former.

Copenhagen, 19th July, 1869. DEAR SIR Thanks for your kind letter. It was a real pleasure to me to see that you have taken my little essay in bonam partem. It was written with a good intention, but I have so long been accustomed to be rewarded by anything rather than thanks for what I write, that I was not at all sure how you would

take it.

My last article will appear on Sunday. It is of the same length as the others. It attempts to put the development of your genius in a clear light.

What I wrote about your relation to criticism was perfectly serious; but I am not the less fond of you on that account. You have injured the position of a critic in this little undeveloped country excessively, and it was not an easy position before; you have done all you could to spread the idea that envy is his inspiration, and that he goes about with a belt of serpents round his waist. I do not consider that in your stories you have made any clear distinction between good and bad criticism. The critic is for you the "reasoner," the sterile and useless critic-aster. But yet there exists both an historical and a philosophical æsthetic science, which cannot endure that so many scribblers and braggarts should boast of the favors of the muse, although they have never loosed her girdle. The true inspiration of the aesthetic critic is the flexible sympathy with which he alternately identifies himself with the most contrary minds, and minds of the most contrary nations. By the power of this sympathy he attempts to feel again all the feelings that have lain at the basis of works of literature. A critic is a person who understands how to read, and who teaches others to read. It is an emphatic statement of this fact which I miss in your works, otherwise so precious to me. You stand on a pedestal in literature from which every word makes a thousand echoes. That you yourself have suffered under an insipid, unjust, and sometimes even loutish criticism, I know well; I myself, who, Heaven knows, in no other respect compare myself with you, have suffered under a similar one, and my expressed opinion as a freethinker has and will in future expose me to more attacks than you have or ever can be assailed by. But it appears to me that you, in

bitterness at what you have personally endured, have done injustice to the cultivators of a whole science. Therefore it was that I wrote what I did write. I quite allow that you have made a difference between severe and

The earlier collection, from which this interesting letter is taken, contains a great many letters which throw interesting light on their authors, if scarcely on Andersen. The correspondence from Fredrika Bremer displays the sentimental sweetness, gentle wit, and delicate style of the great Swedish novelist in a striking way.

Her introduction to Andersen was very curious. On his first visit to Sweden, as he was standing on the deck of the steamer in the Göta Canal, he remarked to the captain that his dearest hope in coming to Sweden was to see Fredrika Bremer. He was told that he would do well to resign this hope at once, for the lady was on the Continent. At the next town at which the steamer stopped, however, a little shy personage got in, and the captain hurrying to Andersen, said: "You're in luck: for that's Miss Bremer who has just come on board." Andersen lost no time in presenting himself to her, but, unfortunately, she had never heard of him, and was only stiffly civil. Upon this, Andersen produced one of his own volumes, and presented it to her. She disappeared, and, after an hour or two, came up on deck. again with a very beaming face, and said: "I know you now!" The acquaintance, thus oddly made, ripened into a lifelong friendship. Very much as Andersen in his youth came to Fredrika Bremer, the Norwegian novelist Björnsen came to Andersen in his old age. The letters from Björnsen which are here printed are very characteristic of that egotistical and turbulent man of genius. He pours his tributes at Andersen's feet without the least reticence, and responds with stormy affection to the old Danish poet's cordial

tions under which mental imagery as above defined is most useful, and the particular forms of it which we ought to aim at developing, and I shall adduce evidence to show that the visualizing faculty admits of being educated, although no attempt has ever yet been made, so far as I know, to bring it systematically and altogether under control.

away.

In the recollection of a flash a similar sequence of events would take place, but | they would occur in the reverse order. A variously distributed irritation in the brain, due to one or more of a multitude of possible causes, into which we need not stop to inquire, would propagate itself outwards, becoming fainter the farther it travelled. The same links of the same nervous chain would be concerned in both cases, but the tension would be differently distributed among them. When the faculty of sight-memory is strong, the vigorous propagation of a central impulse towards the optic nerve must be habitual; when it is weak the propagation will not take place except in peculiar states of the nerves, as in dreams, in delirium, in high excitement, or under the influence of certain drugs.

These physiological considerations, vague as they are, will nevertheless suffice to establish the existence of a true kinship between mental imagery and ordinary vision. They enable us to define Shakespeare's phrase of seeing "with the mind's eye" as a condition in which the activity of the nervous centre bears a higher ratio to that of the nervous terminations than it does in actual sight. They also justify us in ascribing the marked differences in the quality, as well as the vividness, of the mental imagery of different persons, to the various degrees in which the several links of a long nervous chain are apt to be affected.

The mental images of which I am about to speak are those which are habitually suggested by well-known associations. Even when the subject is thus limited, it is almost too large for the compass of a single memoir. Therefore, I shall do my best at present not to encroach upon other very interesting branch of it, which

that

I draw my conclusions from no small amount of testimony. In addition to a large quantity of oral information of which I have made notes, I have received separate letters and replies by the hundred to a long list of questions which I circulated, besides obtaining batches of replies to the same questions from various schools. The answers on the whole have been written in a style that testifies to much careful self-analysis, and the general accordance of those that were derived from independent sources, together with the satisfactory way in which I have found many of the statements to bear cross-examination, have convinced me of their substantial truth.

I find the distribution of the visualizing faculty, in respect to its vividness, by a simple method I have described elsewhere.* I take a haphazard bundle of returns, mark them as an examiner would mark the papers of candidates, sort them in the order of their marks, and clip them into a portfolio. If I open the book in the middle I read the medium value; if I open it at one-quarter from the beginning I read the highest quartile value; if at one-quarter from the end, the lowest quartile. If I open it at one-eighth of its thickness I read an octile value; and if at one-sixteenth, a sub-octile.

Between the first and last quartiles extends the broad middle class. It includes the two middle quarters, or the central half of the population, whose characteristics are pretty uniform; it is at the beginning and end of the book that the exceptional cases lie in this, as in all other similar collections of statistics.

The medium quality of mental imagery among Englishmen may be briefly described as fairly vivid, but incomplete. The part of the picture that is well defined at any one moment is more contracted than it would be in a real scene; but by

See an article by myself in Mind (July, 1880), p. 301, on "Statistics of Mental Imagery," and the references in the foot-notes to it.

This brief statement gives a scientifically exact idea of the distribution of the faculty among the inner fourteen in every sixteen Englishmen. I do not go further here, because I wish to specify the extent to which the faculty generally admits of being educated, and not to hold out ideals which are impossible of attainment except by very few. I shall submit direct evidence of what teaching can accomplish, but it will I am sure be allowed, in the mean time, that there is a probability of being able to educate a faculty among the great majority of men to the degree in which it manifests itself, without any education at all, in at least one person out of every sixteen. When speaking, as I shall soon do, of the various qualities of the faculty, I shall keep as now, as far as possible, to the commoner cases.

The power of visualizing is higher in the female sex than in the male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public schoolboys than in men. I have, how ever, a few clear cases in which its power has greatly increased with advancing years. There is reason to believe that it is very high in some young children, who seem to spend years of difficulty in distinguishing between the subjective and objective world. Language and booklearning certainly tend to dull it.

The visualizing faculty is a natural gift, and, like all natural gifts, has a tendency to be inherited. In this faculty the tendency to inheritance is exceptionally strong, as I have abundant evidence to prove, especially in respect to certain rather rare peculiarities, of which I shall speak, and which, when they exist at all, are usually found among two, three, or more brothers and sisters, parents, children, uncles and aunts, and cousins.

Since families differ so much in respect to this gift, we may suppose that races would also differ, and there can be no doubt that such is the case. I hardly like

It is among uncivilized races that natural differences in the visualizing faculty are most conspicuous. Many of them make carvings and rude illustrations, but only a few have the gift of carrying a picture in their mind's eye, judging by the completeness and firmness of their designs, which show no trace of having been elaborated in that step-by-step manner which is characteristic of draughtsmen who are not natural artists.

Among the races who are thus gifted are the despised, and, as I confidently maintain from personal knowledge of them, the much underrated Bushmen of south Africa. They are no doubt deficient in the natural instincts necessary to civilization, for they detest a regular life, they are inveterate thieves, and are incapable of withstanding the temptation of strong drink. On the other hand, they have few superiors among barbarians in the ingenious methods by which they supply the wants of a difficult existence, and in the effectiveness and nattiness of their accoutrements. One of their habits is to draw pictures, on the walls of caves, of men and animals, and to color them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonization, and few of them, and indeed few wild Bushmen, now exist. Fortunately, a large and valuable collection of facsimiles of Bushman art was made before it became too late by Mr. Stow, of the Cape Colony, who has very lately sent some specimens of them to this country, in the hope that means might be found for the publication of the entire series. Among the many pictures of animals in each of the large sheets full of them, I was particularly struck with one of an eland, as giving a

just idea of the precision and purity of their best work.

A small but interesting sheet of copies of Bushman drawings was presented by Colonel Moncrieff, C.B., of gun-carriage celebrity, to the Christie Collection, which is now incorporated with the British Museum. Many notices of them are to be found in Barrow's "Travels in South Africa," and elsewhere.

The method by which the Bushmen draw is described in the following extract from a letter written to me by Dr. Mann, the well-known authority on south-African matters of science. The boy to whom he refers belonged to a wild tribe living in caves in the Drakenburg, who plundered outlying farms, and were pursued by the neighboring colonists. He was wounded and captured, then sent to hospital, and subsequently taken into service. He was under Dr. Mann's observation in the year 1860, and has recently died, to the great regret of his employer, Mr. Proudfoot, to whom he became a valuable servant.

Dr. Mann writes as follows:

This lad was very skilful in the proverbial Bushman art of drawing animal figures, and upon several occasions I induced him to show me how this was managed among his people. He invariably began by jotting down upon paper or on a slate, a number of isolated dots which presented no connection or trace of outline of any kind to the uninitiated eye, but looked like the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal-horse, buffalo, elephant, or some kind of antelope-gradually developed itself. This was invariably done

with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch that no correction of a line was

at any time attempted. I understood from this lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred in making their clever pictures.

It is impossible, I think, for a drawing to be made on this method unless the artist had a clear image in his mind's eye of what he was about to draw.

the multitude of illustrations of their mapdrawing powers, I will select one from those included in the journals of Captain Hall, at p. 224, which were published last year by the United States government under the editorship of Professor J. E. Nourse. It is the facsimile of a chart drawn by an Eskimo who was a thorough barbarian in the accepted sense of the word. That is to say, he spoke no language besides his own uncouth tongue, he was wholly uneducated according to our modern ideas, and he lived in what we should call a savage fashion. This man drew from memory a chart of the region over which he had at one time or another gone in his canoe. It extended from Pond's Bay, in lat. 73°, to Fort Churchill, in lat. 58° 44', over a distance in a straight line of more than nine hunhundred and sixty nautical, or eleven hundred English miles, the coast being so indented by arms of the sea that its length is six times as great. On comparing this rough Eskimo outline with the admiralty chart of 1870 their accordance is remarkable. I have seen many route maps made by travellers in past years, when the scientific exploration of the world was much less advanced than it is now, and I can confidently say that I have never known of any traveller, white, brown, or black, civilized or uncivilized, in Africa, Asia, or Australia, who, being unprovided with surveying instruments, and trusting to his memory alone, bas produced chart comparable in extent and accuracy to that of this barbarous Eskimo. Their powers of accurate drawing are abundantly testified by the numerous illustrations in Rink's work, all of which were made by self-taught men, and are thoroughly realistic.