representative of the whole people. It means now no less than it meant then an upward movement in the development of the race, another phase in the gradual extension of human dignity and self-respect; it means a further step toward the final reconciliation of individualism and collectivism.

To-day, as a hundred and twenty years ago, the names of the men who first gave life to the new literature are not the names of Germans: the modern Rousseau is Tolstoy, and the modern Diderot is Ibsen. But to-day happens what happened then : the foreign pioneers are quickly being succeeded by German writers of originality and power; and if, perhaps, no Goethe or Schiller has as yet come forth, the nearly simultaneous appearance of such works as Sudermann's Heimat and Hauptmann's Die Weber augurs well indeed for the future of the German drama.

Heimat is one of those literary thunderclouds which are charged with the social and intellectual electricity of a whole age.

As a piece of dramatic workmanship it offers little that is new or particularly striking. A father who disowns his daughter; a daughter who, in years of waywardness and misery, finds her larger self; her return to the old home; the renewal of the conflict between father and daughter; and the ruin of both, physically of the one, morally of the other, - this is a familiar, not to well-worn say theme. What makes this simple domestic tragedy so significant for us, what sends such a thrill of sympathy through our hearts as we see the mutual grinding down of these characters, sterling in themselves, but incompatible with each other, is the feeling that here we have a true poetic symbol of the great gulf existing in modern German society.

What an extraordinary sight it is, this modern Germany! On the one hand, Bismarck, whether in office or out; on the other, Bebel. On the one hand, the ruling minority, wonderfully organized, full of intellectual and moral vigor, proud,

honest, loyal, patriotic, but hemmed in by prejudice, and devoid of larger sympathies; on the other, the millions of the majority, equally well organized, influential as a political body, but socially held down, restless, rebellious, inspired with the vague ideal of a broader and fuller humanity. On the one hand, a past secure in glorious achievements; on the other, a future teeming with extravagant hopes. On the one hand, service; on the other, personality. On the one hand, an almost religious belief in the sacredness of hereditary sovereignty; on the other, an equally fervent zeal for the emancipation of the individual. And what is most remarkable of all, both conservatives and radicals, both monarchists and social-democrats, inevitably drifting toward the same final goal of a new corporate consciousness, which shall embrace both authority and freedom.

These are the contrasts which clash together in the modest home of the retired Major Schwartze; this is the struggle which subverts its peace. This is the ideal of the future which illumines its downfall. For it is impossible to think that characters of such rugged nobility and inner healthiness as this imperious major and his rebellious daughter should be entirely annihilated. They may be crushed as individuals, but they will live as principles. And the end of their conflict will be mutual understanding and toleration as the basis of a new and happier home.

No such hope seems to be held out in Gerhart Hauptmann's Weavers. Here we see nothing but destruction, through five breathless acts one protracted agony of death.

Never has the modern proletariat and its inevitable doom been more vividly represented than in this drama. Here Zola might learn true truthfulness. Without a false accent, without a single touch of rhetoric, without the slightest approach to the sensational, the misery of these Silesian weavers is unfolded before us in

all its mute horror, only now and then interrupted by a stammering outcry. In the beginning even this is absent: only an endless variety of ever new forms of physical and mental suffering, of degradation, brooding hopelessness, suppressed scorn, pitiful yet sublime resignation to the Lord's will, tender but helpless sympathy with each other's burdens, and above all, hunger, hunger, hunger. Among these people, nearly benumbed with starvation, there appears a figure which to them must have the effect of a supernatural vision: one of their own kin, well fed and well clad, and with ten thalers in his pocket! He has just come back from Berlin, having finished his military service. At home he was considered a good-for-nothing, but he has made a splendid soldier, has been a model of discipline and a favorite with his officers. He is the first to see the degradation of his people in all its nakedness, and the model soldier turns into a revolutionary agitator. And now we see the wildfire spreading. A superhuman frenzy seizes the dried-up, halfcrazed brains. Like a "dies iræ, dies illa," there wells up and streams from house to house, from village to village, a mighty song of despair and revenge. It is as though the elements themselves had risen in their chaotic power, as though the days of giant struggles had returned. As a matter of fact, it is the death struggle of the proletariat. A few violent convulsions, a few mad onslaughts with stone and pickaxe, then the sound of marching battalions, of musketry volleys, a last rattle in the throat, and all is quiet.

Here, indeed, we have, from beginning to end, a picture of merciless ruin and disintegration. But is the drama, on that account, to be condemned as a work of art? Is not death the most important event of life? Is it not the surest pledge of eternity? In the whole history of art, is there a single poem or painting which preaches more emphatically the imperishableness of reason and justice than Holbein's Dance of Death? Here there

Here

has indeed risen a new Holbein. we see Death, not as an abstract allegory, not in the livery of a well-paid, featureless undertaker; we see Death himself, the angel of wrath, the angel of God, the great fulfiller and redeemer; we see a whole generation sinking into the abyss. Can we be so dull as not to feel that what we have been witnessing is, in reality, not destruction, but the planting of the seeds of a new society?

It seems almost frivolous to mention in the same breath with such earnest and thoughtful works of art as Heimat and Die Weber a malicious though skillful satire which soon will have been forgotten. Only the circumstances which have produced it, and the stir which it at present is creating, give it an undeniable symptomatic importance, and make it a part of the new Storm and Stress.

Some months ago, Professor L. Quidde, one of the most talented of the younger German historians, a former Fellow of the Royal Prussian Institute for History at Rome, editor in chief of the highly respected Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, published in a monthly of avowedly radical tendencies an article purporting to be an analysis of the character and life of Caligula, the successor of Tiberius. The sub-title of the essay, A Study on Imperial Insanity, did not necessarily suggest anything startling or unheard of; for it is a fact now almost universally accepted by historians that the atrocities and crimes of the Julian dynasty are largely attributable to hereditary madness. Nor was the tone of republican indignation at the frivolity and emptiness of court life which pervaded the article to be wondered at; for it is hard to see how any one could tell the story of Caligula's life without republican indignation. What gave such a violent shock to the German reader, what at once exhausted the edition of the reprint, and has since necessitated edition after edition, was the discovery which forced itself from the very first page even upon

the most unsuspecting, that the subject of this essay was not Caligula, but the reigning Emperor William II. of Germany.

Nothing could be cleverer than the way in which, at the very outset, we are flooded with a mass of facts, meaningless in themselves, but so curiously corresponding with recent events in the Hohenzollern family that we are henceforth prepared to accept any new analogy as additional evidence of the correctness of the preceding ones, until the closing paragraph, with its hypocritical eulogy of our own time, in which such monsters as Caligula would be absolutely impossible, appears to us as the most hollow mockery.

"Gaius Cæsar, better known by his surname Caligula," thus the story begins, was still very young, not yet fully matured, when he was unexpectedly called to the throne. Gloomy and uncanny were the circumstances of his succession, strange the earlier history of his house. Far from home, his father had succumbed to a cruel fate in the flower of his years; and there were many rumors afloat about the mysterious circumstances of his death. The people did not refrain from the most serious incriminations, and suspicion dared to approach even the immediate friends and advisers of the old Emperor. With Caligula's father the nation had lost its favorite. With the army he had been united through many campaigns, in which he had borne the hardships of war together with the common soldier. His happy family life, blessed by a large number of children, his affable manner, his fondness for a harmless joke, had endeared him to the citizen as well. To be sure, so long as the old Emperor lived he had been doomed to inactivity in the most important questions of internal policy; but if he ever had come to the throne, freer and happier days would have followed, and the feeling of dull oppression which was weighing on the empire would have been taken from it. Thus the hope

Now there follows an account of the events which marked the accession to the throne of the young Emperor. The sudden dismissal of the "leading statesman;" the liberal beginnings of the new course; the early tokens of restlessness and arbitrariness in the Emperor; his vanity; his passion for theatrical display; his fondness for speechifying, in season and out; his tampering with social reforms; the gradually increasing symptoms of insanity; the extravagance of his yachts and palaces; the sudden mobilizations of certain regiments; the attempt at rejuvenating the army; his fantastic desire of creating a large navy and gaining control of the sea; his self-apotheosis; finally, open madness and bestiality, these are the leading facts in the career of Professor Quidde's Caligula. The whole satire is so transparent and direct that we should be at a loss to understand why the author so carefully wraps himself up in his scholarly domino, if we did not remember that, some years ago, the librarian of a public reading-room at Aachen was prosecuted on the charge of lese majesty because he had failed to remove from his shelves a number of the New York Puck containing a pictorial contribution to recent German history.

If Quidde's pamphlet should have the effect not simply of exciting a morbid and cowardly curiosity, but of helping to arouse public opinion to such a pitch that similar prosecutions would henceforth be impossible; if it should help to

sweep away the whole system of lese majesty indictments, one of the worst relics of Roman imperialism, it would have done a good service, its spiteful temper notwithstanding.

And what is to be the outcome of this whole movement? Will it, like the Storm and Stress of the eighteenth century, exhaust itself in a peaceful struggle for intellectual and moral freedom,

or will it lead to a violent disruption of society? Let us hope that, if the latter should come to pass, literature will not forget that the ideal traditions of the past no less than the ideal demands of the future have been entrusted to her keeping, and that it is for her to give voice to the inner and abiding harmony which underlies the transient clamor and strife of the day. Kuno Francke.

1

AMONG Some recent specimens, which call for comment, of the essentially modern art of book illustration, it may be well, perhaps, to notice first the latest comer, Mrs. Celia Thaxter's Island Garden, illustrated by Mr. Childe Hassam. Like several recent publications of the kind, it is so well done that, in criticising it, one has rather to consider the general fitness of the work than the independent achievement of designer and bookmaker. It is a daintily bound and printed parlor or piazza edition of a book made up of glowing descriptions of the beauty of flowers and the delights of gardening, illustrated by color-prints. As such it undoubtedly represents a grade of success in make-up and reproduction which must be placed very high even when judged by an international standard. Many doubts have been raised as to the artistic quality of this standard, and it is now almost unnecessary to say that our modern colorprints, glossy in texture and ambitious in range of coloring, have not one fraction of the charm of a simple Japanese print. It is more to the point to venture the assertion that they have a charm of their own, which may be turned to artistic purpose. It is of the world worldly, suggest ing the boulevards, and the Avenue de

1 An Island Garden. By CELIA THAXTER. With Pictures and Illustrations by CHILDE

l'Opéra, and the frou-frou of silk skirts, and other things perhaps not entirely in keeping with Mrs. Thaxter's picture of an altogether ideal life, combining the enjoyment of flowers, nature, music, conversation, and unconventionality.

Mr. Childe Hassam would seem to be an artist eminently fitted for the task, from his sympathy with elegant worldliness and his love of flowers, and there is no doubt that he enjoyed his part of the work almost as much as Mrs. Thaxter did hers. But he has given us pictures bound up with the text, not illustrations. The difference between the two, though very simple, is so often lost sight of that it becomes necessary to maintain that there is after all such a difference. A picture is a pictorial representation which has no connection with anything outside of it, which should appeal frankly, simply, directly, through the medium of our eyes to our æsthetic sense, to our memory of things enjoyed, to our imagination and what lies beyond our imagination. Pictures with written explanations weaken this appeal, and hence miss their mark; while pictures that replace it by a momentary titillation of curiosity as to whether the lady, for instance, is going to accept. the lover or not, are, properly speaking, HASSAM. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1894.

not pictures at all. An illustration, on the other hand, exists only in connection with the work it illustrates, while one has a right to assume that the book, if it is worth illustrating, is worth reading. Now, every book that has any literary value creates around itself, aided by our imagination, an imaginative atmosphere of its own, as we all know from our experience of the charm of living "under the spell" of certain books. As the spell of this atmosphere largely depends upon the cooperation of our imagination with that of the writer, suggestive illustrations that stimulate the bright, vague picture-weaving activity of our brain are more welcome to us than definite realizations that check it. The illustrator Ishould not obtrude his vision on ours. Why is it that vignettes and headpieces have so much more charm than fullpage illustrations, in the book under consideration and elsewhere? Just because they have this vague, suggestive, eminently stimulating quality that leaves our imagination free to roam. To take the Island Garden, the series of portraits of Mrs. Thaxter's house and garden are no doubt welcome to her friends. To an outsider, the only portraits that have any interest as portraits are those of her parlor. The subtle charm of the island garden would have been much more impressively rendered by more text engravings of such things as blue tapers of larkspurs and splendid pyramids of hollyhocks, or glimpses of water visible beyond a rich tangle of flowers, and one or two of the simpler and broader fullpage pictures, such as that pretty one of poppies, rocks, and sea, where the simplicity of effect has moreover allowed a comparatively successful reproductive rendering. As a rule, these pictures

all, or nearly all, reproductions of watercolors that have been seen at recent exhibitions—are too impressionist (that is,

1 Le Morte Darthur. By Sir THOMAS MALOWith an Introduction by Professor RHYS, and embellished with many Original Designs

RY.

spotty) in treatment, too much calculated on distance in a gallery, to bear reduction well. Spottiness depends for effect on the purity and vigor of each spot of color, and is lost in this glossy medium, which, on the other hand, gives a certain tone which might be very happily used in combination with the clean, delicate, and vivid tints which the process now has at command. Of this there are several instances in the book, notably among the charming headpieces of loose flowers scattered over or among the text; nearly all these are so attractive that they only make us regret that the artist has not had the opportunity offered him to bend his talent to the real requirements of illustration.

The next book on our list1 is entirely different in scope and aim. It is Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, illustrated by Mr. A. Beardsley in black and white, in a free transcription of late fifteenth, early sixteenth century work. There is much in this book which seems to give us the very essence of illustration, which should be an accompaniment to the text, not a rival, running along by its side, and striking certain suggestive notes that help to attune the imagination of the reader to that of the author. Mr. Beardsley's work consists of headpieces, initial letters, and full-page pictures inclosed in borders or scrolls that help to preserve the decorative unity. These scrolls and borders are superb, full of freshness and originality in treatment, with a decorative feeling that might almost be called intense, if intensity, in connection with English work, did not carry with it a suspicion of impressive awkwardness which may have a deep effeet on the imagination, but which is not pleasing to the senses. Mr. Beardsley · here and in all that is said we are speaking of his work solely in the Morte Darthur is nothing if not full of grace, sweetby AUBREY BEARDSLEY. London: J. M. Dent & Co.

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In two volumes. 1893.