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Seeing the enormous numbers of worthless books published, and the vast amount of time squandered upon their perusal, we can not honestly deny the following assertions:

It is the case with literature as with life: wherever we turn, we come upon the incorrigible mob of humankind, whose name is Legion, swarming everywhere, damaging everything, as flies in summer. Hence the multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which choke the true corn. Such books rob the public of time, money, and attention, which ought properly to belong to good literature and noble aims, and they are written with the view merely to make money or occupation. They are therefore not merely useless, but injurious. Nine tenths of our current literature has no other end but to inveigle a thaler or two out of the public pocket, for which purpose author, publisher, and printer are leagued together. A more pernicious, subtler, and bolder piece of trickery is that by which penny-a-liners (Brodschreiber) and scribblers succeed in destroying good taste and real culture. . . . Hence the paramount importance of acquiring the art not to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the public mind, or even those which make a noise in the world, and reach several editions in their first and last years of existence. We should recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should devote the ever-scant leisure of our cir

cumscribed existence to the master spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers cultivate and instruct us. Of bad books we can never read too little; of the good, never too much. The bad are intellectual poison, and undermine the understanding. Because people insist on reading not the best books written for all time, but the newest contemporary literature, writers of the day remain in the narrow circle of the same perpetually revolving ideas, and the age continues to wallow in its own mire.

This is severe, but who, in these days of book-making and inordinate reading of the emptiest kind, will affirm that the philosopher's strictures are unmerited? Schopenhauer knew what literature is, and had nurtured his intellect on the choicest, not only of his own country but of others; and he could not brook the craving for bad books and the indifference to works of genius that he saw around him. It was not, however, the smatterer, but the book-worm and the pedant he had in his mind when penning the sentence:

Mere acquired knowledge belongs to us only like a wooden leg and a wax nose. Knowledge attained by means of thinking resembles our natural limbs, and is the only kind that really belongs to us. Hence the difference between the thinker and the pedant. The intellectual possession of the independent thinker is like a beautiful picture, which stands before us, a living thing, with fitting light and shadow, sustained tones, perfect harmony of color. That of the merely

learned man may be compared to a palette covered with bright colors, perhaps even arranged with some system, but wanting in harmony, coherence, and meaning.

Feelingly and beautifully he writes elsewhere about books:

We find in the greater number of works, leaving out the very bad, that their authors have thought, not seen- - written from reflection, not intuition. And this is why books are so uniformly mediocre and wearisome. For, what an author has thought, the reader can think for himself; but, when his thought is based on intuition, it is as if he takes us into a land we have not ourselves visited. All is fresh and new. . . . We discover the quality of a writer's thinking powers after reading a few pages. Before learning what he thinks, we see how he thinks—namely, the texture of his thoughts; and this remains the same, no matter the subject in hand. The style is the stamp of individual intellect, as language is the stamp of race. We throw away a book when we find ourselves in a darker mental region than the one we have just quitted. Only those writers profit us whose understanding is quickindeed think for a time, who quicken our thoughts, er, more lucid than our own, by whose brain we and lead us whither alone we could not find our way.

In the same strain is the following extract from his great work, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung":

It is dangerous to read of a subject before first thinking about it. Thereby arises the want of originality in so many reading people; for they only dwell on a topic so long as the book treating of it remains in their hands-in other words, they think by means of other people's brains instead of their own. The book laid aside, they take up any other matters with just the same lively interest, such as personal affairs, cards, gossip, the play, etc. Το those who read for the attainment of knowledge, books and study are mere steps of a ladder leading to the summit of knowledge-as soon as they have lifted their feet from one step, they quit it, mounting higher. The masses, on the contrary, who read or study in order to occupy their time and thoughts, do not use the ladder to get up by, but burden them

selves with it, rejoicing over the weight of the load. They carry what should carry them.

Upon books in the abstract, Schopenhauer has much that is suggestive to tell us, and here few golden grains from the garnered stores bealso we must perforce content ourselves with a

fore us.

He was a stupendous reader; and he read not only the masterpieces of his own age and country, but of most others. Oriental literature, the classics of Greece and Rome, the great English, Spanish, Italian, and French authors, were equally familiar to him. We can not recall a

literary masterpiece he had not studied; and, the more he read, the more eclectic he became. As a critic, he is as original as he is suggestive, whether one can always agree or not. Take the following:

To my thinking, there is not a single noble character to be found throughout Homer, though many worthy and estimable. In Shakespeare is to be found one pair of noble characters-yet not so in a supreme degree-Cordelia and Coriolanus, hardly any more; the rest are made of the same stuff as

Homer's folk. Put all Goethe's works together, and you can not find a single instance of the magnanimity portrayed in Schiller's "Marquis Posa."

And these remarks on history:

He who has read Herodotus will have read quite enough history for all practical purposes. Everything is here of which the world's after-history is composed the striving, doing, suffering, and fate of humanity, as brought about by the attributes and physical conditions Herodotus describes.

form delightful reading—the maliciousness adding piquancy here and there.

But it is on the subject of nature and art generally, above all, his darling theme of music, that we find him at his best and happiest.

The sneer has now vanished from his lips, and instead of gall and wormwood we have honeyed utterances only. While none could more pungently satirize the things he hated, none could more poetically extol the things he lovedwitness his chapters on music, art, and nature. Of course, only scientific musicians, and perhaps also musicians wedded to the music of the future, can fully appreciate his theories; but all who care for music at all, and understand what it means in the faintest degree, will read with delight such passages as these:

How significant and full of meaning is the lanTake the Da Capo, for instance, guage of music! which would be intolerable in literary and other compositions, yet here is judicious and welcome, since in order to grasp the melody we must hear it

But he would not discourage the student of twice. history:

What understanding is to the individual, history is to the human race. Every gap in history is like a gap in the memory of a human being. In this sense, it is to be regarded as the understanding and conscious reason of mankind, and represents the direct self-consciousness of the whole human race.

Only thus can humanity be taken as a whole, and herein consists the true work of this study and its general overpowering interest. It is a personal matter of all mankind.

His running commentaries on some of the literary chefs-d'œuvre of various epochs are acute and ardently sympathetic pieces of criticism. He was, as is well known, a great, if somewhat theoretical, admirer of England and anything English, and had a positive passion for some of our writers-Byron, for one. The reader may find abundant criticism, with frequent citations from many authors, in "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," and these may be enjoyed without plunging ourselves into the gulf of metaphysics.

We must add that he writes always in a lucid manner. Schopenhauer was indeed a German who knew what style meant, and this might have formed his epitaph had he permitted any: "I will have nothing written on my tomb," he said, "except the name of Arthur Schopenhauer. The world will soon find out who he was"- -a prediction which indeed came true. Doubtless the limpid, clear-flowing style of his prose has no little contributed to the popularization of his works. However weighed down with metaphysics, his writings are generally so transparent in expression, and so clear in conception, as to

The unspeakable fervor or inwardness (innige) of all music, by virtue of which it brings before us so near and yet so remote a paradise, arises from the quickening of our innermost nature that it produces, always without its reality or tumult.

Music, indeed, is bound up with Schopenhauer's metaphysical theories; and, rather than miss one of the most exquisite passages on this subject in his opus magnum, we for once graze lightly on metaphysical ground. The following requires to be carefully thought over:

The nature of man is so constituted that his will is perpetually striving and perpetually being satisfied striving anew, and so on, ad infinitum, his only happiness consisting in the transition from wish to fulfillment and from fulfillment to wish; all else is

mere ennui.

Corresponding to this is the nature of melody, which is a constant swerving and wandering from the key-note, not only by means of perfect harmonies, such as the third and dominant, but in a thousand ways and by every possible combination, always perforce returning to the key-note at last. Herein, melody expresses the multiform striving of the will, its fulfillment by various harmonies, and, finally, its perfect satisfaction in the key-note. The invention of melody-in other words, the unveiling thereby of the deepest secrets of human will and emotionis the achievement of genius farthest removed from all reflective and conscious design. I will carry my analogy farther. As the rapid transition of wish to fulfillment and from fulfillment to wish is happiness and contentment, so quick melodies without great deviations from the key-note are joyous, while slow melodies, only reaching the key-note after painful dissonances and frequent changes of time, are sad.

The rapid, lightly grasped phrases of dance-music seem to speak of easily reached, every-day happiness: the allegro maestoso, on the contrary, with its slow periods, long movements and wide deviations, bespeaks a noble, magnanimous striving after a far-off goal, the fulfillment of which is eternal. The adagio proclaims the suffering of lofty endeavors, holding petty or common joys in contempt. How wonderful is the effect of minor and major! how astounding that the alteration of a semitone and the exchange from a major to a minor third should immediately and invariably awaken a pensive, wistful mood from which the major at once releases us! The adagio in a minor key expresses the deepest sadness, losing itself in a pathetic lament.

Such brief citations suffice to show us in what light Schopenhauer regarded music, but all who wish to master his theories on the subject must turn to his works themselves, wherein they will find, as our French neighbors say, à quoi boire et à quoi manger: in other words, intellectual sustenance, equally light, palatable, and nourishing, to be returned to again and again with unflagging appetite. The world of art, like the world of thought and philosophy, was more real and vital to him than that of daily life and common circumstances; and how he regarded a musical composition, a picture, a book, or any true work of art, the following happy similes will testify:

The creations of poets, sculptors, and artists generally contain treasures of deepest recognizable wisdom, since in these is proclaimed the innermost nature of things, whose interpreters and illustrators they are. Every one who reads a poem or looks at a work of art must seek for such wisdom, and each naturally grasps it in proportion to his intelligence and culture, as a skipper drops his plummet-line just as far as the length of his rope allows. We should stand before a picture as before a sovereign, waiting to see if it has something to tell us and what it may be, and no more speak to the one than to the other, else we only express ourselves.

This last sentence shows Schopenhauer's intensity of artistic feeling, nor must it be for a moment supposed that he was insensible to nature. In his last lonely years at Frankfort, and indeed throughout his life, long country rambles were his daily recreations, the wholesome rule of "two hours' brisk movement in the open air," which he laid down for his countrypeople, not being neglected by himself. Many of us know Frankfort pretty well, and can picture to ourselves exactly the kind of suburban spot which might have suggested this thought to the great pessimist:

How æsthetic is Nature! Every corner of the world, no matter how insignificant, adorns itself in the tastefullest manner when left alone, proclaiming

by natural grace and harmonious grouping of leaves, flowers, and garlands that Nature, and not the great egotist man, has here had her way. Neglected spots straightway become beautiful.

And then he goes on to compare the English and French garden, with a compliment to the former, which unfortunately it has ceased to deserve. The straggling, old-fashioned English garden Schopenhauer admired so much is now a rarity-the formal parterres, geometrical flowerbeds, and close-cropped alleys he equally detested, having superseded the easy, natural graces of former days. He adored animals no less than nature, and amid the intricate problems of his great work and the weighty questions therein evolved concerning the nature and destiny of human will and intellect, he makes occasion to put

in a plea for the dumb things so dear to him. His pet dog, Atma, meaning in Sanskrit the Soul of the Universe, was the constant companion of his walks, and when he died his master was inconsolable. The cynic, the misanthrope, the woman-hater, was all tenderness here.

Was Schopenhauer happy or not? Who can answer that question for another? He was alone in the world, having never made for himself a home or domestic ties; he hated society-except, as we have seen, that infinitesimal portion of it suited to his intellectual aspirations, his favorite recreations being long country walks and the drama. It also amused him to dine at a table d'hôte, which he did constantly in the latter part of his lifetime. But that he understood what inner happiness was we have seen, and the secret of it he had discovered also. If joy of the intenser kind is born of thought and spiritual or intellectual beauty, no less true it is that every-day enjoyment depends on cheerfulness, and with the following golden maxims, suited alike for the "Normal Mensch " and the "Genialer," commonplace humanity and the choicer intellects among whom Schopenhauer found his kindred, may aptly close this little paper:

makes us happy, is cheerfulness of mind, for this exWhat most directly and above everything else cellent gift is its own reward. He who is naturally joyous has every reason to be so, for the simple reason that he is as he is. Nothing can compensate like cheerfulness for the lack of other possessions, while in itself it makes up for all others. A man may be young, well-favored, rich, honored, happy, but, if we would ascertain whether or no he be happy, we must first put the question, Is he cheerful? If he is cheerful, then it matters not whether he be young or old, straight or crooked, rich or poor; he is happy. Let us throw open wide the doors to Cheerfulness whenever she makes her appearance, for it can never be unpropitious; instead of which, we too often bar her way, asking ourselves, Have we

indeed, or have we not, good reasons for being content? Cheerfulness is the current coin of happiness, and not like other possession, merely its letter of credit.

We will close this paper with a few quotations culled here and there from the four volumes before us. It is alternately the sage, the artist, the satirist who is speaking to us:

Poverty is the scourge of the people, ennui of the better ranks. The boredom of Sabbatarianism is to the middle classes what week-day penury is to the needy.

Thinkers, and especially men of true genius, without any exception, find noise insupportable. This is no question of habit. The truly stoical indifference of ordinary minds to noise is extraordinary; it creates no disturbance in their thoughts, either when occupied in reading or writing, whereas, on the contrary, the intellectually endowed are thereby rendered incapable of doing anything. I have ever been of opinion that the amount of noise a man can support with equanimity is in inverse proportion to his mental powers, and may be taken therefore as a measure of intellect generally. If I hear a dog barking for hours on the threshold of a house, I know well enough what kind of brains I may expect from its inhabitants. He who habitually slams the door instead of closing it is not only an ill-bred, but a coarse-grained, feebly-endowed creature.

It is truly incredible how negative and insignificant, seen from without, and how dull and meaningless, regarded from within, is the life of by far the greater bulk of human beings!

The life of every individual, when regarded in detail, wears a comic, when regarded as a whole, a tragic aspect. For the misadventures of the hour, the toiling and moiling of the day, the fretting of the week, are turned by freak of destiny into comedy. But the never-fulfilled desires, the vain strivings, the hopes so pitilessly shattered, the unspeakable blun

ders of life as a whole, with its final suffering and death, ever make up a tragedy.

Mere clever men always appear exactly at the right time they are called forth by the spirit of their age, to fulfill its needs, being capable of nothing else. They influence the progressive culture of their fellows and demands of special enlightenment; thereby their praise and its reward. Genius flashes like a comet amid the orbits of the age, its erratic course being a mystery to the steadfastly moving planets around.

Genius produces no works of practical value. Music is composed, poetry conceived, pictures painted; but a work of genius is never a thing to use. Uselessness indeed is its title of honor. All other human achievements contribute toward the support or alleviation of our existence; works of genius alone exist for their own sake, or may be considered as the very flower and bloom of destiny. This is why the enjoyment of art so uplifts our hearts. In the natural world also we rarely see beauty allied to usefulness. Lofty trees of magnificent aspect bear no fruit, productive trees for the most part being ugly little cripples. So, also, the most beautiful buildings are not useful. A temple is never a dwelling-place. A man of rare mental endowments, compelled by circumstances to follow a humdrum career fitted for the most commonplace, is like a costly vase, covered with exquisite designs, used as a cooking utensil. To compare useful people with geniuses is to compare building stones with diamonds.

Could we prevent all villains from becoming fathers of families, shut up the dunderheads in monasteries, permit a harem to the nobly gifted, and provide every girl of spirit and intellect with a husband worthy of her, we might look for an age surpassing that of Pericles.

Virtue, no more than genius, is to be taught. We might just as well expect our systems of morals and ethics generally to produce virtuous, nobleminded, and saintly individuals, as æsthetics to create poets, sculptors, and musicians.

Fraser's Magazine.

M

MOOSE-HUNTING IN CANADA.

OOSE-HUNTING, if it has no other advantages, at least leads a man to solitude and the woods, and life in the woods tends to develop many excellent qualities which are not invariably produced by what we are pleased to call our civilization. It makes a man patient and able to bear constant disappointments; it enables him to endure hardship with indifference, and it produces a feeling of self-reliance which is both pleasant and serviceable. True luxury, to my mind, is only to be found in such a life. No man who has not experienced it knows what an

exhilarating feeling it is to be entirely independent of weather, comparatively indifferent to hunger, thirst, cold, and heat, and to feel himself capable not only of supporting but of enjoying life thoroughly, and that by the mere exercise of his own faculties. Happiness consists in having few wants and being able to satisfy them, and there is more real comfort to be found in a birchbark camp than in the most luxuriously furnished and carefully appointed dwelling.

Such a home I have often helped to make. It does not belong to any recognized order of

architecture, although it may fairly claim an ancient origin. To erect it requires no great exercise of skill, and calls for no training in art schools. I will briefly describe it.

A birch-bark camp is made in many ways. The best plan is to build it in the form of a square, varying in size according to the number of inhabitants that you propose to accommodate. Having selected a suitable level spot and cleared away the shrubs and rubbish, you proceed to make four low walls composed of two or three small suitable-sized pine logs laid one on the other, and on these little low walls so constructed you raise the framework of the camp. This consits of light thin poles, the lower ends being stuck into the upper surface of the pine-trees which form the walls, and the upper ends leaning against and supporting each other. The next operation is to strip large sheets of bark off the birch-trees, and thatch these poles with them to within a foot or two of the top, leaving a sufficient aperture for the smoke to escape. Other poles are then laid upon the sheets of birch-bark to keep them in their places. A small doorway is left in one side, and a door is constructed out of slabs of wood or out of the skin of some animal. The uppermost log is hewed through with an axe, so that the wall shall not be inconveniently high to step over, and the hut is finished. Such a camp is perfectly impervious to wind or weather, or rather can be made so by filling up the joints and cracks between the sheets of birch-bark and the interstices between the pine logs with moss and dry leaves. You next level off the ground inside, and on three sides of the square strew it thickly with the small tops of the sapin or Canada balsam-fir for a breadth of about four feet; then take some long, pliant ash saplings or withy rods, and peg them down along the edge of the pine tops to keep your bed or carpet in its place, leaving a bare space in the center of the hut, where you make your fire. Two or three rough slabs of pine to act as shelves must then be fixed into the wall, a couple of portage-straps or tumplines stretched across, on which to hang your clothes, and the habitation is complete.

I ought perhaps to explain what a "portagestrap" and a "portage" are. Many French and Spanish words have become incorporated with the English language in America. The Western cattle-man or farmer speaks of his farm or house as his "ranche," calls the inclosure into which he drives his stock a “corral,” fastens his horse with a "lariat," digs an "acequia" to irrigate his land, gets lost in the "chaparral " instead of the bush, and uses commonly many other Spanish words and expressions. No hunter or trapper talks of hiding anything; he "caches" it, and he calls the place where he has stowed away a little store

of powder, flour, or some of the other necessaries of life, a "cache." The French word "prairie," as everybody knows, has become part and parcel of the English language. Indians and halfbreeds, who never heard French spoken in their lives, greet each other at meeting and parting with the salutation “bo jour "and “adieu.” And so the word "portage" has come to be generally used to denote the piece of dry land separating two rivers or lakes over which it is necessary to carry canoes and baggage when traveling through the country in summer. Sometimes it is literally translated and called a "carry." Another French word, " traverse," is frequently used in canoeing, to signify a large, unsheltered piece of water which it is necessary to cross. A deeply-laden birch-bark canoe will not stand a great deal of sea, and quite a heavy sea gets up very rapidly on large, fresh-water lakes, so that a long “traverse" is a somewhat formidable matter. You may want to cross a lake say five or six miles in width, but of such a size that it would take you a couple of days to coast all round. That open stretch of five or six miles would be called a " traverse."

The number and length of the portages on any canoe route, and the kind of trail that leads over them, are important matters to consider in canoe-traveling. A man in giving information about any journey will enter into most minute particulars about them. He will say, "You go up such and such a river," and he will tell you all about it-where there are strong rapids; where it is very shallow; where there are deep, still reaches in which the paddle can be used, and where you must pole, and so forth. Then he will tell you how you come to some violent rapid or fall that necessitates a "portage," and explain exactly how to strike into the eddy, and shove your canoe into the bank at a certain place, and take her out there, and how long the " portage" is; whether there is a good trail, or a bad trail, or no trail at all; and so on with every “portage" on the route. Carrying canoes and baggage across the "portage" is arduous work. A birchbark canoe must be treated delicately, for it is a very fragile creature. You allow it to ground very carefully; step out into the water, take out all the bales, boxes, pots, pans, bedding, rifles, etc.; lift up the canoe bodily, and turn her upside down for a few minutes to drain the water out. The Indian then turns her over, grasps the middle thwart with both hands, and with a sudden twist of the wrists heaves her up in the air, and deposits her upside down on his shoulders, and walks off with his burden. An ordinarysized Mic-Mac or Melicite canoe, such as one man can easily carry, weighs about seventy or eighty pounds, and will take two men and about six or seven hundred pounds.

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