phrey Ward a most accomplished literary critic has been lost to us; in Mr. George Moore a candid student of sociology; in Mr. Stanley Weyman a historian of the school of Robertson. Among the departments of literary energy which are now the most neglected is scientific philosophy of the sort so brilliantly illustrated by two of the great men who have disappeared since 1888, by Tyndall and Huxley. The class of writer which they represented, the pioneer in physical discovery, who is also a splendid popular exponent, combining accurate research with the exercise of imagination and style, has ceased to exist in England. Mr. Wells might have risen in it to the highest consideration, but he prefers to tell little horrible stories about monsters. On all sides we may see, and we ought not to see without acute alarm, the finer talents being drawn from the arduous exercises to which nature intended to devote them to the facile fields of fiction.

The result of all this is that, to an extent which ought to occasion all serious observers no little alarm, the great reading public is rapidly becoming unable to assimilate any ideas at all, and to appreciate impressions it requires to have them presented to it in the form of a story. The multitude of readers grows every hour, but with these masses those individuals become fewer and fewer who are able to follow the path-ways of thought without the help of knowing what Edwin did and what Angelina wore. Specialists push the subdivision of observations about fact to an even more extreme nicety; but they only address other specialists. The rest of the world prefers to take its information and its excitement from two sources of entertainment, the newspaper and the novel. It is almost certain that if Modern Painters or The Grammar of Assent or even The History of Civilization had been published within the last ten years, it would have scarcely attracted any attention at all, outside a narrow circle. It is more than probable that Buckle and Newman, if not Mr. Ruskin, would have resigned themselves to the inevitable, and have tried to present their views and convictions in the form of tales.

This curious condition has been greatly encouraged, if it has not been mainly caused, by a change in English habits of life. which will certainly interest and puzzle the historian of the future. If any feature of these last ten years has been more patent than another, it assuredly is the predominant prestige of the exterior parts of social existence. The human body has reVOL. CLXV.-NO. 489.

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ceived an amount of attention such as no previous age, perhaps not even the Hellenic, had given it. The elements of education have come to reduce themselves more and more into a sort of disciplined athleticism, in which the mind is not indeed entirely neglected, but is made to take a very inferior position to the limbs. Our public schools have fostered this physical training to such an excess that in many of them participation in sports is more obligatory than attendance at lessons, and to be "good at games " is the only pathway to happiness in this world and the next. Masters are chosen not because of their scholarship or their tact, but because of their prowess at football or cricket, and even the good things of the Church may be secured to-day by the spirited application of a reputation for athletics.

The over-materialism of our educational centres, and the dangerous abuse of physical training, date from a period much earlier than 1888. But during the ten years which have just passed, the boys brought up under the athletic system have been in their prime as men of influence. In the general result, I should be the last to suggest that there has not been much to congratulate ourselves upon. This latest generation of Englishmen is healthy, active, and determined; its members are admirably fitted to employ the hours of their wholesome youth and vigorous middle age in energetic action and in spirited interference with the habits and wishes of inferior populations. They form the bodyguard of a nation to which it is exceedingly convenient to belong. But these heroes of a thousand fields, these insatiable players of games which are but forms of mimic warfare, cannot expect, and fortunately do not wish, to excel in the peaceful exercises of the mind as well. What with its polo and its golf, its shooting and its fishing, and all its other enchanting physical exercises, the ruling class in England is much too tired and too happy when evening comes to devote its thought to any serious branch of study or to pursue any difficult train of thought. For the sons of men who used to sit up half the night discussing the Origin of Species, Mr. Anthony Hope prepares the sleeping draught of his soothing romances. There is nothing whatever to be sarcastic about in this. It acts like the rule of three. If you spend the day in violent strain of the muscles in the open air, it is absolutely impossible to work your brain at night, and it would. be hurtful to you if you were to try to do so.

In this respect the masses of the nation have paid to the rich flattery in its sincerest form. They also have accepted the physical or athletic ideal, and are cultivating it to extravagant excess. It is an admirable thing that young men of the working class should be able to relax their sinews and enjoy as many innocent sports as possible. But, in the fullest seriousness, I suggest that it is not admirable or wholesome, but puerile and almost crazy, that the record of these games should swell into the proportions of national events, that news about county cricket and football should take precedence of the most weighty affairs of state, and that hundreds and thousands of persons should be encouraged by their educated leaders in the press to consider a champion billiard-player a more exalted personage than a great statesman or a great scholar. I do not think that Englishmen of the more moderate way of thinking realize the violent degree to which the athletic ideal has pushed all others to the wall within the last few years. Matthew Arnold warned us that we had a barbarian class amongst us. If he had lived till to-day he might judge that we have practically no other.

While, however, I feel bound to express a certain alarm, or disquietude, at the turn which taste has taken during these last ten years, I am far from supposing it to constitute a lasting danger. It is easy to have too much intellectual strenuousness. We are resting a little, after the stern Middle Victorian priggishness. Literature is, after all, merely the reflection of life, and life may be so vivid as not to require to be illustrated. Doubtless the happy nations only read stories, and the millennium will probably know nothing but illustrated descriptions of its own prosperity. The existence of a Briton, since 1887, has been exceedingly varied and exciting. It has not encouraged contemplation; it has been full-blooded, robust, contentious. There can be no amazement caused by the fact that those who have enjoyed it, those who have felt its tug at their muscles and their heart-strings, should have turned to books for amusement, and not for intellectual exertion. To follow the masters of thought demands laborious days, and Hegel is hardly the author to take up after a long spin on a bicycle. A sedative is what we have wanted, not a stimulant, rest for the brain, and not the stress of mental gymnastics. Nor would I for a moment pose as a scoffer or a satirist. I have the old, fatalistic conviction that whatever is is right. But I see no

reason for claiming triumphs in the particular field where we have not been fighting, nor in pretending that a decade chiefly spent in other interests and with antagonistic habits has been one of brilliant literary progress. Without a suspicion of sarcasm, I merely record that the ten years since 1887 seem to me to have been marked in England, so far as literature is concerned, by an extraordinary removal of the great traditional figures which gave their tone to thought; by an excessive and unwieldy preponderance of one class of book-and that the class least amenable to criticism-namely, the novel; and by a growth of combined athleticism and commercialism highly unfavorable to art and letters. EDMUND GOSSE.

HAS JUDAISM A FUTURE?

BY PROF. ABRAM S. ISAACS, EDITOR OF "THE JEWISH
MESSENGER."

Ir is difficult to secure a just and unbiased interpretation of Judaism as a modern religion, because the Jew who shares the honor of being included with priests, lawyers, and women in the capacious storehouse of uncomplimentary popular proverbs, is treated either with superlative praise or superlative condemnation. The want of due proportion in the estimate in both cases leads to faulty generalizing and gross injustice. For the Jew is neither angel nor fiend, but a profoundly human animal with all the defects and virtues, original and acquired, that are common to mankind, "Jew and Gentile, bond and free." Perhaps on the whole his enemies have done less harm than his friends. People like to be agreeably disappointed. It is pleasant to realize that the average Jew is certainly no fiend; and it is always more or less of a shock to discover that our idol is necessarily of clay. The Jew, then, is neither a Daniel Deronda nor a Fagin, neither a Shylock nor a Nathan.

That the Jew is treated as a rule with a prejudice which either exaggerates or distorts the truth, is due almost wholly to the amazing popular ignorance of his history and religion--an ignorance which unhappily is not confined to caricaturists in the comic weeklies or playwrights who revel in hooked noses and flashy jewellery as essentially Hebrew characteristics. Even to Thomas Carlyle, Judaism is simply a religion of "old clothes." So cultured and refined a critic as Goldwin Smith seems as much irritated when he touches upon the Jew as was Haman when he saw Mordecai at the gate. It would be harsh to say that the Jew is made a man of straw, a kind of theological scarecrow, dating from the early centuries, and sent adrift down the ages as a per