A student of the literature of our own time who has only recently completed his first half-century of life cannot help feeling suddenly aged and almost antiquated when he awakes to the fact that he has been privileged to see the completed literary career of two such accomplished craftsmen as Robert Louis Stevenson and Guy de Maupassant. In youth they were full of promise, and in maturity they were alike rich in performance; and at last the lives of both came to an end all too soon, when their powers were still growing, when their outlook on life was still broadening, and when they bid fair, both of them, to bring forth many another book riper and wiser than any they had already given us.

The points of contrast between the two men thus untimely taken away are as striking as the points of similarity. Both were artists ardently in love with the technic of their craft, delighting in their own skill, and ever on the alert to find new occasion for the display of their mastery of the methods of fiction. Stevenson was a Scotchman; and his pseudo-friend has told us that there was in him something of "the shorter catechist." Maupassant was a Norman, and he had never given a thought to the glorifying of God. The man who wrote in English found the theme of his minor masterpieces in the inevitable and inexorable conflict of which the battle-ground is the human heart. The man who wrote in French began by caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human body. The one has left us Markheim and the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while the other made his first bid for fame with "Boule de Suif."

master every secret of the craft, to do his best always, in the hope that some fortunate day the Muse would reward his unfailing devotion. And from Flaubert, the author of that merciless masterpiece Madame Bovary, the young man learned the importance of individuality, of originality, of the personal note which should be all his own, and which should never suggest or recall any one else's. Flaubert was kindly and encouraging, but he was a desperately severe taskmaster. At Flaubert's dictation Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote incessantly and published nothing. The stories and tales and verses and dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticised by the author of Salambo, and then they were destroyed unprinted. In all the long history of literature there is no record of any other author who served so severe a novitiate.

Douglas Jerrold once said of a certain. British author who had begun to publish very young that "he had taken down the shutters before he had anything to put up in the shop window." From being transfixed by such a jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert. When he was thirty he contributed that masterpiece of ironic humour, "Boule de Suif," to the Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories put forth by the late Emile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and followers. On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant stepped at once to a front rank. That was in 1880, and in 1892 his mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died. In those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories and half-a-dozen novels. Of the novel he might have made himself master in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very earliest of all his tales.

It must be admitted at once that many of Maupassant's earlier short-stories have to do with the lower aspects of man's merely animal activity. Maupassant had an abundance of what the French themselves call “Gallic salt." His

humour was not squeamish; it delighted in dealing with themes that our AngloSaxon prudery prefers not to touch. But even at the beginning this liking of his for the sort of thing that we who speak English prefer to avoid in print never led him to put dirt where dirt was not a necessary element of his narrative. Dirty many of these tales were, no doubt; but many of them were perfectly clean. He never went out of his way to offend, as not a few of his compatriots seem to enjoy doing. He handled whatever subject he took with the same absolute understanding of its value, of the precise treatment best suited to it. If it was a dirty theme he had chosen-and he had no prejudice against such a theme-he did whatever was needful to get the most out of his subject. If it was not a dirty theme, then there was never any touch of the tar-brush. Whenever the subject itself was inoffensive his treatment was also immaculate. There is never any difficulty in making a choice out of his hundred or two brief tales; and it is easy to pick out a dozen or a score of his shortstories needing absolutely no expurgation, because they are wholly free from any phrase or any suggestion likely to bring the blush of shame to the cheek of inno

cence. In matters of taste, as we AngloSaxons regard them, Maupassant was a man without prejudices. But he was a man also of immitigable veracity in his dealing with the material of his art, in his handling of life itself. He told the truth as it was given to him to see the truth; not the whole truth, of course, for it is given to no man to see that. His artistic standard was lofty and he did his best not to lie about life. And in some ways this veracity of his may be accepted, if not as an equivalent for morality, at least as a not wholly unworthy

substitute.

The most of Maupassant's earlier tales were not a little hard and stern and unsympathetic; and here again Maupassant was the disciple of Flaubert. His manner was not only unemotional at first, it was icily impassive. These first stories of his were cold and they were contemptuous; at least, they made the reader feel that the author heartily despised the pitiable and pitiful creatures he was depicting. They dealt mainly by the externals of life,-with outward actions;

and their internal motives not always adequately implied. But in time the mind came to interest Maupassant as much as the body. In the beginning he seems to have been interested solely in what his characters did, and he did not care to tell us what they felt and what they thought; probably he did not know himself and did not try to know.

The inquirers who should read his stories in the strict sequence of their production could not fail to be struck with the first awakening of his curiosity about human feeling; and they might easily trace the steady growth of his interest in psychologic states. Telling us at first bluntly and barely what his characters did, he came in time to find his chief pleasure in suggesting to us not only what they felt, but especially what they vaguely feared. Toward the end of his brief career the thought of death and the dread of mental disease seemed to possess him more and more with a haunting horror that kept recurring with a pathetic persistence. He developed a fondness

for the morbid and the abnormal; and this is revealed in "Le Horla," the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotised to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence he

could feel. There is more than one of these later tales in which we seem to perceive the premonition of the madness which came upon Maupassant before his death.

In every work of art there are at least four elements, which we may separate if we wish to consider each of them in turn. First of all, there is the technic of the author, his craftsmanship, his mastery of the tools of his trade; and by almost universal consent Maupassant is held to be one of the master craftsmen of the short-story. Second, there is the amount of observation of life which the author reveals; and here again Maupassant takes rank among the leaders, although the sphere in which he observed

had its marked limitations and its obvious exclusions. Thirdly, there is the underlying and informing imagination which invents and relates and sustains; and there is no disputing the vigour of Maupassant's imagination, although it was not lofty and although it lacked variety. Finally, there is always to be taken. into account what one may term the author's philosophy of life, his attitude. toward the common problems of humanity; and here it is that Maupassant is most lacking, for his opinions are negligible and his attempts at intellectual speculation are of slight value.

Technic can be acquired; and Maupassant had studied at the feet of that master technician Flaubert. Observation can be trained; and Maupassant had deliberately developed his power

of vision. Imagination may be stimulated by constant endeavour to a higher achievement; and Maupassant's ambitions were ever tending upward. Philosophy, however, is dependent upon the sum total of a man's faculties, upon his training, upon his temperament, upon the essential elements of his character; and Maupassant was not a sound thinker, and his attitude toward life is not that by which he can best withstand the adverse criticism of posterity. Primarily, he was not a thinker any more than Hugo was a thinker, or Dickens. He was only an artist-an artist in fiction; and an artist is not called upon to be a thinker, although the supreme artists seem nearly all of them to have been men of real intellectual force.

Brander Matthews.

I

F our colleges were what they should be, and if our newspapers were what they should be, there might be then no need of a School of Journalism. As things are, there is a place for the Joseph Pulitzer Foundation at Columbia University, and the best evidence thereof is the attitude of the educator on the one hand and the journalist on the other toward this enterprise. The newspapers have been on the whole very courteous in comment on Mr. Pulitzer's gift, but also very empty of suggestions for its application. They do not see what a college can teach journalism. The professors and presidents have been very polite also, and also very barren of ideas. They can't see what further their colleges can do.

If the Pulitzer School shall instil a little more humility into both these professions, it will have been worth the million dollars Mr. Pulitzer has laid down in cash. And if in its operation it substitutes for this self-satisfaction, some dynamic unhappiness it will have justified the second million which the editor of the New York World promises. His spirit is the right spirit. Mr. Pulitzer is a self-made journalist, and he founded

OF JOURNALISM

ism, the yellowest known in his day. But he has grown and he has learned. He has improved the New York World till now it is almost as accurate and more truthful than many a "better paper," and, in editorial expression, free, sane, simple, forcible, and earnest. But Mr. Pulitzer knows he never succeeded in making "the" paper for the masses; he knows his yellow journalists never knew what yellow journalism might be; and he knows that nobody he can get knows how to make the newspaper he can now imagine. He must know this since he has run a life career throughout the business, has "succeeded" so far that he can give away two millions of dollars and yet, standing, many of his contemporaries say, at the head of his profession, he gives this money into the hands of others, men with the learning he did not have, men of the kind that have found fault with his journalism and them he asks to do what he could not do; teach journalism and, perhaps, make journalists. "Make journalism a profession" is his phrase.

A business it is, and business it must always be. All this talk we hear of a subsidised newspaper is essentially wrong. The idealists, even more than

good newspaper be so made that it will pay; since it is not the paper but the readers they are after and the profits are the proof of the reading. But a business man cannot make a great newspaper. That takes an editor, a man, a personality; all the best paying papers have either been produced by an editor or have produced one. Journalism, a business, is a profession too, like law and medicine, and just as the best lawyer or the best physician, in the long run, makes the best collections, so the best journalist gets in the end the best "ads." The "newspaper man" with one eye on the circulation and the other on the ads., does not see how his trade can be elevated into a profession, and he scoffs and sneers, like the business man at the college graduate, like the old doctors at all the first schools. And they challenge, these apprentices, this veteran, who does not see how himself. His correspondence contains no plan for his school. He knows only that he does not know; but, bowed by the failure perceived from the vantage point of success, he thinks others may know. journalist.

The veteran is a humble

And he may well be humble. The commodity of journalism is all knowledge and all wisdom and the market is all ignorance and all folly. The world is full of these things, full of knowledge and full of ignorance too, and ignorance is curious. The business of journalism is to sell in the form of books, periodicals or newspapers, all the world's knowledge to all the world's ignorance. "All," I say, and this is no "literary" statement of an "academic" idea. It is a "journalistic" observation made in the day's work at the news desk of a daily newspaper. There is no knowledge that is not general which cannot be printed as news if it can be put into "news form." And this phrase is only a technical expression of the requirement that the information be offered in a shape comprehensible to "all the world's ignorance." In other words, the news editor has to have the new facts presented in their relation to the old facts, the news in its bearing on what his readers already know. He can sell a scientific fact just as well as he can a fact of local politics, but he usually will give politics "preferred position" because both his reporters and his readers

will be more interested in it; and they are more interested because they have the history of politics in mind and will see just how the new alters the old. The reporter will write it intelligently and the reader will read it intelligently. If the news editor could have a scientific discovery stated as well, then, if it is really as significant, he can "hit it up" as just as "big news." The scientific report of Darwin's theory of acquired variations was news only to the scientific world; the statement that man may have been evolved from the ape was news to the great world.

The lack of journalism is the lack of understanding. The editors cannot know all things, nor the reporter, nor the scientist. None of these is seeking knowledge. All alike are "after the news,' and the keenest on the scent is the ordinary scientist. He is the most absorbed and of the least understanding. He does not pursue his researches with a sense of the bearing of his hypothesis on our knowledge or even upon his own philosophy of life. He is doing the world's work like all the rest of us, each in his separate sphere, and is elated at the discovery of a new variety of his particular plant. That is news in his world. To the world where the stars shine, it may be no more news than the discovery that the Bowery lodging houses are filling up with bums. If the bums turn a Republican majority into a Democratic majority and if this may carry New York and decide a Presidential election, it is news that may interest the botanist. And if the botanist's new variety should complete a chain and show the genesis of animal life from plant life, then his discovery, if reported as intelligently as the reporter would report the discovery of the bums, would be offered as news in the lodging houses and it might interest the bums.

One great difficulty in journalism, one reason why it is thrown back upon crime, scandal, and gossip, is that the scientist cannot report his own results. Sought in the abstract, they are seized in the abstract and the abstraction is passed on in the dead slang of science. Now and then a mind comes along, takes the materials piled up by the day labourers of science, perceives the possibilities in them, prosecutes an intelligent search for the missing

links, then conceives the whole and "builds him a structure brave." Since he is an intelligent being, he probably speaks a living language and tells the world what has been going on in the laboratories. This is understanding. Also it is journalism. [The news may go out in book form, but book-making to-day is largely journalism, and books are a rich source of newspaper news. Think of the "news" in the books, old and new, which the newspapers could get out if their reviewers had understanding!"

For the understanding I am talking about is that which understands not only what is known but what is not known. The editor cannot, he does not have to know everything. He needs only to understand, and to know what he and we do not know. That is part of what used to be called culture till the uncultivated got hold of the word and emptied it of its contents. The editor, whether of a book publishing house, a magazine, or a newspaper, should be in touch with the men who know, but he must not, like them, draw back from those who do not know. He has to have human sympathy. The pupil of the learned, he is the teacher of the ignorant.

The objection to the school of journalism that it will have to prepare such men, not specialists, but men of broad culture, and that that is what the universities are supposed to do, is sound enough as far as it goes. But that is my point. Perhaps the Pulitzer School will do what the universities are supposed to do. Having a special purpose, and that purpose as broad as life, may be it will teach what it teaches in its relation to life. May be it will teach what it teaches, and teach men to tell it.

There is the niche for the School of Journalism: knowledge so understood by men so intelligent that they can tell it so that all men may read as they run. Let the students of journalism learn-what you please; there is a choice, but no matter. The point is, having learned, let them write it, write it, write it. They cannot write without understanding it, so writing is not the one thing to learn. That will come, or not, with the trying. But having the habit of seeing and learning, they can go, such students, where they will to the North Pole, into business, into politics, into literature, into

journalism; they will be journalists all. They will be able to tell what they know.

Teach Latin and Greek in the School of Journalism. Teach them for the great "stories" in those languages, but also to teach the future reporter to tell these great stories and deliver these great orations in good English. They can't do that without conning correctly and feeling truly the classics, and that will teach them, as it teaches the educated Englishman, English.

Teach philosophy. Teach it for its own sake, for the sake of the great news assignments its ultimate queries contain for man, for the relationship which it develops of knowledge to knowledge and of knowledge to life. But tell the student how the best paid editorial writer in New York is selling his penny paper to thousands on thousands of men, some with brokers' orders in their pockets, some with dinner pails in their hands, by simply writing simply the ideas of the metaphysicians. Journalism has run mad (like science and like art) after facts, and my penny journalist almost alone is selling ideas. The college bred editor has so far lost his humanity that he forgets the intellectual pleasure he had when as a junior he saw the whole world as Hegel saw it. Schopenhauer speaks bitterly of the unsatisfied "metaphysicial needs of the human mind." Christian Scientists are building marble churches and Dowie is founding a city upon the recognition and satisfaction of this demand of the ignorant. The supply is bad and my metaphysician-journalist may offer bad philosophy, but he can write it and why should not some other think sound thought and write that as simply for the journals, yellow and pink. The world wonders, like a child, at the world and the sophisticated keep back its secrets. By all means teach metaphysics and philosophy in the School of Journalism, but teach it so that Hegel will not have become old before he was news.

Teach literature; not only for the English of it, but also that the journalist may be able to see that a murder is not merely a sensation but a tragedy; so that the yellow journalist who means well, will not begin his crime news with the announcement that "Patrick Healey shot and killed Mary Healey, his wife, in their apartment on the fifth floor of the tene