through private charity. This illegitimate taxation, as to the purpose and extent of which the taxpayer is not consulted, carried to the length now threatened, is what the author stamps as the coming slavery. From this, in the third lecture, on "The Sins of Legislators," Mr. Spencer passes to paint the evils arising from uninstructed legislation. After stating that of eighteen thousand public acts passed by the legislature with which he is most familiar the English Parliament a large proportion were repealed after a short trial, either as unnecessary, because the evils they sought to remedy had passed away, or as ill as ill adapted to effect their object, or as having proved positively mischievous, Mr. Spencer from these facts infers that this disastrous result is due mainly to the ignorance of the makers of English laws; to the insane idea that any young man of fair education, though without special training or experience, is competent to sit as a legislator. Among the laws pronounced most mischievous are those for the protection of trade and industry as opposed to free trade; sumptuary laws; laws interfering with the interest of money, with the price of labor or of food; with the acts of engrossing or forestalling the market; and even, by reason of their complexity, uncertainties, and contradictions, so well-intended laws as those for the prevention of shipwrecks. When the evils of such legislation have become intolerable, the remedy applied is not, as it should be, the abandonment of the vicious system, but the enactment of more laws, so devoted is the public mind to legislature-worship, which he compares to fetish-worship, though for the latter he finds greater excuse. This leads the author to his final article, "The Great Political Superstition," which is, in short, that Parliament, or the legislature, is omnipotent; or, going back to the sources of authority, that the majority have the right not only to govern, as politically the sovereign, but to do whatever they will. To this doctrine, in all its forms, Mr. Spencer refuses to assent. Whatever may be thought of the English Parliament, which, it has been declared, could do anything but make a man a woman, nobody claims such powers for legislatures in America. It is in relation to the doctrine of political sovereignty, as inherent in the people as an organic whole, taught in this volume, though more fully expounded in other works of his, that Mr. Spencer has exhibited most clearly the profoundness of his insight into the problems of political philosophy, and has best earned the gratitude of America, to which a sound doctrine of sovereignty is of great concern.

Thus, in the compass of a little over one hundred pages, Mr. Spencer has propounded

novel and striking views, many of which our age would do well to adopt, and some of which it would perhaps be wise wholly to reject or to hold in suspense until time shall have ripened or have reversed existing tendencies. In passing judgment upon these articles, we must, as already hinted, distinguish in many points between our own country and England, for which they were principally prepared. In others, they are as applicable to America as to the mother country from which she derived her spirit and her institutions. American legislators are guilty of many of the sins charged against those of England. They are generally more uninstructed, and the codes adopted by them are proportionately as voluminous, as transient and as mischievous as the worst English specimens. How could it be otherwise, when our state legislatures are filled with ambitious youths, the scum of our town and ward politics, or briefless lawyers, deigning, to the disgrace of their profession, to enter the legis latures as the paid lackeys of corporations? Ascending to the national legislature, if a slight improvement is discernible it is due to the more conspicuous position and the broader field afforded by national politics, by which a rather higher type of men is induced to seek seats in it; and perhaps those chosen are a little sobered by the greater responsibility of their position. In all alike there is great and increasing pandering to corporate interests, insomuch that thoughtful men would despair of the republic but for our judiciary, generally stanch and incorruptible, seemingly the last hope, outside of the homes of the people, of liberty amongst us. And yet, with all the sins of our legislators, it is the delinquencies of the administrative authorities of our great cities that most menace the existence of our governments: an evil which for long periods threatened England also, but which seems there to have been largely remedied. Strange that popular government should be better administered by a monarch than by the people; that corruption and corporate greed should be most rampant here, where they who are to suffer from them, though they are the rulers, yet seem powerless to check or to punish them! In respect to many kinds of laws reprobated by Mr. Spencer, it is early, certainly in America, to speak decisively, since their effect is still a subject of experiment, and what may be demanded for one age or society may be unsuited to another. Among these are laws for the protection of industry, which Mr. Spencer denounces as aggressions against individual rights. The same holds true emphatically as to the whole class of relief laws. Conceding that the abuses growing out of them may be more pronounced in a country of vast wealth,

applaud is that which rings the newest in their ears. And again: "The bards are not to blame, but rather Zeus, who gives to toiling men even as he wills to each."

It is obviously impossible to examine Mr. Palmer's version in detail here, nor can I follow Homer and Mr. Stillman on the track of Ulysses, even with the incitement of such discoveries as reward the reviewer in "The Atlantic," who has found in the "Odyssey," what no man ever found there before, Ulysses dropping in on "the restored domesticity of Helen and Menelaus." The text of this edition is substantially that of La Roche, and is carefully reprinted, misprints being confined to an occasional trifle as the nominative for the dative, in VIII. 425. That the translation is accurate and scholarly, goes without saying. We may regret that Mr. Palmer follows Merry's rendering in I. 19, that he employs "speedy-comer" for the characteristic epithet of Hermes, and makes Athene keen-eyed rather than grey-eyed; we may doubt the propriety of the epithets "heavenly goddess" applied to Calypso, and of the rendering "potent" for "potnia," which is a frequent epithet of mother. But these are all questions on which difference of opinion is permitted.

a

In the suggestive preface, the importance of the personal equation, or special standpoint from which the interpreter regards Homer, is dwelt upon. Mr. Palmer's personal equation is a strong sense of the directness and simplicity, not to say homeliness, of Homer. This, together with his happy renderings of Homeric epithets, used to give a special raciness and reality to his readings, and perhaps constitutes the note or cachet of this translation. Those who fear "classic" and are repelled by "standards" will undoubtedly get from this plain vocabulary of every-day life a stronger sense of the reality of the marvellous fairy tale than they would from a language tinged with poetical or biblical associations. Such being the distinctive service rendered by this version, it is perhaps to be regretted that Mr. Palmer has, in de ference possibly to the criticism of colleagues, abandoned some of the raciest of his old renderings. "Whipped up to start" is certainly nearer the Greek, and is not more prosaic than "cracked the whip to start," which has supplanted it as a translation of the expression more freely rendered by Butcher and Lang, "touched the mules to start them." Perhaps it would not do in print to ask Nausicaa where she "picked up" the stranger Ulysses, but I confess to some regret at the substitution of "Telemachus, lofty of tongue," for our old friend Telemachus, the "tall-talker," and, if the etymological force of Helios Hyperion must be rendered, I prefer the "sun who moveth on

high" to "the exalted one. "Swing-paced, crook-horned oxen" is a very happy rendering of those puzzling epithets, one of which a character in "Middlemarch" stigmatizes as "poetical slang," and translates "leg-plaiters." The line, "But as the sun declined toward stalling time," offers another happy hit in verse as good as the corresponding vaguer line of Bryant,

"But when the sun was sloping towards the west." The translator of Homer, however, has the defects of his qualities, and, in endeavoring to bring the "Odyssey" nearer to one class of readers, Mr. Palmer has perhaps missed something of the nobility and poetic charm he might have secured for others. "Thou' does not stand alone," he tells us; "it carries a long train after it." But to many readers the associations of the English Bible and of our poetical literature, the phrases even of those bookish men Virgil and Milton will seem more fitly representative of the true spirit of Homer than the language of the modern newspaper, the essay, and conversation. Such readers will miss the poetic vocabulary; they will prefer "cruse" to "oil-flask," "raiment" (sometimes) to "clothing," and a "goodly golden ewer" to a "beautiful pitcher made of gold" (VII. 172). They will wish Athene to say (VI. 25), "Nausicaa, how hath thy mother so heedless a maiden to her daughter?" rather than, "Nausicaa, how did vour mother ever have a child so heedless?" They would rather have Calypso promise Ulysses to "make him know not death nor age for all his days," than to "make him an immortal young forever" (VII. 257); and they would have Telemachus hold, possess, or dwell on his demesne in peace, rather than "farm it” (XI. 185). It might also be urged that by the insistence on the etymological equivalence of proper names more is lost of sonority and vague poetical charm than is gained in intelligibility. "Hyperion" is more pleasing than "the exalted one," and "the Highlands" is somewhat misleading as a rendering of "Hypereia." Such differences of opinion and taste, however, will always exist, resulting from different theories of translation or different views of Homer; and since no translation can ever be adequate, all lovers of Greek literature must welcome a work that is a scholarly and able presentment of one theory and one point of view.

In another matter my dissent from Mr. Palmer is more serious. The movement of his sentences is sometimes unpleasant; they are too often jerky, abrupt, saccadé; there are too many dashes and too many short clauses in apposition; there is too l'ttle employment of the few connecting particles we possess, especially of the repeated "and" of our old storytellers almost our only means of representing

the loose but subtle connections in Greek narrative.

This defect, if it be one, is not caused by imperfect execution, but is the result of a fatally wrong theory of the limits of prose and verse It is to be regretted that Mr. Palmer has adopted the dangerous heresy of rhythmic prose. All good prose has its rhythm, but it is not the rhythm of verse. A tertium quid, for which the dubious authority of Walt Whitman is cited, is generally an unanalyzed mixture of both. It is not difficult to reduce Mr. Palmer's tertium quid, so far as it is rhythm at all, to very definite feet; and the result is not pleasant when set against the "stateliest measure moulded by the lips of men." Mr. Palmer characterizes his rhythm as "loose iambics," and a slight scrutiny of his work suffices to show that the rhythmic effects are produced by an intermixture of all known forms of iambic measure with each other and with prose. In short sentences and detached clauses, we find the monometer "then check myself," the tripody "thus did he speak and pray," the penthemimeris "my heart impels me," the dimeter "and I was eight years on the way," the dimeter catalectic "a wicked crew betrayed me." Clauses of moderate length and recurring formulæ frequently fall into the iambic pentapody, or English heroic verse, as in IV. 123-4, "For her, Adraste placed a well-wrought chair; Alkippe brought a carpet of soft wool"; and in the formula, "Then answered him discreet Telemachus." Among longer measures, the heptapody often occurs: "Dear children, surely mortal man could never vie with Zeus;' "Through many wars and wanderings I wars and wanderings I brought it to my ships." The most characteristic of Mr. Palmer's longer measures, however, is the tetrameter catalectic, the most familiar example of which is, "A captain bold of Halifax, who lived in country quarters." Compare I. 315, "Do not detain me longer now when anxious for my journey"; and, for two successive lines, I. 264: "If as he was that day Odysseus now might meet the suitors, they all would find quick turns of fate and bitter rites of marriage.' These definite forms of iambic measure are combined in a variety of ways with each other and with prose. The closing cadence of the tetrameter is frequently employed to close a sentence: "Each man departed homeward"; "and question royal Nestor." Occasionally other verse-forms are found, as the dactylic hexameter in I. 96, "Saying this, under her feet she bound her beautiful sandals," but they are rare, and contribute little to the general effect. This question is perhaps of little moment to the average reader, who does not feel rhythmic language very keenly, even when printed as avowed verse; but the few to whom genuine rhythm is an in

tense delight cannot regard such lawless intermixtures as artistic, and will regret that Mr. Palmer has laid so much stress on the least valuable portion of his work.

In conclusion, I have a word to say concerning Mr. Palmer's apparent estimate of the poetic genius of Homer. In his preface, he touches on the various interests and aspects which the "Odyssey" has presented to its numerous interpreters. What he himself enjoys most in Homer is the peculiar psychology, the "unique ethical attitude," the fact that the poet "seems to confront the world like a child." It seems that Homer's constructions are coördinate, not subordinate, as that master of style, Mr. Herbert Spencer, would have them; "to find language equally free in our time we must seek it in the mouth of Uncle Remus"; he has all the child's delight in "saying it again." Pursuing this train of thought, Mr. Palmer discriminates Homer from the "bookish" poets, Virgil and Milton. With them, "personality counts for more; the idea of moral obligation has arisen; grief has become more profound; human life . . . has acquired an infinite significance and pathos. But Homer knows nothing of all this." Now, while recognizing the qualifications by which these views are limited in Mr. Palmer's mind, I must state that, so expressed, they are essentially misleading, and call for uncompromising protest from every lover of the poet. It is time our critics ceased regarding Homer as a naïve barbarian, and endeavoring to realize the conditions under which the poems were composed by the mistaken analogies of artless improvisatori delighting with their rude chants a primitive people. Of the actual genesis of the Homeric poems, we know nothing; but it is historically conceivable, as Curtius has shown, that they were the product of a refined civilization on the coasts of Asia Minor. Be this as it may, Homer is for us neither a child nor a barbarian nor a primitive man, but the "poeta sovrano"

the "Ionian father of the rest," first in that band in which Dante's modesty assigned himself the sixth place. He may be less literary than some later poets, but compared with ballad-mongers, simple story-tellers, and primitive minstrels, Milton is his double, as Matthew Arnold truly says. His language, with its artistic blending of the resources of several dialects, was no more a colloquial tongue than is Lord Tennyson's in the United States to-day. His grand and flawless rhythm will never be found in any primitive poet; and it is often consciously adapted to the thought expressed with an art which is the despair of modern imitators.

He employs alliteration, not with the insistent monotony of early Germanic poets, but with an art that equals, a temperance that sur

passes, Mr. Swinburne's own. His repetitions, if sometimes in the story-teller's manner, have not infrequently the suggestiveness of a Wagnerian Leit-Motiv, or the literary charm of Milton's "fallen on evil days, on evil days though fallen and evil tongues." His matter is as far above primitive simplicity as his manner. We have all learned from Alfred de Musset and Mr. Symonds the difference between the ancient and modern spirits; but such generalizations are very misleading if they are taken to mean more than that the greatest of the ancients are, like Shakspeare and Milton, free, not from the sentiment but from the sentimentality of the lesser of the moderns. In truth, I cannot understand how it can be held that there is nothing tragic in Homer, or that it was reserved for after poets to discover the significance of life. I should not know where to look in later literature for a more unutterable anguish than that of Priam, as he bows to kiss the hand of the slayer of his son; for a more poignant remorse than the desolate self-reproach of Helen at the pyre of Hector; for a more pathetic portrayal of the mystery of innocent suffering than Andromache's presage of the orphanage of her child, and the banquet at which his lips would be moistened but not his palate; for a more infinite yearning of human tenderness than the speech of Ulysses' mother in the Shades; for a more overwhelming embodiment of the destiny that seems to make us its sport than the Homeric gods, who have interwoven evil in the woof of human life but themselves live at ease, "where falls not rain nor hail nor any snow." In Homer, as in later literature, the issue of sin is sorrow and the issue of sorrow is song: "The gods decreed it; they ordain destruction to the sons of men, a theme of song thereafter." (VIII. 579.) Surely these things are a part of the poet, no less than the simple truth of perception, and sunny serenity of spirit that made him clearest-souled of men.'

PAUL SHOREY.

A NOVELIST'S THEORY OF THE ART OF

FICTION.*

It was worth the while of the audience of the Royal Institution to listen to this lecture, and it is worth our while to read it. It is an inter esting and useful, if a somewhat inconclusive, contribution, from a novel point of view, to the very empirical art of rhetoric. Mr. Besant begins by advancing three propositions; the first being that fiction is a fine art, the peer of

*THE ART OF FICTION. By Walter Besant. Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co.

painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. The second must be given in his own words:

"That it is an art which, like them, is governed and directed by general laws; and that these laws may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion."

The third proposition is that, like the other fine arts, fiction cannot be taught, as can the mechanical arts, to those unendowed with the natural gifts.

Most of this is indisputable; but it would seem that, in the second part of the second proposition, Mr. Besant errs fundamentally. He ignores the fact that the body of rules and precepts which has been dignified by the name of "the science of rhetoric" is utterly unscientific and empirical. Unlike "the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion," the innumerable vague and fluctuating rules of rhetoric are handicapped by limitations, shackled by exceptions, hamstrung by audaciously successful violations. The literary craft is so conditioned by considerations of subject-matter, aim, audience, and especially by the incalculable element of personality in the author's talent or genius, that all but a few broad rules, so obvious as to be truisms, are subject to the most alarming infractions.

Coming to speak of the laws which govern this art, the author lays down the following:

"First, and before everything else, there is the rule that everything in fiction which is invented, and is not the result of personal experience and observation, is worthless."

This rule, as a practical one for the guidance of young writers, is admirable; but this is not the point. Mr. Besant is aiming at the precision and absoluteness of pure science. He forgets that an artistic precept is far from being a scientific principle. Insisting as it does upon the necessity of thorough familiarity with your facts, the rule is as important as it is ancient and obvious. It is only in the attempt. to postulate it as a law which "may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion," that the error lies. One need go no further than to the autobiography of Anthony Trollope, for striking testimony to the unscientific nature of this rule. One of Trol

lope's most finished and life-like creations, the archdeacon in "The Warden"-" who," says the novelist, with the pride of a parent, "has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon down to the very ground "was, as he phrases it, the simple result of an effort of the author's moral consciousness.

"I have been often asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a close. I never lived in any cathedral city, except London, never knew