worth doing. "The single attempt is to discover from Tennyson's use of Scripture the successive and orderly stages of his artistic and poetic development. Here is a poet who used biblical phrases and images in one way in his earliest lines, who used them in another way in subsequent poems; and in still other ways in productions that were later and later yet. If the following pages have any new value it lies in exhibiting the orderly development and progress of a great poet's genius by showing that progress and development as seen in the successive stages of his artistic use of the English Bible. . . . Seen as a whole it is a bird's-eye view of the total landscape of a great artist's far-stretching career." The study is of interest not only in the light it throws on Tennyson's career, but in the conception it gives of the religious development of his age. Let us have more such dissertations from our budding doctors of philosophy.

PAST AND PRESENT. By Thomas Carlyle. With an Introduction and Notes by Edwin Mims, Professor of English, Vanderbilt University. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1918.

Among the recent editions of the Modern Student's Library, an excellent series of English classics sponsored by the oldestablished house of Scribner, is a new edition of Carlyle's Past and Present. The book well measures up to the test set for the series, that every volume shall be recognized as essential to a liberal education and shall tend to infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the qualities which cause it to endure. The editors of the several volumes have been carefully selected with a view to their peculiar fitness for their tasks. The editor of this political masterpiece of Carlyle, Dr. Edwin Mims of Vanderbilt University, was chosen with special propriety, because of his familiarity with the social and economic questions which caused the book to be written. He is so well known in the realm of American scholarship that it is sufficient to say that his Carlyle is one of his best pieces of editorial work.

Though written in 1843, Past and Present is perhaps the most timely and forward-looking essay of the Seer of Chelsea. It reads, indeed, like a contemporary treatise on social and industrial problems. Its message for the present day, for example, is

far more significant than that of Ruskin's political writings. The author, as usual, shouts at the reader from the printed page with uncouth, sprawling sentences that often stand topsy-turvy on their heads to attract attention. Like Ibsen, he was determined to be heard. But aside from its grotesque, volcanic style, Past and Present shows a prophetic insight into the social forces which wrought an industrial revolution in England and which can be understood better to-day in the light of subsequent events than they were by the early Victorians. Of the gaints of that age Carlyle alone read aright the progress of the TimeSpirit.

Dr. Mims shows in his illuminating introduction how democracy and freedom were then as now the watchwords of both liberals and progressives. Carlyle declared that "Liberty needs new definitions" from age to age, and our President has given voice in his world-shaking speeches to this new ideal of individual, national, and international freedom. Some of the Scotchman's ideas of the efficient state and the moral equivalent of war have been paralleled in the writings of Wells and James. Past and Present clearly forecasts the socialistic state and sets forth the compromise between "inevitable Democracy and indispensable sovereignty" as the "highest question hitherto propounded to mankind."

The book was not understood in its day for reasons which the editor makes clear. The author not only did not speak literally or figuratively the language of that utilitarian and conservative age, but was opposed by the social democratic champions on one extreme and by the spokesmen of the old order in Church and State on the other. "Carlyle's attack upon liberty," says Dr. Mims, "considered as a negative individualism, unresticted and unlimited, is now justified in the increasing insistence upon industrial liberty as a necessary element and upon social duties as of equal importance with the rights of the individual." The present war with its rapid and drastic changes, as seen in the government handling of the prohibition problem, strikes, mininum wage, social vice, the military draft, food laws, management of public utilities, fuel regulation, and the whole system of taxation, has struck at the root of many of the evils denounced by the

plain-spoken Scotch philosopher, who boldly set himself to solving the Sphinx riddle of the world.

Bentham and his school had maintained the dangerous doctrine that the happiness of mankind depends upon "mere political arrangements," guided entirely by selfish interests; government a taxing machine to the discontented, a machine for securing property, to the contented. Carlyle set his face like a flint against this hard, mechanical theory of society, which had much in common with the present Prussian idea, and opposed to it a deep spiritual view of man's relationship to himself, his fellowmen, and the State. Past and Present presents this idea of a real democracy, a brotherhood of men, dependent for its driving force upon "Dynamics, which has to do with the inward, primary power of man."

The book was written as a true seer's commentary on an age of superficial, makeshift reforms, which did not reach or heal the deeper ulcers of the body politic. Carlyle feared, indeed, that England would suffer a second edition of the French Revolution, "truth clad in hell-fire," "for there is nowhere any tie remaining among men." Past and Present should be read by thoughtful minds to-day in the light of contemporary events as a remarkable prophecy in the enduring literary form of that new democracy which Mr. Wilson and Mr. Lloyd George are writing with pens of flame into the constitution of that greater world-state that is to be. GEORGE A. WAUCHOPE.

THE METHOD OF HENRY JAMES. By Joseph Warren Beach, Assistant Professor of English, University of Minnesota. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pp. 270. 1918.

Can a labor of criticism be a labor of love? This "searching study of the technique of James in its various aspects," answers the question affirmatively. Those intellectually élite souls that wish to study the finesse of characterization in the depths of human personality may well seize upon Professor Beach's book as a godsend of a guide! For, though the book is studying James's "method," in James the method is the key to the matter. A few quotations from the early chapters will give those interested in James-and no others are likely to read the book—a -a

foretaste of the good things set before them in this acute but generous study:

to us.

"It is a chief distinction of James that he was the first to write novels in English with a full and fine sense of the principles of composition. . . . If you are to use the word story at all in connection with these novels, the story is not what the characters do, nor how the situation works out. The story is rather the process by which the characters and the situation are revealed The last chapter is not an addendum tacked on to let us know what happened after the wedding. It simply turns on the light by which the whole situation—which had perhaps long since taken shape in the dark—is at last made clear. And no one can hope to learn how such a novel 'comes out' by turning to the last chapter, which is wholly unintelligible save as the last phase of the general situation,-last not necessarily in time, but the last to be displayed, and as meaningless by itself as a predicate without a subject. In [some of] the novels . . . there is a strong tendency towards the author's distinctive method of gradual revelation. . . . . The narrative is taken up with the gradual emergence of relationships and points of view, of attitudes and designs. Behind these subjective facts lurk indeed great cloudy masses of the objective. But they remain always in the mist, behind the subjective facts,-which seldom, for that matter, come out themselves into the clear, sharp light of plain statement. . . . In other novels we are in suspense as to the fortunes of our friends in the story, their success or failure in what they have undertaken, the nature of the dangers or difficulties they are destined to meet. The question is, What is going to happen? In James, the question is more often, What is it that did happen? where are we now? what did that mean? what is the significance of that act? what new light is thrown upon such and such a character, or upon our situation? . . . From beginning to end of the story we are occupied with just finding out what it is the author is hiding from us. . . . This extreme jealousy of his material is not to be attributed wholly, or even principally, to a mischievous love of teasing the reader, however legitimate this may be in a writer of fiction. More important is his concern that the reader may not have too big a

helping. He wishes him to master one position thoroughly before he proceeds to the next. This both on account of the next position, which will be more securely seized if the first position is solidly occupied, and more especially on account of the earlier position itself. James wishes to express the last drop of human significance from whatever circumstance he puts into his press. This is required by that law of economy that he so cheerfully obeys. Any less deliberate rate of progress would make it impossible to 'work' his story, as Mr. James would say himself, 'for all it is worth.'. . . . The stories of Henry James are records of seeing rather than of doing. That we have seen to be, at any rate, the general impression of the reader. The process of the story is always more or less what Mr. James himself calls in one case a 'process of vision'” (pp. 37, 41-43, 50, 54, 56). T. P. B.

THE SCIENCE AND THE ART OF TEACHING. By Daniel W. La Rue. New York and Cincinnati: American Book Company.

In his "First Word to the Reader" the author of this little book declares that "emphasis is laid on the fact that teaching is becoming an efficient art, because we are learning to base it on scientific certainty, on the results of schoolroom experiment. The day of tradition and of merely personal authority has not altogether gone in education, but we can all help to speed its passing. Not only are the scientific spirit and ways of working emphasized, but teaching method is shown to be based on scientific method as found in the field and in the laboratory." Fortunately for the value of the book the extreme point of view taken in the foregoing sentences is modified in chapter two and elsewhere, and education is shown to be an approximate science dependent upon many unseen forces. The chief fault with much of the teaching in our so-called normal schools is that the students are deluded by a study of "teaching methods"- a barbarous terminology-into the belief that method comes before matter and that the whole process of teaching (which our author calls "teaching process") may be reduced to a scientific formula. Professor La Rue's book, though for the most part a sensible, practical treatment of his subject, is not altogether free from such complacent optimism.