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League of Nations. People greedily read every scrap of information, every prophecy and speculation, published regarding the coming fight, every detail of the biography of the contestants, their weight, physical condition, health, and programme of daily acts. We were surfeited with data regarding their fighting style, their individual excellences, and their science.

And these spectators came, not only from New York, but from Chicago, Philadelphia, and wherever railways and steam navigation reach. America was more engaged by this event than by the Versailles peace or by the greatest European revolution. Journalists were present from San Francisco, Texas, Canada, and across the ocean. They were grouped, several hundred strong, close to the ring, in order that the results of each round might reach instantaneously an expectant world.

Now the world knows the result. In spite of the liberal support which Bernard Shaw gave his favorite, the contest ended in the fourth round with the decisive victory of the American champion. France's favorite of the gods, who did indeed win the throng by his grace of manner, was not the peer of the Anglo-Saxon Hun. The question which a great French publicist once asked: 'How is Anglo-Saxon supremacy explained?' was answered in this particular application easily enough. Against the overpowering physical force of this grim giant, who combined confidence and sureness in attack with apparently invincible resistance, Gallic skill, French brilliance, and all the other personal and sportsmanlike qualities with which the challenger was so abundantly gifted, were helpless.

Why, then, did I recall Heinrich von Treitschke? For several reasons. He hated the Anglo-Saxons more than any man in his age and country. Only a few

months before his death, on returning from his last trip across the British Channel, he fairly howled with rage, 'Simply horrible!' This passionate protest was evoked by England's political power, which stood straight athwart the path of German progress; it was evoked by English liberalism, whose free air was sweeping clear across the continent; and it was evoked, finally, by the Anglo-Saxon trading spirit, which made him unceasingly wonder how Shakespeare came to be born in England. In one of his last lectures upon politics, he illustrated the difference between German and Anglo-Saxon culture by contrasting the knightly art of sword-fencing with the brutal sport of 'breaking a man's nose with your fist.'

To-day the civilized world watches the latter sport with bated breath, and looks to the Anglo-Saxon trading spirit for its salvation. The young, democratic giant, as dramatically incorporated in Dempsey's powerful, brutal, natural strength, born of the American West, as was French culture and chivalry in his opponent, that democratic giant of whom Treitschke wrote some decades ago: 'What shall we say of a nation whose history dates from yesterday?' has become the master of the world. All Europe lies at his feet. And he has won this triumph less by arduous effort than by the mere spontaneous waxing of his strength in a day of crisis for mankind. Whether Europe has hopelessly lost the leadership of the world for all time to come depends largely upon whether the civilized nations, which practised the art of the sword until they learned boxing from the Anglo-Saxon, continue to devour each other in national rivalry, or whether they learn their bitter lesson, and turn to the path of reconciliation and peace.

BY LOUIS LEGER

From La Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse, June and July (SWISS POLITICAL AND LITERARY MONTHLY)

THE Serbians are rightly proud of their popular poetry, and particularly of their epic songs. The honor of having brought these precious documents to light belongs to a man whose name, though justly celebrated in Slavic Europe, is scarcely recognized further west, and of whose biography there is scarcely any knowledge - Vouk Stefanovitch Karadjitch. It is my wish, relying wholly upon Serbian sources, to shed some light upon this interesting personality.

Vouk Stefanovitch Karadjitch was born October 26, 1787, in the village of Trchitch, on the frontier of Bosnia in the western part of the present Serbia. His family, which had established itself in that region in 1739, having originally come from Herzegovina, was of the pure Serbian race and the orthodox Greek faith; but the name, like many others, was Turkish. Karadja, from the Turkish kara (black), was an epithet given to some ancestor with a dark or brownish complexion. The Browns (Lebrun), and the Blacks (Lenoir), as everyone knows, are not lacking among our own proper names in France. When he was born, his mother had already had five children, all of whom had died in the first few months. According to popular belief, it was the wicked fairies who had done them ill; but a Serbian proverb says that the fairies can do nothing against a wolf, and so the name of Vouk, or Wolf, was given to the child. He lived, but was of such delicate health that he could not walk VOL. 310-NO. 4029

save upon crutches, an infirmity thanks to which, in that epoch of bloody struggles for independence, he could preserve a life which was later to be invaluable to his fellow countrymen.

The child was endowed with exceptional intelligence. Brought up in a world quite without letters, he learned to read in his games. His village had no school, and he was eight years old when his countrymen had the idea of opening one at the neighboring city of Loznica. His father sent him there to learn, and the young pupil had already advanced far enough to read the book of hours in Slavonic (for there was nothing Serbian to read) when an outbreak of the plague compelled the establishment to close. Young Vouk's father sent him to a monastery, but the monks were much less eager to instruct than to exploit the children, whom they set to watching the flocks, and kept busy in tasks of the field and household. Vouk was set to pasturing the goats and his father had to take him from the monastery and keep him at home, though grieved at the necessity; for, recognizing his son's ability, he dreamed of making him a priest or a business man. Vouk occupied himself with religious books, the only ones available at that time. When he was sixteen, he passed for a savant. He understood the various coins of Europe, could announce the feasts of the Church, and read the letters which the people brought to him. His reputation was so well established that, when the Turkish Bey came from Her

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zegovina to collect the imposts, he took Vouk for his secretary and gave him a place at table beside himself.

His father urged the boy to choose one of the two professions which he had in view priest or business man; but the youth, eager for knowledge, sought still further education, and begged to go to Austria, into Syrmie (the Slavonia of to-day), where schools existed which could give him higher education than the Psalter.

In 1804 the revolt of the Karageorge dynasty broke out, from which was to issue the independence of the Serbian nation. Although Karadjitch could not fight because of his infirmity, the insurgents asked his services as a secretary. His father's house was burned in the struggle, his goods destroyed or stolen. There were no more herds to watch. Karadjitch, securing permission to cross the frontier, went to the town of Karlovice, which we know to-day under the German name of Karlowitz. This town, the seat of the archbishoppatriarch of the Serbian Church, was a sort of Athens, or Rome, of the Orthodox Church. In a single year the young student learned Latin, Slavonic, and German. At the age of nineteen, he wished to enter the gymnasium; but admission was refused him, for he was too old. He knew enough, however, to become a priest, an instructor, or a scribbler.

In the spring of the year 1807 he went back to Serbia, where he became secretary to the Senate at Belgrade, then professor at the city schools, then judge in the tribunal of Brza Palanka. In this primitive epoch an educated man was a jack-of-all-trades. Karadjitch taught without cessation. He gave particular attention to the language of those about him, to their customs, religious rites, and folk-lore, as we say to-day, amassing innumerable materials for his later works.

In the course of the year 1813 he had to quit Serbia. The work of the liberator Karageorge had failed. The Turks had come back, masters of the land. He went to Vienna, a capital whichthough we are now prone to regard it as a German city has from that time until to-day been an international place of residence to which flow the Slavs of every land. Two Serbians, Frouchitch and Davidovitch, were editing there a newspaper, the Serbian Gazette (Srpske Novine) - Heaven only knows in what intermediate jargon between the Slavonic of the university and the genuine Serbian of the peasants.

Among the Slavic philologists who dwelt at Vienna, a prominent figure was the Slovenian Kopitar, who was regarded as one of the great masters of his science. We are only beginning even now to realize of what stuff the Slovenians are made, and what aspirations from that time onward linked them with the destiny of their neighbors, the Croats and the Serbians. At that time their aspirations went neither so high nor so far. Kopitar was at bottom what my friend Palacky would ironically call a court-Slavist; he regarded the Slavic languages as purely a matter of philology, and he scarcely foresaw the circumstances which one day would set Europe on fire as the result of a conflict between Vienna and Belgrade.

In Vienna, where the censorship then existed, Kopitar fulfilled the functions of censor for Slavic languages, and in this capacity he had control of the Serbian Gazette, which, as a patriot and a philologist, he was indignant at seeing written in a strange jargon, a mingling of Slavonic, Russian, and Serbian. These ideas were also those of Vouk Stefanovitch Karadjitch. He had occasion to write an article upon the fall of Karageorge, which came to the eyes of the censor. Kopitar was delighted to find here the Ser Janguage as he had

dreamed of it, and communicated with the young publicist. One day their conversation turned to the Serbian popular songs, a great number of which Vouk knew by heart. Kopitar insisted that he should publish them and one of his countrywomen, Mme. Jivkovitch, supplied him with additional folk-songs; from this collaboration sprang a volume which was published in Vienna, in 1814, with the unpretentious title, A Little Book of SlavoSerb Ballads. The volume had but a hundred and twenty pages, for it is a long way from this modest beginning to the great collection of which I am about to speak.

It goes without saying that I do not possess this rarest of books. In publishing it, Karadjitch came to understand the necessity of submitting the modern Serbian language to the rules of a definite grammar, just as in the same century the Greeks were forced to set free the neo-Hellenic speech from the influence of the classic language. He published a grammar of the Serbian language according to the popular idiom at Vienna in 1814 which was far from satisfactory and which Kopitar urged him to begin anew on a more ambitious scale. He was equally insistent that Karadjitch should make a new collection of the popular songs. Vouk went through Syrmie for this purpose, took up his residence at Karlowitz, and assembled his materials.

an essay

Kopitar had also turned him toward a new work, the publication of a dictionary of the Serbian language, bringing him one day a package of cards and directing him to write down little by little all the words that he knew or that were already included in previous lexicons. When he had filled out a great number of these, Kopitar took to spend ing every evening with him, discussing the meaning of the words and giving

their equivalents in German and in Latin. Thanks to this fecund collaboration, the work went forward rapidly, and the dictionary was ready to appear in Vienna in 1818. It bore, as the name of the author, that of Vouk Stefanovitch alone, and it was printed with the new characters which he had designed to simplify Serbian spelling, characters which after long dispute, have definitely triumphed and make the orthography of Serbia one of the simplest in the world.

The book was preceded by a grammar of the Serbian language, a revised and enlarged edition of that which had appeared in 1814. In all the countries where Serbians were living, even in Vienna, Venice, Budapest, and Trieste, there were numerous subscribers. Jacob Grimm was so interested that he translated the translated the grammar and published it in German with a eulogistic preface.

Karadjitch had paid the expenses of publication. He was already married to a Viennese girl, and had one child. He had exhausted all his resources, and his circumstances were so reduced that he had to sell a cask of slivovitsa (plumbrandy), which he had received as a gift, and his razors as well. The intervention of a generous Mæcenas was all that saved him from complete ruin.

He decided to try his fortunes in Russia. At that time Russia appeared to the Slavs like a sort of Eldorado. Karadjitch made a package of a hundred copies of his dictionary, and visited Cracow, Warsaw, Vilna, Pskov, Petrograd, Novgorod, Tver, Moscow, Toula, and Kieff. The venture did not turn out ill, either for him or for his nation. Indeed, the success of this trip induced him to try others. In the spring of the year 1822, he went into Germany, to Leipzig and to Halle, where he made the acquaintance of the great linguistic scholar, Vater; to Weimar, where he paid his respects to Goethe, who took

a lively interest in his work; to Cassel, where he visited Jacob Grimm, the translator of his grammar; to Göttingen, and again to Leipzig.

This city was at that time the principal market for the book-trade, not merely German, but almost cosmopolitan. Whether by his own efforts, or through the help of his devoted friends, Vouk had somewhat increased his collection of popular songs. During the year 1823, he published three volumes at Leipzig. The first was dedicated to the Duke of Weimar, the second to the celebrated Russian Mæcenas, Count Roumantsov, the third to Miloch, the reigning prince of Serbia. We may mention in passing that Miloch could neither read nor write. We shall recur presently to his relations with Karadjitch.

The Serbian scholar went back to his own land enchanted with the success of his travels. "The Germans now are learning Serbian at a furious rate,' he wrote to a friend. I suspect that he exaggerated a little, for he was intoxicated by the interest shown in him by Goethe, Vater, Ranke, and by the distinguished lady then known as Thérèse-Albertine-Louise von Jacob, who soon afterward, under the pseudonym of Talvi (borrowed from her five initials) published a translation of poems selected from Karadjitch's collection, at Halle (1823-1826), with the title Volkslieder der Serben. Mlle. von Jacob had long lived in Russia, where her father was a professor, and the acquaintance with the Russian language which she thus enjoyed made easier her acquirement of the Serbian idiom. After this translation, a French edition appeared at Paris from the pen of Mme. Elisa Voiärt (1854).

Thus, little by little, recognition cane to the modest student, but recognition is not enough to bring up a family. Karadjitch had numerous children, and

his resources were more than modest. In 1826 the Emperor Nikolas, acting on the recommendation of Schichkov, president of the Russian Academy, awarded the Serbian savant a pension of a hundred ducats a year. In 1830 Germany was interested in Serbia after a fashion quite different from that of 1914. At Vienna, the illustrious historian, Leopold Ranke, had met Karadjitch and asked his collaboration on a history of the Serbian revolution, which he was contemplating and which appeared in 1829, as well as for another work, Serbia in 1829. He offered, as remuneration, half the author's rights.

'I wish happiness of every sort to you and the Serbians,' wrote Ranke to Karadjitch. The grandchildren of the historian if he had any took it upon themselves to make the wish come true!

The innovations with regard to language and spelling which Karadjitch had made stirred up enemies from the very beginning, especially among the clergy, born defenders of the Slavonic spelling and tradition. The censorship existed at Vienna as well as at Budapest. Karadjitch had undertaken a collection of proverbs, but such difficulty was thrown in his way that he was forced to print it at Cetinje, in the principality of Montenegro, where the censor had no authority. A letter of eulogy came from Jacob Grimm to console him.

He had an especially bitter adversary in the Metropolitan Stratimirovitch, an uncompromising partisan of the ancient traditions. 'I write as the people speak,' Karadjitch argued; to which the prelate retorted: 'If a drunken man staggered and fell in the street, you ought not to imitate him but to guard against doing likewise.'

Karadjitch made the cruel discovery that a prophet is without honor in his own country; but, on the other hand,

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