The Living Age.-Supplement. SEPTEMBER 11, 1897. READINGS FROM AMERICAN MAGAZINES. diverse From Harper's Magazine. EAST AND WEST FACE TO FACE. What will be the actual conditions when these civilizations of origin and radically distinct-because the evolution of racial characteristics radically different-confront each other without the interposition of any neutral belt, by the intervention of which the contrasts, being more remote, are less apparent, and within which distinctions shade one into the other? There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers, and those numbers, however incoherent now in mass, composed of units which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest survives. Deficient, apparently, in aptitude for political and social organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable. This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which, as compared to ourselves, they now labor. But men do not covet less the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create-a trait wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force. Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Cæsar's, may have erected against them. Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned-forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancesVOL. XV. 793 LIVING AGE. tors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits. Nevertheless, even under such conditions,—which obtained increasingly during the decline of the Roman Empire, -positions suitably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retaru and, by gaining time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is, and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations to-day. Consciously or unconsciously they are advancing the outposts of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to this day. Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of the world as in the political development and material prosperity which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in commerce and in war. To these energies the me chanical and scientific acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in material well-being existing between those within its borders and those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the same advantages. And along with this pre-eminence in wealth arises the cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the world, were already run, and the goal of universal peace not only reached but secured. Yet are conditions such, even within our favored borders, that we are ready to disband the particular organized manifestation of physical force which we call the police? Despite internal jealousies and friction on the continent of Europe, perhaps even because of them, the solidarity of the European family therein contained is shown in this great common movement, the ultimate beneficence of which is beyond all doubt, as evidenced by the British domination in India and Egypt, and to which the habit of arms not only contributes, but is essential. India and Egypt are at present the two most conspicuous, though they are not the sole, illustrations of benefits innumerable and lasting which rest upon the power of the sword in the hands of enlightenment and justice. It is possible, of course, to confuse this conclusion, to obscure the real issue, by dwelling upon details of wrongs at times inflicted, of blunders often made. Any episode in the struggling progress of humanity may be thus perplexed; but, looking at the broad result, it is indisputable that the vast gains to humanity made in the regions named not only once originated, but still rest, upon the exertion and continued maintenance of organized physical force. The same general solidarity as against the outside world, which is unconsciously manifested in the general resumption of colonizing movements, receives particular conscious expression in the idea of imperial federation, which, amid the many buffets and reverses common to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense practical difficulties have to be overcome in realizing the ends towards which such sentiments point is but a commonplace of human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the constitutional lion in the path, which the unwilling or the apprehensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words of one who never lightly admitted impossibilities, "If a thing is necessary to be done, the more difficulties, the more necessary to try to remove them." As sentiment strengthens, it undermines obstacles, and they crumble before it. The same tendency is shown in the undeniable disposition of the British people and of British statesmen to cultivate the good-will of the United States, and to draw closer the relations between the two countries. For the disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Balfour has used an expression, “race patriotism," a phrase which finds its first approximation, doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but which may well extend its embrace, in a time yet distant, to all those who have drawn their present civilization from the same remote sources. The phrase is so pregnant of solution for the problems of the future, as conceived by the writer, that he hopes to see it obtain the currency due to the value of the idea which it formulates. That this disposition on the part of Great Britain, towards her colonies and towards the United States, shows sound policy as well as sentiment may be readily granted; but why should sound policy, the seeking of one's own advantage, if by open and honest means, be imputed as a crime? In democracies, however, policy cannot long dispute the sceptre with sentiment. That there is lukewarm response in the United States is due to that narrow conception which grew up with the middle of the century, whose analogue in Great Britain is the Little England party, and which in our own country would turn all eyes inward, and see no duty save to ourselves. How shall two walk together except they be agreed? How shall there be true sympathy between a nation whose political activities are world-wide, and one that eats out its heart in merely internal political strife? When we begin really to look abroad, and to busy ourselves with our duties to the world at large in our generation -and not before we shall stretch out our hands to Great Britain, realizing that in unity of heart among the English-speaking races lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful days ahead. For what awaits us in the future, in common with the states of Europe, is not a mere question of advantage or disadvantage of more or less. Issues of vital moment are involved. A present generation is trustee for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all-it may then be too late will be so at the cost of blood and tears that timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent conditions, such as we observe in Turkey-and not in Turkey alone-cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war, the last state is worse than the firstan opinion which these passing days of the hesitancy of the concert and the anguish of Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely endorse. Europe, advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side, unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in recognized dominion over fair regions of great future import a system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the lapse of time renders continually more certain an evil augury for the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of barbarism ready for alien occupation. It is essential to our own good, it is yet more essential as part of our duty to the commonwealth of peoples to which we racially belong, that we look with clear, dispassionate, but resolute eyes upon the fact that civilizations on different planes of material prosperity and progress, with different spiritual ideals, and with very different political capacities, are fast closing together. It is a condition not unprecedented in the history of the world. When it befell a great united empire, enervated by long years of unwarlike habits among its chief citizens, it entailed ruin, but ruin prolonged through centuries, thanks to the provision made beforehand by a great general and statesman. The Saracenic and Turkish invasions, on the contrary, after generations of advance, were first checked, and then rolled back; for they fell upon peoples, disunited indeed by internal discords and strife, like the nations of Europe to-day, but still nations of warriors, ready by training and habit to strike for their rights, and, if need were, to die for them. In the providence of God, along with the immense increase of prosperity, of physical and mental luxury, brought by this century, there has grown up also that counterpoise stigmatized as "militarism," which has converted Europe into a great camp of soldiers prepared for war. The ill-timed cry for disarmament, heedless of the menacing possibilities of the future, breaks idly against a great fact, which finds its sufficient justification in present conditions, but which is, above all, an unconscious preparation for something as yet noted but by few. From "A Twentieth Century Outlook." By A. T. Mahan, From The New England Magazine. THE NEW SCIENCE. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" That was in the later dawn: In thy bosom; there before Time's first planet proudly swam Into space, and back of then, In the darkness thick and long, Closer was I knit with thee In the ardent planet wheeled: Upward, onward, striving still nursed by Out of weakness growing strong, ular runs, the books, aiming at immediate sale, are all largely formed by the taste of that part of humanity which in other countries, where there is no popular education, has little to do with literature. Small and few indeed among us are the sets yet formed which raise and nourish men who care more for the mild approval of the judicious than for the money and the notoriety of popular an American success. Suppose that of the understood the mechanism drama as well as M. Sarcey, say, or Mr. Archer, would he be found out aud encouraged by our journals? For a critic as erudite as M. Brunetière what respect, what dignity is there here compared to what France offers to solid work? What newspaper in America would not call an unknown Walkley or Anatole France "too literary"? How many editors frankly tell contributors that literary excellence is nothing; that popularity of subject is everything! Thus it is that the size of the audience which listens to the critic here makes him speak like a stump orator. very possibilities of criticism keep from The crowd it healthy encouragement. will not be led too fast. We support literary criticism in but one weekly of the same class with the French and By John W. Chadwick. English, and in but one daily. From the plant that useless grows, With the awful might of love. Never severed from thy heart, Ere the worlds began to be, From The Bookman. It is the size of our reading public that keeps our literary criticism lower than our creative work in literature and the plastic arts, and lower than our art criticism. We read not only more books than the people of other countries, but more newspapers also; and it is the newspaper which partly sets and entirely represents average American standards. The large amount of space given in the dailies to literature and drama forms a contrast to the quality of the treatment. They must give the crowd what it will take immediately. They, the newspapers, aiming at great circulations, the plays, aiming at pop The Expert handling of what we all feel capable of handling bores us, and even insults us. There is a story, probably true, that the owner of a great New York paper discharged his dramatic editor and openly announced his preference for ordinary reporters as critics of the theatre and as book-reviewers; in that, as in most of our publications, are the side issues of untrained men. The principal exception consists of the careless opinions of men who are famous for other things, and these opinions, being bought for the signature, are almost always miserable. How many readers know of the existence of Mr. Brownell compared to the number who read the critical trivialities published by prominent men, whose critical faculties are so feeble that they are rightly treated with condescension even by the newspapers? When one of these prominent men does write criticisms he is careful not to go over the heads of his readers or to hurt the man who says, as so many say, "Perhaps I don't know what is good, but I know what I like," meaning that his opinion is as good as another's. The action of the committee of the Army of the Tennessee, overruling as unintelligent the decision of the Sculptor's Society, to which they had submitted designs for a statue of General Sherman, is fresh in our minds. We will accept facts from experts, but our opinions are our own. To remain cheerful, however, one need only remember that criticism as an art is always a late development, which truth is too general to grieve over. Winslow Homer can be a powerful artist on the solitary coast of Maine, Miss Wilkins can make pictures in forlorn New England towns, but a general excellence in criticism, much more than in any other art, is dependent on the formation of groups of intelligent people, which in turn is dependent on social stratification. Criticism, as it is immediately the voice of culture, will appear only as part of the general intelligence now unsifted in our raw mass of democracy is freed and crystallized in smaller classes independent of everything save their own barrier which will separate our future cultivated class from the masses behind it, will keep it on the move and prevent hardening into forms. Just now, however, it is natural to think less of possible safeguards for our prospective civilization than of the changes needed to begin the refining process. Therefore, any growth of social distinctions, of a leisure class, of respect for tradition and authority, is an encouraging sign, the danger of the sequence of bookishness, rigidity, and deviation from the constants of human nature being too remote to think of yet. In the mean time there is more immediate promise in the criticism of art than there is in that of literature, probably because the public, recognizing the technical difficulties of painting and sculpture, sees more often the need of training for the critic of pictures and statues than it sees the need of training and natural fitness in a man who doesmerely what almost any American high school graduate feels capable of doing. From "American Art Criticism." By Norman Hapgood. From Scribner's Magazine. tastes. It is, indeed, not impossi- ENGLISH HOSPITALITY IN THE NORTH ble that when these necessary divisions are made the culture which will result will be broader on account of the influence of democracy, which must still be felt; because that influence, destructive now, may then tend to give a deeper human tone, to give to the ordinary critic, the mere spokesman of his environment, something of that wide interest tempered with humor, that free play with his material, the average mind, which has usually been the exclusive possession of the great critic of life, the Rabelais, Cervantes, or Molière. Much as we need instruction and technical understanding, as requisites to any advance, we shall of course be lucky if our culture when it comes is slower to run the ordinary historical course into formalism, and one may at least hope that the narrowness of the WEST. Both the shacks and their owners are at their very best when a house-party is on. The shacks, to begin with, are preternaturally clean, and the young Englishmen most extraordinarily polite and agreeable. They do things on a large scale at these house-parties. When the six or eight Englishmen who constitute a crack polo-team, and who fortunately have neighboring shacks, invite eighty people with their traps and tents and servants, and two other crack polo-teams with thirty or forty polo-ponies besides the horses they ride or drive and the half-breeds who bring the ponies, and the Indians who always turn up, and when one reflects that all these people and horses are to stay for two days and that the shacks are seventy miles from a railroad and thirty |