Chapter XVI (4)

While early familiarity with the best of these songs would have a good effect in refining the popular sense of melody, the appreciation of what came last and is highest in music--of harmonic progressions--could best be taught by a similar familiarity with the German four-part chorals. They are the very embodiment of vigorous, soul-stirring harmony, the basis of sacred, as the _Volkslied_ is of secular, music. "Each of our churches," says Thibaut, the author of the celebrated little book on _Purity in Musical Art_, "had a period of the highest enthusiasm, which will never return, and each of them has at this very period of the most ardent religious zeal done its utmost for the development of its song." The German choral is the result of the intense devotional feelings which existed among the early Protestant congregations, and it is evident that a wholesome religious spirit could with it be introduced in our schools in a manner which could be objectionable to no denomination. In course of time these chorals might then be transferred to our churches, where they might well take the place of the easier but very eccentric melodies and incorrect harmonies now too often heard there.

HENRY T. FINCK.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A SUCCESSFUL ENTERPRISE.

In one of the side streets of a city which fronts on Long Island Sound is to be found a curiosity-shop whose show-window challenges the attention of all lovers of the quaint and queer by its jumble of cracked and ancient porcelain, old-fashioned brasses and small articles of more or less valuable bric-a-brac. Inside, the three small rooms are crowded with sets of delft and willow china, old candlesticks, clocks, andirons, fenders, high-backed chairs and the like. The whole aspect of the place is shabby and dingy, and the antique furniture has no chance of showing either its worth or its dignity amid such surroundings; yet the traffic which goes on in this "curiosity-shop" has already brought a respectable fortune to the owner, and promises, if the rage for revivals of ancient fashions continues, to make him a capitalist. Knapp, as we will call this dealer in second-hand furniture and bric-a-brac, began his trade some five or six years ago. He was originally a tin-peddler, travelling up and down the country with his wagon, offering tin and glass ware in return for rags, feathers and old metals. Knapp probably had, to start with, a touch of that original genius which transmutes the most ordinary conditions of life into means of personal aggrandizement. He laid the stepping-stone to his fortune when it one day occurred to him to accept a piece of old-fashioned Wedgwood ware in return for half a dozen shining tins. It was an inspiration which he considered half a weakness, but he yielded to it, and afterward had cause to congratulate himself when he found an opportunity for disposing of the cup at a remunerative rate. This gave him an impulse of curiosity toward any heirlooms in the way of china and pottery to be found among the farmers' wives in the section of New England he traversed; and his activities soon had their reward. At that date the passion for ceramics was but just beginning to invade our cities, and not a suspicion of it stirred the minds of the good women who artlessly opened their cupboards and displayed their treasures of Worcester china and willow-ware to the ingratiating Knapp. No man in the world was ever better calculated to drive good bargains for himself, yet leave an impression on his victim's mind that the peddler's interest in a "sort of china which matched a set his grandmother used to have" was running away with his better judgment.

Knapp became shortly a most interesting personage to people who were making collections, and he attained, besides ingenuity, genuine taste and skill in detecting marks and discerning values. In a year he had as nice a knowledge of china and pottery as any one in the country, and if the farmers' wives were so much the poorer by the loss of what had been in the family for generations, they did not recognize their loss.

However, it was by old clocks and brass andirons and fenders that Knapp made his fortune. A gentleman asked him to procure him some old-fashioned articles of this sort, and the peddler at once went into the matter on speculation, and bought up all the old brasses he could find within a radius of fifty miles. These fenders and andirons were gladly parted with, growing rusty as they had been for years, and almost forgotten in garrets and cellars. New England farmers remember too distinctly the shiverings and burnings of their youth not to feel an insurmountable prejudice against open fires. So Knapp, whose wider knowledge made him master of the fact that this present generation, sickened of stoves and dreary black holes in the wall and burnt dead heat, and longing for some cheerful household centre, were restoring the old fireplaces and open fires, where the flames could leap and roar, and the logs burn and glow and smoulder,--Knapp, I say, humored this fancy by opening his shop and offering his old-fashioned fenders and andirons to the public. He had bought them at a mere song, and sold them again at a price so reasonable that any purchaser might be suited, yet still at a profit of five hundred to a thousand per cent.

Once started as a regular dealer, he went steadily on: his activity was incessant, and always productive. His energies seemed to have been shaped by an unerring and divining instinct. He found old sideboards, chests, wardrobes, brought from England two centuries ago, dropping to pieces in barns and cellars. He found an "almost priceless Elizabethan cabinet" serving as a hen-house in a farmer's barnyard, and another in a little better condition used as a receptacle for pies in his cellar. He bought them both for five dollars, had them "restored," and sold one for eight hundred and the other for five hundred dollars. It is true that this process of "restoration" was an expensive one, and in his next venture of the sort he demanded higher prices without offering articles so valuable or so unique. At present he is engaged in refurnishing a North River mansion of colonial times with suitable furniture and decorations, and will be handsomely rewarded for his pains. But he is too well known now to find rare and curious articles as freely parted with as they were a few years ago. Still, the hard times help him. Then, too, in New England old families are constantly passing away, and leaving what small possessions belonged to the last surviving maiden of the race to far-away relations. These possessions, consisting of good solid old furniture, are certain to become Knapp's if he finds anything desirable among them. He has been known to go to a house within twelve hours of the death of the last surviving member of the family, and offer to negotiate with a servant or friend of the deceased for a chair, table, clock or sideboard he coveted. I doubt if an auction of old furniture has occurred for four years within one hundred miles of him where he has not been the first and the most privileged buyer.

L.W.

SMALL-WAISTED WOMEN.

If the truth be fairly stated, women have many excuses for their infatuation regarding small waists. It is Mrs. Haweis who says, "The reason why a small waist is a beauty is because, when it is natural, it goes together with the peculiar litheness and activity of a slenderly-built figure. All the bones are small, the shoulders and arms _petite_, and the general look is dainty and youthful." In other words, a small waist is only a beauty when it is in proportion to the rest of the figure. The common mistake lies in considering it a beauty in a large woman of massive proportions. A few centuries ago women did not take a scientific view of things, and fell into delusions which in this age are a disgrace to the sex. They knew nothing of anatomy, of the law of proportion or of the curve of beauty, and they misunderstood the language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master Wither included in the attractions of her who had left him,

Her wast exceeding small,
The fives did fit her shoo;
But now, alasse! sh'as left me.

This suits exactly the modern view of a small waist and a No. 5 shoe.

In the well-known Scotch ballad "Edom o' Gordon" the Lady Rodes is represented as being shut up by Gordon in her burning castle. The smoke was suffocating when,

Oh than bespaik her dochter dear:
She was baith jimp and sma', etc.

Here it might be said that the evident youth of the girl, who was dropped over the wall and fell on the point of the cruel Gordon's spear, accounts for her being "jimp and sma'." The explanation will not apply to "The Cruel Sister," as given by Sir Walter Scott:

She took her by the middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

So fascinated was the rhymer by that special feature of her beauty that he returns to it after recounting how the elder sister drowned the younger:

You could not see her middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
Her gouden girdle was so bra,
By the bonny milldams of Binnorie.

Another instance is in the opening verse of Sir Walter Scott's version of "The Lass of Lochroyan:"

Oh wha will shoe my bonny foot?
And wha will glove my hand?
And wha will lace my middle jimp
Wi' a lang, lang linen band?

The last line appears to indicate the use of a linen band, as the Roman ladies used the _strophium_, a broad ribbon tied round the breast as a support. From this it may be inferred that the "Lass of Lochroyan" did not owe her "middle jimp" to any very deadly artificial means of compression.

One of the most remarkable instances that can be adduced is in the original version of "Annie Laurie," by William Douglas, a Scottish poet of the seventeenth century. It has been so completely displaced by a later version that few are probably acquainted with the song as written by Douglas:

She's backit like a peacock,
She's breisted like a swan,
She's jimp about the middle,
Her waist ye weel micht span;
Her waist ye weel micht span,
And she has a rolling ee, etc.

In view of all these passages is there any wonder that it is hard to persuade women that men do not admire "wasp" waists? How are they to know that the "jimp middle" of the ballads was in its jimpness in proportion to the shoulders? The trouble is, that the early rhymesters have used up the only side of the question capable of poetical treatment. One cannot sing of the reverse: no poet could seriously lift up his voice in praise of her "ample waist" or "graceful portliness." In order to reach woman's ear, modern writers must adopt a different course, and it is curious to contrast their utterances with those of the ballad-makers. Place Charles Reade by the side of Douglas, and then what becomes of the "waist ye weel micht span"? After showing how the liver, lungs, heart, stomach and spleen are packed by Nature, the novelist asks: "Is it a small thing for the creature (who uses a corset) to say to her Creator, 'I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,' and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close by a powerful, a very powerful, and ingenious machine?"

Every lady should read _A Simpleton_, and learn something of the monstrous wrong she inflicts upon herself by trying to compass an artificially-produced "middle sae jimp." It will prepare her for Mrs. Haweis's lessons upon _The Art of Beauty_. One or two passages will give a hint of their flavor: "Nothing is so ugly as a pinched waist: it puts the hips and shoulders invariably out of proportion in width.... In deforming the waist almost all the vital organs are affected by the pressure, and the ribs are pushed out of their proper place." "Tight-lacing is ugly, because it distorts the natural lines of the figure, and gives an appearance of uncertainty and unsafeness.... Men seldom take to wife a girl who has too small a waist, whether natural or artificial." "In architecture, a pillar or support of any kind is called debased and bad in art if what is supported be too heavy for the thing supporting, and if a base be abnormally heavy and large for what it upholds. The laws of proportion and balance must be understood. In a waist of fifteen inches both are destroyed, and the corresponding effect is unpleasant to the eye. The curve of the waist is coarse and immoderate, utterly opposed to what Ruskin has shown to be beauty in a curve. Real or artificial, such a waist is always ugly: if real, it is a deformity that should be disguised; if artificial, it is culpable, and nasty to boot."

No rhyming can withstand such reasoning. If the ballads really had any effect in fostering an admiration of abnormally small waists, both science and a truer conception of beauty should by this time have counteracted their influence. Women cannot much longer, with decency, plead ignorance of the results of a practice which would be ridiculous were it less pernicious.

J.J.

VICTOR HUGO AT HOME.

On the steep heights of the Rue de Clichy, at the corner of a street, we find the number 21. How many heads crowned either with a laurel or a diadem have passed beneath the arch of this doorway since Victor Hugo left the Rue Pigalle to take up his abode here! The apartment inhabited by the poet can hardly be considered either spacious or elegant. Its dining-room is of cramped dimensions, and the famous red drawing-room, though handsomely furnished, lacks the air of individuality that one would naturally expect to find in it. Probably this arises from the wandering life that Victor Hugo has led for so many years. After the _coup d'etat_ the furniture of his house in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne was sold at auction. Contrary to custom, and probably through the interference of some member of the imperial party, no police were at hand to protect or watch over the articles exposed for sale. Consequently, the depredations were frightful. Small objects were carried off bodily, tapestries were cut to pieces and the furniture and statues were mercilessly mutilated. One well-dressed man walked off with Columbus's compass--that which the insurrectionists had a few months before examined so respectfully, their leader remarking, "That compass discovered America." Many of the poet's household treasures remain at Hauteville House, in the island of Guernsey.

But the curiosity of the abode is the study. From floor to ceiling it is one mass of books, letters, newspapers and manuscripts: the chairs, the mantelpiece, the table have disappeared beneath their burdens. A narrow path, shaped in the midst of these accumulations, permits the poet to pass from the door to the window, Victor Hugo's correspondence is enormous, and is continually increasing. He receives letters from all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects--letters of homage and letters of abuse, requests for autographs and demands for money, verses sent by youthful poets with prayers for his advice, and the wails of the oppressed who look to him as their sworn champion. Very seldom does Victor Hugo refuse to answer, though his responses are necessarily brief. Among these accumulated papers must be cited the vast mass of Victor Hugo's unpublished works. He never fails to devote a certain portion of the day to literary work, his brain being as clear, his imagination as fertile, his pen as ready, as they were twenty-five years ago. "Nulla dies sine linea" is the motto of his daily life. Yet with all his industry he has been heard to lament that he will not live long enough to transfer to paper all the conceptions that crowd his busy brain. In January, 1876, he remarked to a friend, "Were I to begin giving to the world my unpublished and completed works, I could issue a new volume monthly for a year." Among these treasures for posterity are to be found the tragedies of _Torquemada_ and the _Twins_ (the Iron Mask); the comedies of the _Grandmother_, _The Sword_, and perchance _The Brother of Gavroche_; a fairy piece wherein the flowers and trees play speaking parts; volumes of poems entitled _The Four Winds of the Mind_, _All the Lyre_, _Just Indignation_, _The Sinister Years_ (a connecting link between _Les Chatiments_ and a _Terrible Year_); and even a scientific work on the effects of the sphere. He once said, "I have more to do than I have yet done. It seems to me that as I advance in years my horizon grows larger, so I shall depart and leave my work unfinished. It would take several more lifetimes to write down all that fills my brain. I shall never complete my task, but I am resigned: I see in my future more than I behold in my past."

He was once speaking of the denouement of _Marion Delorme_, and remarked that he had written two last scenes for that tragedy, the first sombre and terrible, the second tender and touching, and that he had preferred the former, but had yielded to the counsels of his friends and the actors in the piece, and had suffered it to be produced with the more gentle denouement. On being asked if he had destroyed the rejected scene, he made answer that he preserved everything he had ever written. "Posterity can destroy what it pleases, and keep what it pleases," he added with a smile.

Victor Hugo's receptions are delightfully simple and informal. He is at home one evening in the week, when his friends and admirers gather round him. No change of toilette is needed: the ladies appear in walking costume, the gentlemen in frock-coats. "The Master," as his intimate friends and disciples love to call him, avoids all airs and posing with the quiet simplicity of true genius. He does not plant himself in the midst of his company, neither does he assume the consequential manners of a dictator. Seated in an arm-chair or on a sofa beside some favored guest, he converses--he does not discourse. At an early hour, in view of the age and the simple habits of the host, the company separate, the most enthusiastic raising the hand of the Master to their lips as they take leave. One of the greatest charms about Victor Hugo's manner is that he never shrinks from or repels any manifestation of genuine admiration or homage. Unlike celebrities of far less note, who profess to be indignant or disgusted at any such manifestations, he lends himself to what must often be wearisome to him with a kindly graciousness that often changes the enthusiasm of his admirers into a passionate personal attachment.

Few men have ever enjoyed so wide-spread and enduring a popularity as does Victor Hugo among the people of Paris. When, during the dark days of 1870, he returned from his long exile, he was greeted at the railway-station by a vast crowd, which escorted his carriage to his first resting-place, the home of M. Paul Meurice, and he was twice compelled to address a few words to them in order to appease their eagerness to hear his voice. When he appears in public on great and solemn occasions, such as the funeral of M. Thiers, he is invariably made the object of a popular ovation of the most touching character. People climb up the sides of his carriage to touch his hand, mothers lift up their children to the windows imploring his blessing, and the cry of "Vive Victor Hugo!" goes up from the very hearts of the throng. On the day of the funeral of Madame Paul Meurice, as the cortege was going along the exterior boulevards, it passed near a menagerie. Just as the carriage of Victor Hugo came opposite the door the lions within set up a tremendous roar. "They know that the _other one_ is passing by," said an old workingman beside the carriage ("Ils sentent que l'autre passe"). The fondness of Victor Hugo for riding about Paris on the top of an omnibus is well known. It has sometimes happened that on tendering his fare the conductor has put the coin aside with the remark, "I shall keep that as a relic." One day, on returning from a session of the senate at Versailles, he arrived late at the station. It was a snowy day, the train was full, and he was obliged to climb into a fourth-class place, a seat on the top of the cars. The benches were covered with snow. A workingman who recognized the poet would not let him sit down till with his blouse he had wiped the seat clean and dry. Victor Hugo thanked him and offered him his hand, and with a naive delight the good fellow cried, "Ah, monsieur, ah, citizen, how proud I am to have seen you and touched you!" More than once the cabman employed to take the poet to his house has refused to accept his fare, declaring that the honor of having driven Victor Hugo was recompense enough. On the day of the funeral of M. Thiers so dense a crowd surrounded the carriage of the poet that it remained for a long time motionless and imprisoned, and the shouts that greeted him were so wildly enthusiastic that the coachman who was driving his carriage fairly shed tears, remarking, however, in a shame-faced manner, "A crying coachman! what a silly sight!"

Naturally, beside this passionate love stands a hate as passionate. The vindictive fury of the Bonapartists against Victor Hugo can easily be understood. No writer more than he has contributed to render a restoration of the Empire impossible. Hence insults of all kinds, from the calumny openly printed in an imperialist newspaper to the anonymous letter overflowing with menaces. One of these, received in September, 1877, threatened the poet in no doubtful terms. "Do not imagine, scoundrel, that we will let you escape us a second time:" so ran one of its paragraphs. Under the Second Empire all letters written to or by Victor Hugo were compelled to pass through the ordeal of the Black Cabinet. Many of his Parisian correspondents evaded this surveillance by sending their letters under cover to acquaintances in Germany or by confiding them to travellers who were going to England. But the letters of the poet to his friends in France were invariably opened and read, and many of them were confiscated. In a sarcastic mood Victor Hugo caused a quantity of envelopes to be prepared for his use, in one corner of which was printed an extract from the law forbidding any agent of the government to open or to tamper with any letter that passes through the post-office. On one occasion he wrote across the address of a letter, "Family matters--useless to open it."

It is said that the empress Eugenie, after perusing _Les Chatiments_, threw the volume aside with this exclamation: "I do not see what harm we have ever done to this M. Hugo." This remark was afterward repeated to the poet. "Tell her that the harm was the second of December," was his reply.

The bottle that contained the ink used in writing _Napoleon le Petit_ had a curious history. That splendid and fiery piece of invective, so amply justified by after events, was commenced on the 12th of June, 1852, and finished on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastile. With the few drops of ink that remained in the bottle Victor Hugo wrote upon its label--

Out of this bottle
Came _Napoleon the Little_,

and affixed his signature. The bottle was given by Victor Hugo to Madame Drouet, who afterward presented it to a young physician who had attended her through a dangerous illness. This young physician, Dr. Yvan, owed to the intercession of Prince Jerome Napoleon permission to return to France to visit his dying father. Having invited the prince to dinner after his return, he showed him as a curiosity the famous bottle. No sooner had the prince read the inscription than he insisted upon taking possession of it, and in spite of the remonstrances of Dr. Yvan he carried it off in triumph.

Victor Hugo is very hospitable, and delights in having three or four friends to dine with him, but his appetite, though healthful, is neither very great nor very dainty: he prefers plain food and drinks only light claret habitually. He is a very early riser, and on fine spring or summer mornings he may often be met at six o'clock taking a stroll in the Champs Elysees. Of his fondness for riding on the tops of omnibuses I have already spoken. These long rides, when he traverses Paris from one end to the other, are his periods of composition. He sits plunged in a profound reverie, with vague eyes gazing unseeing into space. So well are his moods understood by the conductors and habitual travellers on those lines that he is always left undisturbed. Sometimes the greater part of the day will be passed in these excursions, nor does any severity of the weather ever daunt the aged poet. Yet with all the quiet simplicity of his habits his daily life has not escaped the shafts of calumny. The Bonapartist press declared that he was a drunkard who used often to be picked up insensible from the floor of his own dining-room. He has been called an assassin because of his sympathy with the proscribed Communists, a madman because of his enthusiastic and impassioned utterances, and he has been said to be a hunchback whose deformity was dissimulated by the skill of his tailor.

Any sketch of the poet's home-life would be incomplete did I not touch on his passionate fondness for his grand-children, the two little beings whose prattle and caresses lend a charm of peculiar sweetness to the waning hours of that illustrious career. For them the world-renowned genius is but the most loving and tender of grandfathers. Their games, their studies, their baby caprices, sway the actions of that grand personality as the zephyrs ruffle the surface of the summer ocean. The creator of _Marion Delorme_ excels in manoeuvring a puppet-show and in getting up plays on a dolls' theatre. The author of _Les Miserables_ often lulls these little ones to sleep with improvised tales of wonderful fascination. For their sakes he becomes a sculptor and moulds in bread-crumb most marvellous pigs with four matches for legs. They it is who know best the almost feminine tenderness, the wellnigh maternal love, of which that powerful nature is capable.

I write in the present tense, yet as I write these things exist no longer. The red drawing-room is closed, the dwelling on the Rue de Clichy is deserted. Victor Hugo is in Guernsey, and from that far retreat come sinister rumors respecting his failing health. These are denied by his friends, but are stoutly supported by his enemies. Which of them speak the truth? That is hard to tell. It may be that this grand career, long and lustrous as a summer day, has reached its evening hour at last. Perchance we shall see no more the massive head framed in its snow-white locks and beard, the piercing eyes, the stalwart frame that bore so lightly the burden of wellnigh fourscore years. It may be so, and yet we hope, we pray, for the return of him who lights our century with the lustre of the great creative genius of the world.

L.H.H.

SPIRITS IN SCANDINAVIA.

Although it is generally known that there have been of late great and peculiar changes in the laws which regulate the sale of intoxicating drinks in the Scandinavian peninsula, there is not among foreigners an accurate idea of these changes. It may not therefore be uninteresting to state them a little in detail, as well as to glance at the results as gathered from personal experience and observation in different parts of Sweden and Norway. It should be premised that the peculiar "vanity" of both the Swedes and the Norwegians is spirits, and that the recent licensing laws in Scandinavia have been largely levelled against the sale of these drinks. For about a century prior to 1854, Sweden was so given to drunkenness that one who has had special opportunities of judging described it as "the most drunken country in the world." Free trade in spirits was practically in force: every small land-owner could distil on payment of a nominal license fee, and in towns every burgher had the right of sale. The whole country may be said "to have been deluged with spirits;" but, profiting by the exertions of the apostles of temperance, a public opinion was created which twenty-four years ago produced a bill on which the existing _general_ law is based. It abolished the small stills and imposed a comparatively heavy duty on the popular drink, _branvin_. It established a sort of threefold control over the issue of new licenses for the sale of spirits, under which the communal committee, the commune and the governor of a province have power to restrict or lessen the number of such licenses, while each seller of spirits was required to pay to the local rates a tax on the amount of spirits sold. The licenses were issued for periods of three years, and sold by auction to the highest bidders. To such an extent has the sale of spirits been swept under this law from the rural parts of Sweden that in 1871 there were only four hundred and sixty places for the sale of spirits in the country, the towns excepted. From observation and from the report of others the writer is able to say that the effect of this has been most beneficial in the rural parts, materially contributing to the sobriety and the moral welfare of the people. The general law, it may be noticed, had some of the clauses which are commonly supposed to attach to the later local laws that have been put into operation. It contained a permissive clause which allowed of the formation of companies to control the spirit-sale in towns. One company may take the whole of the licenses allotted to any town, guaranteeing a certain income to the town from such sale of spirits. In Gothenburg, the chief port of Sweden, such a company was formed at the suggestion of a committee appointed in 1865 to inquire into the cause of the constant increase of pauperism and insanity there, which it charged largely on the sale of spirits, especially in dark, unhealthy places. This company, which was called the "Goteborg Utskankings Bolag," began operations in October, 1865, with forty licenses, and acquired by 1868 the whole of the public-house licenses for the sale of spirits, with the exception of about a dozen, the owners of which had life-licenses. The Bolag, or company, had, with these exceptions, a monopoly of the sale of spirits in the town in places for consumption on the premises, and a monopoly to that extent only. It weeded out some of the worst of these public-houses: it improved the condition of the rest, appointing salaried managers, who had in addition the profit on the sale of food and all drinks except spirits, the sale of the latter being under very stringent regulations for the profit only of the Bolag. The managers were compelled to sell food, "cooked and hot" if needed; to give no credit; to keep orderly, clean and well-ventilated houses; to allow no drunkenness; and not to sell spirits to those "overloaded." In the first ten years of its existence the Bolag met with opposition, not only from spirit-sellers who sold for non-consumption on the premises, but also from the many sellers of ale and porter, who were permitted to sell those drinks unnoticed by the law. It is claimed that in spite of this competition the working of the company materially contributed to the sobriety of the town; and it may be worth while to test this by the facts.

When the Bolag began in 1865 there were, for the police year, 2070 cases of drunkenness; in 1866 there were only 1424; and there was a decrease in the next year, and again in 1868, when the number was 1320, which has proved the minimum. From that period there has been an increase, until in 1876--the latest year for which the facts are procurable--the number of cases was 2357. But during the whole of that time the population has been increasing: it was 46,557 in 1866, and in 1876 it was over 66,000; so that the apparent increase in these years is a proportionate though very small decrease--a decrease of about one per cent. There has been also a large decrease in the more serious crimes reported to the police of the town. As to pauperism, there is a decrease in the number of persons receiving entire relief from the community, but an increase in the number of those receiving partial relief. The sales of spirits by the company's agents have materially increased, but it is urged that this is due to the fact that in its earlier years it had more opposition to encounter, while in 1875 it had acquired a full monopoly over the sale of spirits, except in the instances of the life-licenses, which had been reduced in number. Its gross profits have materially increased, rising from L7200 in English money in 1865 to L52,850 in 1876, and the amount of the net profit it paid into the town treasury had increased from L2800 to L40,100! The authorities of the town are satisfied with these results; and there is an almost universal belief that the state of Gothenburg in regard to drunkenness is incomparably better than it would have been without the operation of the Bolag: at the same time it is fair to state that some are of opinion that the benefits have not been so great as they should have been, and that the company has to some extent been worked rather with a view to money-making for the community than to the repression of drunkenness. As to the general opinion, it is indicated by the fact that every large town in Sweden has now followed in the wake of Gothenburg. In 1871 the Norwegian Storthing passed a law to enable their towns to follow suit; and about a score have adopted a similar scheme, modified by allowing the profits of the Norwegian "associations" to be paid by the members to objects of public utility.

As to personal impressions of the working of the system, it may be first said that attention having been so fully directed to the provision made for sale of food in these public-houses, this was tested in many with satisfactory results--food cheap, plentiful and wholesome being procurable. The public-houses were found to be generally neat and orderly, but not equal in comfort or appearance to the public-houses in other lands, several of them being underground vaults merely. The company has in Gothenburg twenty-five public-houses now; it leases the right of sale of spirits to eleven eating-houses and clubs; it has seven spirit-shops and thirteen wholesale places of sale; so that it makes ample provision for the satisfying of the thirsty throats of the Swedes. Unquestionably, Gothenburg has still a larger amount of drunkenness than is known in towns of equal size elsewhere, and a few minutes' observation near one of these "model public-houses" shows that there is a very great sale of drink; but it is also evident that much of the sale on market-days is to country-people from districts where there are no public-houses. Finally, the result of some time given to observation and to the consideration of the question on the spot convinced us that the stricter regulation and supervision of the sale of spirits in this method has reduced the proportionate drunkenness so far as it is brought before police notice; that the public-houses are improved in appearance and in order; that the grosser evils are to some extent done away with, and the community pecuniarily benefited; but that the working of this "experiment" has not succeeded in lessening the exceedingly large local demand for spirits.

J.W.S.

RUSSIAN RECRUITING.

It is a common observation in the mouths of men who are estimating Russia's military strength that, although short of money, she has at least a boundless supply of men; but this idea, though plausible at first sight, is utterly erroneous. A few years ago the confidence of the Russian optimists in their "inexhaustible numbers" was rudely shaken by the discovery that in a single year, out of eighty-four thousand conscripts sent up to the various recruiting centres, no fewer than forty-four thousand were rejected as unfitted for service by disease or other physical defects, _not_ inclusive of short stature. The government took the alarm, and gave orders for the immediate formation of a medical commission and the thorough investigation of the sanitary condition of the population at large. This was promptly done, and the result startled all Russia with the announcement that her strength was barely one-half what it had previously been supposed to be.

Nor is this by any means an over-statement of the case. In European Russia the weakness in productive ages is such that whereas in Great Britain the proportion of persons alive between the ages of fifteen and sixty is 548 in the thousand, and in Belgium 518, in Russia it barely reaches 265. It is computed that in the government of Pultava alone, by no means a populous district, not less than one hundred thousand persons are absolutely disabled by various chronic complaints. Out of the forty-nine millions of the laboring class, the "raw material" of the Russian army, fully fifty per cent. are practically unfit to serve. The statistics of the average duration of human life are even more terribly significant. In England and Northern Germany, according to the best authorities, every man lives, on an average, about 40 years; in Southern Germany, 38 years; and in France, 36. In Russia, on the other hand, the average, even in the healthiest regions (_i.e._ the north and west), varies from 27 to 22 years. Along the banks of the Volga and in the south-east provinces generally, where the conditions of life are less favorable, the proportion falls as low as 20 years, while in the governments of Perm, Viatka and Orenburg it is only 15.

In whatever way this glaring evil may be explained away by native apologists, it really springs from two very simple causes--insufficient wages and popular ignorance. The miserably low scale of wages among the artisans of the great towns has long since become proverbial, but in the agricultural districts matters are even worse. The ordinary wages of the Russian "field-hand" are as follows: Laborers by the day, 37-1/2 kopecks (about 25 cents) per diem; by the month, 23 kopecks (15 cents); by the season, 17 kopecks (11 cents); in harvest, 75 kopecks (half a dollar). For this pittance the peasants toil from twelve to fifteen, and often sixteen, hours a day; and, thanks to their insufficient food, the constant strain soon begins to tell. A few seasons of such overwork and their strength breaks down altogether, while, instead of the substantial diet needed to recruit it, their scanty fare is still further diminished by the countless fasts of the Greek Church, occurring twice, or even thrice, a week. Hence, upon the first outbreak of fever or cholera the poor creatures perish helplessly, thousands upon thousands, while the St. Petersburg fashionables, yawning over the printed death-roll, languidly wonder why the lower classes are so careless of their health. Nor are the calamities entailed by superstition less deplorable than those which spring from poverty. Those who have seen, in the villages of the interior, new-born infants plunged in ice-cold water which it would be thought sacrilege to warm; children of four and five running about on a bitter day in the fall of the year with no clothing but a light linen shirt; cholera-stricken peasants refusing the medicines offered them; and women employed in hard field-labor three days after their confinement,--can easily credit the statement, frightful as it is, that at least fifty, and in some cases eighty-three, per cent. of the children born in the provinces die in their infancy, and that the population of certain districts has diminished fully one-third during the past generation.

D.K.

SOCIETIES OF HEALTH.

That an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure has passed into a proverb, and yet there is no doubt that the majority of the cases of sickness, general ill health and debility, especially with women, arise from a disregard of the simplest rules for health. But how shall the people learn these rules unless they are taught them? and who so well fitted to teach them as the doctors?

Does any one say that it is against the interest of the doctors to prevent disease? The reply would be that such a conception of the medical profession is a very low one; for doctors were men before they acquired their profession, and there is little doubt that they would find their profession a much more agreeable, and possibly a more profitable, one if, as in China, they were paid for keeping their patients well, instead of for curing, or trying to cure, them when they are sick.

At least such a conception of his office has occurred to Dr. George Dutton of Springfield, Mass., and he has been engaged for some years in attempting to have the idea practically introduced in that city. About two years ago he started a Society of Health there with a few members. The members, who have now reached about fifty, pay him two dollars each a year for advice and one dollar for the expenses of the society. Whenever they need his services they call upon him and get his advice gratis, or he calls upon them at their homes for half price. But this is the smallest part of the innovation. By the agreement Dr. Dutton binds himself to give them a free lecture once a month upon matters of hygiene and cognate subjects, either serving as lecturer himself or obtaining the services of some competent person for the same duty. When the society was first formed it was made a part of the agreement that the members should annually elect their consulting physician, but so far the society has preferred to elect Dr. Dutton to this position.

In these days of enforced combinations for economy there is no reason why such societies of health should not multiply, to the manifest benefit of all parties concerned.

E.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Cossacks: A Tale of the Caucasus in 1852. By Count Leo Tolstoy.
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.

Russian novels, to judge from the specimens that have been presented to English readers, are prose poems rather than novels in the English sense of the word, dealing more with poetic phases than with those details and events of ordinary life which go to make up English and American novels of the better class. With whatever elaboration of plot or the reverse, they are distinctly artistic compositions, in which every part is in unison with a dominant idea, and their effect, not being scattered or diluted, is single and more or less forcible. Their method is the reverse of analytical. Nothing, for example, could be further from the pregnant sentences, the exhaustive analysis, of George Eliot, whose books are freighted with the accumulated and ever-accumulating wisdom of a life, than the poetic suggestiveness of Tourgueneff's creations, in which a wealth of material is sacrificed to artistic perfection, and the highest thought often seems to lie between the lines. George Eliot lays bare the innermost souls of her characters--we enter fully into their lives and thoughts: with Tourgueneff's it is left to a glance of the eye, a few passionate words, to reveal the mind within. In _The Cossacks_ this absence of analysis is still more apparent. It is a picture of a curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no affectation of pastoral simplicity. _The Cossacks_ is distinctly a primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique, their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character. Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in her quiet, regular toil. Whether, clad in a loose skirt of pink cotton, she drives the oxen or piles the _kizyak_ or dung-fuel along the fence with her hoe, or in holiday attire mingles with other girls at evening, she is always a subject for the artist's brush. What thoughts occupied this stately figure, in what way ideas circulated in her kerchiefed head, we are left to divine. Her conduct is a little enigmatical. Had she any thought of marrying Olenin, or were her actions dictated by coquetry accompanied by a spice of mischief? We are inclined to the latter opinion.

The story of _The Cossacks_ exhibits a close similarity to that of a recent English (or rather Irish) novel, _The Hon. Miss Ferrard_. Both books transport a man of culture to the midst of a rude and more or less primitive people: in each, the hero, smitten with the beauty of a native girl (and in Olenin's case with the wild freshness of the life), is seized with a desire to throw off his old life, with its polish, its intellectual disappointments and its limitations, and become a primitive man among primitive men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more natural than his presenting the young Cossack Lukashka with a horse in a fit of generous enthusiasm, and the latter's astonished and suspicious reception of the gift. Being utterly unable to divine its motive, he suspects some lurking design of evil, and regards the generosity as a deceit practised upon him.

But any comparison with an English book would but faintly illustrate _The Cossacks_. In the novelty of its scenes and characters, in its poetic simplicity of form and its unconscious picturesqueness, it is widely different from anything in our literature. It has a certain coldness, the coldness of an epic; for passion, though not lacking, is kept in abeyance in its pages, which are indeed chiefly filled with pictures, a set of literary _chef d'oeuvres_, drawn with great power and vividness and full, of color and poetic feeling. That the book should produce such an impression in a translation so uncouth and blundering as Mr. Schuyler has given us is a strong testimony to its merit. It is usually thought that a translator ought to be tolerably familiar with two languages, but readers of _The Cossacks_ will be forced to doubt if Mr. Schuyler is acquainted with one.

Molly Bawn: A Novel. By the author of "Phyllis." Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott & Co.

_Molly Bawn_ disarms criticism by its exuberant gayety, its lusciousness of description, its imperturbable good-humor and self-satisfaction, and its utter absence of responsibility. What can an auld _critic_ do wi' a young _book_? And such a very young book!--so full of sweets and prettinesses, of audacious coquetries, and of jokes delivered with such a simple and fatuous joy that the meed of our laughter cannot be denied them! If we were to suggest that there is rather a surfeit of these good things, our objection would be liable to be set aside as the acrid cavilling of one whose taste for sweetmeats has been vitiated by dyspeptic tendencies. We can only recommend the book with hearty good-will to those whose sweet tooth still preserves its enamel, congratulating them upon the acquisition of a novel which may be read without any of those harassing perplexities or dismal ideas in which petulant authors embroil our tender susceptibilities--a novel in which the utmost pathos is in the little poutings of true lovers; in which kissing goes by favor, and favor is lavishly distributed; in which ugliness is the only crime, and virtue, or rather beauty (which is the same thing), is unfailingly triumphant. The stock scenery and properties, together with the usual characters of a society novel appear in _Molly Bawn_; and the personages are invested, if not with the divine gift of life, with a certain wire-strung movement which does not lack vivacity, and in some cases novelty; the villain, for example, having but little employment in his original capacity, and being utilized as a laughing-stock for the amusement of his victims. Even the grammar of the book can hardly be taken _au serieux_. It exhibits a serene carelessness of rules, with a tendency to bulls which suggests that the heroine's nationality is also that of the author. A sentence in which we are told of a house that it is "larger, at first sight, than it in reality is," strikes a blow at the very essence of things, and those much-abused words _will_ and _would_ usurp the place of their relatives, _shall_ and _should_, with a uniformity that proves the absence of negligence.

Samuel Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. (English Men of Letters, edited
by John Morley.) New York: Harper & Brothers.