choice and draw their own conclusions and consolations from the medley. Of homogeneousness there is none; nor is there the remotest attempt to create a harmony. Plato, St. Paul, the author of the wisdom of Solomon, Emerson, Shelley, Seneca, Milton, Shakepeare, Trench, Cicero are successively allowed to walk across the stage, and the audience chooses, or forbears to choose, from the bearing and gesture of each one, and from the direction in which he tends, with whom it will cast in its lot. To such a scheme, however, there is one inevitable objection: even the most versatile of minds must select one out of the several conflicting views, and hold to it with a sober and tenacious grasp, unless it would incur that punishment which George Eliot tells us attaches to those poorspirited mortals who flicker needlessly their little lamp of truth, to the bewilderment-and sometimes to the enduring loss-of those before whose eyes its beams may scintillate. A pantheist with Shelley one may be if one will-or a stoic with Marcus Aurelius, or a hedonist with Goethe, or a Christian with the Apostle to the Gentiles; but all of these things not even the senior member for the University of London well can be: to attempt it is to invite the sorrowful ridicule of the initiated. Again: how any man could soberly pen-and by penning them think to add anything to our understanding of the mystery of life-such sentences as the following, we confess ourselves unable to conjecture: "But what of the future? There may be said to be two principal views. There are some who believe indeed in the immortality of the soul, but not of the individual soul: that our life is continued in that of our children would seem indeed to be the natural deduction from the simile of St. Paul," as that of the grain of wheat is carried on in the plant of the following year. 66 So long indeed as happiness exists it is selfish to dwell too much on our own share in it. Admit that the soul is immortal, but that in the future state of existence there is a break in the continuity of memory, that one does not remember the present life, and from this point of view is not the importance of identity involved in that of continuous memory? But however this may be according to the general view, the soul, though detached from the body, will retain its conscious identity, and will awake from death as it does from sleep; so that if we cannot affirm that 'Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep,' at any rate they exist somewhere in space, and we are indeed looking at them when we gaze at the stars, though to our eyes they are as yet invisible." (pp. 265, 266, vol. ii.) The writer forbears to do more than to emphasize with italics certain portions of the quotation; since anything more palpably chaotic-not to say hopelessly self-contradictory— than the philosophical and scientific condition of mind which the sentences betray it would be difficult in his opinion to parallel in the whole history of the expression of cultivated thought upon the subject of which it treats. Reading it, one asks one's self wonderingly if it can be possible that any educated Englishman could stand upon a platform in the presence of a company of his fellows, in this last quarter of the nineteenth century, and deliver himself of such inconsequence! The writer begs permission to insist, once more, that before a man is competent to say whether life is an arena for our enjoyment, or a training ground for our endurance, or a school-room for our instruction, or a play-ground for our dalliance, he must in his own mind have decided upon the very vital problem as to what we are; he must be profoundly impressed with some certainty or another, be it that a man is merely a beast and is to perish with his body, or that he is compounded of flesh and spirit and destined to an immortality of blessedness or uncontent. And this, there is all too much reason to infer from these volumes, their author has never done, since even in the closing chapter his belief in the whole matter of man's personal immortality is left in a state of hopelessly inextricable confusion. In one of his keenest analyses, Carlyle has likened the condition of the barque of human life to a ship in danger of sudden precipitation among the breakers at a moment when the intelligence and energy of every man aboard is called for in the interest of her safety, and when the least the most incompetent among her passengers can do will be to forbear embarrassing the operations of his saner comrades by any paralyzing expression of his own bewilderment. And the position. which is thus assumed is one that is coming to be more and more recognized in the domain of human thought among both Christian and non-Christian publicists; it is a translation into a deeper sphere in our activity of that saying of the apostle, "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat." There is unfortunately a sense in which these little volumes are typical of a phase and tendency of our times. They furnish to us one more example of the quiet confidence with which certain scientific minds, more or less eminently authoritative in their proper spheres, invade those regions of life and thought which lie outside their province, and settle, as with a wave of the unconscious hand, problems which wiser men touch upon with reverent diffidence. In reading them we are occasionally reminded of the work of a far more earnest and skillful dialectician and a more brilliant scientist-Professor T. H. Huxley-whose invasion of the sphere of New Testament criticism and history in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, and of the field of metaphysics in the monograph on Hume, afford a somewhat striking example of a similar inconsiderate ness. As the writer first turned some of the more serious pages of these volumes there floated before his mind the picture of Hood turning out ream after ream of his "Whims and Oddities," and of the "Comic Annual," amid all the pathetic torture of his daily life; he thought, too, of the domestic tragedy behind the scenes in the life of that most exquisite of English humorists the gentle Elia, and of that comic journal in which the genius of the mother-nation for humor and gentle satire has been mingled with some of the most pathetic verses ever written by an English pen; and thinking upon these things, and upon the mingled yarn of life whose strands have come within the range of his own vision, these attempts of the Kentish baronet to sound the deeps and solve the mysteries of life in his facile pages seemed like the efforts of the child upon the seashore to stem with his puny barrier the onset of the tide. From the days when the Book of Job was painfully penned beneath a Syrian sky, and Achilles on the shores of the Egean recognized that in the conduct of human things one fate happened to all alike whether a man fought strenuously upon the plains of Troy or remained sulkily idle in the beached ships, until the days of the In Memoriam and the sermons of Frederick Robertson, of the heroes and heroines of George Eliot and the stanzas of Matthew Arnold, the deeper testimony of thoughtful men has been concentrating towards that line of Lenau's "There is no life without wounds ;" and precisely as men have been greatly gifted, and their spirits finely touched to fine issues, have they felt the incompetence of any philosophy of existence which shuts its eyes to the capacity therein for sorrow, and for suffering, and for yearning, and for regret. So long as men can enter into that region where exists the struggle after an ideal right clashing with the promptings of selfishness and sense, of which the great and avowedly nonChristian novelist of the last half of our century has given us so many and such keen delineations, humanity may be trusted to distinguish the chaff from the wheat in such utterances as these we have been discussing; and it is possible that the writer may have erred in taking as seriously as he has done some of the inadequacies in which these talks abound. It is, however, because from some things in them he finds it difficult to decide that their author does not consider himself as speaking from the standpoint of a Christian philosophy and faith that he ventures to close his criticism with two verses of that most profoundly thoughtful and reverent of modern poems—the prologue to the In Memoriam: "Let knowledge grow from more to more, May make one music as before, "But vaster. We are fools and slight; WILLIAM HIGGS. ARTICLE VI.-HOW TO AMERICANIZE THE INDIAN.* He says I can give you the gist of the whole matter in half a dozen words. The Indian youth must be Americanized. The segregation policy must be abandoned for the policy of absorption. Do we not assimilate millions of ignorant and semi-barbarous foreigners, speaking different languages and bred under other institutions than our own? and shall we hesitate before a paltry quarter of a million of red Indians? Put the little savages into the mill and grind out American citizens ! She says I accept your platform with the omission of a single word. Why not say at once, The Indians must be Americanized? We make citizens of the first generation of “semibarbarous foreigners," you know! He says I regard the adult Indian as a hopeless case. The traditions of the past have too strong a hold upon him—the bounty of the Government has too thoroughly undermined his self-respect. But let that pass! Our hope is in the rescue of the rising generation. We must lift them bodily out of their environment of savagery, filth, and superstition, and transport them into the midst of our civilization. We must break up the jargon of Indian dialects and the hold of the tribal organizations by bringing together in one school the representatives of many different tribes. Best of all is the policy of scattering these children among the thrifty farms and villages of the Eastern States (no two of them together), then letting them take their places side by side with the white youth in the struggle for a livelihood, never to return to that stagnant pool of corruption-an Indian Reservation! *Whether the writer of this Article succeeds, or does not succeed, in convincing the readers of this Review of the practicability of the plan here suggested for the "Americanizing the Indian," no one can fail to consider with interest and respect the method of solving this difficult problem, suggested by one who has spent years among the red men, engaged in philanthropic labors for their elevation.-ED. OF THE NEW ENGLANDER AND YALE REVIEW. |