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one o'clock in the afternoon of that day, his soul, "too great for what contained it," passed into the life beyond. Prematurely old, he had reached only the age of forty-seven years and five months.

He was honored with a public military funeral at Santa Martha, but only in 1842 did the joint commissioners of Colombia and Venezuela exhume his remains and have them transported in a Venezuelan warship to La Guayra, whence they were taken overland to Caracas, his birthplace, where, on the 17th of December, the anniversary of his death, they were deposited amid the most imposing ceremonies in

the Cathedral of Caracas, where his ancestors had been buried. There, a splendid sarcophagus, made in Italy at the expense of the Republic of Venezuela, has been erected. "A beautiful though tardy reparation," says Señor Don José Manuel Restrepo, the eminent Colombian historian, "for the insults to which he was subjected during his life by the sons of Venezuela and Caracas on whom Bolivar had conferred so much luster and distinction, and to whom he had rendered so many incalculable benefits!"

Malden, Mass.

FREDERIC M. NOA.

WHAT OUR UNIVERSITIES ARE DOING FOR AMERICAN LITERATURE.

BY EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER,

Author of The Saxons.

"WE ARE living our epic,” said a

professor some years ago in answer to a question as to the cause for the dearth in America of literary works of the first order. This reply, reaching the public through various channels, assuaged in a large measure the mortification which the nation felt. And how deep this had been was apparent in the delight with which the phrase was taken up and in the alacrity with which it was tossed from shore to shore. To-day, if a foreigner should ask of educated men and women in any part of our country, "What is the matter with American literature? Why is it that you people, admittedly leading the world in so many lines of intellectual activity, lag so far behind in this particular line, literature?" he is certain to be met with: "Ah, but you do not consider the place of literature in the order of development. You are looking for blossoms at a time when the trunk is just dividing into branches. We have not yet mastered the valleys and mountains of our great land. Lit

erature comes with leisure and as yet we have no leisure. We are a business people. We are taking out our iron and coal, building our highways and cities. You saw New York and Chicago, how they tower up into heaven? Then you have seen upon what it is that the swelling brain of the American Titan is at work. With us it is still the age of the hammer. The pen will come later. First the battle, then the song. Agamemnon, then Homer. We are living our epic."

What is meant by "living our epic"? Obviously that we are sailing our Ægean or pounding the walls of some new Troy for the rescue of some new Helen. What is our Egean? Our troubled industrial sea. And our Troy that must be battered down? The old-world idea of king and peasant carried into the new régime of industry. And our Helen? That beautiful social harmony which the seers of all ages have foreseen and for which martyrs have died and are still dying. It is unquestionably true that

this great work, for which our new humanity is just taking up arms, must first be accomplished before it can be sung. In this sense and in this sense alone is the fact that we are "living our epic" an excuse for our not writing it. When industry that is now drudgery shall have become romance, then, and not till then, will our Homer appear and begin his song. But before there can be romance there must first be victory, and victory is something which we have not yet achieved. We are still encamped upon our Troad.

But the apologist for our disease of sterilty in great literature does not deal squarely with us. When he says: "We are living our epic," he uses the word epic in the sense in which it is applied to the Iliad, a narrative of an heroic enterprise, or to the historical plays of Shakespeare which have been called the real English epic. The Wars of the Roses and the French wars must be fought before the great kings can move in spiritual majesty through the plays. And we who are engaged in a still more heroic enterprise must fight out our industrial battle before we can marshal its heroes

upon the pages of immortal verse. But in the suppressed half of the sentence, "and therefore we can not be expected to be writing our epic," the word epic is used in its broader, derivative sense which includes all literature in its higher forms. Else how should the phrase serve the purpose for which it was coined, the general propping up of the national pride? For it is not alone our epic that is lacking, but our drama and novel as well.

And the cause for this, we are told, is that we have no leisure, that we are living in a business age. What a clearing-house for the sins of the nation is this business age of ours! How naked, how unpresentable we would appear were it not for some such wide-flowing mantle. Is there a vice, is there a shortcoming at which fingers are pointed from oversea that does not disappear under its great folds? If government is corrupt, the poison has its

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Is it true that we have no leisure? Dare we say so when we have in abundance that which makes leisure possible, wealth? Do we not boast that we are the richest nation in the world? And if we are the richest, have we not potentially the most leisure? If leisure were all that were needed, could we not, with our surplus bank-stock, purchase a golden age far surpassing the age of Pericles or of Elizabeth? Why do we not do it? Because we know that it is not leisure, but leisure plus a knowledge of how to use leisure, that has built the golden ages of the world. And do we know how to use leisure? Suppose we should purchase it, what would we do with it? We would be in the position of a man who has purchased a musical instrument which he knows not how to play. And we are too familiar with the ridiculousness of the Bourgeois turned Gentleman ever as a nation to wish to imitate him. We are too proud to love being laughed at.

If we prefer to spend our money for lumber and iron and hogs, which we know how to use, rather than for leisure, which we know not how to use, are we therefore sordid? There would be some foundation for the charge were it not for the fact that we have astonished the world by the vast sums which we have spent in our efforts to learn how to use leisure. Phillip of Macedon was not more solicitous for the education of his son than are we for the education of young America. We have reared and swung wide the doors of scores of universities. We have provided them with equipment the like of which the world has never seen. Have they asked for buildings, we have piled them up until they have become cities in

themselves. Have they asked for fields where the body of the nation might be made more beautiful and efficient, we have laid out ample stadia and have pointed our young men to the Greeks. Have they mentioned club-houses where the new social sense might come to flower, we have supplied them. Theaters, have they not had them? And to aid our wise men in their work of instruction, have we not imported masters from oversea? What is it that we have left undone ?

men.

We are told that this is a business age; then let us be business-like. If a manufacturing enterprise is not paying dividends, the owners overhaul it, examine it, and find out why. If it is discovered that it is a particular department that has occasioned the loss and, by its unsatisfactory work, has injured the reputation of the plant, that department is at once renovated and new methods are installed and, if necessary, new We have put millions into our universities and each year we are putting millions more. Is it not about time we were looking into this investment to see if these institutions or any part of them are running at a loss? Or is it of more importance to know that the shoes of the nation are being well made than it is to know that its brain is being properly trained? At least, as Yankees, we ought to want to know if we are getting our money's worth.

Using as a criterion of excellence the recognition of Europe, for our own judgment is apt to be a little warped, what have our universities done to justify this vast outlay? Do we know any more of how to use leisure than we knew before they were established? Are we any nearer to self-expression? What have they done? They have sent forth athletes who have met and vanquished the best. Their technical schools have produced engineers and mechanics who have built monuments to their skill in every land. In science, too, their graduates are making a name not only for themselves but for their country. Of the

work done by these departments one would perhaps be a little over-exacting to complain. But what these have done only renders more conspicuous what the others have not done. Can we overlook the fact that our statue has no head? Where in the field of glory are the representatives of that large department which presides over the arts and whose task it is to develop the literary genius of the nation? Why is it that we have no poets to compare with our athletes, no novelists to match our engineers, no dramatists to stand up with our scientists ? Something is wrong. What is it? The age?

No, distinguished gentlemen of the arts department, it is not the age that is to blame: it is you. You receive each year into your classrooms young men and women as brainy and as bright as any that find their their way into the mechanical schools or the laboratories. As hungry for fame as those who seek it with the microscope or in the paths of commercial life they come to you, as those who know can testify, on fire with divine enthusiasm and hopeful of some day producing works which their country "will not let die," and after years of instruction under you, go away with their dream fabrics disintegrated and falling down. Is it not true? Have you not for years watched the horizon hoping to see those bright minds rise and shed their glory? Have they done so? Run over the roll of those whose books have attracted the attention not of Europe but simply of our own land and note what a small proportion of them have had their training under you. Add to this the fact that our painters and sculptors, whose works are honored abroad as equal to the best, are the products of European schools, and you have before you facts that should make you pause and seriously consider if there may not be something wrong with your methods.

In spite of all this, in spite of the fact that this department of our universities has done little or nothing to loosen the

tongue of our great democracy, success-
ful business men go on year after year
furnishing funds for carrying on the work
in the same old way. Were it a mining
company or a manufacturing enterprise,
does any one imagine that the vein would
not long ago have been abandoned or the
plant shut down or at least that a rigid
investigation would not have been made?
Then why this laxity with regard to edu-
cation? How are
we to explain this
apparently unbusiness-like procedure of
our business men? Possibly from their
view-point the procedure is not unbusi-
ness-like. Let us see.

Each year our great commercial organizations are calling louder and louder for brains. The cry is raised that they cannot get efficient help. Our export trade, which is making its way into every mart and jungle of the known world, is meeting each year with a resistance that is fast becoming an attack. Never before has our trade line been so hacked at. The conflict is on in deadly earnest and the nation which throws the most brains into the battle is going to win. At such a crisis to allow a young man or woman of ability to idle with art would be the height of folly. Write literature when our dividends are in danger! If our dividends are decreased where are you universities going to get your endowments? Do you hear? If our dividends are decreased where are you universities going to get your endowments? Do as we say and you shall have all the millions you want. Turn us our business men, men whom we can use as bolts and screws in our great trade-machines, engineers and mechanics: our contracts are terribly behind. Yes, and scientists: they discover devices and chemicals and keep our factories up to date. Your athletes, too, make good stuff; they don't get crazy notions in their heads. What shall we do with those in our arts department? Send the sharp ones to us. But they want to write. Botch their brains so they can't.

behind the scenes when the gold has been handed out? Or is this one of those things which are simply understood? Are our universities being operated as by-plants of the trusts, shaping their product to the order of the masters? And are we to be left no alternative but believe that the young men and women of America who might be writing our drama and novel have been sold to our czars of trade and, shipped off to the firing-line, are bombarding some outpost for the Beef-Trust or serving as spies for the Standard Oil Company? Certainly no better method could be found of "botching their brains" and forcing into the commercial those who are ambitious for the literary life than that employed by the instructors in our universities.

What is the process by which great literature is produced? Synthesis. What is the process taught by our universities? Analysis. The poem is studied as a flower is studied not by the artist but by the botanist, torn apart petal and ovule. That splendid piling up of golden stone on golden stone, the natural process in creation, is never seen in the classroom. How the "cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces" arise is never dealt with. The lightning of genius, that is now here, now there, building in an instant for eternity, is, it would seem, either feared as something elemental and therefore destructive, or else it is passed over as something of too little importance to engage the attention of serious men. The stones are the thing, and the mortar between them, not the art of the builder. That has to do with the mechanic. Universities are places of education. Education is the finding of truth, and truth is found by analysis. Why our professors of literature have followed this will-o'the-wisp is easily perceived. Peering over into the department of science and beholding the wonders there wrought by analysis they have imagined that the same process would give similar results in literature. It seems never to have Has something like this been whispered occurred to these learned men that science

and literature are two very different things; that whereas the discovery of a new element in matter may mean the laying hold on a vital law, a new element discovered in the works of a poet can never be anything more than a dead fact. And so we have the spectacle of the poem dissected by the knife and the drama examined under the microscope. It is idle to expostulate that the life principle in literature is beauty, and that to discover beauty there is no need of the microscope or the knife. They know what they are doing. They are seeking the color-scheme in Tennyson or what odors appealed most to Baudelaire. It is not to be expected, of course, that students entering the classroom for the first time should immediately perceive the importance of this. And so, if they go on for a while idling their time away producing stories and poems and fragments of dramas, we must be patient with them. Sooner or later they will come to see how they are wasting their golden youth. Meanwhile everything possible is done to discourage them from such practices and to turn their minds to worthy objects. In order that there may be no doubt in the minds of the students as to the purpose of the instruction, fellowships and other university honors are never awarded to those who show a genius for creating but only to those who show an aptitude for dissecting literature. Figure out the time scheme of Faust. Write a thesis showing how much Wordsworth owed to Percy's Reliques. Trace the beginnings of romanticism as shown by the love of wild-flowers in the age of Anne. Is Hamlet mad? A prize to him who first finds the germ. The recitation becomes a clinic. The Prince of Denmark is stretched upon the table and the search begins. And so it goes. If one class has immortalized itself by discovering that the favorite color of Tennyson is purple, another wins equal honor by showing what bird is most often mentioned by Milton. With the soul of literature these

.

men have nothing to do. That belongs to God. But of that which belongs to man no part has been overlooked. Skeleton, veins, pigment-centers, corpuscles, not an atom but has passed under the lens. And this work, the pride of our rhetors, has been rendered august by giving it that name which science has made illustrious, original research. Original, indeed. And applied to the study of literature, surpassingly original. A sculptor is envious of a warrior and because the warrior has won glory with the sword the sculptor uses the same instrument in the carving of his statue. And when his Venus turns out a hitching-post he looks about and does not know what the trouble is. Finally he concludes that it is because he is living in a military age. A professor of science has won glory and a professor of literature has had his eye open. Eureka! Now we have it. This is the way to teach literature.

men.

Out with your microscopes, young Let us discover something. And these learned gentlemen do not see that it is not Hamlet who is mad!

This, then, is the education of our youth This is the training those undergo to whom the nation is looking for immortal books. Is it any wonder that our poets lack the divine fire and look more to their words than to their thoughts, that our drama is impotent and cannot soar, that our novel gropes and cannot find its way? Is it any wonder that, while our athletes return from the games with the Olympic crown, while our engineers are summoned abroad to give advice to kings, while our statesmen are admitted as peers in the councils of the nations, while our painters and sculptors stand four square and look the world in the face, is it any wonder that our literary lights burn low? Taught to unravel the brains of others, is it any wonder that our young authors enter upon their work with their own brains unraveled? And if, after years of struggling with a demon that forces them to pick apart when they would put together, pause and consider when they should

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