a cat, if not hungry, investigates objects which puzzle it before eating or drinking. Fear in cats is stronger than normal hunger or thirst, and maternal instinct (naïvely labelled "spite" by unobservant people and known as maternal affection in woman) is strongest, and is far less self-conscious, simpler, and more vehement in the average feline than in the average human mother. Fear sometimes literally paralyzes cats whom it assails. Anyhow cat-psycho

The Spectator.

sis is so subtle that all redaction of it is hypothesis. After reading Miss Keller's amazing books unknown forms of life, with personalities invisible, inaudible, and intangible seem possible. If she, in the narrow limits of a maimed existence, communed with unseen and unheard associates, who knows what might ensue after bodily dissolution? And animals, less hampered by externalities than ourselves, may know strange things now. One must leave it at that.

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in the fact that so many worthy people fight shy of Ibsenite drama, such plays as Mr. Galsworthy's "Justice," or of harrowing and depressing novels like "Jude the Obscure." "uncultured" person-"uncultured," by the way, is a most "uncultured" word -is not a bit hurt when his bland intellectual superiors regard him as a Philistine, a man of coarse tastes, lacking in the faculty of appreciation and all the rest of it. Not having enough knowledge of æsthetics to entrench himself in the position that art is an appeal to the average man, that its first duty is to reach our primitive instincts, and that what is in the main unpleasing cannot be altogether good art, he meekly says nothing, or expresses his antipathy with the off-hand concision of Squire Western. Yet, if he would only think it out, how he could turn the tables! For who are the true Philistines-those who have schooled themselves into affecting, and even into believing, that they like what no rational creature can really and truly enjoy, or the man who is quite honest about his emotions?

A critic recently argued that the objection of the ordinary playgoer to the drab environment of Ibsen and

Hauptmann was a right and proper objection, and that these playwrights made a fundamental mistake by clothing idealistic dramas in the unbeautiful forms of realism. He pleaded for more of the sensuous element in intellectual drama. Life ought not to be represented as more painful and ugly than it is, but in terms of greater beauty and nobility. There is much truth in this, although the bases of the argument are not entirely sound. The lurking fallacy shows itself clearly when the critic goes on to say that, when matters are righted, plays will no longer be divided into comic and tragic; for it is really in this vital distinction of kinds that the force of his complaint resides.

Realism is never justifiable in art except when the impressions to be conveyed are on the whole pleasing. This follows from the very nature of art, which is a spontaneous communication of feeling, a spontaneous expression of ideas. Pure art is not didactic or subservient to any purpose; it is, first and last, simply expression. So far as Ibsen's or Hauptmann's plays are intended to teach something or to denounce anything, they are not pure art, but art adapted, art subordinated to a foreign object. Many so-called works of art would be

with agonies, sorrows, and disasters, with things that in themselves can certainly not be pleasing, unless they satisfy some passion of hatred or revenge, unless we take ignoble delight in seeing our enemies suffer. But the very soul of tragedy is sympathy. Obviously, tragedy would be the reverse of pleasing, and accordingly the reverse of artistic, if it made us suffer agonies, griefs, and terrors in our own selves, or in those whom we might identify with ourselves. The closer it comes home, the more it is realistic, the more intolerable and subversive of artistic enjoyment must it be. Yet the emotions corresponding to grief, agony, and terror, the emotions of pity, sympathy, and admiration, are undoubtedly pleasurable. The artistic function of pathos is to evoke these feelings, not to make us suffer. Our pity and admiration should be greater and more intense than our sense of pain, which is but a minister to spiritual exultations. We do not want to realize the suffering; we do want to realize the noble results of suffering, which poetry, and poetry alone, can

express.

Thus tragic art must avoid familiar environments and too much verisimilitude; it must be ideal; and, sure enough, we find that the great classical writers of tragedy never deviate into realism. What could be further removed from actuality than Eschylean or Sophoclean tragedy, with its highly artificial structure, its elevated dialogue, its chorus, the formal intermediary between the real world of the spectator and the ideal world of the protagonists? Shakespeare usually wrote his comic dialogue in prose; his tragic scenes are always exalted blank verse, the language far removed from ordinary speech, radiant with imageries that transport us into the ethereal world of ideal vision. His comic people belong to that class

which we succinctly call "the man in the street;" his tragic personages are kings and queens, nobles and courtiers, not of his own day, but of periods remote. They are only a little less ideal in nature and circumstance than the demi-gods and heroes of Eschylus and Sophocles. It was the same with Corneille and Racine. Molière might be realistic; though even he in his more serious and tragic comedies idealized not only characters and sentiments, but the very speech, and wrote such plays as the "Misanthrope" in alexandrines.

When Ibsen forsook the poetry of his early days, he changed all this completely. It was as if Shakespeare had translated "King Lear" and "Macbeth" into the terms of that terrible morality-play, "Resurrection," as we saw it staged at His Majesty's. Imagine the regality, the mystery, the poetry taken away, and a middle-class home, people like ourselves, anguish expressed in bald, brutal prose, poverty, disease, hereditary vice, the doctor, the police-court, substituted for the lofty figures of tragedy. Who could endure even Shakespearean tragedy brought thus into our actual lives? This is what Ibsen and those who accept his emancipation of tragedy have done. Tragedy has descended into our streets and houses; we sit and watch people, exactly like ourselves, suffering agonies that might be our own; we sit and suffer cording to the sensibility of our nerves, rather than expand according to the strength lent to our imagination. The plain man feels this to be unendurable, and the plain man is right.

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He is right again when he protests against realistic tragedy in fiction, since the novel can be as successful as the stage in driving home the sting of anguish. In the novel, it is our own everyday life that we see

mirrored; the characters are our very selves, the voices are our own, the thoughts and feelings belong to the tissue of our lives. And the novelist can go even further than the playwright in compelling us to realize the pangs of tragedy with intolerable force, for he is not restricted to what is said and done; he is at liberty to represent hidden and unspoken agony. Only as the instrument of moral awakening and social insurrection can such torture be justified: it has nothing whatever to do with art. Ibsen's prose dramas thrilled at first by dint of the novelty and illegality of their form; but they never give the unmixed satisfaction of perfect art. It is now becoming recognized that the true Ibsen was he of the poetic dramas, upon which he expended much less labor, but poured forth his genius into a suitable mould. I have cited only one of the numerous plays that Ibsen's example has called into being, Mr. Galsworthy's "Justice." No one is likely to deny that this is rather a pamphlet than a tragedy. Only a great indignation and a longing to help put things right could justify the harrowing realism of its pathos. Mr. Hardy has written but The Academy.

one novel entirely on this plan-"Jude the Obscure," though many of his shorter stories in "Wessex Tales" and "Life's Little Ironies" are constructed on the same obnoxious principle. Compare "Jude" with such a novel as "The Woodlanders" to see the difference between the painful and the tragic. The one has actuality, the other is true. To quote a crucial instance, what is the chief blot upon his great masterpiece, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"? Surely the discordant actuality of the police-officers in the solemn theatre of Stonehenge, and that excruciating incident where the lover and the sister catch sight of the black flag above the gaol, signalling the execution of Tess. Great tragedy leaves us not thus, in a state of revolt and disgust, of criticism or questioning, but reconciled by our sense of a justice somewhere-perhaps in our hearts-inspired with a sense of hu man nature's greatness and capacity to endure. A sure touchstone of the tragedy that is not pure art is that it leaves us in rebellion, challenging gods and men, and only too anxious to dispute the very premises of the playwright's argument.

Ernest A. Baker.

If it is manners that make men, there can be very few in these days. One is inclined to ask, do they also make women? We hope not, for, if they do, women must be even rarer still. If William of Wykeham came to judgment now, he would surely have to find a new class for humans; they could hardly be genus homo any more. Yet, if the truth must be told, we have an idea that William of Wykeham's text had no strict rele vance at all to Lord Rosebery's theme when he was lecturing the boys of

Guildford Grammar School so wholesomely the other day. Did not pious William really mean character by manners? There was a day when it would almost have been thought wicked to say that it was mannersin Lord Rosebery's sense-that made a man. The hollowness of manners as a guide to character used to be a favorite text; illustrated descriptions of polished paragons-the quintessence of elegance and formal courtesywhose hearts were black. The inno cent, indeed, starting through the

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world was practically told to suspect a blackguard in every gentleman. Good manners were a disguise. We have very little of this now-even popular novelettes, we understand, are not now peopled with elegant villains. Naturally, for there is no elegance to be warned off. The deceitful heart is now wearing the mask of the hoyden and the romp, the hooligan and street arab. A much more skilful disguise for polish was never believed to be spontaneous, hardly natural, in Englishmen, and as something artificial it put people on their guard. But horse-play argues an untutored mind, so that in the young men and maidens of to-day you see just the simple (sometimes noble) savage, necessarily honest for want of sophistication. So they can deceive with much more success than their polished ancestors. It undoubtedly is the popular view that as we have sloughed off manner have taken on honesty. One is asked to tolerate good-humoredly and even to admire the young things' high spirits as all so natural and simple. It may be natural and it may be simple, especially as simple is sometimes synonym for fool. But where is the consolation in a man being natural if he is naturally offensive? Why should we like a woman the more for being simple if she is simply vulgar? This apology for the casting off of good manners does not appeal to us at all. If a man or woman cannot be, or, at any rate, is not good inside as well as out, we would rather have him good outside than not good either way. Who would think of objecting to a lunatic that he had a sound body? Possibly an unsound body would correspond better with an unsound mind and so be simpler; but we never heard of anyone on that account preferring a deformed and hideous lunatic to a handsome one. We would be quite willing to take our chance of

the mischief worked by Brummels and D'Orsays if we could get back the manners of their age; not that it was at all the high-water mark of manners. If the Hebro-American plutocracy of our day were to assume courtly manners, we would promptly become bull purchasers of moral stock. But we do not look for any immediate rise.

Lord Rosebery did not attempt a definition of manners. He would have been very silly if he had. He would have left the boys without any idea what manners were or what he meant by them. Every definition breaks down. If one says it is the expression of character, numerous examples spring up to refute us. If we say it is the bearing of a gentleman to a gentleman, one knows of many gentlemen who have bad manners; and we are bound to add, quite as many ladies. Moreover people of any class can have good manners. A king may have no manners; a slum child or a peasant may be a model. We all agree that the quintessence of illmanners is pretence, especially the pretence of fineness. Yet spontaneity does not make good manners; the lower classes have always shown this, and to-day the higher classes are driving this truth home with energy. Neither will reality hold as a test, though often put forward. A roughnatured person could never achieve good manners by mere honesty. То cite the savage is a great mistake; primitive people are always conventional and ceremonial. So one takes refuge in saying that manners, like so many other things which we know and appreciate as facts, are felt, but cannot be explained. Good manners are the manners of a good man is very nearly what Aristotle would have said. It sounds a truism; it is not always true; yet you will not get much further than that, once you begin an