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rank of life are parents of pure conscience, least of all are the illconditioned. And as long as the spirit of morality and religion is short of universal, the necessity of protective laws for children can never be superseded. To every child its property is already secured; to every child the endurableness of its existence ought to be secured, especially where the law is its only protection. And the result of such laws will, in the long run, be both moral and religious; because punctilious and bracing righteousness about the bruising of but one baby-body in its midst exalteth a nation. The unhappy child of the savage, growing up under the new unconscious influences of such surrounding, will carry into manhood freedom from the evil habit of the past; for disuse is destruction.

As a people, we have already set up the throne of law in warehouses of merchants, to see fair-play between trader and trader; the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children wants to set it up in the courts and slums of the land, to see fairness between an unworthy parent and his helpless offspring. And the throne cannot be put to a more worthy or beautiful use.

HENRY EDWARD, CARDINAL ARCHBISHOP.
BENJAMIN Waugh.

THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE.*

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DISCUSSION, in which many eminent persons took part, was lately held with a view to finding an answer to the question, "What hundred books are the best?" It would have been more profitable for us had we been advised how to read any one of the hundred ; for what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the best books or the worst, if we lack the power or the instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any one of them? Books for most readers are, as Montaigne says, a languid pleasure;" and so they must be, unless they become living powers, with a summons or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or wrestle with them.

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Now if some of those who have proved their power of getting to the heart of great books were to tell us of their craft or their art or their method, we should listen with interest and attention; and if we were to compare method with method, we could not fail to learn something worth learning. One would like to know, for example, the process by which Sainte-Beuve dealt with an author; how he made his advances; how he invested and beleaguered his author; how he sapped up to him, and drew his parallels and zigzags of approach; how he stormed the breach and made the very citadel his own. We have heard of the secret of Hegel; but it is not Hegel alone who has a secret. Every great writer has a secret of his own, and this is none the less difficult to discover because the great writer made no effort at concealment. An open secret is as securely guarded as any, like Poe's purloined letter, which was invisible because it was obviously exposed upon the mantelpiece. Every great writer has his secret, and there are some writers who seem to cherish their

* In this article I have said nothing of the historical study of literature and its interpretation through the general movements of the life and mind of nations.

secret and constantly to elude us, just at the moment of capture ; and these, perhaps, are the most fascinating of all, endlessly to be pursued. Who, for example, has ever really laid hold of Shakespeare? He is still abroad, and laughs at our attempts to capture or surprise him. If some fine interpreter of literature would but explain to us how he lays hand on and overmasters the secret of his author, we should feel like boys receiving their lessons in woodcraft from an old hunter and we are all hunters, skilful or skilless, in literaturehunters for our spiritual good or for our pleasure. How to stalk our stag of ten; how to get round to the windward of him; how to creep within range; how to bring him down while he glances forth with startled eye (yet does he not always elude us?); yes, and how to dismember him and cart him home (but is he not far away, filling the glades with ironical uproar ?)—in all this it is that we should like to be instructed by some experienced ranger of the woods.

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We speak of the interpretation of literature; and it may be asked, Is not literature itself an interpretation-interpretation of external nature and of the nature of man? Why, then, should we speak of an interpretation of that which itself interprets, an interpretation of an interpretation? And persons who talk in this way are also likely to say that a work of literature-a poem, suppose-which does not explain itself is not worth explaining. But literature is more than an interpretation of external nature and of human life; it is a revelation of the widening possibilities of human life, of finer modes of feeling, dawning hopes, new horizons of thought, a broadening faith and unimagined ideals. Moreover, every great original writer brings into the world an absolutely new thing-his own personality, with its unique mode of envisaging life and nature; and in each of us he creates a new thing-a new nerve of feeling or a new organ of thought; a new conception of life, or a new thrill of emotion. sometimes call him by even a higher name than revealer; we call him a maker or creator. The ideal world in which we live and move and have our being a world in the most literal sense as real as the material universe-is indeed in great part the handiwork of man the creator. By countless generations of men this world of thoughts and hopes and fears and joys and loves has been brought into existence, and it is still in process of creation. To reveal or to create this world every great thinker, every great artist has helped in an appreciable degree. It is inhabited by noble creatures-men and women-Achilles, Odysseus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Helen, Antigone, the Socrates of Plato, the two explorers of the circles of Hell and the mount of Purgatory, Don Quixote on Rosinante, Hamlet, Imogen, Cordelia, Falstaff, Prospero-all born of the brain of man the creator. That we should understand the facts and the laws of this ideal world is surely little less important to us than that we should measure the

courses of the planets or explore the universe that lies in a drop of stagnant water.

Now if literature be part of a gradually opening revelation or creation from man's spirit, it is easy to understand how it should need to be interpreted. It cannot be comprehended all in a moment; its widening horizons can hardly be recognized. The light of a new truth, coming suddenly upon us, blears our eyes. Seeing, we see, and do not perceive; hearing, we hear, and do not understand. A great point is gained when men acknowledge that something has indeed come before them, though what it is they cannot tell; when they see men as trees walking; when they know that a voice has spoken to them, though it be as the voice of a trumpet, the words of which they cannot understand. At first with most men the revealer can do no more than this; whatever he utters must be for them at first a dark saying or a parable. The majority of men are slow to apprehend new truths, are slow to become sensitive to new feelings. They require to have these things demonstrated and brought home to them. Or, if they try to take things up at once, they take them up, as we say, by the wrong handle, and get no good of them. But time alone is needed, with a serious effort on the part of each man to interpret things to and for himself, using in that effort whatever aid he can obtain from his fellows, who may happen to be better qualified than he to come at the meaning of the widening revelation. A great writer never fails ultimately to become his own interpreter; only this may need much time-perhaps the lifetime of a generation of men. And thus it is quite right to say that a poem which does not explain itself is not worth explaining; only we should add that it sometimes needs twenty, thirty, forty years to explain itself to the mass of men, and that for a long period it may be able to explain itself only to a few chosen disciples.

The professional interpreters of literature, as a class, do not help us much. These are the scribes of literature, who expound the law from their pulpits in the reviews, weekly, monthly, quarterly. The word "critic" by its derivation means a judge rather than an interpreter, and the function assumed by these ministers of literature resembles that of a magistrate on the bench. Now a crew

of disorderly persons, often of the frailer sex, each of whom, more perhaps through weakness than wickedness, has been guilty of bringing into the world a novel in three volumes; now a company of abashed and shivering poetlings, each charged with the crime of having uttered counterfeit verse, comes before his worship the reviewer, who lightly dismisses some with a caution, and sentences others to public laughter and the stocks during a week. And the sad thing is that though instances have been known in which a poetaster reformed and became a respectable citizen, the female

novelist, having once erred, is lost to all sense of shame, and inevitably appears before the bench again and again, once at least in every six months during the period of her natural life. We need this police and magistracy of literature, and we may cheerfully admit that, unless bribed by friendship or malice, they do in the main truly and indifferently administer justice of a rough-and-ready kind.

But, if in the company of petty poetical offenders there happen to be one true prophet-a Shelley, a Wordsworth, a Keats-the chances are that his worship the reviewer, hearing the evidence against him, and being addressed by the prisoner in an unknown tongue, for which no interpreter can be found in the court or in the city, will, with irritated impatience, sentence him to the stocks for seven days, which under no circumstances can do him much harm, and which may teach him the advantage of learning to speak plain English. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman-each in his day has stood in the stocks, and every fool has been free to throw a cabbage-stump or a rotten egg at the convicted culprit. In the case of some of these, perhaps, the sufferings of their late apotheosis have been more severe than the light affliction of their early martyrdom.

When we inquire what were the obstacles that hindered or delayed the recognition of such writers as these, and turn to the utterances of the critics who gave expression to the popular thought or sentiment, we find the accusation of obscurity a constant part of the indictment drawn up against them. The poet has been well termed a pioneer of beauty," and he may also be a pioneer of passion and of thought. But nothing is more unintelligible, nothing looks more like affectation, folly or downright madness than enthusiasm for ideals of beauty which the world has not as yet learnt to accept. If we were asked to name a poem of this century, the beauty of which now imposes itself inevitably on every reader, we might well name Coleridge's "Christabel." But to the Edinburgh Reviewer "Christabel" was "a mixture of raving and drivelling;" and he goes on to suggest that the author of the poem may possibly be under medical treatment for insanity. "A more senseless, absurd and stupid composition," wrote another critic, "has scarcely of late years issued from the press." If we were asked to name the highest poets of the middle of the eighteenth century, we should instantly name Collins and Gray. And of Collins, the great eighteenth-century critic, Johnson, wrote, " The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance were always desired by him, but were not always attained;" and he specifies the faults of "harshness and obscurity" as characteristic of Collins. "My process," he writes contemptuously in his life of Gray," has now brought me to the wonderful wonder of

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