ments Leo is incapable of grasping her intention. On apprehending it, the recoil of his feeling expresses itself with the disappointment of revolt. Felicitas is mortally piqued. She stares at him for a moment, then steps to her husband's door and calls on him frantically. When Ulrich rushes in, she explains the situation by coolly repeating against Leo the charge of Potiphar's wife.

The spell over Leo is at once broken. The heartless untruth of the woman's words, their vulgar flippancy, the coarse boldness of the impromptu intrigue, is a shock that does for him what an icy wind does for a landscape when it whirls away a fog and shows the limbo therein to be but a common gulch. He can manage a mere lust of the eye: he knows that sort of thing, and can cope with it. The hysterical pleading of his sister, the religious admonitions of Breckenridge, and all the rest had made him mistake their passion for authority. The more fool he for having let his own instinctive judgment be knocked on the head, as it were, and carried off stunned in the company of superstitious ideas. Now he is once more himself. And with this feeling he strides back home to await the dawn of day, when Ulrich, as he is firmly determined, shall not be the one to suffer in the duel which they have been forced into by Felicitas.

But the novel and Leo's life are not to close tragically. He goes to the place of rendezvous at the appointed hour, but only to find Ulrich an unconscious heap in the snow, distinguishable by its dark color alone from the rest of the desolate winter scene. The tale continues with an account of Leo nursing his sick friend to life and convalescence, while Felicitas betakes herself upon a journey, during which she obtains a writ of divorce.

unacquainted with the author's works to look attentively, for it displays several of Sudermann's most striking peculiarities. First of all, his overbalanced tendency toward the dramatic. He is like the very greatest of epic writers in crowding his pages, as human homes are crowded, with inanimate objects, with children, with accessories; but, unlike novelists of the first class, he is incapable of enduing all personages with life according to their individual natures, or of carrying forward two or more actions in parallel lines. Instead, one action or one set of his numerous characters gets a start and runs quite away with his pen; all the rest are left behind, to be fetched up at intervals or at the end of the book, with evident want of spontaneousness; his fire and strength having been expended in guiding the main runners to their final goal. His novels are neither of the trim French style, in which a few grown-up individuals, sharply delineated, are presented against backgrounds as unobtrusive as old tapestry in their faint coloring, nor, on the other hand, are they like the English romances of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, swarming with personages to the last page, almost shutting out all background; they resemble English workmanship in their beginnings and endings, and French in their main, middle portion. There are scenes in Es War of incomparable merit, either by reason of their verisimilitude, as the opening scene in the railway station, or because of their rugged naturalism, or for their passionate power; but these scenes, like the coulisses of a stage, are limited in number, and, without exception, they are illustrative of the one main plot of the criminal passion of Leo and Felicitas. The growth of the affection of Leo for the girl Ethel, the secondary action in the story, is utterly incapable, on the other hand, of suggesting one real bit of life; the hundred pages devoted to this subject leave not a single vivid picture in the reader's mind. In other words,

Sudermann's talent is shown, by the very faults of his novels, to be theatrical; it discloses itself in the rapid development of single plots that unroll with increasing force. It is as if a play, Leo's Reënchantment and Coming-To, were imbedded in a shapeless, flabby romance.

The situation in the culminating scene in the chamber is characteristic of Sudermann, since it shows him taking a very hackneyed theme and lifting it into novelty by making the motive of the lover's coming one of dead earnestness. The voluptuous details of the early part of the scene are also common in fiction, but these Sudermann does not vary by a single line; he might have copied them in gross from a hundred French novels, or from some of his own earlier works; they are so totally without any individuality, in fact, both in Es War and in his earlier works, that it may be asserted confidently that the erotic romanticism of this author is merely a reminiscence of the schools, and not a product of his own nature. The exaggerated sensuality, the pessimism, and the gross virility which he feels obliged to display in imitation of the French masters whom he has studied compose a slag in his compositions which he would do well to throw off and out. It has no real innate affinity with the rest of his matter, and his best inspirations, his most individual creations, are without it. The sensuality of Magda in the drama Heimat, of the hero of Frau Sorge, and of Count Trast in the drama Ehre is not that of French romances; it is that of ordinary life. If the instinct of sex in them had free play, it would be but one manifestation of the universal energy which distinguishes them; and there is in this a virility as different from the superficial one which disgusts us in mere erotic fiction as exuberant health is from delirium.

If Sudermann is thus inferior to the latest school of novelists in this matter of describing lust and grossness, he is above it in greater respects. He diverges

from the beaten paths and journeys independently towards truth. The majority of pessimistic realists let their characters succumb to temptations of the flesh and the devil; he shows his as fighting successfully against adverse obstacles of every kind. If his characters have human weaknesses, they possess at the same time firm and healthy fibres of will. And from the optimistic realists, like Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, he is equally distinguishable. For these realists incline to point to the future for adjustment of wrongs and faults, whereas Sudermann never takes his eyes from the present and its moral contrasts. In Ehre, Count Trast says to Mother Heinicke, "You have toiled so hard and suffered so much, you must be right." Evidently a vital point of the creed of the author lies condensed within the homely phrase. So far as he has fathomed, every character in individual life and every phenomenon in social life are the result of doleful experience. experience. Each one is, consequently, sublimely justified in its own peculiar existence. His faith seems to conclude, furthermore, that every human being acts in the main according to the best of his ability; and to show that the best ability of a single soul is pathetically at odds in the struggle with the battalioned enemy, - the corps of bodily wants, the regiments of social requirements, the mobs of temptation, the ambushes of hereditary and ingrained perversities,and that, notwithstanding, it does effect something through loyalty to its inner sense, is the great mission of his enheartening art. Nothing can be more like the actual world than his books, if taken as a whole; their pages teem with descriptions of sins and small miseries; yet just as mankind, in spite of the Fall in Eden, has perceptibly advanced in civilization, so, in spite of small miseries and faults, the characters of his creation make progress, if not in material wealth, then in the possession of character, insight, will, charity.}

It is not easy entirely to love the heroes and heroines of Sudermann. There is something hard about them. They remind one of the bronze figures of Donatello. They want the graciousness and the repose that win the affections while captivating the soul. Magda fills the heart with appreciation, without, however, warming it to love. So likewise with Count Trast and the young hero of Frau Sorge. The iron of care stiffens their backs; they have left off kneeling, and their attitude of unbending fortitude electrifies us by flashing across our minds a sense of the tragedy of their spiritual iso

But we have no longing to take part with them therein; while they, on their side, have passed beyond the weakness of drawing near to us.

The dramas of Sudermann are models

of plain, colloquial German, as forcibe by reason of their clear and unadorned expression as Sheridan's. They afford no "immortal sentences," but delight through their mastery of what Thackeray calls the dialect of the individual. Each personage speaks according to his individual nature, so that his every phrase is a revelation of character. The conversations in the author's later novels display a good deal of the same naturalness; but in all the novels, save in the sketches entitled At Twilight, which are of genuine Gallic lightness, there is still so much superfluous rhetoric in the descriptive parts that his style must be pronounced inferior, as a whole, in point of polish and brilliancy. On the other hand, he is not only a versatile writer; he is a strong one, and can be charmingly fresh.

AN impression easily obtained from the current higher criticism is, that of all who have had to do with the Scripture documents the final redactor merits the scantiest regard. To the prevailing historic sense, so greedy for origins, he is almost necessarily a marplot, who will not let the primitive writings speak for themselves, but mixes them together in the most perplexing way, or confuses their utterance with glosses of his own; and from this view it is but a step to regarding him as a bungler and dislocator, whose interference were better dispensed with. It is as if there had crept into Biblical study a kind of book-fancier's craze for first editions; which latter, one suspects, are accounted all the more valuable for not revealing their inside, but remaining uncut. Of course this impression is not intended by the higher critics themselves; it is chargeable rather to the unchecked critical method, which in

fact can see only one thing at a time, and which just at present is in the sway of the historic spirit, as heretofore that has in its turn been controlled by the dogmatic and the philological. The untoward fact remains, however, that for the time the general reader's sense of Scripture as an ordered, digested, articulated whole is painfully eclipsed, a result whose reductio ad absurdum may perhaps be expressed in the words of Renan, who, in his comic History of the People of Israel, describing the Oriental compilations, says: "The last absorbs those that precede it, without assimilating them; so much so that the most recent compilation always has in its stomach, so to speak, morsels of previous works quite raw."

It is with a real sense of relief that one escapes from this feeling of dislocation and chaos to a view which, without laying aside the strictest scientific spirit,

frankly approaches the Scripture record as it lies before us, in its final and presumably definitive edition, a view which contemplates the finished evolution, in its larger meanings, as it reveals itself after it has worked out of the confusion of history and literature in the making. This common characteristic it is which unites the books we have here chosen for remark.

If Professor Moulton's analysis of the literary forms of Scripture1 holds, the men who were responsible for the final shape assumed by the Hebrew writings are worthy of greater respect than we have been inclined to accord them, the respect due to trained men of letters. Nor were the writings themselves, those immensely potent factors in the life and uplifting of the world, the mere Grub Street hack-work that all this talk of Jehovists and Elohists and Priests' codes would seem to make them. Let it be proved by careful study of their form that they have crystallized into an organic literary creation, part answering to part, and one constructive idea controlling word and plan alike, and we have a fact of great significance to import into our critical study. The final editor becomes increasingly identified with the original creator; and the Bible is seen to have reached its acknowledged literary power by having an involution to balance its evolution; it was made according to the dictates of the literary sense, like a book, rather than those of the business sense, like a directory.

This is the great service that Professor Moulton is rendering to Biblical interpretation in one important depart ment, the study of form, he has applied the literary sense to the investigation of the Hebrew literature. As one reads his book, and sees how much the study yields not only of interest, but of positive illumination, the wonder is that men could

1 The Literary Study of the Bible. An Account of the Leading Forms of Literature represented in the Sacred Writings. By RICHARD

have let a field that lies at their doors remain so long uncultivated, while they were compassing land and sea to get means of elucidating Scripture. After all, "the word is nigh thee."

With some general principles and facts of Hebrew literature, scholars, and to some extent general readers, have long been familiar. That there is in the poetic parts of our Bible a verse system founded on the principle of parallelism; that indications of an art sequence in verse, albeit to our sense more artificial than artistic, are to be found notably in the acrostic poems; that in some poems set expressions recur like a refrain or response; that to broaden our view — some parts of the Bible have a certain epic power, others are rudimentally dramatic, others idyllic, others elegiac: such things as these are open to a mere casual observation. But they have heretofore been studied only far enough to produce the sense of crudeness rather than that of skill; the acrostic poems, for instance, have been regarded as the decadence of an art never highly developed, and the larger literary types, estimated by the Greek standard, have been named by accommodated terms, and under protest, as a kind of half-barbarous coincidence. So the Hebrew poetry has come to us as an incongruity: on the one side, word and imagery confessedly of the purest and sublimest; on the other, a form that seems either to have happened or to have run wild. May it not be, however, that these superficial forms, so crude in seeming, are merely the translatable evidences of a much more finished art, outposts of it as it were, and that if we could get the key to it there is a wealth of literary art represented in our Bible just suited to the genius of the Hebrew mind? Professor Moulton seems to have proved abundantly that there is: parallelism, lower and higher; stanza forms wrought up

G. MOULTON, M. A., Ph. D. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. 1895.

even to the fineness of the sonnet; elaborate arrangements of strophe, antistrophe, refrain, antiphon; nor these poetic forms only, but an equally cultivated recognition of the sphere of prose, in its historical, oratorical, and epistolary forms, and of a spontaneous alternation of prose and verse to which certain kinds of Hebrew subject-matter naturally lend themselves. On the basis of a lucid classification of forms, tabulated on page 108, he subjects the various types of Scripture discourse to a detailed analysis, which then is condensed into valuable tables in the appendix. His results are so rich as to be hardly short of bewildering; it will take time, doubtless, for general readers to get them verified in everyday sense. And not improbably he has in some cases yielded to the discoverer's enthusiasm, and pushed his distinctions farther than was in the original author's mind, erring on the side of minuteness, - a fault, if a fault, which the testing of time will correct. There is enough in half of what he has here given to throw an amazing new light and coloring over Scripture, if we will simply get out our Revised Version and let its articulations of thought and form reveal themselves.

This last remark, indeed, goes far to sum up Professor Moulton's practical aim in his literary study of the Bible. It is the body rather than the spirit with which he is dealing; but while he attempts nothing of that subtle appreciation of word and figure which was so present to Matthew Arnold in his little work on Isaiah of Jerusalem, he is doing what is perhaps the best service toward clearing the approaches thereto. It is not so much through considerations of age, or authorship, or cleavage and documentary components of the books, as through a simple recognition of literary forms, prose or poetic, lyric or dramatic, that we can hear the Bible speaking for itself, in its natural and intended voice.

"For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make." To approach a passage as poetry is to approach it in a mood poetically attuned, and to get from it the effect, not of matter of fact or of dogma, but of an exalted, impassioned truth or image. Joshua chanting to the sun and moon his intense desire to be avenged on his enemies produces a very different effect from Joshua issuing a command as a general to his troops. To approach a lyric poem with a recognition of its stanza form is to have a means of parting and combining its thoughts, of adjusting our sense to its natural arsis and thesis, and thereby getting its proposed impulse and power. Thus the appreciation of the form determines our mood toward it; and to a great degree this literary mood makes the Bible independent of a commentary. It becomes by so much like a book of our own day, which the spirit of the time makes plain and congenial to the common mind without need of explication.

A further means of making the Bible speak for itself in the familiar accents of a modern book Professor Moulton insists upon, a means astonishingly effective for one so simple, — and that is a modern manner of printing. No book has suffered so much from a printing truly atrocious as the Book which of all others should be most attractive. The text cut up, from beginning to end, into little prose bits, each about long enough for the text of a sermon, and probably so intended by the perpetrator; these bits carefully numbered and grouped into chapters, not according to the natural divisions of the subject, but in convenient sections for reading in public; words in Italic print constantly appearing, not for emphasis, but requiring the exact reverse; occasional paragraph marks disfiguring every page; pages in double columns, and generally on the thinnest of paper and in eye-destroying fineness of print; add to this, in the case of reference Bibles, a text sown thick with