Hitherto we have dealt with the outward and superficial manifestations of vulgarity, and in the region of manners rather than of morals. Let us now try to probe a little deeper, and to see whether vulgarity is of its essence sinful. Of course, there is a great deal of superficial vulgarity that is not at all sinful, but is simply the natural buoyancy of a rather ill-bred temperament. But this kind of vulgarity, distressing and disagreeable as it is to be brought into contact with, is rather a lack of finer consideration for the rights and tastes of others, and is not inconsistent with great kindness, generosity, affection, and loyalty, and even enthusiasm.

There is, however, a deep-seated and inner vulgarity of soul which may be certainly held to be a grave and disfiguring moral fault, and this species of vulgarity is a commoner thing than is sometimes suspected, because it may coexist with a high degree of mental and social refinement. This inner and deeper vulgarity is sometimes accompanied with an almost Satanical power of suppressing its outward manifestations. A fine typical instance of it is to be found in Mr. Henry James's wonderful novel, The Portrait of a Lady, where Gilbert Osmond, who marries the heroine, is slowly revealed as a man of a deep and innate vulgarity of spirit. When he first appears in the book, he comes upon the scene as a man of intense and sensitive refinement, living in great simplicity and seclusion in a villa near Florence, fond of art and artistic emotions, a collector of bric-a-brac, who appears to the romantic Isabel as one who has solemnly and deliberately eschewed the world because he cannot bring himself to strive, to desire, to fight. She marries him, and endows him with her wealth; and then, by a ghastly series of small discoveries, she finds that his one aim has been to mystify the world, and that his ambition has been to stimulate the curiosity of others about himself, and to refuse to gratify it. His one desire has been to be a personage, and as he could not achieve this by performance, he has tried

to achieve it by pose. The man whom she thought a kind of gentle Quietist appears to be nothing but a mass of ignoble and snobbish traditions.

Now it may be said that this species is not a very uncommon one, and it may be seen to its perfection among wealthy aristocracies. You may meet people who are the perfection of breeding, of courtesy, of consideration, and you may then, as you penetrate deeper, discover that all this elaborate panoply is the result not of sympathy, but of a mere sense of dignity and of what is due from people of position. Such people are often so intensely secure of consideration that it is not worth their while to claim it or parade it. Then one finds that a certain status or position—it is not wealth, or even rank that they admire, so much as a certain weight of tradition — is the one thing that they value. They take themselves with an infinite seriousness. They have no respect for energy, intellect, nobleness of character, activity, capacity, except in so far as such qualities tend to make people socially important. Their attitude to all these qualities, if they are unaccompanied by social status, is that of a condescension so delicate that it is hardly observable. There was a delightful picture in Punch, about the time that Tennyson accepted a peerage, representing two of these graceful and attenuated aristocrats, faultlessly attired, and destitute of chin and forehead alike, standing together in a drawing-room. One of them says amiably to the other, "I hear that what's-his-name, that poet feller, is going to become one of us."

It is such deep-seated vulgarity, such ineffable and courteous complacency, that has plunged countries into civil war, and that, indeed, ultimately produced the French Revolution. Argument, rhetoric, persuasion are thrown away on these impenetrable natures; and even when their estates are confiscated and they are reduced to poverty, their sense of inner dignity is undisturbed.

Thus vulgarity, when it is seen in its

deepest and most recondite form, is undoubtedly a heinous moral fault. It results in tyranny and oppression, and is fatal to the rights of man. It was this kind of vulgarity, the sense of rightness and superiority, that our Lord assailed so fiercely and denounced so unsparingly in the Pharisees. The essence of it is to know one's place, and to despise those who have not one's own advantages. Thus it may be found also in both intellectual and even highly moral people. There is a species of intellectual vulgarity which shows itself in contemptuous derision of sentiment and emotion; which makes a certain type of reviewer trample disdainfully upon literary work with which he does not happen to be in sympathy. There is a terrible species of moral vulgarity which is to be found in great force among members of the religious middle class, which tends to suspect the morals of all other classes, and to consider its own ways of life the perfection of simplicity, rightness, and virtue.

Indeed, a very curious problem arises out of the fact that there are many undeniably effective forms of religion which are yet strongly mixed up with vulgarity. Not to travel far for instances, the preaching of the late Mr. Spurgeon was highly spiced by a kind of superficial vulgarity of treatment. Yet, if one reads the Gospel, one instinctively feels that it is in its essence opposed to every kind of vulgarity. The explanation probably is that the

part of Mr. Spurgeon's religion which proved effective from a spiritual point of view was not the vulgar part of it; but that, dealing, as he was compelled to do, with people whose native refinement was not very deep, he made a practical compromise, and preached a religion which was superficially attractive to shrewd and sensible minds, in order that he might insensibly allure them past the outworks and into the inner citadel of personal holiness; and that, as Coventry Patmore writes, "the sweetness melted from the barbed hook" as soon as the capture was made.

It seems, then, that the essence of all vulgarity is the favorable comparison of one's self, upon whatever ground, with the characters and habits of others. The duchess who considers herself a model of unimpeachable dignity is vulgar if she pities those who have not her advantages. The mechanic who has a strong sense of his own rectitude and ability is vulgar, if he despises those who are not equally endowed.

It is a subtle poison, and perhaps of all the dangerous essences of the soul the most difficult to expel, because it is so often based on a consciousness of what is really there. Rank and rectitude alike are pleasant gifts; but the moment that one derives a sense of merit from the fortuitous possession of them, that moment one crosses the border-line of vulgarity, and is daubed with its malodorous slime.

A DUTCH artist is said to have taken a cow grazing in a field as the "fixed point" in his landscape with consequences to his perspective that may be imagined. The writer on the "laws" of punctuation is in much the same predicament. He must begin by admitting that no two masters of the art would punctuate the same page in the same way; that usage varies with every printing-office and with every proofreader; that as regards the author, too, his punctuation is largely determined by his style, or, in other words, is personal and individual - "singular, and to the humor of his irregular self." The same writer will tell you, further, that punctuation will vary according as one has in view rapidity and clearness of comprehension, avoidance of fatigue in reading aloud, or rhetorical expression. Worse still, coming to the conventional signs which we call points or stops, he is bound to acknowledge that they are very largely interchangeable, at the caprice of authors or printers. Well may he exclaim, with Robinson Crusoe, "These considerations really put me to a pause, and to a kind of a full stop."

It is the paradox of the art, however, that the more these difficulties are faced and examined, the fuller becomes our understanding of the principles which do actually underlie the convention that makes punctuation correct or faulty. And in so unsystematic a system the expositor has the delightful privilege of flinging order to the winds, and choosing his own manner of development. may elect to dwell at the outset on the apparent want of rule and the undoubtedly shifting and fluctuating practice. Take, for example, the question which nearly cost Darwin the friendship of Captain Fitz-Roy on the Beagle:

He

"I then asked him whether he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything?"

How Mr. Darwin printed this sentence I do not know, but in the printed volume of his Life it ends with an interrogation mark. No one can contest the propriety of this. Nevertheless, he might have chosen to follow the prevailing custom with indirect questions and end with a period [was worth anything.]. Or, again, he might have used an exclamation point, to indicate his surprise at Fitz-Roy's believing a slave who said he did not wish to be free; and, more than surprise, the scornful feeling that was in his tone, for he says that he put the question "perhaps with a sneer" [was worth anything !]. In this instance, the period and the interrogation mark address themselves merely to the eye, as aids to quick understanding. The inflection of the voice for one reading aloud would be the same, whichever was employed. The exclamation point, on the other hand, subtly conveys an emotional, rhetorical hint to the reader, which puts him, and enables him to put his hearers, in sympathy with the mood of the writer.

As a matter of fact, Darwin was intent simply on illustrating Fitz-Roy's temper, and had no rhetorical designs whatever upon the reader. Suppose the opposite to have been the case, and that he had preferred to suggest not his own moral indignation, but the sheer intellectual absurdity and grotesqueness of the commander's credulity. He might then, discarding the exclamation point, have chosen to end his sentence with a dash or double dash [was worth anything]. This stop would have had the value of a twinkle of the eye, or of a suppressed guffaw. I do not mean that ridicule is the special and

constant function of the final dash. What it does is to make an abrupt termination, leaving it to the reader's imagination to guess what lies beyond. But the imagination is really directed by what has gone before. The French use, instead of the double dash, a series of dots. Sterne is the chief English writer who has liberally adopted this rather unsavory Gallic application, and he substitutes for it on one occasion a dash which has neither a ludicrous nor an unclean signification, but one quite solemn. He interrupts the touching story of Uncle Toby's benevolence to Lefever with this finished-unfinished ejaculation:

"That kind Being who is a friend to the friendless, shall recompense thee for this

"Just heaven! how does the Poco più and the Poco meno of the Italian artists the insensibly more or less determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence as well as in the statue! How do the slight touches of the chisel, the pen, the fiddlestick, et cetera, give the true pleasure!... O my countrymen! be nice; be cautious of your language; and never, O never! let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend."

In quainter fashion, Emily Dickinson wrote to a correspondent: "What a hazard an accent is! When I think of the hearts it has scuttled or sunk, I almost fear to lift my hand to so much as a punctuation."

A British organ of the book-trade heads thus an illustration of the working of the Bankruptcy Act of 1883:

ANOTHER SATISFACTORY SETTLEMENT?

The use of "satisfactory" is here clearly satirical, as is meant to be intimated by the interrogation mark. As a jester with a sober face, the writer might have contented himself with a period [satisfactory settlement.]; or, with more feeling, he might have used the explosive exclamation point [satisfactory settlement !]; or, again, he might have ended with the period while inserting immediately after the word "satisfactory" either of the other two points, in parenthesis [satisfactory (?) settlement, satisfactory (!) settlement], or resorting to quotation marks ["satisfactory "settlement].

Next, two sentences out of Ruskin: "You think I am going into wild hyperbole ?"

"But, at least, if the Greeks do not give character, they give ideal beauty ?”

Here the form is affirmative, but there is a suppressed inquiry-"You think, do you?" "They give, do they not?”and this justifies the interrogation mark. The affirmative interrogation is abundantly exemplified in Jowett's translation of Plato's Dialogues, being skillfully employed to vary the monotony of the catechism; as in the case of this sentence from the Charmides:

"Then temperance, I said, will not be doing one's own business; at least not in this way, or not doing these sort of things?"

So Dickens writes inquiringly to Forster concerning a projected novel: "The name is Great Expectations. I think a good name?"

Dr. Bradley, the Oxford Professor of Poetry, commenting on In Memoriam, says there are frequent instances in it and in Tennyson's other works of defective punctuation, "and, in particular, of a defective use of the note of interrogation." And shall we not here make a little digression to accuse poets in general of neglect of pointing? A stanza of Whittier's" Pæan" was thus maltreated in the