for college in regular boys' schools and entered the University of North Carolina at the age of seventeen. He came out with high honors at the head of his class and was at once made instructor in mathematics in his own university.

During the ensuing years, he diligently pursued his studies and gained further degrees. Indeed, he received the doctorate of philosophy from two universities, his alma mater and the University of Chicago. In 1908 he was elected to the professorship of pure mathematics in the University of North Carolina. Two years later, he went to Europe for study and creative work in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris. At these great universities he engaged in intensive research, browsed in incomparable libraries, and foregathered with famous folk. During the space of eleven months, he made frequent contributions to leading American and foreign journals, and gave to the world five books which were published in England and America.

On June 23, 1903, he was married to a graduate and master of arts of the University of North Carolina, Miss Minna Curtis Bynum, of a family as distinguished as his own, a young woman of brilliant mind, endowed with poetic genius. Four children, beautiful in appearance and highly educated under governesses of three different nationalities, fill their home with joyousness and light.

In their charming home at Chapel Hill, with occasional flights out into the world, Mr. Henderson has found time for scientific, literary, and cultural activities that almost make us think that in his case time keeps no count of hours. Mathematical and scientific societies of America and Europe know Dr. Henderson for his learned papers in their own fields. His treatise, The Twentyseven Lines on the Cubic Surface, which was published by Cambridge University, England, has been highly lauded at Oxford and Cambridge, and received encomiums from mathematicians in Denmark, Italy, and Japan.

Another side of Dr. Henderson's interests is revealed to us in his activities as an historical investigator. He ranks as an authority on the movement of westward expansion in America during the eighteenth century. His historical addresses and articles are well known to platform listeners and to magazine

readers at home and abroad. As a practical educator, he has, in the South, been sponsor of the movement for cultural advance. He has established a series of exchange lectureships among Southern universities, and he has himself gone out with his message to universities and literary associations all over the country. Recently, in recognition of such services as well as of his literary attainments, the University of the South has conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.

The list of learned societies to which he belongs makes an imposing catalogue. He has been president of the State Literary and Historical Association of North Carolina, of the Elisha Mitchell Scientific Society, and of the North Carolina Modern Literature Club; and vice-president and national director of the Drama League of America. He is a member of the Circolo Matematico di Palermo, the famous Italian mathematical society, the North Carolina Academy of Science, the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the American Historical Association, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, the Ohio Valley Historical Association, the American-Scandinavian Society, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, the Poetry Society of America, the Scottish Society of America, and the Authors Club of London.

The duties to be expected of a member of so many learned bodies, not to mention the work of a professor of pure mathematics, might be supposed to give scope enough for the energies of any one man. But all these things are only illustrations of the phenomenal range of Henderson's activities. It is by still another line of performance, multitudinous as well as altitudinous, that he is mostly known on both the eastern and western continents. It is as a literary critic that he has established his largest and most enduring reputation. His books of literary criticism are published in both England and America and his essays have been translated into French, German, and Scandinavian. He stands to-day as the chief literary critic of the South and in the very forefront of the critics of the nation.

Dr. Henderson is primarily interested in the evolution of humanity, through spiritual ideals as typified in great world-figures. Now there are geniuses among creators of biography, just as there are Angelos and Rodins in sculpture; and Archibald Henderson

is of those who build up human characters of heroic size and marked by living gesture and expression. He is allured by the great exponents of an epoch, the men who focus and fling out again the thoughts and feelings of their time. With a free hand and a free stroke, he moulds his figures and liberates their traits and tendencies.

In his Interpreters of Life, and the Modern Spirit, Henderson gathers up a half-dozen characters conspicuous on the literary horizon of the century and shows the mood and meaning of their contribution to humanity. Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Meredith, Shaw, and Wilde-how varied the personalities and the performance of these men of four races and four lands! Yet Henderson, measuring art against life, finds in them all the rush of one elemental, onward-moving expression of the new spirit brooding upon the deep of things. Of this book it was truly and graciously said in the Mercure de France of Paris:

Le titre indique à quel point de vue l'auteur s'est placé pour étudier chacun de ces écrivains, et c'est avec une remarquable perspicacité qu'il analyse leur personnalité et leur oeuvre en fonction de "l'esprit moderne.". . . . Ces études révèlent chez le critique une connaissance très étendue du mouvement des idées à notre époque, une lecture attentive des œuvres des écrivains qu'il examine et des littératures des principales nations européennes, et à cette érudition considérable il joint une remarquable pénétration de jugement.

This volume was hailed in France, England, and America as a piece of creative criticism, rounded and balanced, fine in evaluation and evocation; and it gave the author international standing as a critic.

Following these over-sea presentments, came Henderson's study of Mark Twain, whom he had read diligently from his youth up and had known personally. This critique, with its Hendersonian accompaniment of time, place, and history, was conceded to be a persuasive and penetrating re-creation of this philosopher and humorist seen against the background of American characteristics like a bas-relief carven on a granite ledge.

But Archibald Henderson's greatest biography, and one of the super-biographies of the world, is his oceanic presentation of that insurgent and cryptic personality, George Bernard Shaw. The

publication of this comprehensive work raised a shout in the literary world. It was a huge life-study of a living, changing man, a man hewn out against a background of the historic, literary, and social events of his time. It was a work of large significance not only in tracing the currents of modern thought, but also in giving the pulse and pressure of this Shavian force that is so mighty a spiritual energy for moulding human opinion. This work nailed the name of Archibald Henderson high on the pillar of literary achievement. Bernard Shaw himself said: "You are a genius, because you are somehow susceptible to the really significant and differentiating traits and utterances of your subject."

Since the appearance of his monumental biography of Bernard Shaw, Henderson has written various luminous criticisms on the drama at home and abroad. Conspicuous among his writings, for critical acumen, balanced judgment, and literary charm, are The Changing Drama, a study of the dramatic movements and tendencies of to-day, the elaborate monograph on Thomas Godfrey, the early American dramatist, and European Dramatists, which has passed through many editions. In speaking of one of the essays in European Dramatists, Maurice Maeterlinck wrote to Archibald Henderson: "You have written one of the most acute and most penetrating essays in the whole modern movement."

I cannot omit to say that Henderson will always be held in grateful remembrance for his loving labor in raising the funds and having erected at Raleigh a national memorial to that other North Carolina genius, "O. Henry," the famous short-story writer. For another thing, he has rendered America a service in flashing back to us from the French a translation (with his wife) of the subtle and tender appreciation of the late William James by the distinguished French philosopher, Émile Boutroux.

Versatile, vigorous, vivacious, insistent on the primal rectitudes and the eternal realities, this thinker, talker, and writer is a marvel of being and doing. His faculties are electrically quick and effective. His sympathies are genial and genuine. As a scholar, as a citizen, and as a man, Archibald Henderson is an ornament to North Carolina and an honor to America.

EDWIN MARKHAM.

Staten Island, N. Y.

THE COMÉDIE-VAUDEVILLE OF SCRIBE

The comédies-vaudevilles of Eugène Scribe may be of interest not only to one concerned with the development of technique in the comedy of manners, but also to anyone seeking a complete and faithful picture of the bourgeoisie of the capital during the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Devoid of literary value and written in a mediocre, prosy style, these little plays have nevertheless the charm of an old album, for in them are sketched, gracefully and graciously, many of the figures that made up Parisian society during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Scribe was eminently qualified to depict the follies, the vices, and the virtues of this society. Born, like Molière and Béranger, in the heart of commercial Paris, he was a true child of the Paris of the Halles, of the Marais, and of the Faubourg Saint-Denis. The ferocious attacks made upon him by Alexandre Dumas, by Théophile Gautier, and by others of their school, show him to be a representative of that class who were anathema to the Jeune-France and their imitators. To the morbid and extravagant ideals of the Romanticists he opposed the glorification of quiet optimism; to the undisciplined marriage of love, the marriage of reason. Moreover, at a time when speculation and extravagance were rampant, he took his stand for order, industry, and economy. Despising charlatanism in all its forms, he showed that to all those who win their living and their rank in life through honest effort, happiness is sure to come.

Yet he was no preacher. His great concern was to interest and amuse his public; and with his marvelous instinct for detecting the current of popular favor, he realized, soon after becoming attached in 1820 to the newly-founded Théâtre du Gymnase as its official purveyor, that he could best attract and retain both the Chaussée-d'Antin and the Faubourg Saint-Germain by presenting light and amusing sketches of these two classes. If in many cases his inoffensive satire brought home and made harmless certain eccentricities; if occasionally the follies of the day were killed by ridicule, it was because they were held up to public view and not because they were bitterly attacked. Politi