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Carlyle and Browning are good fashions. It was worth while to conform to them. Making every allowance for eccentricity and faddism among the followers of giants such as these there remains a positive gain of strenuous thinking and generous feeling. It is much better to lose one's way in the unparsed depth's of Browning's Sordello than not to have any literary enthusiasms at all. It would be better for the educated young men and young women of the present year to be caught up into the seventh heaven of Transcendentalism with Carlyle or Emerson and to make themselves a little ridiculous if need be, rather than to be without illusions:-or to be under the spell of that worst and most dangerous of contemporary illusions, that which glorifies a barbaric pride of success and fatness of purse and skilful use of material resources, and which, so far from letting the ape and tiger within us die, boldly whistles to the brute within us, and pats him on the head and calls him a "good dog."

Now the brutality or the spirituality of any one author is contagious. It becomes possible to trace the fashions set by a single writer as they pass over into the more general fashions established by a school or group of authors. Walter Bagehot has pointed out in one of his political essays,—Physics and Politics,—that the style of a period becomes fixed in much the same way as the style of a newspaper or other periodical. In a newspaper certain views get expressed in a certain way. It is found to be an effective way. All the writers for that paper fall into it unconsciously. If contributions from outsiders do not conform to the character of the journal, they are either not admitted, or they are edited into accordance with the general vocabulary and rhetoric of that paper. This is more true, perhaps, of English journalism than of our own, though it often seems as if a thoroughly well-edited paper, like the New York Sun, were written throughout by the same man.

Our own American literature, perhaps fortunately, has known little of the sway of the fashionable clique, of the styles adopted by a literary center. Poe's attack upon literary coteries (in The Literati and other essays) was a Don Quixote charge against a wind mill of his own devising.

There are no literary conspiracies against the suburban or rural author, no "ring" to be feared or courted. Even the New England school of authors, who for forty years rightfully led our literature, were bound by no such ties of mutual intimacy as is often believed. The charge that these men in the past, or similar groups of men in New York or elsewhere, in the present, can set the fashion to the detriment of the obscure and struggling provincial genius, is a delightful myth, but a myth none the less.

Let me try to sum up definitely the value of this study of literary fashions. It aids, first, our sense of proportion as we face the confused and ever multiplying mass of readable books. It gives us perspective. We do not get a fair impression of the literary significance of Robert Elsmere in measuring it by the fact that in 1888 every clergyman was taking it as the text of his Sunday evening discourse. And it is equally unfair to test the value of the book by the fact that in 1889 copies of Robert Elsmere were marked down to ten cents with no purchasers. But take these two facts tocents-with gether, and in the way Robert Elsmere or Janice Meredith or Richard Carvel or The Virginian came in and went out, as we say of hats or sleeves, you can discover not only certain characteristics of the American public, but some indication of the permanent literary rank of the book. It is the mean tide that measures these things, not the flood or the ebb. Shakespere was neither the savage that Voltaire thought him, nor the angel that Mary Cowden Clarke would fain believe him. There will always be temporary aberrations in the public taste, but if there were no aberrations we should not appreciate so well its normal state of sanity. More copies of Peck's Bad Boy, it is said, were sold in a single year than of Emerson's Essays in sixty years, but that fact has nothing to do with the relative literary rank of Emerson and Peck.

And, secondly, and I suppose because it ministers to one's sense of proportion, a scrutiny of literary fashions is an unfailing resource for one's sense of humor. The comedies of the literary life are more numerous than its tragedies. For one Chatterton who perishes through pride and neglect, there are a dozen charlatans who grow fat through conceit and

favor. When we are inclined to wax melancholy over the fate of some book that failed to be read, there is always comfort-though perhaps of a rather cynical kind-in thinking of the sort of books that have succeeded. A picture on the cover, a pleasing shape, a new binding, a striking color, an effective title, publication in February rather than in January or March, a commendatory postal card from Mr. Gladstone, such are some of the accidents to which books have apparently owed their fortune.

And finally, this scrutiny of literary fashions teaches, more effectively than some more pretentious studies, the permanent value of real worth. Sincerity, manliness, spirituality tell, in whatever guise. They cannot be disguised. Daniel Webster looks grand, whether sculptured in a Roman toga or in the American trousers of the year 1840. Genuine poetry touches the heart, whether bound in the gilt annual or keepsake of 1850, or printed in a ten cent magazine of 1904. The images of those we love are no less dear to us because the family photograph presents them to us in stocks and flowered waistcoats, or earrings and crinoline. Those passing styles do not hide the real man or the real woman, and beneath every popular applause or censure there abides the real book. Thomas Carlyle passed them, "W'at an 'at!" cried one English workingman to another. "Ay," said the other, "but w'at an 'ead in the 'at!" Let us penetrate to the essentials. It is silly to worship the old-fashioned book because it is old; it is more silly still to devour the new book simply because it is Make fashions serve you, instead of you serving the fashions. Notice them. Conform to them if you think best. Often it will be best. But do not be preoccupied with them. "There is but one way of wearing a beautiful gown," said Madame de Girardin,-"and that is-to forget it!"

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I remember an art collector pointed out to me with a touch of cynical amusement, a Greek statuette that adorned his library. He had been collecting critical opinions about it from the time of its discovery a century or two ago down to the present hour. Each generation of connoisseurs, he declared, had seen in that statuette precisely the qualities then held to be supremely important in a work of art. The roman

ticists had found it naively romantic, the realists had pronounced it nobly realistic, the technicists had considered it a tour-de-force of technique. And there stood the statuette, generation after generation, incommunicable and unconcerned, calmly smiling at the changing fashions of the critics. But they all had found it beautiful; that redeems the story from the taint of cynicism. It may serve as a closing moral for this wandering talk about literature. Let us not forget to admire the great books; we shall admire them, no doubt, after the fashion prevailing in our own day; but through whatever spectacles of custom we may gaze, there will always be beauty there, serene, tranquil, imperishable.

Education in a Democracy*

BY HON. JOSEPH W. Folk,

Governor of Missouri

We have come from Missouri here to the Conference for Education in the South, not that Missouri needs help, but because we want to do all that we can to advance the cause of education. The republic rests on education. The perpetuity of a republican form of government depends upon the intelligence of the masses. Imagine, if you please, every university in the land closed, every school-house shut, every teacher's lips sealed, and all education stopped; it would not be long before the result would be chaos, anarchy, barbarism; and as an entire lack of education in the masses must bring disaster, so on the other hand, the more the masses can be educated, the greater the blessing to governmental welfare and individual happiness. The children of today will be the sovereigns of the nation of tomorrow, and as the State has the right in order to protect society, to punish crime, so the State has the right to demand the education of the children who will be the future citizens of the State.

There has been a great deal of prejudice against compulsory educational laws. This prejudice, I am glad to say, is rapidly passing away. It used to be urged that the State had no right to go into a man's home and take his child and educate it without his consent; but we now realize that it is better for the State to take the child, even without the consent of the parent, and educate it, and make a useful citizen out of it, than to let it remain in ignorance, and grow up in crime. The penal institutions of the land are filled with the ignorant and the uneducated. Statistics show that ignorance and crime go hand in hand. For every dollar a State spends in the cause of education it gets back ten in lessened criminal costs, in better morals and in higher citizenship. We need more compulsory education laws in all of the Southern

*An address delivered at the Conference for Education in the South, Lexington, Ky., May, 1906. It is now printed in full for the first time.

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