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"Excellent and

his full appreciation. pleasantly suggestive ... you are safe in this writer's hands," he wrote of Old Sea Wings; and of The Sea Boat, "I have an esteem for this writer's work. The present one has permanent value, and is interesting, besides useful, to read by yachtsmen and the general public"; and of A Waterbiography, "I find it interesting and readable

Mr. Leslie writes of fresh or salt water and of boats in a way to create interest in all classes of readers, young or old."

He delighted in W. H. Hudson's nature books, and recommended A Naturalist in La Plata as "Excellent, well observed or gathered-instructive"; of Birds in a Village he wrote, "Instructive and pleasant to read. There is a taste for books of this kind. the present writer has a manner of his own and a known name."

Mr. Hudson-a fact not generally known, I believe-joined the ranks of the novelists during the "three-volume" days, and two of his novels were submitted to Mr Meredith, neither of which he could recommend, although one, which was published by the firm under a pseudonym had "good points -shows an observer of exterior London life. But he is not a creator. (The heroine) is a good girl, too good. Some scenes of the tempers' of women are true to life. A long work, with a mass of dialogue, little incident." The chief character of the other, who gave the title to the story, appears in a recent and clever book of the author, at any rate so far as the name is concerned, and sets one wondering if the books are identical.

Mr. Meredith was very partial to books relating to the sea, and even the unpretentious stories of Captain Lindsay Anderson, such as The Cruise of an Opium Clipper, Among Typhoons and Pirate Craft, pleased him, although he saw "no literature" in them. But they

were "honest and interesting." In the latter book, "the captain's name is 'Gulliver,' he says; "still, it seems honest." A neat little touch.

Books of travel, and those concerned with foreign countries and peoples, attracted his special attention. This applies particularly to Antonio Gallenga's books, most of which Chapman and Hall published at his suggestion. Major Ellis's books I have already alluded to. The first book of Harry de Windt's From Pekin to Calais received careful consideration, as his report shows:

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The writer seems really to have made the journey as he describes it. In the absence of literary skill there is an honest transcript of his experiences. The looseness of the style and the jarring repetition of potent phrases might be corrected. If accepted, a stipulation to begin the start from Pekin with a densed account of that city would be well. Also request him to quash exclamations in narrative. I have an impression that his dates when crossing the desert of Gobi are once incorrect. He puts July without the day, when, if I remember, it is August.

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But it is not possible to deal with a tithe of the interesting and valuable criticisms he passed on the hundreds of books he read for the firm. Everything he said was well said, and many of his laconic reports were not only to the point, but amusing too. "Is there anything clever in Meredith's reports this week?" was a common question in the office. And invariably there was no disappointment. Here are a few pithy comments, culled at random, on what was often the first novel of now fairly popular novelists or, as each indicates, a valueless book:

Old-fashioned kind of playful narrative of a good creature with prankish cousins.

In charity to the author it should not be published.

Apparently by a muddle-headed beginner, bothered by the expression of his views and ideas.

An infernal romance.

It has cleverness, but of the old school. . . . If there were any need to publish a novel, this would serve as a piece of trade ware.

A mere wisp of a tale. Feebler stuff than this might be written, but would tax an ape.

Suitable for the smallest of boys phenomenal in their power to give attention to matter dealt out by a man who seems to have just acquired it. A splendid knave. speaks lines that scan and are empty as the ring of a glass.

He

According to the dates given this was done in a month. It has no other merit.

Written in a queer old maundering style, poor stuff, respectable in the mouth of one's grandmother. He may have something to say, but he harps on the platitudes familiar to the ears of infancy.

No. It comes through a friend. I have the task of writing to her.

It reads like a boy's nightmare dream and written by a boy.

Verse which has the merit of flummery and nothing more. Vaporish stuff.

Dreariness of verse has hardly ever surpassed this collection.

I should think it would be rejected by a farthing magazine.

Elaborately done, with index to contents of chapters. After going through some and running over the others, I found the index to be preferable.

By a homely imitator of Haggard. He may know Van Diemen's Land well, but he is a stranger to composition.

Weak wild stuff. MS. looking as a survival of a dozen shipwrecks. Apparently by a boy-probably a very precocious boy of tender years.

Dedicated to Mr. Gladstone with permission, Mr. G. can hardly have read the verses. In any case, no one not under constraint would do so.

Stated to be "for a magazine." I do not know of a magazine that would accept it.

The dulness of vapid liveliness marks the style of this work. It has no quality.

Anstey might have made the subject amusing. This writer is an elephant. Such themes can only be made interesting when they are treated airily.

A pale piece of work.

Good of its kind-very readable for Americans. The author is an acquaintance of mine, and I should be glad to say more if I could. He has ability and much earnestness; is too honest to embroider on his souvenirs. A provincial maiden aunt of the old time had about the same notions of humor and horror. A similar manner of narrating.

This is laughable enough in MS. But in print the ridicule would fall upon the publishers.

Might gain a prize for dulness.

If the previous works of the author, praised by certain reviewers, resemble this, then I am at a loss; for this would just suffice to carry small boys along.

Rather better than the average of bad novels.

When we come to the sunken treasure the credulity of boys would be shaken.

There are thoughts in it, but mudded. It offends the orthodox and does not satisfy the infidel.

Rather pretty frail piece of young lady's work.

Poor story of the French Terror. Historical portraiture befitting the pen of an urchin fifty years back.

This is the vocabulary of a boy of fourteen.

Must be accused of every defect that goes to make a work of fiction unreadable . . it is cursed with an itch at times to try the rhetorical swell upon the lowest vernacular.

Would seem to be written in sighs of languor.

Called humorous by the author. Cockneyish dialogue, gutter English, ill-contrived incidents done in daubs, maintain the assertion.

A tale reading as if told by a romantic grandmother of the present generation.

Absurd in point of style, which is that of a child.

A manuscript with the title The Mystery of the Pigeon Holes brought the report:

Melancholy stuff to see and smell.

The Autobiography of a Donkey was considered to be

Faithful only to the donkey's dul

ness.

The Fortnightly Review.

Of a so-called humorous book which ultimately had a fairly notable success he said:

The humor of it is deadly. Reject.

Of a history of bread he observed:

The subject could hardly be lively, but the writer might have given it more yeast.

Of a series of family letters and papers he said:

They are not edited but stitched together, and they are as dry as the chemist's powder.

The interest in the foregoing would be enhanced and become more pointed But that if names were appended. would hardly be cricket, as most of the authors of the MSS. are alive today. Many more, of course, could be quoted; indeed, pages might be filled with them. But enough for the present.

My object in the whole article has been merely to attempt "to prick the enthusiasm," and perhaps the curiosity, of Mr. Meredith's many admirers in a special phase of his work during thirty-five years' association with his publishers.

B. W. Matz.

HOW TO DIAGNOSE GENIUS: A STUDY OF
HUMAN ENERGETICS.

This book is a study in comparative biography, and may be said to point the way to a new field of investigation. Prof. Ostwald was prompted to write it, as he tells us in his first sentence, by an ingenuous question put *"Grosse Männer." By Prof. Wilhelm Ostwald. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1909.)

*

to him by one of his Japanese students as to how budding geniuses could be recognized. Much money, his student went on to say, is spent by various Governments in attempting to discover those people whose thorough education may be expected to bring in a return of value to the State, and

one.

the question how best to discover latent genius is an eminently practical After cogitation, Prof. Ostwald came to the conclusion that it is those students who cannot be kept on the rails-that is, who are not contented with methodical teaching-who have within them the seeds of genius; and the writer's experience would lead him to the same conclusion.

But in order to lay a basis for such a deduction, vague, to some extent, because derived only from personal impressions, a careful comparison has been made of the lives of six men, all of whom had a great influence on the thought of their time. These are:Davy and Faraday; Julius Robert Mayer, who shares with Joule the honor of having shown the equivalence of heat and work; Liebig; Gerhardt, who, in his day, contributed to the revolution in chemical thought; and Helmholtz.

These names belong to men of science, exclusively; the reason for the choice is perhaps to be found in words penned by Liebig:

The history of the nations teaches us of the futile efforts of powers, political and ecclesiastical, to maintain spiritual and bodily slavery over man.kind; future history will deal with the conquest of liberty, gained by the investigation of the reason of things, and of truth; a conquest gained by weapons unstained with blood, and on a field in which religion and morals take part only as feeble allies.

This, it may be remarked, is prophecy, and, as such, is at present beyond criticism; it may, however, be pointed out that to some of us, at least, the prospects held out by the remarkable conquests over what used to be called "the forces of nature" do not at present point to a speedy millennium. However, the retort is open that it is not the spread of the teachings of science, but a disregard for such teach

ings, which is the reason that our moral progress does not keep pace with our material progress,

Be that as it may, Prof. Ostwald has given, in his masterly style, delightful sketches of the lives of these undoubtedly distinguished men. The biographies differ somewhat from the usual "lives," inasmuch as the failings, as well as the virtues, of the subjects have been touched on. No character is perfect, and, without ample knowledge, it is impossible to attempt to draw just conclusions.

One notable characteristic of men of genius is that it is rare for them to have come from either a high or a low grade of society. Exceptions are confined practically to England and France, as witness Boyle, Cavendish, and Lavoisier; Faraday might perhaps be instanced as an example-almost the sole example-of the second class.

Another characteristic is the very early age at which such men develop. Goethe was twenty-four years old when he electrified the German nation by his "Sorrows of Werther"; Schiller was twenty-two when he published "The Robbers"; Newton had invented the calculus, discovered the law of gravitation, and had completed his analysis of light before his twenty-fifth year; Linnæus had evolved his sexual system of plants at the age of twentyfour; and the list might be extended indefinitely, to Carnot, Clausius, Scheele, Berzelius, Vesalius, the reformer of the science of anatomy, the physiologists Ludwig, Helmholtz, and Du Bois Reymond, to, last, though not least, Kelvin. Youths who make their mark at a later age, as already remarked, show a distaste for the formal instruction which is still given in the public schools of Germany and England. In this connection it is interesting to note the saying of a writer on English public schools, himself once a distinguished headmaster, that, while

a

classical or mathematical master does not fall off, indeed improves, with age, inasmuch as he perfects himself in methods of teaching practically unprogressive branches of learning, the science masters cannot but deteriorate, unless they keep abreast with the progress of science by increasing its bounds by their own efforts. Prof. Ostwald takes a strong view of the inutility of the training to be acquired from a linguistic, especially a classical, education, and believes that the usual duration of school life is far too great. In this the writer heartily concurs.

Had Kelvin or Leibnitz been so unfortunate as to have come into the world in our days, and in Germany, their early development would have been of no avail; they would have sat on the school benches till their eighteenth year-an age at which they had gained a prominent position in science.

The temperaments of the men whose lives are chronicled may be divided under two heads, "Klassiker," or "phlegmatic," to quote an old classifi cation, and "Romantiker," or "sanguine." To the former class belonged Faraday, Mayer, and Helmholtz; to the latter Davy, Liebig, and Gerhardt. These temperaments correspond to the rate of reaction to external stimulus. The romantic type is eager, alert, impatient, and impulsive; the classic type painstaking, conscientious to a fault, self-criticising, and accurate. It is remarked on as curious that most men who have achieved greatness belong to one or other of these classes; it would appear that average minds, who occupy a mean position, being neither very impulsive nor very critical, have not the qualities which raise them above their fellows.

The "yield" of such minds, to use an expression borrowed from chemical manufacture, depends, according to Ostwald, on their "economic coeffi

cient." To transform one kind of energy into another implies the "degradation" of a portion; this is the second law of thermodynamics. Born into the world with the usual amount of energy, i.e. capacity for work, some minds are so constituted as to transform a large portion of it so that it is of service to humanity, while a comparatively small portion is, as it were, wasted. The sum of the action of such minds constitutes human progress. It is necessary that the progress of the individual genius should be hindered as little as possible by artificial and unnecessary obstacles, and it would appear that in some countries the path is made easier than in others. Taking the membership of national academies as a test, if only a rough one, of scientific eminence, the proportion of distinguished men to the inhabitants, reckoned in millions, is in Saxony 0.2, in Baden and Norway 0.25, in Switzerland 0.33, in Holland and Bavaria 0.41, in England and Prussia 0.49, in France 0.79, in Italy 2.17, in Austria 2.7, in the United States 3.08, and in Russia 16.3; that is, for example, there is in Russia only one member of international academies to 16.3 million inhabitants. It can hardly be doubted that this low number is due to the hindrances which stand in the way of progress of youths who might, in Russia, display genius, and enrich the world by their efforts.

It is impossible to review such a book as this satisfactorily in a short article. It teems with interest, not only on account of the intrinsic attractiveness of the subject, but also because of the masterly grasp of it displayed by the author. Whatever Prof. Ostwald writes is sure to interest, owing to the originality of his mind and his lucid and attractive method of presentment. On every page there occurs some saying which excites attention, even although the reader may some

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