is unaccompanied by any verbal text or programme, only a series of sounding forms so arranged as to produce the noblest effects? In the development of the art the passage has been made from pure music to programme music with its names of movements and its texts, in which the most varied harmonic complexities have illustrated the most recondite themes; the operas of Wagner, the symphonic poems of Strauss, and the works of Vincent d'Indy, show to what extent the musical idealization of such themes has gone; but Mendelssohn refused to give names to his "Songs without Words" because they were, from his point of view, as clear as any lyrics ever written, and the youth, who, when under twenty, could write music for Titania and Oberon as the master spirit of the ages saw them, had a right to be heard in his maturity, which was one of learning and wisdom and service. Robert and Clara Schumann, who were in music a pair of wedded lovers like the Brownings in poetry, considered themselves as apostles of a dispensation which was to furnish peace and consolation to those who accepted it. Elizabeth Barret Browning in her religious devotion to her poetry did not go beyond Clara Schumann. The world of music like the world of poetry contains the noblest inspirations of the noblest souls at the height of their giving when the Mystery becomes Revelation and the Master speaks His inmost message with a persuasion that is the invincible allurement of truth and love.

The emotional nature of man in its close relation to the will, overpowering the latter too often with the force of its propulsions, stands as much in need of rational development as the intellect for whose clarification and admission into the established inheritances of truth we have built so many honored institutions. Religion has put forth all its efforts so that the will of the race shall be bought into the avenues which lead to fruitions beyond the temporal experiences. For the emotions no discipline can be devised more effective than submission to the enthrallments of music. The emotions have their dialectic as has the intelligence; and the symphony, the sonata, the idyl, call for the same devotion and interpretation as the drama or the romance or the lyric rapture of the poet. It will be a happy consummation when this is fully recognized, and when man shall feel that he

needs to know Beethoven and Bach and Brahms as he needs to know Dante and Shakespeare. It will be good for him to trust

himself for adventurous voyagings on

"The tide of music's golden sea

Setting towards Eternity."

In a book recently published, the Rev. R. Heber Newton speaks as follows: "Music is not an imitation of nature. Nature provides no ready-made models of melody or harmony, as she provides perfect types of form and color. Hints she gives of music, but only hints. Man evolves music from his own nature. It is distinctively the human art. It comes forth in the awakening self-consciousness of man. Music expresses the awakening selfconsciousness of man as he confronts the mystery of the universe, only to find a deeper mystery within himself. The marvelous creations of modern music are studies in self-consciousness; attempts to run the gamut of man's moods, to fathom the problems of his being, to find a voice for

"An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light."

Music is then man's interpretation of the mystery of the nature found without him by the secrets of the nature found within him. It is the universe read in the terms of self-consciousness." Moreover, we have all heard the music of the spheres in the following passage, which brings our tribute to an appropriate close :

"There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims;

Such harmony is in immortal souls."

Chicago, Illinois.

LOUIS JAMES BLOCK.

THE APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

"He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies." The truths involved in this dictum of Emerson's appear sufficiently obvious in connection with most of man's mental activities. We recognize that the chemist must carry a considerable cargo of knowledge about metals and salts and reagents before he can bring any great amount of valuable information out of his laboratory; and so with the astronomer, the biologist, the physician, the man of comIt is only in the sphere of literature that we fail to realize the need of bringing knowledge to the book as an inevitable preparative for carrying knowledge from the book. We voyage with empty bottoms to the Realms of Gold, and then wonder why we fail to return with ingot-laden holds.

We appreciate a poem as we see in it a representation, or interpretation, of life, of our own life,-of our intellectual, sensuous, and emotional experience; we fail to appreciate as the poem offers a representation, or interpretation, of intellectual, sensuous, or emotional states which lie outside our experience. This thesis does not mean that to be appreciated, the poem must be a transcript of our own life, nor yet merely that experience brings with it a deeper and broader mental and spiritual being. It means something less than the former and more than the latter. That we may really appreciate and enjoy a work of literary art, this work must present a situation or emotion capable of reproducing in us a mental or spiritual state which we have already known. The poem becomes a mirror wherein we see reflected our own life, not indeed in its details-most of these, spiritually, may be accidental-but in its essence. Thus we have formed objectively a sort of spiritual memory image.

In this connection we recall Matthew Arnold's defining of poetry as a criticism of life, yet Arnold would repudiate any such interpretation of his definition as I have put forth; in fact, he has done so: "A poet or poem," he says, "may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves. Our personal affinities, likings, and circumstances have great power to sway our estimate of this or

that poet's work. And thus we get the source of a fallacy in our poetic judgments-the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal.

We may agree with Arnold that this personal basis of judg ment leads to error in absolute appraisement, and yet urge that it forms the truest touchstone of our personal appreciation,-of what the poem is really worth to us.

The whole force of this principle lies in its application, and this application each one can probably best make for himself. In a limited space, however, it can be applied in a few illustrations which may be at least suggestive and which may give it a greater clearness and significance.

For purposes of this discussion we may recognize four classes of literary elements and, for convenience' sake, may term them, first, the purely intellectual element; second, the presentively sensuous element; third, the representively sensuous element; and, fourth, the representively emotional or spiritual ele

ment.

The most obvious of these sources of literary appreciation, the purely intellectual, is found in the satisfying of mere intellectual curiosity, the desire for novelty and excitement. This forms the basis of most narrative, particularly of most fiction. If this element be somewhat refined, it becomes a sense of intellectual surprise, finding its cause either in the situation portrayed, in the idea presented, or in mere verbal expression. Out of the surprise of situation, especially where the quality of incongruity exists, arises what is popularly called Humor; and out of the surprise of idea or of verbal expression, arises Wit. The demand for appreciation is here mainly, almost exclusively, an intellectual one. At the lowest it requires intellectual clarity, and at its highest no more than intellectual subtlety.

There is in this connection a wide range and diversity of appreciation. Of the thousands who daily laugh over Goldberg's cartoons, not one, possibly, would find the smallest interest in Don Quixote; and while it requires small effort to enjoy the absurdities of "Mr. Dooley" or George Ade, the merely intelligent reading of Tristram Shandy or the Autocrat presupposes no smail degree of intellectual culture. Still this diversity is almost

entirely on mental grounds, and experience plays here a very small part.

Turning next to the presentively sensuous element in literature, we find a range of appreciation equally wide. By the term, presentively sensuous element, are meant those qualities of the literary work which make a direct appeal to the senses of the reader, irrespective of any thought conveyed or any feeling suggested. In prose this manifests itself principally in the form of expression, its symmetry and harmony. In poetry there is the added charm of rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and the melody dependent on consonant and vowel tone values. A stereotyped example of this element is found in Poe's The Bells and Coleridge's Kubla Khan. This beauty, however, is more telling when it is produced more subtly, as when Tennyson weaves the magic spell of his little moon-tipped lullaby or Rossetti makes into a strain of rare music the mere enumeration of Mary's hand-maidens,

"Whose names

Are five sweet symphonies,

Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret, and Rosalys."

Appreciation of the purely sensuous side of poetic art is of like nature with that of every other art form. It is a growth. The fact that a man can enjoy a sketch of Gibson's does not imply that he can find pleasure in a Botticelli madonna; and a delight in the latest piece of rag-time, come from the Winter Garden all hot, does not suggest even a remote interest in a Beethoven sonata. This growth, in the pictorial and musical arts, is secured partly through the study of abstract principle, but mainly through long-continued contact with the embodiment of the principle. It is in like manner that we grow from an appreciation of such obvious melody as that of Kipling's Mandalay or Alfred Noyes's Forty Singing Seamen to a joy in the "plaintive anthem" of Keats's nightingale and the "lisp of leaves and ripple of rain" which fill shadows and windy places of Swinburne.

While there is this strong dependence of appreciation upon growth, still here again growth is largely independent of experience. The aesthetic faculties, like the intellect, may be expanded without any real enlarging of the spiritual man. Per