that the plan is never finished to the satisfaction of anybody, or that the building is never begun? Is it any wonder that Justice is never realized in the world, since those whose business it is to realize it and whose blessing it would be to enjoy it, do not know what it is?

Our comparison is in some respects not fortunate. In the building of a house, such proceedings as have here been described would be unutterably grotesque. The facts which the comparison was meant to illustrate are not in the least grotesque. Reason and logic are among the guides of human life. They are perhaps its most important, and, on the whole, its safest guides; but as a mere matter of fact we know very well that they are far from being its absolute rulers. Not a little of the charm of existence comes from the effort to achieve the unattainable, and what is often, more or less dimly, no doubt, recognized as such. You and I know full well that, worry about it as much as ever we may, we shall not succeed in making our neighbors much better than they are. Do and say what we will, we know they are sure to go on violating the plainest dictates of common sense, in the simplest as well as in the more difficult relations of life; they will continue to be dull and stupid, failing absurdly in the future as they have done in the past, to appreciate the good things we say and do, and putting an utterly exaggerated estimate upon their own rather pitiful accomplishments in similar directions; and they will make themselves ridiculous in the future as they have done in the past, parading their weakness before the world under the curious delusion that they are not weaknesses but most amiable characteristics, perhaps, even, virtues so fine and rare as to make their possessors unique in their generation, or at least in their neighborhood. But does the fact-which we early learn to be a fact-does the fact that our neighbors are practically unimprovable, make us any the less disposed to give them a sharp disciplinary whack on this occasion, a good piece of advice on that one; and, in general, does it render us any the less disposed to hold over them the whips of correction and let loose upon them the tongue of rebuke, in so far as these things can be done without too serious inconvenience or danger to ourselves? Or again, do not all of us, no matter what our

creeds, over and over again admit, even if only in our secret minds, the futility of our attempting really to fathom the mysteries with which religion concerns itself? Does not the devoutest believer, no matter what the god or system he adores, in the presence of some inscrutable and awful fact, bow his head. and give over the riddle of things by saying, His will, not ours, be done? But do men's thoughts pursue these mysteries to the dark regions where it is imagined their secret may lie, or try to pursue them, with any the less of eager and appalled interest because men know in their hearts, whatever their lips may say, that the veil which hides these mysteries will not be lifted in this world? With far greater interest, rather!

Let us come back to culture. A vague term, it is; let that be granted. But this is not equivalent to admitting that it is a mere dream of the mind, chimera, pretentious sham, non-existent virtue which some men have got credit and perhaps worldly advantage by laying claim to. It is even nothing whatever against culture that the term, and therefore the thing it names, is vague. We have seen that the most vital words in language, the words which stand for ideas that are woven, so to speak, all around and through men's lives, are very apt to be vague words; and we have seen that, from the nature of thought and language, and their relation to one another and to the growing or at least the varied and changing life of man, this must be so. For it is the popular mind that is the maker of language, vital language, the current coin of communication between all men, as distinguished from mere words in a dictionary; and the popular mind is not only a changeable thing without unitary life, a thing that can receive no commands and will therefore obey none, a thing that cannot be driven into conformity and consistency, not though the press, the dictionary makers, and the pedagogues of the world should agree-inconceivable and impossible agreement!-not only themselves to use all words in one simple, consistent, and unchanging sense, but to visit with their high displeasure all who do not follow them absolutely in these matters, to the minutest shade of a thought.

Culture, then, is a vague term, granted. It has meant many different things, and it will mean many more before the opera

tion of social forces shall have levelled all the differences between men which the word in the course of its long life will have denoted and connoted, as the books on rhetoric say. But now having conceded the worst that can be said against our term culture, and therefore against the usefulness of the distinction, or the supposed distinction, which the term names, let us turn our attention to the more pleasant and perhaps more profitable task of seeking, very briefly, a few of the more important elements making up what we conceive to be the indisputable and invariable part of the contents of the term. For part at

least of the contents of almost any term of the kind I have been speaking of is not seriously disputable, is, if not exactly invariable in all cases, at least not so rapidly variable but that the world can at any given time hope to have a fairly working conception of it. Such a conception will satisfy plain people who think in the rough and think chiefly to live; though it will be far, of course, from satisfying either the idealist or the pedant. But as neither the idealist nor the pedant can ever be satisfied in this world anyway, plain, practical people may ignore them here, as they generally do.

We can perhaps get at the heart of our term most conveniently if we turn the abstract into the concrete, or, more properly, turn from the abstract to the concrete, and ask ourselves, not what are indisputable elements in culture, but what, if anything, it is that must indisputably characterize the person whom we are willing to call a person of culture.

Perhaps it would be well first to mention a few of the marks which a person does not need, necessarily, to possess, in order that we may rightly regard him as a person of culture. The person of culture, then, need not have all the virtures. Culture, that is to say, is not synonymous with perfection. People of fine instincts but of loose habits of thinking do not a little mischief by thus reading into a word of good implication a long list of admirable things that constitute no proper part of its meaning; and probably they do a good deal more mischief by treating words of bad implication in the same way. Who, for example, does not remember how all the categories of criminality were confused in the frenzied popular discussions of the term

anarchy which were heard in this country in the weeks immediately following the assassination of President McKinley? Who of us but remembers how impossible it was for any useful discussion of anarchy as a social phenomenon to go on in that atmosphere of crazy intellectual confusion? Culture is an admirable thing in its limited way. But the man of culture is not necessarily a good man. He may have every vice that springs from the selfish or the cold heart. He may even be a person of profoundly immoral life-some of the men and women of rarest culture have been. Charles James Fox seems to have been such a man. It is related of Fox that in the hour before his death, when he could no longer see, he cried out to some one among those who were watching by him, "Read me the sixth book of Virgil!" Such a cry at such a time can have come only from a man of rare culture; and no man of his time-his time, we may remember, was not a nice and dainty time, either-no man of his time had trampled upon most of the moralities and shocked all the moralists of his day so often as poor Fox.

Again, the person of culture need not be a person of refined and gracious manners. He is rather more apt to be made that by his culture, to be sure, than he is to be made a very virtuous person; for the influences which come to the flower in culture can far more easily affect the manners, incidentally, than they can master the animal passions of one type of man, or warm the cold heart of another. One may, indeed, admit that a man's manners are often powerfully, if incidentally, affected for good by his culture. But not even manners are necessarily so affected. The great apostle of culture in his day, a man who battled for it all his life against Philistine hosts, was Matthew Arnold Arnold was as surely a person of culture as the modern world has known; and Arnold is chiefly remembered by some people, it is to be feared, because of one or two rather outrageous violations of good manners of which he was guilty when he visited this country, and which were so singular that they have passed into story. Or consider Tennyson; undeniably, one may suppose, a man of ripest culture. The literature of nineteenth century anecdote has no richer pages than those which reveal how far from gracious Tennyson's manners often were.

If it be said that the most remarkable among these stories of Tennyson's ungracious manners have to do with his efforts to avoid or to get rid of bores who had invaded or were trying to invade his privacy, one must reply that Tennyson had, of course, a perfect right to save himself from bores, even admiring bores, if he could, but that his manner of doing this was usually such as to make it impossible to accord him the praise of graciousness of manners. There have been men and women, surely, who have been able to get rid of bores far more effectively than Tennyson ever could, and have done it without a trace of Tennyson's brusque, even brutal manner.

Culture, once more, has nothing whatever to do with the way one carries one's body, or manages one's legs and arms. Of culture, indeed, one may say, with a rather grotesque inversion of our ordinary manner of speaking, and yet say very truly, that no arms are too long to reach it, no legs too long and ungainly to carry their owner to it. Before some kinds of audience, it would be rather necessary to insist on this point; before an audience of present-day freshmen in a coeducational college or university in the middle West, for instance. In this great

region, the freshman of to-day, who is always, of course, first and foremost in search of culture, seems to tend more and more to regard culture as somehow indissolubly connected with the art of manipulating one's legs gracefully, even rhythmically. Accordingly, somewhat early in his career as a student, as soon, indeed, as he has lost his initial terror of his instructors, and found them to be mere men and women not very different from himself, and possessed of no mysterious power to make him work at his studies any harder than he chooses to do, he is very likely to join a dancing school. In his letters home, he defends this independent step out into the world, on high cultural grounds, and, if one may judge by the results, usually does it so eloquently as to carry conviction home to the parental mind; thus, by the way, making the first movement which, in many a home, is to end in theological catastrophe-perhaps in the overthrow of the good Methodist principles of a life-time! Nevertheless, even if we should happen to sympathize with the freshman's social ambitions, we must yet tell him, in the interests