"While there's Life there's Hope."

MARCH 17th, 1892.

VOL. XIX. No. 481. 28 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET, NEW YORK.

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IT would appear that of all "har

bitrary gents now extant, the two wilfullest are David Hill and the youthful Emperor William. The excuse is made for William that he has the ear-ache so badly at times that he is hardly responsible for what he says or does. The excuse made for David is that his political necessities are exigent, and that he has got to hustle if he intends to arrive. It cannot be said that the explanation gives entire satisfaction in either case. March mobs make Berlin lively for William, and David is kept awake by kickers outside of his machine and rebellion

within it. Both his experience and William's give comfort to the friends of Republican government.

MR. BLAINE has always been known as a

man with a very kind heart, but his benevolence never showed more clearly than in the pains he has taken to give his son's ex-wife a good start on the stage. To be sure it will be said that he reopened the controversy with the Nevins family as a preliminary to his own reappearance on a broader

stage than that of any theatre, but LIFE does not share that opinion. It has no expectation that Mr. Blaine will ever be a presidential candidate again.

As for his argument with the Nevins ladies, the temptation to speak out was very strong, but he labors under the disadvantage of being in a fight with women, and women who are willing to say much uglier things about him and his than he is about them and theirs.

con at Cannes has found favor in the sight of one Hetherington, an American naval officer, who has killed an Englishman whom he believed to be unduly devoted to his wife. If a man has a mind to shoot under such circumstances, it may not accord with public policy to discourage him too much, nevertheless it seems likely that Lieut. Hetherington's zeal outran his discretion. He might at least have waited until he learned how Deacon came out, for although what a man may be allowed to do in Cannes may afford no safe rule of conduct in Yokohama. Still experience is experience, and a discerning person will contrive to profit by the experience of his fellow, even though allowance has to be made for differences in time and place. LIFE may have a defective moral sense, but it admits a conviction that home cannot be made happy with a pistol, and that if the woman prefers the other man the best way out of it is to send her her passports and let them both go. If there is a crime that can be surely trusted to entail its own punishment, it is the crime against the family.

IT

Dr. Eliot of Harvard is making another of those Spring trips in the West that have contributed so much to make Harvard the envied of all her sisters. As an educational drummer Dr. Eliot has no peer. He carries no samples. Sometimes his visits are preceded by the Harvard Glee Club, but usually he is content to represent in his own person what it may profit a man to imbibe a full set of Harvard culture at the only place where it may be had. At various convenient centres Dr. Eliot has established agencies where orders are taken and estimates made; but culture is laid on, as heretofore, exclusively at the institution at Cambridge.

BOOKISHMESS

HENRY JAMES'S THEORY OF ART.

ONE reads the short stories of Henry James with increasing admira

tion for the technical skill which he exhibits, the directness of his insight, and the perfection of his style. He presents the curious problem to his readers whether it is the clearness of his diction which gives the impression of a mental penetration which is deeper than he really possesses, or whether it is an unusual gift of insight which illuminates his prose and makes it seem more direct and definite than it is.

When you have read him for years with appreciation you will perhaps find the conclusion uppermost in your mind that, after all, Mr. James is a stylist first, and a thinker afterwards; that for him the highest art is perfection of form in words. As you read page after page of his beautiful prose you feel it kindle within you something of that æsthetic delight which must have been his when he created it. There is no mistaking this sort of inference;-it is only strings which are tuned to the same note that can set each other vibrating.

WITH this conception of what he considers Art before you, the

meaning becomes plain of the exquisitely finished title-story of

his new volume, "The Lesson of the Master." (Macmillan.)

The Master puts the creed of a modern artist in a nutshell when he says that for him the great thing, the indispensable thing is, "the sense of having done the best-the sense, which is the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or he doesn't-and if he doesn't he isn't worth speaking of. And precisely those who really know don't speak of him."

There is no loop-hole here for happiness, contentment, luxury; it simply means renunciation of all these things, which may distract, and concentration of every faculty and circumstance to one end-the achievement of a certain perfection that is possible and even desirable.'

This is a hard creed, a difficult one for a young man of ambition to accept! it has the same ring in it as the command to the young man of great possessions who was told to sell all that he had."

"What a false position," exclaims the young man of the story, "what a condemnation of the artist, that he's a mere disfranchised monk and can produce his effect only by giving up personal happiness. What an arraignment of art!"

New York: D. Appleton

NEW BOOKS. OVE OR MONEY. By Katharine Lee. and Company. "Our Chauncey." By Isaac H. Bromley. New York: New York Printing Company.

"Bound not Blessed." By A. Lyndsay MacGregor. New York: G. W. Dillingham.

The Realm of Nature. By Hugh Robert Mill, D. Sc. Edin. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Criminal Reminiscences. By Allan Pinkerton. New York: G. W. Dillingham.

Was He Successful? By Richard B. Kimball. New York: G. W. Dillingham.

Edalaine. By F. Roena Medini. New York: G. W. Dillingham. The Centennial Primer. By Walter C. Quevedo. New York: G. W. Dillingham.

Do tor Claudius. By F. Marion Crawford. New York and London: Macmillan and Company.

What it Cost. By F. and I. E. Sullivan. Chicago: Laird and Lee. The Youth of the Duchess of Angoulême. By Imbert de Saint-Amand. Translated by Elizabeth Gilbert Martin.

would find fault with perfec

tion itself.

We all know of the gentleman who, safely landed in Heaven, complained because his halo didn't fit.

And now there be those who would put bitterness into the cup of the Paderewski worshipers. These Philistines claim that the picturesque hair which has led to Mr. Paderewski's being dubbed "the human chrysanthemum," is not his own, but is a product of the wig-maker.

LIFE holds that this statement is absurd on the face of it. Making full allowance for

the eccentricity of genius, it is not for an instant to be believed that even a musician would deliberately handicap

himself with such a top-knot as Paderewski's.

LIFE will maintain to the bitter end that Paderewski's hair is his misfortune, not his fault.

TORTURE CHAMBER

TORTURE CHAMBER