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reference to The Dynasts (Part One, 1904, Part Two, 1906).

This inchoate and disturbing production contains his garnered observation upon the whole of life, no less! It is his final comment, recorded with a scrupulous love of truth which rejects anything so empirical as a conclusion.

In fact, so far from arriving anywhere, The Dynasts gains its chief interest from unraveling the strands which go to make up the dual nature of Thomas Hardy. Aiming at complete freedom from the restrictions of form, he casts it in the shape of a huge panoramic drama of Europe under Napoleon. This immense field is commented upon from middle air by a spirit chorus, each member of which personifies an unchanging point of view. Whatever the practical defects of this form, or lack of form, it at least has the merit of giving elbow room. The author swings individuals, armies, nations, with complete disregard of any limit. His saturation with his period, in feeling and detail, is so thorough as to give The Dynasts weight as a mere historical summary, a tracing of motive and design by a hand strong enough to grasp the situation at its largest.

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Beyond this, his spirit chorus continues an ever baffled attempt "to prove there is any rhyme or reason in the Universe.' At times the lines are full of a sonorous beauty, with a sweep which makes the same demand upon the attention as the long phrasing of modern music. The Spirit of the Pities forever deplores the cruelty and sadness of life. The Spirit Sinister frankly exults in mischief. The Spirit of Irony impersonally comments; the Spirit of Years counsels tolerance.

Indeed, if these debates fail to contain

a satisfactory theory of the universe, they do afford a key to the apparent inconsistencies of Thomas Hardy. While all his reasonings sooner or later abut upon an "unmaliced, unimpassioned, nescient Will," something deeper than reason forever denies so chill and meaningless a law of existence. He is like those biologists who, having pushed research to the remotest forms, are still bound to confess that just beyond there lies something which they can neither explain nor ig

nore.

Re-read in the light of The Dynasts, every one of Hardy's novels represents a phase of mental struggle. Hardy has the mind of an ironic pessimist. Taken from this angle, almost every book is an invective against the wanton cruelty of "The Immanent Will." If this were all, we should merely have an arraignment of the entire scheme of creation. But in this lifelong debate, the intellect is constantly opposed by an instinct which steadily rejects a philosophy of logical despair.

As was wisely said of Anatole France, his intellectual irony would finally grow unbearable, if it were not for his sentient, human heart. Different as they are in every other respect, Hardy and Anatole France have this in common. Each in his way views the spectacle with an inward vibration which irrationally persists, and in consequence of which each is saddened but unembittered by the worst that life can show.

And in the end, as emotion must always prevail over reason, as love is eternally constructive, to the great gain of Hardy's readers, the discouragement wrought by his pitiless logic is forever canceled by his indestructible human sympathy.

CONFESSIONS OF AN OBSCURE TEACHER

I AM ready to forgive whatever faults that charming rascal, Rousseau, may have had, because of the frankness with which he fulfills his introduction to the Confessions. He is going to do something without a precedent, something that will never have an imitator, — “Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature, et cet homme, ce sera moi." Perhaps his partial attainment of this rare feat is what led George Eliot to tell Emerson that her favorite book was the Confessions of the inimitable Jean Jacques. I should enjoy writing confessions with the same abandon that characterizes Rousseau, but I have too much of Teutonic reserve, nor would an Anglo-Saxon public forgive me if I did. And yet we do want frankness. Franklin's autobiography is as good art as Rousseau's, and has the additional merit of wholesomeness; it has the charming simplicity of a frank and noble nature.

I am now giving the straightforward confessions of a college professor who has been teaching for twenty years, and has had a good time, too. I want to express my complacency without any strutting, to tell the Wahrheit of a contented life without the addition of an extraneous Dichtung. I have no quarrel with the public, strange though it may seem. So lugubrious are some of the accounts of the life of a professor that the public would be justified in supposing his lot pitiable. And after the public has read what I have to record concerning my experience, this sombreness of view may be unaltered, but I must still insist that I have found joy in my work. Perhaps that is a matter of temperament. Lowell has suggested that it is well for a poet to burn his own smoke. This might apply also to the teacher. But then it may be that a prosaic professor, like many a poet to whom the

same adjective may be applied, has not heat enough to consume his smoke.

I graduated from one of the best small colleges of the East, and in September of that year I began to teach. I became a teacher because I had no taste for law, medicine, or theology. It was either teaching or journalism. In answer to an advertisement in a New York daily for a weekly correspondent for a commercial or trade paper published in Boston, I went to New York and there met the business manager. I was somewhat flattered upon being told that out of forty letters mine had won his attention and favor. I could have the place. I asked a week's time for consideration. I declined the offer, and turned the opportunity into the hands of a classmate, who during the next three years, while writing his weekly letter, went through the law school of one of the New York universities. He is now a metropolitan lawyer, but I doubt whether he has enjoyed life more than I, who began that fall to teach in a denominational academy located on a quiet hill four miles from a railroad station.

The village was a veritable Sleepy Hollow. In his Letters from the Holy Land Renan tells us "the country I am living in is actually fermenting from lack of ideas." Old-fashioned and utterly unacademic F was too quiescent even to ferment from its lack of ideas. Fortunately for us the academy life had little dependence upon the town. The hill on which we were located was a short distance removed from it. There we taught Homer and Virgil in a region whose native population was as primitive as the Homeric folk, and far less interesting. I doubt whether there were two native residents who had ever heard of Homer. The only incident breaking the Sabbatical serenity of the perpetual monotony was the arrival of the stage, an event occurring twice a day.

The academy was located in the midst of this pre-historic community because a California millionaire had been born there, and his son had been persuaded to donate twenty-five thousand dollars to an ecclesiastical body that wished to start a school. The church organization gave about an equal amount, and located its school on a hill beautiful in its commanding outlook over hill and valley; but the view also included a neighborhood so unscholastic, uncontemporary, rustic, superstitious, and provincial that it belonged to an age and country alien to modern America. And yet the life in the place had its charms.

My private living-room on the southeast corner of the third floor of the academy had a window opening to the east, another to the south. From these windows I had a varied and enchanting outlook. To the south my view extended across a valley dotted with prospering farms to a mountain twenty miles away. In my mind's eye I can still see the tower erected by a governmental surveying corps on the highest point in that region. Nine miles away was a city of twenty thousand, whose largest foundry had a whistle that emitted a deep-toned humming every noon. This we could hear when the wind was favorable, and it made us feel in our hermitlike seclusion a kinship with the teeming world beyond. From these windows I saw the procession of the seasons. The thunderstorms of spring were magnificent. From my eerie I could see them coming down the valley long before they reached us. The great stretches of living green and the soft colors of the autumn and early winter, the chaste splendor of the wintry snows, the holy calm of June evenings made sweet with the scent of innumerable growing things and solemn with the distant tinklings of sheep bells, the fragrant dawns announced by twittering birds, the occasional tolling of the village church bell as mourning feet moved to the little burying-ground, the many wandering expeditions over the mountains only three miles to the north, VOL. 98-NO. 3

- all this had an indescribable charm, and was the dream of a contemplative monk or a Wordsworthian idealist.

After four years of this academic and idyllic sequestration I became a teacher in a state normal school in one of the great industrial regions. The salary was not high, but it was better than what I had been getting. I now moved in a new atmosphere. My classes were large and many. As yet we had heard nothing of the strenuous life, but we lived it. Hundreds of young men and women, many of whom could be called young only by courtesy, as their youth consisted in attainment rather than in years, were eager to learn. Nothing could have been finer than their search for knowledge, had its goal been placed in that many-sided culture attainable only by years of devotion to the elusive ideals of the scholar. Too frequently the near and definite end of their aim distorted their vision. They were getting education on the hop-skipand-jump plan. They had to get it in this way or do without it. While some, it is true, had to do without it, many, it is equally true, received an impulse that became the beginning of the long process of culture. For the school with all its limitations stood for what is best in education. Its atmosphere had a tonic quality. The president was a man of rare good judgment joined to a quiet enthusiasm and noble sincerity. Here I broke away from the medieval seclusion and otium cum dignitate of the academy and gradually felt myself becoming a part of the great educational stream. This attitude or feeling toward my work is one of the compensations of the teacher's life.

At the end of my second year I married a wife who was no more afraid of a teacher's sad lot than I. When I left college I was eight hundred dollars in debt. Out of a small salary at the academy I had paid the debt. My wife was no richer than I, for she, too, was a teacher. We planned a year of study and travel in Europe, so we deferred living under our own roof-tree, saved the money we earned

in teaching a year, and then left in June for a year in Europe.

To the calculating, practical eye that step must have looked like the improvident act of a child. For we resigned our positions unreservedly and invested our all in the fascinating uncertainties of a year of European study and travel. To do so is surely flying in the face of that American virtue which considers getting on in the world synonymous with owning the house you live in. We have never regretted our investment, though we still pay rent.

The greater part of the year was passed in study in the University at Berlin. We also spent a month in the summer term of the University of Cambridge. But our trip included much more than this. Not days, but weeks, were used in becoming familiar with London, Paris, Geneva, and Rome; and shorter stays at Dresden, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Naples, and Pompeii had their charm.

We returned to America in June, without any assurance of finding a "job," but with the confidence of youth that there would be something to do. In less than a week I was elected to the principalship of the academy in which I had done my first teaching. Scarcely had we entered upon the work of the school year when the Supreme Court of the state rendered a decision that took away the entire school property from the trustees who had controlled the school from its inception. The religious denomination had divided itself into two factions. The Supreme Court now decided that the faction to which my board of trustees belonged could not take its property with it. This is an instance in which the word unique could be used with propriety. Morally the property belonged to the body that separated from the old denomination, but legally it fell to the other side. We yielded to the inevitable, but the school did not terminate its career. During the Christmas holidays we moved to an adjoining town. Here our trustees had rented from another denomination a large school

property which had become a burden to the owners owing to the growth in the same state of a rival school of the same religious faith. In moving from our old home we took the entire personnel of the school with us. We left nothing but the building and apparatus. The teachers, the students, the various attachés of a boarding-school,—all manifested a beautiful loyalty. The seeming misfortune has since proved a blessing, for the new locality had many advantages, and the academy has now become a denominational college, doing in a small way a vigorous work. The old academy building, erected with the thousands of the California millionaire, now stands in solitary majesty, unoccupied and unused, a melancholy monument to foolish philanthropy, sectarian bigotry, and the irony of perverted justice.

At the end of that year I unexpectedly received an offer from a state college in the middle West. I was attracted to the place because the work was in my specialty, and because my present position had many clerical duties. The two years in the West were rich in experience. A new president had injected into an old institution old for the West — vigorous blood in the form of a dozen new professors, all of whom were young, hopeful, and desirous of making a new era in the life of the school. The social life of the community had the charm of that free and generous hospitality so characteristic of the West. Coming as we had from the formality and stolid exclusiveness of our eastern town, we found the transition refreshing. We seemed to live in an atmosphere of brotherly love. The millennium had dawned. But suddenly the storm burst. The deluge came. Every member of the faculty received a letter from the secretary of the board asking for his resignation.

Our school was not the only one controlled by state authority. There were several, and all were managed by a central board of regents who were appointed by the governor. Our president had been

selected by a local regent who had removed the old president. This happened a year before my arrival. In the course of three years the politics of the state had shifted, and a new ruler who knew not Joseph had ascended the throne. The new president was asked to resign; the old president, who had been retained in a subordinate position on the faculty, was reëlected; and thus the old régime was vindicated. As eight of us had made ourselves obnoxious to the autocratic board by daring to defend the new president, the entire faculty was asked to resign. So we all resigned. Every one except the eight was soon reëlected.

The story as I have told it is simple enough, and it is a story of only too frequent occurrence in the history of school administration in the middle West. But my story contains only the "pure crude fact." My version is as crude and simple in comparison with the actual play of passion and intrigue, of treachery and diplomacy, as the story Browning found on the bookseller's stall in Florence is simple and crude when compared with The Ring and the Book. I have given only

by recourse to slandering the president, although to do so he had to involve his own wife in the affair. Here ends the most disagreeable episode in the career of a contented teacher.

That same September I was again teaching in the state normal school from which I had resigned to go to Europe. My salary was not so good as I had been receiving in the West, but I added to it by writing and lecturing. After three years of this work I was elected to the position which I now hold.

My work at present is congenial. I have enough to keep me busy and not so much that I am fagged out at the end of the year. My salary is not so high as I sometimes think I deserve, but I have no doubt that some of my acquaintances think I receive more than I earn. The average salary of the college professor in the eight largest state universities in the middle West was recently estimated to be $2300. My college is a state university, but it is not one of the largest My salary is $1900. With the addition of four weeks of lecturing during the summer I add $400 to my income. I do not see how we could live as we should live on less. But

"The untempered gold, the fact untampered during my twenty years of teaching,

with,

The mere ring-metal ere the ring be made." To complete the ring would require the scope of a novel. I may add that our school had aroused the jealousy of the other institutions governed by the state. We had doubled our attendance in three years. Had we had an independent board of regents this would have been in our favor. We had also prospered in our literary and athletic contests. When such things happen there is a possibility that a regent who lives in the town of a rival school may be able to see glaring defects in the institution growing at the expense of the one in which he is most interested. Along with this influence was the desire of the old president to be vindicated by a restoration. Worst of all was the sibilant slander of one of our own professors, who saw the storm coming and saved himself

beginning with a salary of $500, my average income has been but $1400. This is pitifully scant. But I have no complaint to make. After all, does not the wisdom of life consist in knowing how to spend rather than in knowing how to earn? The salary does look pitiful, but I insist the life has not been as meagre as the salary. It may be that I have an undue portion of pharisaic complacency,but I confess that as I come in contact with the busy moneymakers about me I do not envy them. They talk sometimes as though they envied me, though I question their sincerity; yet could their insight be penetrating enough to place the correct evaluation upon my content, I am sure their envy would be real. I would not object to having their income, but my soul protests against paying the price they

pay.

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