body in ways literally undreamed of. There is little wonder that Louise Lateau should have been regarded as a person around whom a special halo of sanctity had been miraculously thrown; while the peculiar fashion in which her body seemed to follow the dreams or visions of her ecstasy in the production of seeming duplicates of the injuries to the crucified body, served but to raise the occurrence to a higher level of the miraculous. Such ecstatic states, however, are well known in the history of science. Maury points out that supernatural revelations were not the exculsive property of the good, but appeared to the sinful likewise. Visions of demoniacal scenes were once as frequent as dreams of heaven, and hence it became necessary, as the last-named author points out, to classify these occurrences as "holy" and demoniacal." St. Francis d'Assisi was the parent of these "stigmatic" visitations; and M. Maury relates that saints' days and Fridays were the occasions on which the stig mata" almost universally appeared-a fact illustrated by such cases as those of Ursula Aguir (1592), and Sister Emmerich (1824). Here, again, we have to face simply the oft-repeated problem of the potent influence of mind over a special region or part of the body, resulting from the extreme concentration

of the attention upon special features or objects of adoration or worship. Emotional excitement produces cases allied to those of the "stigmatics" of religion, under circumstances which suggest a common causation for both. In the case of a sailor related by Paulini, large drops of perspiration of a bright red color appeared on the face, neck, and breast after a severe fright. The man was speechless from mental excitement, but as the bleeding points disappeared the man recovered his speech. This case presents us with the phenomena of Louise Lateau, the stigmatic, separated from the halo of inspiration by which she was surrounded, but induced by a like cause-the abnormal, concentrated, and unconscious action of the imagination upon the circulation. No less interesting is the occurrence of a similar phenomenon in lower life, in the august person of a hippopotamus, which in a fit of rage was noted by the late Mr. Frank Buckland to perspire profusely a fluid containing blood. This latter fact serves to demonstrate not merely the community of these phenomena in man and animals, but also divests the occurrence of that miraculous or occult nature which human credulity or superstition, under certain circumstances, would assuredly attribute to it.-Gentleman's Magazine.

Warnford. I was a little surprised to see you at the Grosvenor" private view this afternoon, Garniston.

Garniston. I am sorry for that. The surprise of an intimate friend at anything one does cannot possibly be flattering.

W. Why not?

If

G. Why not? Think a moment. I have surprised you, I must have revealed some new point of character, compelling you to revise your former conception of me-perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse. But how can it possibly flatter me to learn either that you undervalued me yesterday, or that I have fallen in your estimation to-day?

W. You are captious, my dear fellow. We may discover new qualities in a friend without its affecting our estimate of him, either for better or worse.

G. I believe that to be a mathematical impossibility. Every fact of character must have either a plus or a minus sign. But let us test it by the concrete case. You were surprised, you say, to see me at the private view. Why?

W. Well, I did not know you cared about art, or artists, or crowds of notabilities, or fashionable shows of any sort.

G. In other words, you did not know that I was either the better by an æsthetic faculty with which you had not credited me, or the worse by a frivolous taste of

which you did not suspect me. Come! open your left hand. Which compliment are you going to offer me?

W. The first, unhesitatingly. I plead guilty to having appraised you at one faculty below your value. I pronounce you a hitherto unsuspected connoisseur in art.

G. And I disclaim the character. Art-connoisseurship, in so far as I have had an opportunity of inquiring into its parentage and means of subsistence, is the child of Prejudice handed over to Dogmatism to support. I like my opinions, such as they are, to be the children of Reason, who keeps alive no offspring that she cannot herself maintain.

W. That is a stern sort of mother, Garniston.

G. As Reason is. Is there any sacrifice in that kind of which her severity is incapable ?—she who can look on unmoved while slowly-dying Faith, the most beautiful of her daughters, is calling to her for sustenance in vain.

W. Don't reckon too hastily upon that death, my friend. Sentiment has already adopted more than one of Madame Reason's deserted children, and Faith, who has been last received beneath her roof, may thrive there for many a year yet.

G. Amen! I am not one of those who think that mankind will be the better for her death.

W. If she perishes as Faith, she will survive as Hope. The world may no longer know her as that radiant housedamsel of its youth, who was wont to trip down-stairs with the sunrise, the keys of Paradise jingling at her girdle, and every chamber ringing with her morning-song; but in the evening of man's days, he will still find her at his fireside no longer joyous, perhaps, but calm and cheertul, ever ready with the caress of consolation and the whisper of good courage.

G. True; but you should remember that even the most delightful of old maids is not immortal.

W. I know I should. I foresaw that objection, in fact, when it was too late to escape it. I wish somebody would invent a metaphor with a handle. I never knew one that didn't cut your fingers.

G. Especially when you are trying, as
NEW SERIES.-VOL, XL, No. 2

you were just now, to snatch the edged tool from somebody else.

W. Yes, to be sure, it was you who first attacked me with it, in your refusal to allow connoisseurship a rational parentage. But surely you don't deny that there are some reasoned principles by which the merit of an artist's work may be judged.

G. I dare say there may be; but the only ones that I am acquainted with are so majestically abstract that they seem to me to throw no light whatever upon any concrete case.

W. Are they any less enlightening than literary canons of taste?

G. I think so. I imagine that I should find less difficulty in showing a student why such and such a passage was to be accounted good literature, and such and such another the reverse, than an art-professor would experience in giving reasons in any particular case for the faith that is in him.

W. I admit that you would have an advantage in the nature of your subject

matter.

G. An immense advantage. Literary criticism is ultimately concerned with mental ideas, as to which there is little. or no personal equation" to be taken into account. But art criticism deals with sensory impressions varying infinitely as between individuals. How convince any one, for instance, that Mr. A.'s coloring is "mellow," and Mr. B.'s "crude," that X.'s "symphonies" are harmonious, and Y.'s horribly out of tune?

W. In questions of form, however, as distinct from color, the difficulty does not arise.

G. Doesn't it? Take Mr. Burne Jones's ideal of beauty in the female form. You may accept or you may reject it, but you cannot deny that it differs sensibly from that of Rubens, and that neither is identical with that of the modeller of the Melian Venus. W. Yes, but

G. Excuse me. I mustn't be beguiled by you into a disputation on art criticism. Why, moreover, is it necessary that I should be interested either in art criticism or in art? I can account otherwise for my visit this afternoon to the private view. Suppose I am interested in artists ?

17

W. I can't entertain such a supposition-no offence to them. I have always found them the most self-centred of

men.

G. And you think that makes them less interesting?

W. I certainly think it doesn't make them better company.

G. Who said anything about their company? I see, Warnford, that you are infected with the chief intellectual, as it is the chief social, vice of the times -the desire to be incessantly excited and amused. Men, even the most intelligent, seem nowadays to look round upon their fellows in the spirit, not so much of a Greek philosopher, as of a Roman emperor. Their question is not, What can I learn from you? but, What sport can you make for me? Look at the exaggerated horror with which we are accustomed in these days to speak of a bore. Yet how much profit we may often derive from listening to one!

W. You are thinking of George Herbert's God takes the text and preaches patience."'

G. No, most facetious of men, I am not. I am thinking of the instruction which we get from the man himself. You may learn something new of human nature from any one who is natural, and the bore is natural almost in very virtue of his definition. Will you tell me that his self-disclosing tediousness can teach one less than the false epigram, the artificial picturesque, the sham profundity, in which your celebrated talker is mostly found to deal? No! give me the bore.

W. With all my heart, and much may you learn from him! Zeus, says Eschylus, has founded knowledge upon suffering by a fixed law." But I hope the artists don't know your reason for cultivating their society.

G. They might know it, so far as I am concerned. It is you, not I, who have classed them, by implication, among the bores. All I said was in answer to your depreciatory remark upon these most self-centred of men. It is their very self-absorption that makes them so interesting to me. That most of them care for nothing outside their art is the very thing that piques my curiosity about them. They are almost the only men I know-of those, I mean, whose calling involves the exercise of

W. So it is very often.

G. Yes; but I leave those cases out of account. There is no known employment so self-sufficing as the chasse aux pièces de cent sous, unless it be that other chasse which is chiefly dear to English

men.

Once enslave yourself to the passion for killing as many animals, or for collecting as many sovereigns as possible in the course of the year, and you will never more be troubled with any vague mistrust of the worth of your work in life, still less with those darker misgivings of the value of life itself. But it is rare to find immunity from such heartsearchings among those whose nightly pillow is not smoothed for them by the daily indulgence either of the acquisitive or of the destructive instinct. The exercise of any other human faculty, whether it be imaginative energy, or speculative subtlety, or scientific curiosity, appears to be attended among almost all men with increasingly imperfect satisfaction.

W. In the case of scientific curiosity, that is not to be wondered at. It presupposes an incurable dissatisfaction with existing knowledge.

G. No doubt; but not with the work of enlarging knowledge. You know the famous choice of Lessing between the two gifts presented to him in either outstretched hand of God. Pure Truth, O Lord, is for Thee alone. Give me the search for truth. I will be content with that!" There indeed was a saying all aglow with that happy philosophic spirit of the eighteenth century-the saying of a man who found in the work of inquiry the perfect satisfaction of the soul. But is that the spirit that animates the inquirer of the present day? Is it in that spirit, for instance, that the man of science interrogates nature?

W. Well, no. I confess that he is

given to interrogating her a little too much after the manner of a French juge d'instruction that is to say with a preconceived theory to support.

G. Precisely. He is determined to make her admit that she alone is responsible, and no Person or Persons unknown. How can anybody contend that the pursuit of scientific truth brings peace to him who pursues it in these days? He is as much tormented by the speculative unrest of the age as any inan; and it drives him to all sorts of distractions, controversial and other. He can't spend six consecutive months in the laboratory or the dissecting-room without getting so restless that he has to go out of doors and fight a parson to relieve his feelings. And when he isn't wrangling with Theology, he's flirting with Metaphysics.

W. Yes, that last is certainly the strangest phenomenon of our time.

44.

G. Isn't it? And so significant. Who would have thought that Metaphysics, who only the other day plumped down exhausted by her ineffectual dance of two thousand and odd years, was only to enjoy the repose of the wall flower' for so short a time, and should be off again in a wild galop with Physical Science, utterly discomposing the staid quadrille of the Positivists, and making one as giddy to look at her as ever she used to do in the days of her German waltz.

W. Well, I suppose I must give up the man of science. But I confess I am surprised that you should regard the life of art as more self-sufficing than that of letters.

G. The words "art" and "letters'' are not mutually exclusive. There is a large department of literature which could not be self-sufficing without abandonment of its proper function: which is, to reflect faithfully the temper of an age as far as possible from being satisfied with itself. The literature which deals with the actualities of life, with the

G. No. "He best can paint them who hath felt them most.

On the principle of the line,

W. Felt them most? I am sure you can't mean oxen; for that would be to elevate every rib-puncher at a cattle show into a Paul Potter. May I take it that you were speaking not of oxen but of emotions?

G. You may. I wanted to show you that one quotation is only good as an argument until another is cited. My position, however, is a very simple, and, I think, an unassailable one. The every-day literature of a restless and discontented age will have its own undertone of restlessness and discontent just as the ordinary prose description of scenes of pain and horror must itself be painful and horrible. Unrest, like any other form of human suffering, must be poetized before its representation ceases to partake of its own nature. Poetry, which conjures beauty and pleasure out of hideousness and anguish, is alone capable of picturing agitation in forms of repose.

W. Hideousness is surely a little beyond the control of the poet.

G. Not at all. Let us imagine a modern newspaper rendering of a certain famous incident of antiquity which the poet and the sculptor have alike admirably dealt with, and compare their work with the reporter's. This is how the latter's account would probably have run: Shocking Death of a Father and two Sons. Yesterday afternoon as our respected fellow-townsman, Mr., was walking on the beach in company with his two sons, youths of fourteen and fifteen years of age respectively, he was startled by the apparition of two enormous snakes, who, emerging suddenly from the ocean, glided swiftly toward the lads, and proceeded with incredible rapidity to envelop them in their serpentine folds. Horror-stricken at the sight, the father hurried to his sons' assistance, but only to be himself seized by the scaly monsters in a double ccil, one round the middle and the other round the neck, while their heads, towering above their elder victim, presented a most appalling spectacle. The unfortunate man, whose clothes and hat were speedily covered with blood and slaver, strove in vain to loosen the folds which

encircled him. His cries were terrible, and are compared by witnesses of the scene to the bellowing of a wounded bull. After having been engaged for a few minutes in their work of destruction the monsters retired, when the usual restoratives were at once applied to their victims, but the vital spark was in each case extinct. There you have the prose version of the death of Laocoon and his sons, and its effect, or, at any rate its effect upon my own mind is one of mere disgust and disturbance. How does it strike you?

W. Certainly it has neither the beauty of the lines in the second Eneid, nor the repose of the group in the Vatican. G. And yet it is a pretty close paraphrase of Virgil. Poetry therefore can exercise its transforming power not only over the painful but over the hideous, so that what, in the description of our imaginary penny-a liner, appears as a mere confused and ignoble tussle, is not only elevated by her into grace and symmetry, but subdued into calm. But the tranquillizing power of Poetry is no less than the beauty-giving power, her exclusive secret. I repeat that the prose literature of a restless and discontented age will have its own undertone of restlessness and discontent; and it would be unreasonable to expect that the men who provide us with this form of literature should find contentment in their work.

W. There is one class of modern prose writers who, concerned exclusively with actualities, would be more deeply imbued I should think than any other, with the spirit of their age. What should you say of the occupation of the journalist ?

G. I should say that it was the most stimulating and animating that exists. W. Indeed?

G. Why, of course. You know the guild of antiquity to whom they have been so truly compared. What can be more stimulating and animating than the work of making the worse appear the better reason? And our journalists. pursue it with an impunity denied to their Hellenic ancestors. They ought to have as good a time of it as the Sophists before the appearance of Socrates.

W. Do you know, I begin to be horribly afraid that I have misunderstood

you from the outset. It is most unfortunate.

G. Not at all. I have no doubt that it has greatly tended to moderate the asperities of discussion. The value of misunderstandings for that purpose is not half appreciated. Yet to my mind it is one of the chief attractions of metaphysical controversy; for hence it is, that while grammarians, whose points of difference are not easily mistaken, have for generations been invoking the Divine vengeance upon each other's heads for their rival theories of the irregular verb, metaphysicians, on the other hand, have always dwelt together in the amity of the mutually unintelligible.

W. Still, even at the risk of disagreeing with you, I think I should like to understand you. I find it difficult to reconcile your favorable view of the journalist's occupation with what you had just said about prose writers in general. Surely this most "stimulating and animating employment" must be self-sufficing?

G. Every active employment of the faculties is so, during the period of their exercise.

W. But I thought you said it would be unreasonable to expect the modern prose writer to find contentment in his work.

G. Oh, I see now; it is one of the old pitfalls of the English language. May I talk Greek to you?

W. H'm-yes, in moderation.

G. It is not in my power to exceed it. When I spoke of work then, I did not mean energeia but ergon--not intellectual activity, but its results. And I certainly think that the ergon of the journalist, the end to which he devotes those energies, from the exercise of which he doubtless derives pleasure, is as little likely to afford him contentment as can well be imagined.

W. Perhaps so if your comparison of him to the Sophist is a just one. But I have good reason, as you know, to protest against it.

G. Then, please consider it withdrawn. The Sophists were not only unscrupulous in boasting their ability to make the worse appear the better reason, but foolish as well. They ought, like their intellectual heirs, to have begun business by seriously considering