possess it; but do not aim at making too much, for fear it should possess you. Money cannot buy everything. It cannot buy health, life, or love. If you were a hundred times richer than you are, you could not multiply your wants and pleasures by one hundred. You could not eat or drink a hundred times more than you do now." There is truth and philosophy in that remark of the English drunkard staggering in the gutter: "If I was the blooming Dook of Westminster, I could-not-be-more-drunk-than -I-am." Renan would say to you, Don't take life too seriously, when you are old, you will remember life with pleasure only by the hundreds of little follies you have indulged in, by the hundreds of innocent little temptations you have succumbed to. Avoid perfect people and angels of all sorts-this side of the grave. Man will never be perfect; love him with all his imperfections. Never resist impulses of generosity, they will make you cheerful, nay, healthy. They will give color to your cheeks and prevent your flesh, in old age, from turning into yellow, dried-up parchment. Come home with pockets full of presents for the children. Let them put their little hands right to the bottom of those pockets. You will be repaid, amply repaid, by their holding out their little round faces, to thank you in anticipation of what they know you have done for them. That may be cupboard love —of course it is; every love, except a mother's, is cupboard love— never mind that: if you will make up your mind not to expect too much from man, you will be satisfied with getting what you can from children.

The most real, the sweetest pleasures in life are the pleasures of poverty.

There died, in Edinburgh, a few years ago, a cheerful, happylooking old woman, who sold sweets to the children of the Cowgate, that wretched, squalid spot of the Scottish capital. Her whole stock was worth about a couple of shillings, and she once told me that when at the end of the day she had made six or eight pence profit she was quite satisfied. Alas, there are many children, in the Cowgate, who never felt in the hollow of their hands a half-penny or even a farthing, and who, on beholding the old woman's basket full of shiny white, pink and rose candies, would throw a side glance of envy and pass on, sad and dejected, or stop a few seconds, with their fingers in their mouths. Seldom

was a child, who could not afford to pay her, allowed to pass that basket without receiving one for love. One day, coming out of school, the children looked for the old woman in vain. She was dead. At her funeral, hundreds of barefooted little boys and girls in rags followed their departed friend down the Cowgate.

When that old woman arrived at the gates of Heaven, there were more angels to meet her and take her to the throne of the Almighty than there would be for the arrival of all the dukes in Christendom. If there are social sets in Heaven, I guess that old woman is a leader of fashion among the four-hundred there-or my idea of Heaven is altogether wrong.

MAX O'RELL.

RECENT PHASES OF LITERARY CRITICISM.

BY JOHN BURROUGHS.

I.

THE criticism of criticism is one of the marked literary characteristics of the last ten or fifteen years, both in this country and in Europe. It is seen in France in Brunetière's essays and in Hennequin's "Scientific Criticism;" in England, in the recent work of Wm. B. Worsfold on the "Principles of Criticism" and in Mr. John M. Robertson's two volumes of "Essays Toward a Critical Method;" in this country, in Mr. Howells's "Criticism and Fiction," in Prof. Johnson's "Elements of Criticism" and in the still more recent work of Prof. Sears on "Methods and Principles of Criticism," besides the numerous discussions of the subject in the magazines and literary journals.

One of the latest phases of the subject was recently discussed by Professor Oscar L. Triggs, of Chicago University, under the head of "Democratic Criticism." When Professor Triggs first broached this subject, a year or two ago, in a western literary journal, several voices of protest-mostly those of college professors-were heard. One of them asked, ironically, Why not have a democratic botany and zoölogy and geology and astronomy, etc.? I think it may be said in reply that, so far as democracy is based upon natural law and means free inquiry, a fair field and no favor, we have these things already. All science is democratic, in the sense that it is no respecter of persons, has no partialities, stops at no arbitrary boundaries, and places all things on an equal footing before natural law. No doubt, also, science directly makes for democracy. When it has shown us the celestial laws working here under foot as well as in the heavens, and that all things are made of one stuff, it is making smooth the way for democratic ideas and ideals.

Still, pure science is outside the domain of literature, and does not reflect a people's life and character as literature does. It does not hold the mirror of man's imagination up to nature, but resolves nature in the alembic of his understanding. It is not an exponent of personality, as art is, but an index of the development and progress of the impersonal reason. But when we enter the region of the sentiments and the emotions-the subjective world of criticism, literature, art-the case is different. Here we find reflected social and arbitrary distinctions; here we find mirrored the spirit and temper of men as they are acted upon and modified by the social organism and the ideals of different times and races. A democratic community will have standards of excellence in art and criticism differing from those of an aristocratic community, and will be drawn by different qualities. It seems to me that Dr. Triggs was quite right in saying that a criticism that estimates literary features according to absolute standards, that clings to the past, that cultivates the academic spirit, that is exclusive and unsympathetic, may justly be called aristocratic; and that a criticism that follows more the comparative method, that adheres to principles instead of to standards, and lays the stress upon the vital and the characteristic in a man's work, rather than upon its form and extrinsic beauty, is essentially democratic.

No doubt the ideal of the monumental works of antiquity is essentially anti-democratic. It was fostered by an exclusive culture. It goes with the idea of the divine right of kings, of a privileged class, and is at war with the spirit of our times. The Catholic tradition in religion and the classical tradition in literature are as foreign to the spirit of democracy as is the monarchial tradition in politics. They are all branches from the same root. The classical tradition begat Milton, but it did not beget Shakspere, the most marvelous genius of the modern world. To the classic tradition, as it spoke through Voltaire, Shakspere was a barbarian. Indeed, Shakspere's art was essentially democratic, how much soever it may have occupied itself with royal and aristocratic personages. It is as free as an uncaged bird, and pays no tribute to classic models. Its aim is inward movement, fusion and vitality, rather than outward harmony and proportion. A Greek play is like a Greek templechaste, severe, symmetrical, beautiful. A play of Shakspere is,

as Dr. Johnson long ago suggested, more like a wood or a piece of free nature.

II.

Democratic and aristocratic may not be the best terms to apply to the two opposing types of critics-men like Matthew Arnold or the French critic, Ferdinand Brunetière, on the one hand, both the spokesmen of authority in letters; and men like Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, and the younger generation of English and American critics on the other, men who are more tolerant of individual differences and more inclined to seek the reason of each work within itself. Yet these terms indicate fairly well two profoundly different types.

Brunetière is a militant and dogmatic critic, as we saw by his severe denunciation of Zola while lecturing in this country last year. One of his eulogists speaks of him as the "autocrat of triumphant convictions." Of democratic blood in his veins there is very little. He reflects the old orthodox and aristocratic spirit in his dictum that nature is not to be trusted; that both in taste and in morals what comes natural to us and gives us pleasure is, for that very reason, to be avoided. Nature is depraved. In morals, would we attain to virtue, we must go counter to her; and in art and literature, would we attain to wisdom, we must distrust what we like. This suspicion of nature was the keynote of the old theology, which found its authority in a miraculous revelation, and it is the keynote of the old Aristotelian criticism, which found its authority in a body of rules deduced from the masters. The new theology looks for a scientific basis for its morals, or seeks for the sanction of nature herself; and democratic criticism aims to stand upon the same basis, and cleaves to principles and not to standards, not by yielding to the caprices of uninformed taste, but by seeking the law and test of every work within itself. We no longer judge of the worth of a man by his creed, but by what he is in and of himself; by his natural virtues and aptitudes, and we no longer condemn a work of art because it breaks with the old traditions.

Arnold was of similar temper with Brunetière. His elements of style are" dignity and distinction," a part of the classic tradition, a survival from the feudal and aristocratic world, from a literature of courts and courtiers, as distinguished from a literature of the people, a democratic literature. Distinction of