Mutato Nomine

on in Berlin was hissed off the stage with great disorder amid some smashing of chairs. This was due to the fact that the farcical situations were exaggerated, and we can well understand how the Germans would resent this; because it put them in the light of invading and conquering an island populated by feeble fools. Even in the version of it which was given in New York, it seemed to us that the fatuity of the English was carried too far; for even a band of Central Americans could have overcome such a ridiculous set of people as the English volunteer force was represented in the play to be. It would be like stealing candy from a baby. One should note that in England, the rescue of the Brown household and the capture of the German squad were effected, not by a motley throng of Volunteers, but by a detachment of a Highland regiment belonging to the regular army. This, in fact, was the point of the whole play-that England must rely upon regularly trained and disciplined troops and not upon a fortuitous collection of fantastic freaks. By the way, we may repeat a brief anecdote which is being told regarding a German officer on leave, who visited London for a week or two and spent most of his evenings at the different theatres. Among other plays he went to see An Englishman's Home. As he was coming away, an acquaintance met him and very naturally asked him what he thought of the play.

"Oh," said the German officer, "it is a very good play. It is a very true play. Only I think they ought to change its title."

"Why," returned his friend, "what would you call it?"

"Natürlich," returned the officer, "it ought to be called What Every German Knows!"

This recalls the story of the Englishmen who were discussing the German peril in a London club where a German army officer was a guest. The German grimly endorsed their wildest apprehensions. "Why," he said, "the German War Office has the name of every house

À propos of the sale of Swinburniana in London, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton has been writing to the London Times denying Swinburne's authorship of "Dolorida." This was the poem in French which Swinburne was said to have written in the album of Adah Isaacs Menken, the extraordinary circus rider, who after

a

career involving sentimental affairs with a number of eminent men of letters became the wife of the American prize fighter, John Henan, who fought the great international battle with Tom Sayers in 1859. Adah Isaacs Menken was herself the author of a volume of poems called Infelicia which was dedicated, by permission, to Charles Dickens, and in a copy of which Swinburne wrote: "Lo, this is she that was the world's delight!" In a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, in 1883, Swinburne repudiated "Dolorida," which runs as follows:

Combien de temps, dis, la belle,
Dis, veux-tu m'etre fidele?
Pour une nuit, pour un jour,
Mon amour.

L'amour nous flatte et nous touche
Du doigt, de l'oeil, de la bouche,
Pour un jour, pour une nuit,
Et s'enfuit.

With his letter to the Times Theodore Watts-Dunton encloses Swinburne's letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in which he suggests that the announcement that he is the author of "Dolorida" is a "seasonable freak of jocose invention, an example of Christmas burlesque,” adding: "But in case any too innocent reader should imagine it to be anything else, I may perhaps as well mention that the annual and the editor, the contributor and the contribution, are all alike un

known to your obedient servant—A. C. Swinburne.' Mr. Watts-Dunton goes on to say:

was

With regard to Adah Menken, the famous circus rider, it is very likely true that in the late John Camden Hotten's copy of the doggerel called Infelicia Mr. Swinburne did inscribe the words, "Lo, this is she that was the world's delight." But that "was his fun," to use Charles Lamb's saying about Coleridge's "sermons." And it is true that Adah, having a craze to know every famous man, brought into contact with the great Alexandre Dumas in France, and in England with Mr. Swinburne, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade and others; but as to Mr. Swinburne's opinion of the doggerel called Infelicia, he would have had critical insight enough at twelve to estimate its poetical worth at its true value. For years the Adah Menken matter has at intervals been brought up. Some few years before his death, I asked Mr. Swinburne what he thought of Infelicia. His answer was, "Can you ask me? A girl may be admired as Mazeppa without being admired as a poet. I think it the greatest rot ever published." How Charles Dickens ever came to accept the dedication of it is, of course, past all comprehension.

Poe and Jules Verne

The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Jules Verne is the subject of an article by Henri Potez in La Revue of Paris. While Poe's popularity in France has always been beyond dispute, M. Potez contends that it would have been infinitely greater had Poe's work been less marked by horrors. Jules Verne recognised that fact and hit upon the winning formula to please the French taste. Jules Verne, therefore, according to M. Potez's ideas, has Poe with a little dressing up. This dressing up implied the suppression or mitigation of the horrible; the retention of all that was mysterious and exotic; and the addition of the ordinary stock ingredients employed by the elder Dumas; a large dose of adventure, heroics, and good spirits.

Almost all of the more important of Jules Verne's books M. Potez traces back to Poe. For example, his Five

Weeks in a Balloon, which was published in 1863, was anticipated by Poe, who represented the balloon Victoria as crossing the Atlantic in sixty-five hours. The idea for Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne got from Poe's Manuscript Found in a Bottle and A Descent Into the Maelstrom. The device of the cryptogram used by Verne in his Journey to the Centre of the Earth came from The Gold Bug. From the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Verne drew suggestions for the shipwreck in Chancellor, the apparition of the giant in the Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and the description of the North Pole in the Adventures of Captain Hatterus. The inspiration of the climax of Around the World in Eighty Days, the error in the computation of time which almost caused Phineas Fogg to lose his twenty thousand pound bet, M. Potez thinks that Verne found in Poe's Three Sundays in a Week.

A Genuine Biography

In his Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, Professor Wilbur L. Cross is chary of his own opinions, but lavish of facts that even by a bare chance may affect the opinions of others. Apparently he has searched everywhere and left nothing unread. It is a most loyal biography of the large, unsparing, loveme-love-my-dog variety, assuming that

no details will seem trivial to one who

really cares to know the man. Whatever the Sterne specialists may have to say about it there can be no doubt as to

the completeness of the picture or the astonishing industry that has gone to the making of it. It is Sterne from every point of view, not merely from Professor Cross's. "Aspects" and "appreciations' and Sterne's "place in literature" have not seduced him; nor does his biographical devotion take the form of literary flunkeyism, like Dr. Dowden on his knees to Browning. He knows that a man like Sterne, who conquers so completely his present, does not annex posterity.

Sterne's personality, like a great actor's, loses perforce its brilliancy in the pale reflection of

a biography, wherein traits of manner and character are obscured by numberless facts, dates, and minor details necessary to a true relation of the humourist's career, but most difficult to carry in the memory and thereafter combine into a living portrait. No biographer, though the spell be upon him, can hope to make it quite clear why Sterne captivated the world that came within his influence. His wit, humour and pathos, which exactly hit the temper of his age, seem a little antiquated now as we derive these qualities second-hand from the books which he left behind him, and from the numerous anecdotes which were related after him, all rewrought for literary effect. Indeed, only a few of his letters retain their original freshness, for in most cases their phrases have been all smoothed out by editors and biographers. We may look upon the wonderful portraits that were painted of him by Reynolds and Gainsborough, and observe his dress, figure, features, and bright, eager eyes; but we must add from our imagination the smile and the voice of the king's jester.

Yorick's gibes were certainly perishable, and many of the anecdotes about him are sorry enough. As a wit he triumphed easily, but it seems to have been equally easy to put him down.

According to a story which Sterne himself is reported to have related to a company of fellow-clergymen, he was addressed one Sunday, as he was descending from the cathedral pulpit, by a poor widow sitting on the steps. She inquired of him where she might have the honour of hearing him preach on the next Sunday. After she had followed him about to his great discomfort for a succession of Sundays, from one church to another, always taking the same position on the steps of the pulpit and always asking the same question, he finally chose as his text, modifying Holy Writ, the words: "I will grant the request of this poor widow, lest by continual coming she weary me." "Why, Sterne," immediately retorted one of the company, "you omitted the most applicable part of the passage, which is→ Though I neither fear God nor regard man." "The unexpected retort," it was added, “silenced the wit for the whole evening."

As to Sterne's character, any reader of the book will see the justice of what Professor Cross says in conclusion, and contrast it with Thackeray's narrower view

Of course, I am entering no defence in behalf of Sterne's conduct. I am merely explaining it from his volatile disposition. Nor would it serve any purpose to censure him for his follies and indiscretions. True, one is amazed at the freedoms of the old society. And were it not for Sterne's humour, the man and his books would have become long since intolerable. But the everlasting humour of the man saves him; it lifts him out of the world of moral conventions into a world of his own making. We must accept him as he was, else close the book. Everything about him was unique-his appearance, what he did, what he said, what he wrote. Acts for which you would reproach yourself or your nearest friend you pass over in his case, for in them lurks some overmastering absurdity. “I am a queer dog," he wrote in reply to an unknown correspondent who conjectured he must be one over his cups. "I am a queer dog-only you must not wait for my being so till supper, much less an hour after-for I am so before breakfast. . . ." As we view him in his books and in his life, Sterne had brief serious moods, but he quickly passed out of them into his humour. When he advised a brother of the cloth "to tell a lie to save a lie," he did not exactly mean it so, but he could not resist the humour of the absurd imagination. He must have been sorely troubled over his wife's insanity, but he could not announce her illness without awakening a smile in the hearer as he said: "Madame fancies herself the Queen of Bohemia and I am indulging her in the notion. Every day I drive her through my stubble field, with bladders fastened to the wheels of her chaise to make a noise, and then I tell her this is the way they course in Bohemia.”

Nothing, however sacred, was immune against Sterne's wit. He was, if one wishes to put it that way, indecent and profane. And yet indecency or profanity never appears in his letters and books by itself or for its own sake. His loosest jests not only have their humorous point, but they often cut rather deeply into human nature. He had, as we have said, very little of the animal in him; and perhaps, for this very reason, in the opinion of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, he was amused by certain physical instincts and natural functions of the body when contrasted with the His higher nature to which all lay claim. imagination was ever playing with these inconsistencies, and down they went without premeditation, as might be easily illustrated

the grave of a dead one. These, of course, are not biographies, and ought never to be known as "lives," but only as Somebody on Somebody for example, Chesterton on Dickens, thus making it clear which has the upper hand and conforming to the order of the thought. One does not think of the Dickens under Chesterton. Not that we blame a man for triumphing so completely over his subject or leading us altogether away from it, provided that he gives us a pleasant time. We merely mean that he is not likely to write the life of another when he is wholly preoccupied with his own. It is only by Professor Cross's faithful, copious, patient, self-suppressing methods that a biographer can give a fair view of his man.

Our magazines have repeatedly assured us that a new moral era has dawned upon us, that the heart of the people is stirred as it never was before, that new forces are at work "deep, subtle and far-reaching," and that we are

Our "Moral Awakening"

on the eve, edge, brink, threshold (according to the taste in metaphors) of a palingenesis, cataclysm, revolution, metamorphosis, uplift or upheaval. Every popular magazine has a "new movement" writer of some sort, and every other one is likely to have on its cover or as its frontispiece the symbol of the "new democracy," that is to say, the figure of an impossibly muscular young man with a jaw like a ploughshare. Now all this is only for home use. We natives thoroughly understand our native writers. We know that there is no new movement, and that we are not waked up. We know what a very large moral can easily be drawn with an ordinary magazine corkscrew. But the effect on our foreign visitors is sometimes very confusing indeed. The latest victim, Signor Ferrero, the historian, has returned to Europe with the impression that a "tragic struggle" is going on here, very different from anything that is taking place in any other country; and he

DAN BEARD, AUTHOR OF "DAN BEARD'S ANIMAL BOOK"