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SCRIBNER'S
MAGAZINE

During 1898 the follow

ing will be important contributions.*

"THE STORY OF THE REVOLUTION" by SENATOR HENRY CABOT LODGE will run throughout 1898. The author of "The Life of Washington" undertook this large work with two ideas in view: (1) To present the fight for American independence—not as a dry history, but a vivid picture of a vital struggle, reproducing the atmosphere and feeling of the time. (2) To make clear the historical significance and proportion of the events described. (For the first

time all the modern art forces and resources will be brought to bear upon the Revolution. Howard Pyle and a corps of artists began work upon it last summer.)

THOMAS NELSON PAGE'S FIRST LONG NOVEL, "RED ROCK-A CHRONICLE OF RECONSTRUCTION," Will be Scribner's leading fiction serial during '98. Mr. Page has hitherto written of the Old South or the New South; he now writes, with all the richness of color that has gained him so much affection, the novel of the era when the Old South was lost forever and the New South had not yet found itself. Mr. Page has devoted four years to the story, and he considers it his best work. (It will be illustrated by B. West Clinedinst.)

"THE WORKERS."-WALTER A. WYCKOFF, the college graduate who became a day-laborer in order to learn the truth about the working classes, will continue the story of his two years' experiment. In '98 he will tell about his experience with laborers and anarchists in Chicago and the problems of organized labor in city districts. (W. R. Leigh will illustrate it.)

“BITS OF EUROPE IN AMERICA."-The three most typical European settlements in this country have been studied by three women writers, Octave Thanet, Cornelia Atwood Pratt, and Elia W. Peattie. (The articles will be illustrated.)

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"LIFE AT GIRLS' COLLEGES," like the articles on "Undergraduate Life at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale," will tell of the manners, customs, and life of various American college girls. Miss ABBE CARTER GOODLOE, author of Girls," "College will write of WELLESLEY; the other authors will be announced later. (These articles will be illustrated from life and actual scenes by artists who will make special studies of each college.)

ARTICLES ON ARTISTS.-There will appear from time to time during the year appreciations of the work of American artists, such as, MCCLURE HAMILTON, by Harrison S. Morris; HoMER MARTIN, by W. C. Brownell; WILTON LOCKWOOD, by T. R. Sullivan; THEODORE ROBINSON, by A. F. Jaccaci. There will also be an article on Ruskin by Spielmann.

STUDIES BY C. D. GIBSON.-A series of drawings called " A NEW YORK DAY" and, another, "THE SEVEN AGES

OF AMERICAN WOMAN" are the most im

portant pieces of work that Mr. Gibson is at present engaged upon for the magazine.

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SENATOR HOAR'S POLITICAL REMINISCENCES.-Senator Hoar is a shrewd observer and a witty writer, and he has been in public life for fortyfive years.

SHORT FICTION..- RUDYARD KIPLING, GEORGE W. CABLE, KENNETH GRAHAME, and others, are under engagements to contribute short stories during 1898.

SCRIBNER'S
MAGAZINE

The NOVEMBER number is now out. Most of the

contents follows:

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a swift and singularly well armed little poet, and their
occupants, down to the very smallest among them, chased
in all directions, the people of that district lived in peace
and contentment, pinched it may be by poverty, but
unvexed by critical detraction. The great Unappreciated
of the present period must look back, one might imagine,
upon that era-or they should do so if the supposed
eternal enmity between author and critic were a fact,
instead of, largely, an amusing fiction-as upon a Golden
Age of letters. For there was no one then, as nowadays
they complain that there are so many, " to come between
them and their public "; and that public was so easy to
reach that an obscure author of the early Georgian era
had only to find an influential patron in order to be at
once relieved of all apprehension of having to sleep out of
doors. If such a patron were not forthcoming that risk
had, it is true, to be run; but even then the literary
aspirant who could find no nobleman to accept a dedication
could still address the reader in a preface. In those days
he was the "gentle reader," the "candid reader "-gentle
because his heart was not yet seared, and candid for that
his judgment was still unperverted by the cruelty and dis-
honesty of the professional critic. And so the Golden
Age ran its course and passed away.

Saturn succumbed to Jupiter we may suppose in
1802. The commencement of the Silver Age is marked
by the establishment of the Edinburgh Review. Obscurity
then for the first time ceased to be a protection. Criticism
began to organize itself, and a little band of reviewers
arose who, not content with discussing the merits of such
writers as had already gained the ear of the public,
affected, as they still affect, to sit in judgment on the
claims of those who were as yet only aspiring to win it.
They showed, in fact, from the very outset of their opera-
tions that they had no idea of confining their attentions
to well-known authors like MR. SOUTHEY, whose "Thalaba"
is roughly but not, perhaps, unrighteously handled in
No. 1 of the Edinburgh, or like the famous divine and
scholar whose pulpit eloquence is the subject of a still
quoted "appreciation " beginning, "Whoever has had the
good fortune to see DR. PARR'S wig"; for a luckless and
now long-forgotten MR. PRATT, author of " Bread; or the
Poor-a Poem," is called up for correction, and two other
unhappy Doctors of Divinity, of less note than PARR, are
chastised for their presumption in publishing their
sermons. These last three are evidently only aspirants to
acceptance; so here we have the critic "coming between "
them and their public to warn off their possible readers

and, as they doubtless flattered themselves, their not impossible admirers. The Silver Age, we see clearly, has begun. Like its mythical prototype, though worse than the Gold, it was vastly better than the Brass, for the critie only went on the war path once a quarter, or a little later once a month, whereas when the Brazen Age-for.authors -was ushered in by the appearance in. 1817 of the Literary Gazette, the critic began to go about his sinister business every week. As to the Iron Age, its commencement is almost an affair of yesterday. It began when the daily newspapers, instead of bestowing merely a casual and intermittent notice upon literature, took to opening their columns liberally to the reviewer at short intervals and regularly-recurring dates. From the combined effect of their separate action it has resulted that when one of these great journals is not reviewing another is; so that the critic is now to be seen at work somewhere or other every morning of our lives, and no author can be sure of not awakening any day to find that intrusive shadow falling "between him and his public." The daily critic! Do but consider what it means. The gentleness of the gentle reader turned into severity, the candour of the candid sophisticated, at least, once in every twenty-four hours. This should be the worst and darkest of all our literary eras for the injured author. It should be verily and indeed the age of the departure of Astræa-the age when Justice, despairing at last of preserving that scanty remnant of impartiality which the critic has left in the mind of the public, has finally taken leave of the earth.

Or that, at any rate, is what ought to be the author's gloomy view of the situation; and that is what it would be if there were any truth left in the legend of his hostility to the "irresponsible, indolent reviewer." As a matter of fact, his actual attitude towards this immense development of the critical industry has been surprisingly different. So far from his having been driven in disgust from the field by the vastly-increased number and activity of his "natural enemies," he has redoubled, or rather quadrupled and quintupled, his own energies of production. One would think that he welcomed criticism instead of repelling it; that it stimulated instead of discouraging his literary ambitions; and that his dread of injustice had been completely conquered by his desire for notice. It has apparently been borne in upon even the Great Unappreciated that obscure merit, after all, fares better with too many critics than with too few or none, and may congratulate itself that its lot has been cast in a time when, instead of sinking helplessly in the icy waters of neglect, it is much more often found floating, perhaps even too buoyantly, on a "boom." But there is, perhaps, another reason why the ever-increasing crowd of authors, especially among the ranks of the unknown, have begun to look upon criticism with other and more friendly eyes. They are getting dismayed by their own numbers, and, what is more, they have begun to perceive that this feeling of dismay is becoming general. They are uneasily conscious that, even if the reader still retained all the gentleness and candour which they were wont to ascribe to him, he would

be unable to exercise those qualities through sheer mental confusion; and they no longer, therefore, attach a superstitious value to the privilege of coming unintroduced into the presence of a public which is merely bewildered by their multitude. On the contrary, they have begun to feel the need of an intermediary between themselves and the reading world. Looking round upon their crowded and ever-swelling ranks, and "conscious, as they are in the words of the famous judicial epigram-" of each other's imperfections," they welcome and, indeed, crave for the services of the discriminating dust-sifter who will be quick to discern the flash of merit amid the rubbishheap of incompetence.

The situation is not without its embarrassment for the critic; but in one respect, at any rate, it simplifies his course of action. He is not called upon to excuse himself for increasing the scope of activities which seem to be so much in demand. No apology, for instance, can be needed for adding another to the list of journals which devote themselves, exclusively or principally, to the art and industry of literary criticism. Vastly as that industry has developed of late years, its progress has been not equalled merely, but outstripped, within the same period by the growth of literary production. Where the analytic impulse abounded, the creative nisus apparently doth much more abound. There is apparently no reason to hope, or fear, that the former will overtake the latter, or that there can ever be a time in store for us when critics will be found increasing and multiplying with as much rapidity-even relative rapidity-as authors. Nor, even in that case, would it be possible by any conceivable expansion in the literary department of the periodical Press to overtake and keep abreast of the stream of production. Already, however, the thought may have occurred to the reader of these lines that, even if this were possible, it would scarcely be desirable. To render an account, however short, of every book published nowadays is a task only to be attempted on the quite untenable assumption that every such book deserves to be so treated. In offering to the public a new weekly journal dealing exclusively with the subject indicated by its title, we are animated by no chimerical hope of accomplishing the impossible. Literature, on the contrary, owes its existence in some measure to the conviction that, in the effort to satisfy every one of the innumerable applicants, deserving and undeserving, for its notice, contemporary criticism is running a real danger of neglecting its discriminative functions, and of forgetting that the special recognition which it owes to writers of genuine literary merit is necessarily depreciated in value by association with a too liberal complaisance of attention to all writers whatsoever. While endeavouring, therefore, in these columns, to provide the public with an adequate account and appraisement of whatever works may deserve any critical notice at all, we shall at the same time make it our constant aim to assign that position of importance to the higher class of literary productions which nowadays, amid the multiplicity of claimants to the attention of criticism, they too often fail to obtain.

Reviews.

Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir. By his Son. 91+6 in. 516+551 pp. London, 1897. Macmillan. 36/- n. (FIRST NOTICE.)

A biography of a great poet from the hand of one who stood to him in the three-fold relation of son, secretary, and constant literary confidant must needs be full of interest for the world; and Lord Tennyson's personal

share in this memoir of his illustrious father abounds naturally enough in matter of the highest value. But the additions, copious in amount and various in kind, with which he has been able to enrich it indefinitely increase its worth. It may be doubted, indeed, whether any work of this description has ever before so munificently enlarged the stock of public knowledge concerning the inner and spiritual life of a profoundly thoughtful philosopher-poet, the opinions and judgments of a life-long student of English poetry, and the artistic development and methods of the most exquisite of poetic artists. The book contains letters of the highest interest from and to the late Laureate, an abundance of his own literary memoranda, a faithful record of his conversations, ranging over a wide field of subjects, a collection of critical pronouncements, always weighty and illuminating, on the literature of the past, and, most precious of all, a singularly large array of hitherto unpublished pieces from the hand of the poet himself. It is only by the biographer's resolute selfeffacement that room has been found even within the thousand pages of these two substantial volumes for the mass of illustrative matter with which they present us. "According to my father's wish," writes Lord Tennyson, in the modest and judicious preface with which he introduces the work, "throughout the memoir my hand will be as seldom seen as may be "; and he goes on to plead this excuse, unneeded, it appears to us, for its "occasionally fragmentary character." It will surprise none who can recall certain famous and trenchant utterances of the poet that he "disliked the notion of a long formal biography." "He wished, however," adds his son," that if I deemed it better the incidents of his life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further and unauthentic biographies." His wish has assuredly been fulfilled in this work. It is not always that what may be called the "official biography" of an eminent person is, or indeed deserves to be, the final one; but here the claim to finality is quite indisputable. What the biographer has given us about the poet's "birth, home, school, college, friendships, travels, and the leading events of his life supplies an ample account if not, to use his own words, of all that "people naturally wish to know," yet certainly of all that people have any sort of right to learn. Those who wish to know more will belong essentially to that class of persons upon whom the Laureate half humorously, half seriously imprecated the "curse of Shakspeare."

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To readers of this order-an order unfortunately which various causes have for a good many years past contributed to increase the new biography will be a wholesome disappointment. One cannot honestly say that the story of Tennyson's life, domestic and literary, full though it is of human interest, would as here told supply much 66 copy for a "mainly-about-people" column. The biographer has adhered so resolutely to his own sound principles that, writing as he does on a man who had already been the subject during his lifetime of "sketches," "studies,"

"monographs," and "appreciations" without number, he has naturally made few new additions to the Tennysoniana with which all the world was already familiar: a fact which only shows that inquiry and revelation had been carried to the verge of the legitimate before he even entered upon his task. Such additions to popular knowledge as he has made are to be found, as might be expected, in the earlier chapters. We catch a glimpse for the first time, for instance, of the poet's grandfather-the wrongheaded and capricious old gentleman who left his landed property away from his elder to his younger son, and who deserves immortality if only for the monumental infelicity of the prophecy of which he delivered himself in handing to the youthful Alfred the honorarium for a poem which the lad had composed "by desire” on his grandmother's death, "Here is half a guinea for you, the first you have ever earned by poetry, and, take my word for it, the last." Had the unlucky old man contented himself with the less specific prediction that the boy would never become a poet, he might even now be sturdily defending it in the Elysian Fields as a matter of individual opinion. But the hard fact that his grandson left behind him the largest fortune ever amassed by the exercise of the poetic art must be beyond the power of the venerable shade to explain away. Another quaint picture sketched from the Tennysons of an earlier generation is that of the poet's rigidly Calvinistic aunt who wept over the infinite goodness of the Deity in damning "most of her friends," while she, who was no better than most of her neighbours," had been picked out for eternal salvation--a reflection quite in the manner of Browning's "Johannes Agricola ;" and who one day remarked encouragingly to her nephew, " Alfred, Alfred, when I look at you I think of the words of Holy Scripture, Depart from me ye cursed, into everlasting fire!"" Something, too, we hear, and would fain have heard more, of Alfred Tennyson's brothers and sisters, the other members of that extraordinary family of twelve-remarkable alike for longevity and genius-which has produced two poets of distinct mark besides the Laureate himself, and is even at this day represented by five survivors, the eldest upwards of ninety and the youngest approaching her eightieth year. The poetic instinct appears to have developed itself almost as early in Alfred's two elder brothers as in himself, and, indeed, was in all of them, it would seem, an inheritance from their father. In an interesting fragment of autobiography he writes:

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According to the best of my recollection, when I was about eight years old, I covered two sides of a slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older than I was, Thomson then being the only poet I knew. Before I could read I was in the habit, on a stormy day, of spreading my arms to the wind and crying out "I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind," and the words "far, far, away" had always a strange charm for me. About ten or eleven Pope's "Homer's Iliad " became a favourite of mine, and I wrote hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre-nay, even could improvise them,so could my two elder brothers, for my father was a poet and could write regular metre very skilfully.

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At about twelve and onward I wrote an epic of six thousand lines à la Sir Walter Scott-full of battles, dealing too with sea and mountain scenery-with Scott's regularity of octosyllables and his occasional varieties. Though the performance was very

likely worth nothing, I never felt myself more truly inspired. I

wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields in the dark. Somewhat later (at fourteen) I wrote a drama in blank verse, which I have

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