Accordingly, Robert Browning, the things about you for which we do not greatly care are those for which you were blue-ribboned by your own generation. They have been allowed by default ever since, but you will now have to begin living them down. And conversely, what we prize are the darker streaks in your "veined humanity", not for their darkness, but for their richness, depth, and truth. We cannot be terribly impressed by your vaunted discovery that when you stoop you pluck a posy and when you stand and stare all's blue, since obviously if you had chanced to be stooping over the desert sands or staring at a thunderstorm, your botanizing would have been less bonny and your sky-gazing less blithe. We take little stock in the mighty to-do you make to establish your wishes as facts, your zeal in nursing your hope to keep it warm.

"Take away love," sings Fra Lippo Lippi, "and our earth is a tomb." Take away also material comfort, scope for healthful activity, recompense for effort, and religious faith, and what is our earth but a charnel-house? Yet hordes of your fellow-beings are doomed to live and die on a minimum physical and spiritual ration, and few indeed are endowed with your as triplex of happy environment, buoyant disposition, and naïve theology. Since life for you never was reduced to its lowest terms, you naturally are not qualified to grapple with ultimates. Yet even you reiterated a score of times this admission:

I must say or choke in silence-"Howsoever came my fate,
Sorrow did, and joy did nowise-life well weighed-preponderate."

Here you touch the responsive chord, Robert Browning, and for this shall you be saved. Not for your love of the garish day, of shawms and trumpets, of C major and the Mode Palestrina, do we welcome and speed you on, but for the wistful minor of your Toccata, the ineffable unfulfillment of your Campagna, your confession that our joy may be three parts pain and dearly bought at that with strain and throe, your recognition that this curse will come upon us: to see our idols perish. In your redoubtable harrying of evil and doubt through Bishop Blougram, Bernard de Mandeville, Mihrab Shah, and lesser lights, we see more of an oratorical gesture than a pugilistic blow, but in the

embarrassed wondering of Karshish and in the scornful groping of Cleon-who "sees the wider but to sigh the more"--we find the simple, sincere handclasp of human fellowship. It is not your David of inspired prophecy, but the young shepherd who would suffer for him whom he loved that we love. And more than Ben Ezra, prating of "plastic circumstance", do we trust del Sarto's "So free we seem, so fettered fast we are!"

This aspect of you we appreciate not because we love mirth and blessed assurance less, but honesty more. It is not that we revel in misery and enjoy our poor health. We too "desire joy and thank God for it", although we do not expect Him to furnish it on demand. Our eyes and ears also take in their dole, our brain treasures up the whole, our heart beats that it is good to live and learn; only we are beginning to be more concerned that we learn aright.

It is when you celebrate the heroisms and loyalties of the ambiguous creatures, discouragingly weak and astoundingly strong, summoned into this life; it is when you sing of the beauty and the wonder and the power of this world; that you enter into our common human heritage of grief and bliss and mystery, and render it more luminous and endurable. And thus from your manifold pages we shall select and hold parley with Certain Poems of Importance, enshrining them along with Dover Beach, Gloucester Moors, and Pulvis et Umbra.

Leland Stanford Junior University.

FRANCES THERESA RUSSELL.

HYMN TO BACCHUS

(From the Greek of Sophocles' Antigone, lines 1115-1152)

Deity summoned by many names, Semele's dear delight, Child of the Theban maid and Zeus, who thunders loud in his might!

Guarder of Italy's fertile land,

Ruler of Deo's sacred strand,

Thronged Eleusis! O Bacchus, come!

Dweller in Thebes, the Bacchantes' home,

Close to Ismenus' gliding stream, where the seed of the dragon sprung!

Thee doth the smoky flame of the torch, with its lurid glare, reveal

High on the craggy peak where nymphs to the hollow cavern steal.

Thou art seen by Castalia's rills.

Thee do the ivy-mantled hills,

Headlands green with the vine, send down.

Into the streets of the Theban town.

"Euoi, Bacchus !" the mystic shout on the still night air is flung.

This is the city that thou dost love better than all the rest, Thou and thy mother, the bride of Zeus, with her lightningsmitten breast.

Now by plague it is visited;

Therefore come, with thy healing tread,

Over Parnassus' gentle slope, or over the moaning sea.

Thou who leadest in mazy dance stars with the breath of fire, Thou who hearest the strange wild cries of the night rise higher and higher;

Son of Zeus, let thy light appear!

Lord, with thy votaries now draw near,

Thyads that, maddened, all night long, revel and sing to thee!

Vassar College.

CORNELIA C. COULTER.

PROPORTION AND INCIDENT IN JOSEPH

CONRAD AND ARNOLD BENNETT

The appeal of the exotic, of the far-off and unusual, in literature is of long establishment and it is to this in a measure that Conrad owes his popularity among more uncritical readers. Yet it is seriously to be doubted that any one of these feels at the end of Lord Jim, for instance, that he has done no more than read a tale. Perhaps it would be clearer to put this in another form. Let us say that in living vicariously through Lord Jim's experiences, our uncritical reader has gathered into himself sensations. of an unusual consistency, of an intensity not at all commonplace. He must feel that if he had lived this life of Tuan Jim's under any but Conrad's guidance it would not have yielded him an indefinable, yet to him very palpable, richness. If he stopped to analyze, he might find that in other exotic tales his affection was conditioned by the unusual character of the experiences, while with Conrad the fact that his harvest of feeling was gathered under extraordinary circumstances is not important. For, under these exotic episodes, he is made to perceive the throb of universal human life, the same pulsings which determine the existence of his friends and of himself, yet which are ordinarily less perceptible. It is not that Conrad reveals the tides and rips which underlie human life; it is rather that he suggests them more strongly, more convincingly. If they were revealed, we might not, indeed, recognize them. We feel the suggestion of them, however, just as, more or less subconsciously, we feel them in life, save that they are then mixed with so much of pseudoreality, of false permanence. These pseudo-realities and false permanences do not impress us really; the genuine manifestations of what is behind life do. Discrimination between the two is not easy; yet when it is done, it is more easily recognized and we recognize it in Conrad. Neither is the presentation of the genuine, once caught, easy, yet with this accomplishment, too, we credit the author of Lord Jim.

It is interesting to inquire into the method, if it be a method, whereby the singular effect of having lived intensely through

some of Jim's experience, at least of having sympathized intensely with him, as Marlow did, is achieved. As a matter of fact, Marlow's sympathy and understanding approaches in richness of effect the experience itself. To ascribe Conrad's success to so comprehensive a source as his sense of proportion seems to make it no less elusive. Possibly it does not bring it any nearer solution, but that is because all the faculties which we involve in the term "sense of proportion" contribute to this magnificent literary gift.

Lord Jim lives for us and we share in Marlow's affection because, like Marlow, we see something of ourselves in the mate of the Patna. But when we stand off and look at Jim through less understanding eyes, those of some of the men with whom he came into contact, excluding Marlow, Stein, and Brierly, his action in jumping from the Patna stamps him as unadmirable, as standards of the world go. A coward with many of the romantic ideas of a girl, a girl's sensibility,-what is there to redeem such a character? Why do we tolerate him, much less look upon him with tender regard? It is because we are shown through the medium of another sensibility, unusually fine, that he is tossed upon the same sea with ourselves. We see how easy it would be to fail as he failed, how irrevocable such failure would seem. We have ourselves been pursued and reminded as he was; we have been at odds with our surroundings, our world, our very selves, as he was.

This is not conveyed in bold, undetailed strokes. It cannot be so done any more than Hamlet could be presented in a one-act play. It is an effect arrived at through a series of minutiæ, magnified, subtly emphasized, repeated with some variation. And it is in such a process that we detect the operation of Conrad's sense of proportion. Before he could write the story at all, it was necessary that he see Jim's life after the Patna affair in an unusual way. He did not say that the man was an ass to conduct himself as he did, to let the affair grow like a tumor in his consciousness, and then dismiss him as unworthy of attention. Of course, it is nothing extraordinary in an artist to do this, but it seems to me worthy of mention for two reasons. First, it is easy to overlook the fact that if we were to meet Jim, we should