. Is it due to the pushing of the doctrine of individualism to excess-an individualism which logically can only end in the rule of the strongest individual, that is, the rule of force? Is it unavoidable in a period of necessary license, in a day of transition out of various mental bondages and personal servitudes into a society where no law need be invoked, because no man will desire to do anything that is not right? Are we demoralized because we have cast away tradition, and are not instructed or guided by the lessons of the past, while materialistic science, which has destroyed so much that we used to rest in, created so much of self-confident expectation, and confused us as to the value of life and the way of life, and mechanical utilitarianism, with its cold doctrine of laisserfaire, have not yet been able to make for us a modus vivendi? The drift of an age, or the philosophy permitting that drift, is too complex to be dogmatized about,

and we shall not make the error of attributing the present condition, an onward or a retrograde movement, to any one cause. But there is one reason for our present situation which is too palpable to escape attention. It is a cause which is recognized by the new school of moralists in France as the direct source of the degradation of thought and of life. It is a source of the loss of faith, of the lowering of ideals, of the loss of respect for law, of the loss of the power to discriminate between right and wrong. We speak of the relation of literature to lawlessness, to the duties of life, to crime. By literature is here meant whatever is read, spread broadcast by the press, and especially fiction, which is universally read by young and old, and is most subtly influential in its effect upon mental and moral states. Before going further it is well to say that it is not here a question of intellectual emancipation, nor of what is. called the freedom of thought and the freedom of the press. It is just a question of the responsibility of writers in the creation of the moral atmosphere of a people.

II.

This responsibility should be put where it belongs. Much has been written about the low-grade and vulgar stories of adventure and crime, which are read by incipient Jack Sheppards, and which help to manufacture before our eyes young "toughs," who fill the jails and the reform schools; and girls who, having set before them false ideals, tread the glittering path of vanity that is lighted by no ray of modest and womanly feeling; or the weak and sentimental stories that reduce to flabbiness the moral sense and the intellectual fibre of the young reader. We are not likely to overestimate the deleterious effect of these demoralizing works, which publishers circulate in unrecognized channels, and which newspapers scatter like the down of the Canada thistle. But all these, if not comparatively harmless, are only reflec tions of demoralization in a higher plane

only symptoms of a disease that does not originate where it seems to spread with most virulence. For ideas that corrupt or that save society do not originate from below; they filter down from serene

heights through the masses.

It is the theory that is potent; it is the philosophy that kills or brings life. Nearly every social disorder is the child of some closetthought set afloat in the world. It is the parallel of Carlyle's remark that there is certain to be trouble when a thinker is let loose in the world. It is as idle to say that the theory or the philosophy is not responsible for the crudeness and the violence of its application by ill-educated and sensual men as it is to relieve of responsibility for the devastation of an inundation the mountain flood that gathers force as it goes, and rages all the more on account of the dams and the obstructions in its path. This influence is as plain as that of the sun upon the vegetation of the earth. We see it clearly enough historically, in another time or in another country. In France it is not necessary, in tracing the literary genealogy of crime and of social demoralization, to go back to the pre-Revolutionary theories. We find the spirit of license in the Restoration period, in and beyond the revolution of 1830. There is in the higher literature a revolt against law; respect for authority is weakened-"passion alone is interesting; it excuses every sin and every crime." Madame St. Blaze de Bury traces with a firm hand this decadence in a paper in the Contemporary Review-one of those remarkable papers in which from time to time this philosophic thinker has mirrored the tendencies of an age and marshalled the thought of Europe. Victor Hugo's dramatic types opened the downward road in fiction and poetry. Wrong was not to be denounced, still less punished; violence was tolerated, untruthfulness was venial. Châteaubriand's René "altered the whole conception of criminal possibilities, and traced out hitherto unavowed currents of sinful thought, beautifying them by the manner of their presentation." From this time began the hero-worship of the Criminal; everything is forgiven to him who defies the law. The moral recklessness in literature grew; unlawfulness is the element of George Sand; the gospel of transgression is preached, and responsibility for such preaching is denied; to the cynical spirit the moral is nothing, the style everything; the Realist asserts that he is no more responsible for the effects of his scenes of vice and degradation in the printed page than for the effect of his

"Here,

shameless pictures in the salon. then" (says Madame de Bury, referring to the period from 1800 to 1840), "began that long series of 'bad examples' set forth by French fiction, the influence of which was destined to expand till, by the strange progression of evil thought into evil deed, it culminated in active crime, and was embodied in such heroes of infamy as Lacenaire or Pranzini, and in the typical malefactors, from Troppman down to the anarchists of to-day. All these were engendered by the printed thought, by the subtle teaching of the book. From the perpetual reading of immoral books,' says Ravachol's nearest relative (and be it remembered that he says it by way of excuse) 'came the irresistible attraction of all sin for my unfortunate brother.' Equally emphatic is the testimony borne to the power of books by the latest confession of the miserable Anastay. Yet, until a few weeks ago, every journalist throughout France, and most of her so-called moral philosophers, maintained that it was absurd to attach criminal acts to criminal theories, and that in unlawful principles, proclaimed with no matter what force to the outside world, there lay no responsibility of any kind for unlawful acts." So the deterioration went on, from the theories of life that admitted that there was no absolute right, that in individual cases wrong might be right, to the admission of "le crime passionnel," which confused juries and even the legal mind itself. The claims of morals were set aside by the formula, "Il faut avoir du talent.” From 1825 to 1870, it is not too much to say, exclaims Madame de Bury, "that the art and literature of France were the slaves of licentiousness. To no one principle of right did they render service; to no one principle of wrong did they offer antagonism. Idealism was mocked at. The real type of the age is Robert Macaire." Whence come cynicism, depravity of manners, contempt of women, disrespect for parents and for all authority, in short, respect for nothing, a disease of this age of realism and materialistic science? Who teaches the worthlessness of life, fatalism, helplessness of the will, that whatever we attempt, the end is the same-weariness, nothingness, defeat? It is the testimony also of M. Wagner in Jeunesse that the breath of disrespect which blows over the youth of

France comes from men highly placed, teachers of the wrong way-des éducateurs à rebours, des prophètes de néant et de boue-writers whose doctrines, which confuse all notions of right and wrong, filter down through a thousand channels into the heart of the masses. And, says this courageous assertor of the value of life and the value of the soul, "there is something more dangerous for a people than the demolition of principles, than holding up to ridicule things holy and things respectable, or even soiling their imaginations with impure recitals, and that is the destruction of faith in honesty, in disinterestedness, in all virtue." Degradation is then accomplished.

III.

It is easy to understand how the writings, perfect in form, in style, seductive in art, which undermine the moral character and render one hazy as to distinctions of right and wrong, should breed a spirit of lawlessness among men in the coarse shock of interests in common life. The sympathy of the leaders of the Realistic School with disorder and defiance of law, so often expressed, may not be so easily explicable. When that sympathy is expressed, does it not show that they are conscious of the tendency of their writings? These teachers seem to have gone astray from the fundamental truth that a crime cannot be made a good act by affixing to it an apologetic adjective. No theory of the rights of man, of the unequal distribution of property, of the hardship of labor, will excuse it. If the world is ever to be any better it is to be by the gospel of love and not the gospel of hate-it is through obedience only that freedom comes. Murder is not less murder, pure and simple, because it is called political by the man who commits it, or because it is committed by a nihilist or an anarchist or by a striker. The murderer may be pitied, indeed; perhaps naturally he would have shrunk from this crime; his mind has been confused and crazed by false theories. Whence come these theories? How did it happen that a private in the Pennsylvania militia stepped out from the ranks and cheered the assassin of one of the men whom the military arm of the State was then under orders to protect? This soldier was under discipline; he was a part of the majesty of the State, legally evoked to save the

State. He was not only insubordinate to military law, but to all law that holds society together. His insubordination pervading the ranks would have brought anarchy and chaos to the State. His punishment should have been prompt and severe-the degree of severity is not in question in this argument. His position was monstrous. But was he the chief sinner? No. The theoretic preachers of lawlessness had demoralized him. Of course his action had its defenders, for the sympathy with lawlessness is widespread, and a sympathetic writer promptly comes forward to say that the man had a right to express his opinion, and that to curtail it was an outrage on the American freedom of speech! So it would have been an outrage on freedom of speech if his commanding officer had promptly shot a private in a critical moment of a battle in the late war who had stepped from the ranks and called for cheers for secession. No theory about the conduct of the war ought to have saved him. He would have been not less despised by the enemy than by his own company.

Loss of a sense of the need of discipline in life, the spread of lawlessness, sympathy with anarchy, can be directly traced to the indifferentism, to the cynical view of life, in literature, to its debased ideals; but this does not affect simply the class that labor and that are still poor. The demoralization becomes general. The gospel of sordid facts unrelieved by any spiritual life or aspiration excuses if it does not stimulate the materialistic spirit. The coarse greed for wealth, for luxury, the want of sympathy with the struggling multitude, the tyranny of the insolent rich, the indifference to means of success, are also the result of vicious theories of life woven in fiction and disseminated by the prophets of disorder. It is against the selfishly. prosperous and the disregarders of others' rights that the discipline of law and the principles of justice must be invoked, as well as against the more ignorant and helpless disturbers of the social order. Outside of law equally applied to all conditions there is no hope for anybody in this republic or elsewhere. But law cannot be enforced, the judges cannot judge, the juries will not hold even scales, if the moral sense of the nation is warped or confused as to private relations