One of the characteristics of the late Frank Norris was a trick of repeating, word for word, the descriptions of his characters. In "The Octopus" his heroine's hair is over and over again, a "thick, sweet-smelling mass," while her voice is of a "velvety huskiness" and "amber tint" is used constantly in the pictures of her.

* *

A defect that might be ascribed to the "artistic temperament" and one that is. right in line with Mrs. Ward's descriptive. incongruities is cited in a recent issue of the New York "Evening Mail," in a few paragraphs that mention "Novelists' Pet Phrases."

The summary reads,

Mr. Rider Haggard's pet phrase is "And then a strange thing happened;" while if you delete the first and fourth words of that sentence you will get Mr. Stanley Weyman's favorite expression also. On somewhat similar lines is Mr. William Le Queux's oft-recurring "And then the mystery was increased a thousandfold," which will recall many an exciting moment in this master of mystery's thrilling tales. Forcible Mr. Bart Kennedy, as is perhaps natural in a writer who fifteen years was a tramp (but not a "hobo") in the United States, makes frequent use of "I went on and on."

Mr. Frankford Moore, who achieves the difficult task of being as brilliant a writer of historical as of Society novels, confesses to two pet phrases "curiously enough" and "but that was just where he made a mistake." Mr. Jerome K. Jerome has always done his best to avoid anything of the kind, but finds that "at least, so it appears to me," will slip into his work.

Warm-Hearted Mr. Coulson Kernahan, whose new religious booklet, "The Face Beyond the Door," beautiful in thought and diction, should be read by all, betrays his Irish blood in the employment of "the soul of him," "the heart of him," for "his soul," "his heart," and has also a fondness for such combinations as "heartwise" and "hoopwise."

Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, whose Indian stories may possibly outlive Mr. Kipling's, believes that "briefly" is her "besetting sin." "But," she adds with a delicious touch of humor at her own expense, "I fear I rarely succeed in committing it."

I

Disraeli, the Novelist

there, notably by Sir Leslie Stephen, tribute has been paid, but no place has been assigned to him by Mr. John Morley among "English Men of Letters," nor by Professor Eric Robertson among "Great Writers." The general mass of readers who, so far as concerns works of real literary merit, are undoubtedly swayed by authority, noticing the general neglect, incline to relegate to a secondary place the books in question. In this case, however, it is not necessary to combat opposition or adverse criticism, so much as to present the claims of the novels to be ranked as literature worthy to be enrolled among the classics of the language. As a chief reason for this lack of proper appreciation, Mr. Melville continues,

The neglect of Disraeli's writings may be in part due to the fact that most people think it is below the dignity of a statesman, or of any man following what is called a "serious" profession, to compose works of fiction. Certainly, many do not yet understand that the man who writes novels may be a very wise man; they do not realize that accurately to portray human nature, and to present pictures of life, is not only a most worthy but also a most difficult task, requiring for its performance an intelligence far above the average, acute powers of observation, and a keen sense of humor. Indeed, there are still some-happily, fewer and fewer every year-who sneer at novels and regard them as works of supererogation, all unknowing of the opportunity they throw away to learn something of the nature and habits of their fellow-creatures. For, surely, the great novelist is the observer, sounding the depths while others glance at the surface, and examining the mysteries of life, while others are content to overlook even the obvious. Those who dabble in ink often wade deep in human nature; and, apart from all else, every good novel indirectly teaches humanity, humility, and a deeper understanding of the heart.

Be the cause what it may, by the vast majority Disraeli is regarded as a statesman who wrote novels. The alternative view, that he was a man of letters who became a statesman, is accepted only by those who place literature before statecraft, and who realize that while the triumphs of the politician and the diplomatist are fleeting, a great book is, so far as anything on this earth can be, eternal.

Disraeli was the first Jew to make his mark in English letters. Mr. Melville

says:

With Spinoza and Heine, he forms a trio of Jews notable in the history of modern letters. Almost without exception, until his day, Jews had been contemptuously and cruelly presented in imaginative literature. From Shakespeare to Thackeray and Dickens they were portrayed

Disraeli has not yet been awarded the fruits of his work as a man of letters. Here and

It remained for him to alter this. His treatment of his compatriots was ideal, visionary even. Everywhere he sang their praises.

Mr. Melville is enthusiastic in his estimate; he even goes so far as to find excuse where exception might be taken.

Perhaps there is no writer of the last century in whom the personal element was so strong. "Le style c'est l'homme." The personality which carried Disraeli, without influence, without wealth, to the Premiership, which dominated all his colleagues, stands out vividly in every one of his books. It has been said that he was a "poseur." Undoubtedly he had a love of grandeur that sometimes betrayed him into grandiloquence and an Oriental love of splendour. This is the portion of most sons of Israel.

And of the more general points of Disraeli's writings, his adherent says:

His pungent wit, brilliant word-painting, and powerful character-drawing are undeniable, even as his pictures of social-political life are unrivalled. A master of satire, he was at his best when reproducing the language of clubs and lobbies, when retailing the conversations of salons. If, on occasion, no one could be so flippant, at times no one could be more dignified. When carried away by his feelings, as in "Sybil," no one could be more impassioned or more forcible; when governed by his ideals, as in "Tancred," no one could be more picturesque.

A tribute like this can do much toward the stimulation of new interest. Mr. Melville may find his reward in persuading a few more readers of Disraeli.

born she should be couched upon the ground in token of humility, have a tile to play with in token of the weight which will some day hold the distaff, and indulge in no thoughts beyond her cookery and a constant desire to spare her parents pain. Such was the simple view of woman's sphere which appealed to the balladwriter of China nearly three thousand years ago.

In the "Book of Rites," a comparatively modern compilation, dating only from the century before the Christian era, but embodying the precepts and practices of earlier centuries, we find explicit regulations as to the daily life of women, many of which are in full force at the present day. Therein we are told that men and women should not sit together, nor use the same clothes-horse, towel, or comb, nor pass things to one another, lest their hands should touch. Even at sacrifices and funerals a basket should be used by the woman as a receptacle for things handed by and to her. Brothersand sisters-in-law must not ask one another questions, not even, so says one commentator, as to the state of each other's health; the brothers of a girl who is betrothed may not sit on the same mat with her, nor eat out of the same dish.

*

We read in the "Rites" that a married woman is called "fu," to denote her submission (“fu" "to submit") to her husband; but the "Po Hu T'ung," a work of the first century A. D., tells us that the wife is called "ch'i," to denote that she is the equal ("ch'i," "level") of her husband. The latter book also says that a woman cannot hold independent rank of her own, but that, in the quaint Chinese idiom, "she sits according to her husband's teeth" (seniority).

The earliest Chinese work devoted to women's affairs, entitled "Advice to Women," is by the distinguished lady who flourished in the first century A. D., and carried to its conclusion her father and brother's history of the first Han dynasty when death had removed the latter in A. D. 92. In her preface the authoress, Lady Ts'ao (nee Pan Chao), modestly asserts that she was "born without intelligence, but enjoyed the favour of her father and the teachings of her mother until she was fourteen years old, now forty years ago, when she took up the dust-pan and broom in the family of the Ts'aos."

Touching upon Chinese women who have entered the literary field, Mr. Giles

says,

Between A. D. 785 and 830 lived five remarkable sisters named Sung, all of whom possessed considerable literary talent, and especially the two elder ones. They refused to marry, and devoted themselves to literature, being finally received into the Palace, where in due course they all died natural deaths, with the exception of the fourth Miss Sung, against whom charges of accepting bribes were trumped up, the result

being that she was forced to "take silk"-in other words, to strangle herself. The eldest sister wrote a book called "Discourses for Girls," based upon the famous "Discourses" of Confucius. It is in an easy style of versification, and is generally suited to the comprehension of the young.

"When walking, do not look back;

When talking, do not open wide your lips;
When sitting, do not rock your knees;
When standing, do not shake your skirt;
When pleased, do not laugh aloud;
When angry, do not shout;

Do not peep over the outside wall;
Do not slip into the outer court;
When you go out, veil your face;
When you peep, conceal your body;
With a man not of the family
Hold no conversation whatever."

The authoress then proceeds to inculcate submission and obedience, filial piety, diligent performance of household duties, etc., etc., coupled always with a certain amount of booklearning, not so much as might perhaps have been expected from such a literary lady.

Miss Sung was at no great interval followed by one Madam Cheng. who produced a "Filial Piety Classic for Girls," in imitation of the semi-canonical work which has come down to us from about the first century B. C. This lady boldly embraces in her injunctions all classes, from the Empress and Imperial concubines down to the peasant woman of the village. "Strike a bell in the palace," she says in warning, "and the sound will be heard outside." Virtue, she points out, is a question of environ

ment:

"If a child is surrounded by good influences, he will be good; if by evil influences, he will be evil."

*

The Empress Consort of the Emperor Yung Lo of the Ming dynasty in A. D. 1405 committed to paper her thoughts on the behaviour of women, under the title of "Instructions for the Inner Apartments," i. e., for Women. These are arranged under twenty headings, with an additional chapter on the education of girls. The Empress lays much stress on gentleness, good temper, economy, kind treatment of the young and of relatives, but thinks that speech unrestrained is the real rock upon which most women split.

In her additional chapter on education, which is really a more or less doggerel poem of about 350 lines, our authoress will be considered very disappointing by some. So far from pleading for higher education for Chinese women, she urges only that a girl's governess should teach her pupil to practice filial piety, virtue, propriety, deportment, good manners, and domestic duties, as a preparation for her entry into married life.

Literature: Its Nature

MR

R. VERNON LEE'S dissertations on the "Nature of Literature" in the "Contemporary Review" are full of unique phrases and ideas worth contemplating. For instance, this somewhat extended definition of literature:

The miracle of literature is this: that the love of that one woman, Beatrice, ceases to be the private concern of the man Dante; and becomes, for each of the readers of the "Vita Nuova," his own love;-the love he feels, has felt, will feel; or which is destined, peradventure, to lie dormant and stir once only in his life, at that touch of the poet.

Literature is the universal confidant, the spiritual director of mankind. It revives, relieves and purifies the Reader's feelings by telling him of similar but nobler ones. It makes the Reader give, and thereby possess, his own soul through the illusion of having for a moment possessed that of the Writer.

I repeat: through the illusion. For we must guard against being misled by the private life of writers having become the "corpus vile" of gossiping analysis; a mere accident due to the preservation of famous people's letters and to the autobiographical matter contained, like every other sort of observed item, in their works. Being misled, I mean, into thinking that the writer is revealing, giving away, cheapening, his innermost feelings. He may, indeed, feel poignantly that he is thus exposing his own self, and take pleasure or pain or a bitter-sweet mixture, in making himself a motley to the view. But, taking the act of literary communication as what it really is, it becomes clear that the writer is exposing, evoking, only the reader's own experience; though widened, generalized by the universal experience stored up in the very language he makes use of. The reader, meanwhile, persuaded, no doubt, that what he feels is the writer's experience, is in reality feeling his own: his own experience, but "sub specie humanitatis," so to speak. This is inevitable in the artistic phenomenon, since all artistic form is three-quarters of it an heirloom, handled by mankind and fashioned by its repeated handlings. There is no real unveiling of Dante in the "Vita Nuova," nor of Goethe in "Werther;" but an unveiling of the reader to himself under the pressure of a greater personality than his own, and by the spell of processes which generations have elaborated. And under the name of Beatrice or Charlotte he falls in contemplation of his own mistress, or of the mistress of his dreams. If it were different it would be a case of What's Hecuba to me?

The Work Greater Than

Fo

the Man

OLLOWING the exclamation, "How much greater is what man makes than what man is," Mr. Lee further says, in "The Nature of Literature,"

It was brought home to me, some time ago, at a reading, given at a Roman theatre, of his ode to Garibaldi by D'Annunzio.

The writer was not morally suited to the subject, and the poem is by no means of his best. Yet watching the people in the theatre, and the author himself upon the stage, I felt the utter difference and immense superiority of the at

mosphere of art as against that of reality. As the verses rolled out, sonorous and weighty, and the images surged up and receded in constant metamorphoses; as the whole poem advanced with the decision of course and the weigh-on of a great ship; it seemed as if none of these real people could have had a hand in the making of it, could belong to the same category of existence.

Yet the insignificant man holding the manuscript was the author; and these students in the pit, listless, vague, negligible, were, very likely, just like the youths whose heroic death on the Janiculum the poem commemorated. Had Garibaldi in his reality been present, he too, I almost think, would have been but another poor real ghost-or one taking life only through

has endured all manner of desecration at the hands of the unappreciative. Moreover, as one paper expresses it,

Officialdom for years has neglected the Alhambra in a fashion which would have outraged Washington Irving, and the present condition of the wonderful monument of Moorish elegance and grandeur is the natural result.

In 1821 an earthquake shock shattered. to a considerable degree the great palace. In 1862 an attempt was made to restore it, but the effort was feeble; there was not the money at hand to do the work thoroughly, nor was there the requisite enthusiasm for a task that necessarily appealed more to the artistic senses than to the practical effort at progress.

Now that final demolishment is threatened, there is little chance that the Spanish Government will waste its good dollars on an attempt at preservation, wherefore it would seem that the doom of the aged and magnificent pile is almost accomplished.

'N