deletion of the word "pagan" from the vocabulary of the poem's critics. "Pagan" was not a very suitable word for their purpose, anyway, for Christianity has never had a monopoly on the doctrine of immortality.

That Bryant firmly believed in immortality is well attested in many of his poems, especially in those of his last thirty years. Seeger's ideas on the subject appear to be more vague, and are very much more truly pagan where they appear. In "Liebestod" we read:

Sometimes I think that, where the hilltops rear
Their white entrenchments back of tangled wire,
Behind the mist death only can make clear,
There, like Brunhilde ringed with flaming fire,
Lies what shall ease my heart's immense desire :
There, where beyond the horror and the pain

Only the brave shall pass, only the strong attain.

More strongly defined is his fatalism. Yet that doctrine in Seeger, as in the pages of many other "first-hand writers" on the war, betrays its origin in the necessities of the situation. One is impressed that the soldier in the trenches adopts it because uncertainty as to his own fate is thus made easier for him to bear. When he gives his assent to the fatalism of the trenches he stops worrying and becomes a better soldier for his attitude. Sergeant Empey admits as much in that racy and phenomenally popular book of his. It is all in Seeger's "Maktoob." Out of the fragment of a shell that killed a comrade the poet made a ring-grim relic-and on the seal he "bade a Turco write 'Maktoob,' which is Arabic for "Tis written." And when he goes over the top he looks upon his ring,—

And nerves relax that were most tense,

And death comes whistling down unheard,
As I consider all the sense

Held in that mystic word.

And it brings, quieting like balm

My heart whose flutterings have ceased,

The resignation and the calm

And wisdom of the East.

But whatever may be the genesis of the necessarianism of the trenches, it is there, and it permeates the Later Poems of Alar Seeger. There are very many lines in Seeger's poems, by the way, that are startlingly reminiscent of Fitzgerald's version of of the quatrains of that arch-fatalist, Omar Khayyám.

On July 4, 1916, Alan Seeger kept his rendezvous with death on the "scarred slope of battered hill' that he had previsioned, at Belloy-en-Santerre. The final lines of "The Hosts" are perhaps fitting requiem:

We saw not clearly nor understood,

But, yielding ourselves to the master hand,
Each in his part as best he could,

We played it through as the author planned.

Bryant lived to a ripe old age. But he too met death of a sudden at last, with rather less of warning than Seeger had. One wonders rather vainly what would have been the effect on his fame if Bryant had died at twenty-eight instead of at eightythree. We should have the poems published in his first volume, which was issued in his twenty-seventh year. They include "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "Green River" and "The Ages"--but only eight all told. He had many others in manuscript, and some not included in the book had already been published in periodicals when he made his first venture in book form, in a day when to send forth a book of American poetry took courage indeed.

Youth and Death, and a hundred years; a country doctor's home, and the trenches in France; a precocious New England lad, but one remove from Puritanism, and a "beloved vagabond," whose true home was Paris:- but are not the reactions much the same? Appalled by the imminence of death, they turn to look upon Nature each in his own mood; each finds, how and where he may, his own solace and defence against fear; each resolves to make the best of it, one saying

And we shall brave eternity as though

Eyes looked on us in which we would seem fair

One waited in whose presence we would wear,

Even as a lover who would be well-seen,

Our manhood faultless, and our honor clean!

and the other will

go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

New York City.

FRANK LUTHER MOTT.

DODSONS AND TULLIVERS

The Mill on the Floss may be regarded as a consummate exposition of small-mindedness. In the writing of this novel George Eliot seems to have been impelled, not only by the desire to picture a phase of old English country life, but by the need to register her clear recognition of the sometimes singularly sinister power of pure fatuity, the mischief it can do, the vexation it can cause, the suffering it can inflict. She seems to have been obsessed with the idea of what has often to be endured in the way of misery simply because of the feeble-mindedness of one entirely unmalicious woman; she seems to have beheld as one of the chief sources of unhappiness-at least of those forms of infelicity which arise from causes outside one's self-narrowness of imagination and intellect.

It will be seen that much of the humor which saves The Mill on the Floss from dreariness is ironic, as when we are quietly informed of Uncle Pullet's faculty for ignorance, or when we are told that Mrs. Tulliver "had not studied the question of exchange, and was straining her mind after original ideas on the subject," or when we are given an account of Mrs. Tulliver's interview with lawyer Waken. Again and again in George Eliot's novels have the workings of the uncultured mind been laid bare. The disclosure has sometimes been made ironically and always with marvelous astuteness; but nowhere else has the method been so deliberately ironic. The talk of Joshua Rann, for instance, his report of the goings-on in the village, the doings of the "Methodisses," the sayings of Will Maskery,was conceived, one feels, in the pure spirit of fun. Mrs. Holt's solemn expositions are also accepted as unadulterated humor, and must have been so regarded even by Felix himself, who had much to bear because of his mother.

It will further be seen that the whole process of The Mill on the Floss is ironic. A sort of ironic contrast enables us to keep our emotional equilibrium. It is humorously and disinterestedly that we are made to view these Dodsons and Tullivers, and yet never for a moment are we allowed to forget the pathos of the

situation. Mrs. Glegg as presented to us by the novelist is a very amusing figure, but we are not in the least blind to the fact that as a companion she would be intolerable and decidedly undesirable as an aunt; we know very well that, brought into personal contact with her, we should be inclined to join Mr. Tulliver in pronouncing her "a damned ill-natured woman." The difficulty of assuming at all times the attitude of the onlooker, of viewing one's own affairs with any degree of detachment, is clear to us; that Tom and Maggie were too inexperienced, too closely placed, too intimately concerned, to perceive the ridiculous in the words and ways of their Dodson relatives, is also clear; that a humorous view is necessarily a disinterested view, that humor does not go with concernedness, with preoccupation, with intensity, is another truth of which we are sure. However much we may sympathize with Maggie in her resentment against her aunts for showing no eager tenderness and generosity, however much we may admire her splendid youthful outburst of indignation, we perceive the uselessness of it all; we know that generous impulses are not easily quickened in the parsimonious mind, that the narrow intellect does not readily embrace opportunities for magnanimous action; we perceive that these Dodson relatives were not helped by Maggie's mad outbreak to any knowledge either of her or of themselves, and that her vehemence only filled them with astonishment, which found expression in unfavorable comment and dismal prognostication. In Mrs. Pullet's willingness to buy the spotted table-cloths (she was always fond of spotted damask) and in her rejection of the silver teapot (two silver teapots would be a superfluity, not to mention her disapproval of the straight spout), we behold a humorous exhibition of characteristic obtusity; we are delighted when Mrs. Pullet's generosity is capped by Mrs. Dean's lofty, "Well, I've no objection to buy some of the best things; we can do with extra things in our house," and we chuckle inwardly at sister Jane's scornful ejaculation, "Best things!"

Yes, these Dodson aunts-Mrs. Pullet with her uncomfortably immaculate housekeeping, her lachrymose tendencies, her funereal turn of mind, her interest in bodily complaints, her faith in

medication; Mrs. Glegg with her contrariness, her mood of severity, her air of superiority, her strict adherence to hereditary custom, her pride in the true Dodson spirit, her thankfulness for her own strength of mind; Mrs. Dean with her condescending airs and her kind offer of jelly—are indeed highly amusing. Still, in the frequent display of ill-temper and the scenes of wrangling and quarreling, there is a touch of coarseness, a tone of vulgarity, not found in any other of George Eliot's novels; the life described does indeed fill one with "a sense of oppressive narrowness," which, we are told, it is necessary for us to feel, if we care to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie.

The field in which the novelist is privileged to glean is a very wide one; it may be said to embrace every phase of life and all that constitutes life. The legitimacy of introducing into a work of fiction the sordid, the ugly, the commonplace, the vulgar, the unpleasant, the vile, depends entirely upon the use made of these elements. In fiction, whatever can be handled with skill, delicacy, and wisdom may be regarded as lawful material. If the author's endeavor be to depict that struggle, that conflict between the outward fact and the inward impulse, which, George Eliot tells us, is the lot of every imaginative and passionate nature, he is bound to present those conditions which make up the outward fact. It would be absurd to conclude that a novelist is vulgar because he puts vulgar language into the mouth of a vulgar person, or that he is profane because he puts profane language into the mouth of a profane person; it would be absurd to refuse to read a story, or to pronounce it unfit to read, solely because, in the story, spiritous liquors are dispensed and drunk. Then one must bear in mind this further fact. Much that the eye or the ear would reject as intolerable, the imagination will accept as entirely eligible. A cultivated person, present as a disinterested observer at the dinner-party scene depicted in The Mill on the Floss, would doubtless be more alive to the vulgarity than to the humor of the scene, more ashamed than amused. But, though at the moment of experience his feeling had been that of shame or disgust, he would probably recall the episode with amusement. Viewed imaginatively, the scene would present a quite different