a useful distinction between a gourmet, the delicate taster, and a gourmand, the gross feeder; and the distinction holds in literature as well as in life. The wise Goethe tells us that "there are three classes of readers, some enjoy without judgment, some judge without enjoyment; some there are who judge while they enjoy and who enjoy while they judge." It is within our power always to gain admittance into this third group and to attain a reasoned appreciation of the authors whose writings we relish.

Indeed, we may even acquire an open-mindedness which will carry us a little farther until we can understand how it is that sometimes we admire what we do not personally enjoy, and that on other occasions we may for the moment find pleasure in what we do not greatly admire. We can learn to control our likings; and in time we can correct our instinctive tendency to let our personal preferences erect themselves into eternal standards. Of course these personal preferences must ever be the basis of our ultimate judgments, since we are born always with a bias in favor of one school or of the other. Our native tendency is toward the ancient or toward the modern, and we are by instinct either Romanticists or realists, whether we are conscious of this prejudice or not. Our opinion may be as the leaves that change color with the revolving seasons, but our principles are rooted in us. It is fate, rather than free will, which chooses for us in which camp we find ourselves enlisted. Before we were born it was decided for each of us, once for all, whether we should delight in the massive simplicity of the Attic dramatists with their unerring union of a content of high value and a form that seems to be inevitable; or whether we should revel rather in the rich luxuriance and bold energy of the Elizabethans,-the one moving majestically with the sweep of a glacier, and the other boiling over with the impatience of a volcano.

But even if we cannot help being partisans, we ought to strive to master our prejudices so that we may learn at least to understand the spirit of the masterpieces wrought by those with whom we are not in accord. The critic needs not only insight and equipment; his task calls also for sympathy and for disinterestedness. The code of criticism is not as the law of the Medes and Persians which altereth not; it changes from race to race and from epoch to epoch; it is modified by the successive movements of human feeling and of human thought. Man's place does not loom as im

portant as it did a few centuries ago; and we are now aware that the universe was not built for him alone, even if the sun is still a light to his feet by day.

The scholars of the Renascence, secure in their inheritance of Greek wisdom, had a sublime belief in the comprehensiveness and in the certainty of their knowledge; but now in this new twentieth century of ours we moderns,

"Whom vapors work for, yet who scorn a ghost,

Amid enchantments, disenchanted most,"

-we are at last aware that we are but peering through a chance crack in the dark wall which shuts us in, and that we can only glimpse a fragment of knowledge, glad that even so little is granted to us. We have surrendered the hope of ever attaining final truth; but none the less are we still nerved by the longing for it. Perhaps there are a few who would echo Lessing's proud declaration that he valued the privilege of seeking the truth above the actual possession of it.

Criticism must needs lag behind creation, even if literary criticism may be also creation itself in its own fashion. As Professor Mackail has asserted, "a sharp line can be drawn between the artist and the critic where they work in different materials, as in the criticism of painting or of music," but "no such line can be drawn in literary criticism; for the critic works in the same material and his criticism, so far as it is vital, is also a work of art." Yet, even when the critic is indeed a creator of literature, he cannot do his work until after the lyrist and the dramatist and the orator have done theirs. It is on them that he feeds and from their unconscious practice he derives his reasoned principles. In fact, it is only when the earlier impulse of poetry was beginning to slacken a little that the critic came forward to undertake his parasitic task. He felt it to be his duty— as indeed it is to apply to the present the standards of the past; end it was long before he was willing to recognize the possibilities that these standards might be found in the living languages as well as in the dead.

Brunetière was, perhaps, the most suggestive of recent literary critics, abounding in fertile generalizations and applying to art ideas supplied by science. Here he was following Taine rather than Sainte-Beuve, who was more keenly interested in the idiosyncrasies of individual authors than in the larger movements of

literature. Sainte-Beuve prefers to give us 'biographic psychology"-to borrow Taine's apt phrase. Yet even in criticism there are few real novelties; Sidney's "Defence of Poesy," for example, is imitated from the Italians: Taine's theory of the influence of heredity and environment is amplified from Hegel; and the objections which adverse critics have brought against the veracious realism of Mr. Howells are curiously akin to those that Petronius urged against the Roman poet, possibly Lucan, who had ventured to write an epic in which there was less inventive exuberance and more interpretative imagination. Gaston Boissier even discovered a vague premonition of the struggle-for-life theory in Saint Augustine's "City of God."

Time was when man lived in a cave until he learned how to put together a wooden frame for a more commodious dwelling; and after a while he filled up this framework with the bricks he had found out how to bake, and traces of this temporary device are still evident in the decorations of the later and loftier temples which the Greeks made of marble. Only of late has man gone back to the primitive frame, putting it together now not with wood, but with wrought steel; and the sky-scraper, however modern it may seem to us, is in reality a reversion to the most ancient type of building. A similar spectacle greets us in all the arts, especially in the art of literature, the new is ever the old, even when it presents itself with all the latest improvements. Genius reveals itself when the hour is ripe; it does its work in its own fashion; it comes and it goes again, leaving us the richer. There have been many men of many minds, speaking in their several tongues; but literature is one and indivisible. It has a voice for every mood. It cheers and sustains; it inspires and uplifts; it lights the path for all of us. It passes the flaming torch from sire to son, Greece to Rome, Rome to the Renaissance, the Renaissance to the modern world.

"All passes. Art alone

Enduring stays to us;

The Bust outlasts the throne,

The Coin, Tiberius;

"Even the gods must go;

Only the lofty Rime

Not countless years o'erthrow,

Nor long array of Time."

BRANDER MATTHEWS.

THE COTTON TAX AND SOUTHERN

EDUCATION.

BY DAVID Y. THOMAS.

AN Act of Congress approved July 1st, 1861, provided that a tax of one cent a pound should be collected on all cotton held or owned by any person on or after the first day of October, 1862, except such as was held or owned by manufacturers of cotton fabrics on that day. March 7th, 1862, the tax was raised to two cents a pound. In 1866 the committee on revenue actually reported favorably on a proposition to raise the tax to five cents, but this was defeated, largely through the opposition of the New York Chamber of Commerce. However, the Act of July 3rd, 1866, which purported to reduce taxes, raised the cotton tax to three cents. March 3rd, 1867, the tax was reduced to two and one-half cents, and on February 3rd, 1868, it was abolished altogether on all cotton raised after 1867.

At various times since 1871 bills have been introduced in Congress having in view the repayment of the money collected on the above-mentioned Acts. One introduced by the Hon. Frank Clark, of Florida, in the Sixtieth Congress provides, "That the proceeds of the tax on cotton illegally collected," etc., shall be repaid by the Treasurer of the United States to the original payers upon approval of their claims by the United States Court of Claims. The claimants are to be allowed five years in which to file their claims. After that any surplus remaining in the Treasury from this fund is to be paid over to the States in which those who originally paid such unclaimed sums resided and is to be used by them for the benefit of rural education.

The bill has some defects and some excellent points. One defect is the assumption that the tax was "illegally collected." The evident meaning is that the tax itself was illegal. In the only

case affecting its validity the legality of the tax was affirmed in the lower court and by the Supreme Court, though the vote was equally divided in the latter. The main attack on its legality is that it was a direct tax and was not apportioned as the Constitution directs that all such taxes shall be. To the layman it is hard to see why it is any more of a direct tax in theory than the tax on carriages, whiskey, cigars or oleomargarine. In practice, however, it is altogether probable that the producers paid more of this tax than did the consumers. That it was a tax on exports cannot be seriously maintained. Still, the fact remains that a great many people have always considered it illegal.

But, whether legal or not, the question is worthy of consideration whether the money collected under the tax ought not to be returned. The tax can hardly be defended on the grounds of equity. It was intended to operate and did operate on one particular section. Several of the States never paid any at all, and some of those which did were brought under the operation of the law only because some parties purchased cotton on which the tax had not been paid. Doubtless they deducted the amount of the tax from the price paid, knowing that they would have to pay it. By far the larger part of the tax came from the lower South. Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina paid $58,000,000 out of a total of $68,000,000. In 1867 the corn crop of the United States was worth $610,948,390; the wheat crop, $421,796,460; the hay crop, $372,854,670; yet all of these were tax free, while cotton, worth $201,470,495, paid a tax of $22,500,947.77. The tax of the three cents levied in 1866 outdid the ten-per-cent. tax of the Duke of Alva. In some instances it amounted to as much as thirty per cent.

In 1861 a tax of $20,000,000 was levied on lands and dwellings and was apportioned among the States according to population. There was no question about the legality of this Act; yet, thirty years later, the amount collected under it, less cost of collection, $14,000,000, was returned as a gratuity to the States whose citizens had paid it. The fact that the tax had operated on only one section of the country, the seceding States paying very little, undoubtedly was one cause of the repayment. May not the same principle be applied to the cotton tax? At the time the South was paying this tax-only about $3,000,000 was collected before the close of the war-it was also paying its share of all other taxes. VOL. CXC.-NO. 648.

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