March, 1896.

high on the roll of Australian writers, and in a short time the necessary funds were subscribed and a monument erected. The catholic spirit thus shown is worthy of remark; it recognizes the fact that fiscal and political differences between diverse colonies have nothing to do with matters of the mind.

Clarke's pictures of prison life in Tasmania under the convict system set forth in awful vividness the horrors of the old methods of discipline, and it is probable, as Mr. Wybert Reeve said in unveiling the monument, that their graphic descriptions did much to arrest the injustice perpetrated by those entrusted with criminal rule, and that they awoke slumbering humanitarianism to a sense of what was due even to the most degraded of humanity. Lord Rosebery, when in Adelaide in 1884, said:

"Australia has been during the last forty years the theater of two great geniuses--Marcus Clarke, the author of that description of the most appalling of human experiences, because it was founded on fact, "For the Term of His Natural Life," and Lindsay Gordon, the poet, who, I believe, lived in this very colony, and was, I believe, a member of your Parliament, whose poems are instinct with the very passion and thunder of the gallop-and I venture to say of both these authors that in their own peculiar lines they cannot be surpassed

"For the Term of His Natural Life." That is the simple inscription which visitors to the Melbourne Cemetery read on a monument which has just been erected there under very remarkable circumstances. To an English tourist conversant only with the books he finds reviewed day by day in his morning paper the words might convey little meaning. To an Australian they mean a great deal; for they not only recall one of the literary masterpieces of his country, but they mark an epoch in civilizing reform.

The bones of Marcus Clarke, whose tombstone now bears the title of his best-known book, lay for seventeen years, with no memorial to mark their resting-place, in the cemetery of Melbourne, the city where he lived and worked. But Marcus Clarke was a writer of more than local fame, and the neglect of his memory touched a chord in the hearts of the literary people of Adelaide. A meeting was accordingly held at the University in that city early this year, under the presidency of the Lieutenant-Governor, Chief Justice Way. It

In his letter to Clarke's wife, dated 1884 and published in "The Marcus Clarke Memorial Volume," Lord Rosebery further says, "It is rare that so young a country has produced so great a literary force." and expresses his opinion that Clarke's works are insufficiently appreciated in Great Britain:

Long ago [he says] I fell upon "His Natural Life" by accident, and read it, not once or twice, but many times, at different periods. Since then I have frequently given away copies to men whose opinions I valued, and have always received from them the same opinion as to the extraordinary power of the book. The reader who takes it up, though he cannot but be harrowed by the long agony of the story and the human anguish of every page, is unable to lay it down; almost in spite of himself he has to read and to suffer to the bitter end. To me, I confess, it is the most terrible of all novels-more terrible than "Oliver Twist" or Victor Hugo's most startling effects for the simple reason that it is more real.

Clarke's preface to the poems of Adam Lindsay Gordon is also a fine piece of literary photography; it carries a presentment of the weirdness and silent solitude of the Australian bush which alone would entitle its author to fame. His other work is hardly of a lasting character.

"His Natural Life" has been dramatized and played throughout the United States, and several editions of the book have been published here. At least one has been shamefully abridged, and the only complete edition now obtainable is published by Laird & Lee, in paper covers and in cloth.

CHOPIN AND POE

In music, Edgar Allan Poe's counterpart has been discovered in the person and genius of Frederic Francois Chopin, so declares James Huneker in his book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music." There is such a striking similarity in temperament, personality, and genius between the American poet and the Polish composer that, to understand either of them, they should be studied together.

Poe and Chopin were born only a few weeks apart and died within a week of each other, yet neither was conscious of the other's existence. But it was a curious coincidence-two supremely melancholy artists of the beautiful lived and died almost synchronously.

Mr. Huneker says there are important points at which it will not do to compare the two artists, but there are parallels in their soul-lives that may be drawn without extravagance. The roots of Chopin's culture were more richly nurtured than Poe's but Poe was in the truest sense born a poet, and, like a spiritual air plant, derived his sustenance none knew how. Chopin was carefully trained by the faithful Elsmer, but who could have taught him to write his opus 2 and the variatious over which Schumann rhapsodized, or even that gem, his E-flat nocturne?

The individualities of both these men were as sharply defined in the outset as their limitations. Poe never made more exquisite music in his later years than in his verses "To Helen," written in his teens. Chopin opus 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, his earliest effusions, are perfect of their kind. They were written before he was twenty. Both men died at forty, a period when most men are in their prime; yet years before both began to show decadence and deterioration. Chopin's polonaisefantaisie opus 61 with its hectic flush-in its most musical, most melancholy cadences, gives us a premonition of death. Composed three years before he died, it has the taint of the tomb about it. Read Poe's "Ulalume" with its hunting, harrowing harmonies and you will hear the same note of death.

Poe then, like Chopin, did not die too soon. Morbid, neurotic natures, they lived their lives with the intensity which, Walter Pater declares, is the only true life. "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame," writes Pater, "to maintain this ecstacy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits."

Certainly Chopin and Poe fulfilled in their short existences these conditions. They burned with the flame of genius, and that flame devoured their brain as surely as paresis. Their lives, in Their lives, in the ordinary Philistine or Plutus-like sense, were failures. They were not citizens after the conjugal manner, nor did they accumulate pelf. They

certainly failed to form habits, and, while the delicacy of the Pole prevented his indulging in the night-side Bohemianism of the American, he nevertheless contrived to outrage social and ethical

canons.

Mr. Huneker admits the difficulty of knowing just what sort of a man Poe was, but he is sure there were two Poes-the one a winning, poetic personality, a charming man of the world, electric in speech and with an eye of genius, creature with a beautiful brain the other, a sad eyed wretch with a fixed sneer, a bitter, uncurbed tongue that lashed alike friend and foe, a sot, a libertine, a gambler-and some people knew both these men. Mr. Huneker's father knew something of both Poes, for he had occasion in Philadelphia to see Poe when he was sober, and when he was made a demon by one glass of brandy. But, like Chopin, Poe was always disposed to a certain melancholy hauteur and readiness to pose.

Mr. Huneker considers that America, with its complete absorbtion a half-century ago in trafficking and pioneering, was an unpleasant place for artists and especially for Poe, who ought to have gone to Paris. Mr. Huneker says:

"One is filled with horror at the thought of a kindred poetic nature also being cast in the prosaic atmosphere of this country: for if Chopin had not had success at Prince Valentine Radze will's soiree in Paris in the year 1831, he would certainly have tried his luck in the New World; and do you not shudder at the idea of Chopin's living in the United States in 1831?

"Fancy those two wraiths of genius, Poe and Chopin, in the city of New York! Chopin giving piano lessons to the daughters of the wealthy aristocrats of the Battery; Poe encountering him at some conversazione-they had conversaziones then-and propounding to him Heine-like questions.' Are the roses at home still in their flamehued pride?' 'Do the trees still sing as beautifully in the moonlight?'

"They would have understood one another at a glance. Poe was not a whit inferior in sensibility to Chopin. Balzac declared that if Chopin drummed on a bare table, his fingers made subtlesounding music. Poe, like Balzac, would have felt the drummed tears in Chopin's play, while Chopin in turn could not have failed to divine the tremulous vibrations of Poe's exquisitely strong nature. What a meeting it would have been, but again what inevitable misery for the Polish poet!"

Both men were born aristocrats; purple raiment became them well, and both were sadly deficient in genuine humor. Irony both possessed to a superlative degree, and both believed in the rhythmical creation of lyrical charm of evanescence.

beauty and the

Both artists have left a host of imitators. Poe

has influenced the art of almost every country but his own. In Europe he has founded a school. Chopin's influence has been far less direct. But Liszt would not have been a composer, at least for the piano, if he had not nested in Chopin's brain. And Wagner profited greatly by Chopin's discoveries in chromatic harmonies, discoveries without which modern music would yet be in diatonic swaddling-clothes.

But at one important point these two artists were as wide apart as the poles. Poe was a man without a country. He had no sense of patriotism.

Although he wrote in English, you could better locate his imagination in the moon. Chopin, on the other hand, is patriotic; he is Poland, although Poland is not Chopin. But both had the supreme passion for the beautiful, both possessed great intensity of expression. Both had the power of expressing the weird, the terrific, though Chopin rose to sublimer heights than ever Poe did. Chopin, like Bach and Beethoven, will last as long as the voice of the piano is heard throughout the land.

BOOKS AND BOOKS.

BY SHARLOT M. HALL.
My Love in book lore's very wise,
She cons the ancient classics o'er,
And talks of the "Immortal Four"-
But never talks of making pies.
She raves of Spenser's "Fairy Queen,"
And Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales;"
Says modern verse beside them pales-
But mentions not the rare baked bean.
Euripides and Socrates.

Ovid and Homer, all, she quotes;
Is busy with her, "Browning notes"--
But not a note on biscuits sees.
Of books I know not overmuch.

But oft I with my darling plead,
And beg that she will sometimes read
Some books I value-they are such
As Juliet Corson's "Cooking School,"
"Buckeye Cook Book," "How to Live'
On half enough a week, and give
Three square meals daily, cooked to rule.
I cannot rave of Sappho's wit,
But Miss Parloa well I know,

And Marion Harland's worth can show,
And Mrs. Lincoln quote a bit.
Their works are equal, I maintain,
To all the best of ancient books,
For men are civilized by cooks,

More than by Learning's gentle reign.
Success is work, and hungry men
Few battles win or poems write;
The well-fed mortal wins the fight

In this old world, with sword or pen.

CHARLES DICKENS.

The modern theorists who explain genius by "heredity" may own themselves puzzled in the case of Charles Dickens. The old plan of detecting submerged intellect in the mother is refuted by the circumstance that Dickens' mother lent her traits to the immortal Mrs. Nickleby. More elaborate research seems to have thrown no genealogical light on the mystery. Mr. Foster's biography of his friend does not begin with "an ell of genealogy." Mr. Carlyle's pedigree has been traced, through unliterary peasants, back to the Lords Torthorwald, "who never saw pen and ink," and so to a period preceding the Norman Conquest. Nothing of the kind has been done for Dickens. On the other hand, his kindred were not remarkable for hysteria, lunacy, apoplexy, consumption, or any of the other disagreeable constituents out of which genius is believed (by Lombroso) to be composed. They were very normal representatives of the middle classes. If Dickens inherited a turn for composition from his father, the original of Mr. Micawber, he certainly did not inherit the casual and shiftless character of that hero, being a remarkably keen man of business. Thus it is certain that though, to an allknowing mind, the inherited constituents of genius in the author of "Pickwick" must be visible, it is equally sure that they evade the investigations of human industry. Dickens was the child of himself, and of his own works.

The study of Dickens' early environment throws much light on his bent of mind. Born at Landport, in Portsea, on February 7th, 1812, Dickens might just have remembered, as a childish impression, the battle of Waterloo. His boyhood was spent in the years of dissatisfaction and reaction which ensued, but we know from his own remarks that he then heard of Radicals only as evil men, who thought the Prince Regent too fat, and were banded against that constituted authority from which Dickens pere, as a clerk in the navy-pay office, received an income inadequate to his expenses. While Dickens. was growing up to be twenty, the Reform Bill was passed, the charter of his own middle class, but it awoke no enthusiasm in his ardent nature. He had seen too much of popular misery, and of Parliamentary proceedings, to believe in the new panacea, and became naturally a Radical himself, much as, in totally different circumstances, his great predecessor, Scott, became a Tory. Dickens was thus, from his very first essays, a voice in the great murmur of modern discontent, an impulse in the movement which makes towards an end undiscerned, but he never had a system of thought about the object which chiefly occupied his serious hours. He bore a lasting grudge against the memory of his famous early sufferings: but

one cannot agree with Mr. Gissing, in his most interesting study, in holding that Dickens "strove to found his title of gentleman on something more substantial than glory." One fails to see that he ever thought for a moment about the title of gentleman. Commercial by instinct, he wished his genius to receive the material reward which was its due; he wanted to live largely, liberally and generously. His tastes and his beneficence needed money, and the making of money by labor in his art probably tended to become, unconsciously, an end in itself. He never could bear to yield to age, to resign his endeavor, to leave his portentous energy unoccupied. Like Scott, he might have said, "No rest for me but in the woolen;" he could not withdraw, like Shakespeare, to country quiet. His native bent was as much toward the stage as to fiction, and he wore himself out untimely in working the theatrical side of his nature, in his readings. The desire to be conspicuously before the world which idolized him may have been as potent as the need of money in spurring the energy of Dickens to its fatal goal.

mind, which dwelt lovingly on things uncanny. The Waverley Novels began to appear before Dickens could read, and ceased when he was about twenty. We know that he admired them, but we do not know whether they were the joy of his boyhood. His early reading, which really was the chief literary sustenance of his mind, went back to the eighteenth century. Feudalisın and the Catholic and historic past had no charm for him; he was, in fact, rather a child of the last age than of his own in literature. Against that age, with all his radicalism, he was not wholly in reaction. The true division between past and present-the railway cutting-was made after Dickens was formed as a genius; he belongs essentially to the old coaching days, and his heart, if not his judgment, was on the side of Merry England. His judgment ran otherwise, for it was prematurely humanitarian. He loved the jolly publicans and coachmen, the tavern life, the punch, the red faces and red waistcoats; the broad-blown merriment which accompanied cruelty of punishment, and indifference to popular suffering. Cruelty and indifference and oppression were detested by Dickens above all things; yet, in the constitution of society, humor had been coeval with hardness of heart. We all are, or ought to be, tender-hearted now; but where are our humorists? A work on recent Victorian humorists would be a scanty and gloomy compilation. Dickens was able to combine the old jollity with the new humanitarianism; his age, education, observation and natural temperament all combined to this result. The scanty taste for books, the absence of the literary quality, the native rhetoric of one who had not painfully reflected on style, were to prevent him from puzzling the widest public, but, in turn, were to make him most distasteful to the later precieux and precieuses. His quality has become his defect.

It is to these circumstances, extraordinary energy, craving for employment, a half-suppressed genius for the stage, need of money, and need of publicity, that we trace these defects of Dickens' work which are due to surplusage. He did too much, with the inevitable consequences. He read too little. His nature was all for literary action; not for study, criticism and reflection. The results. were these blemishes with which he is reproached in that age of reaction which ever succeeds to a career of vast popular success. Criticism, indeed, was not lacking, even when he was best accepted. It is quite an error to think that Dickens' literary contemporaries did not see the motes where a younger generation is apt to see the beams. At present we do not find it easy to estimate the genius which, even in its errors, so delighted our fathers. A natural loyalty must not blind us to defects, nor should the complacent superiority of a more recent generation be allowed to lead us yet further astray.

The education of Dickens, as he has described it himself, was only a trifle better than that which the wisdom of the elder Mr. Weller devised for his son. From a very early age Dickens' knowledge of shabby London was, indeed, extensive and peculiar. After acquiring the elementary arts of reading and writing, he was fortunate enough to fall in with a little neglected collection of the great novelists of the last century-Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Defoe-some volumes of travel, and the "Arabian Nights." On these he made himself; and probably the popular tales with which his nurse, Mercy, used to frighten him, nourished the more romantic part of his

Brought up in slums and shabby streets, familiar with the workroom of the blacking factory, with the pawnbroker, the dun, the bailiff, the debtors' prison, Dickens "was making himself all the while," like Scott among the glens of Liddesdale. Odious and detested as were his surroundings, they only fostered his sympathy with the dispossessed, the unknightly disinherited. The genius of the world selected for him this gloomy apprenticeship, that there might be a new voice, and a new tale for it to tell among men. Born whatever rank, educated in slums, or at Charterhouse and Trinity, Dickens must have been an observer, a teller of tales. He has remarked on the instantaneous keenness of his own observation, and on the rapidity of his inferences, even in his earliest years. These things were free gifts of his genius, and he naturally delighted in their exercise, as in his long nocturnal prowls in

poor neighborhoods. He was born to note each unmarked trait, each eccentricity, and to lend his eyes to the mass of us unobservant spectators of life. Fortune placed him early in Thackeray's "dreadful poor man's country;" born in Thackeray's class, he would have observed that, too, as, in fact, he never actually did. To the study of the well-to-do, of the contented and well-bred class, Dickens brought older eyes and a grain of prejudice. It might have been wiser in him to enter society as Lockhart did, considering it as a theater where "the dresses and actresses" were prettier than in any other. But he did not choose to become really familiar with a world which he often chose to satirize; hence the frequent failure of such satire. Perhaps a man can never write his best outside of the sphere of his early and most poignant impressions. He would have been in society, not of it, an intelligent stranger, like the Chinese of Goldsmith, or the Huron of Voltaire. He did not like the idea of that positionnot a matter for marvel; his "Dedlocks" and his "Cousin Feenix" are decidedly sketched from a distance. But it was not his especial business to draw them.

The observation of Dickens was as peculiar in kind as minute and sleepless in exercise. Every human being, of course, down to the semi idiotic landlord of the inn in "Barnaby Rudge," sees existence at an angle of his own. We look at life each through our personal prism. But the prism of Dickens, if the phrase is permissable, was peculiarly prismatic. It lent eccentricity of color and of form to the object observed. It settled on a feature, and exaggerated that. Now, to look at things thus is the essence of the art of the caricaturist. A very good example may be found in the amusing charges of Mr. Max Beerbohm. He shuns or omits everything but that which he considers essential for his purpose of diverting, and he insists upon that. It has been denied that Dickens' work is caricature, and to say that it is always caricature would be vastly unjust. Nevertheless, the insistence on Carker's teeth, Pancks' snort, Skimpole's manner, Jarndyce's east wind, and Rigaud's mustache, to take only a few cases, is exactly what we mean by caricature; and it is caricature in the manner of Mr. Carlyle. The historian, like the novelist, was wont to fix on a single trait or two-in Robespierre, St. Just, or whoever it might be, and to hammer insistently upon that. It was

ready, if inexpensive,

method of securing a distinct impression. Both Dickens and Carlyle overworked this method, which becomes, in the long run, a stumbling block -to Monsieur Taine, for example.

Connected with the vividness of Dickens' observation (which becomes, in effect, a recreation of the object) is what one may call his Animism,

in Mr. Herbert Spencer's sense of that ambiguous word. In the opinion of many philosophers, early man, and simple, natural men, and children, regard all nature as animated. Whether they attain this idea by virtue of a process of peopling nature with "spirits," or whether, without conscious theory, they mentally transfer to all things in the universe the vitality of which they are conscious themselves, or whether their mode of thought is merely playful, is not a question which we need discuss here. Whatever the origin of Animism, thus understood, it is a mark of savage and popular invention, as displayed in myth and fairy tale. Now, the early form of human fancy, the form conspicuous among backward races, peasants, fishers, and children is undeniably the source of all the civilized poetry and romance. The genius of Dickens was a relapse on the early human intellectual condition. He sees all things in that vivid, animated way, and inanimate objects play living parts in his books more frequently than in any other modern works, except Hans Andersen's fairy tales. "Hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no silent being without its voice." This manner was perfectly natural to Dickens, who, we may presume, had not reflected much on Animism, or the survivals of the primitive in the civilized intelligence. But the manner tended to become a mannerism; like all other mannerisms, was easily imitated, and degenerated into a weariness,

Dickens himself leaves it certain that his imagination, at times, went back to what is probably the primitive condition of actual hallucination. Faint perceptions of trees, or other objects, in a dim light, became recognizable illusions, representing persons absent. He awoke once, and saw his father sitting by his bed, when his father was at a distance. His dreams were wonderfully distinct and coherent; sometimes they seemed to slip the bond of time and become actually premonitory. At other times, he himself could not say whether the dream was onar or hupar, in Homeric phrase-an illusion of sleep or a waking vision. All this side of genius, all its manifestations and experiences of the "subliminal" or subconscious self, form a topic hitherto very little studied, but obviously deserving of the care of psychologists. Dickens himself was interested in the theme, but subordinated his interest, for fear of being carried beyond the reckonings of common sense. Here it must suffice to say that his experiences of this kind were on a par with those of Goethe, Shelley, Alfred de Musset, Alexandre Dumas, Scott, George Sand, Socrates, Herschel, Stevenson, Napoleon, and even Thackeray. In this place we may be content to remark on them merely as common notes on the exaltation of