| At
the Congress of Experimental Psychology an interesting
paper was read by Dr. Berillon, dealing with the uses
to which hypnotism might be put in educating and improving
the moral nature of children. The doctor's experience
has been large in this department of experimental psychology,
for he has personally attended to the education of 250
children. He found it possible to give, in some cases,
a check and in others a perfect cure to habits of stealing,
idleness, cowardice and impudence. The paper naturally
caused discussion, and although the doctor found opposition
to his theory that it was useful to aid the transformation
of the moral nature of children by physical methods,
yet the consensus of opinion seemed to show that hypnotism
might be advantageously used to these ends. Mr. F.W.H.
Myres mentioned that Mr. Wingfield had found no difficulty
in persuading a Cambridge undergraduate to give up his
bad habits, to "sport his door" every morning
and get a very creditable degree. Here is a new method
of action for weary and discouraged parents, who are
in despair over their recalcitrant offspring: take them
to the nearest hypnotiser, or, better than that, learn
how to use the "influence" themselves. All
that would have to be done in the latter case would
be to transfix the unruly John Henry who persists in
stealing the neighbors' pears, and suggest to him that
he hates pears and that climbing over orchard fences
is a thing to be despised. He would awake after a few
applications of this influence to refuse pears even
at dessert, and this would leave his parents the full
enjoyment of the fruit basket and reduce the family
expenses. Even in a well-regulated family this influence
might result in producing anything but model members
of society; but what would be the result if the parent
was himself vicious, and turned his child, who loved
to go to Sunday school and was by nature the model boy
of the ward, into something a good deal worse than himself?
It is to consider too whimsically to consider so; but
the possibility of hypnotic influence being used from
evil as well as good motives must be recognised. In
fact at this very congress an instance was cited by
Professor Liegeois of this vicious application of the
force, where a lady in Algeria was supposed to have
killed her husband and children, acting on the suggestion
of a man who had fallen in love with her. The plea of
hypnotic influence or suggestion may in the future be
a favorite one with criminals, but a jury would have
to be specially constituted before such a defence would
receive much consideration.
S.
There
can be nothing more life-inspiring than to read the
well-written biography of a great man. To live over
again in fancy his deeds, his aspirations and even his
faults, is to give one a larger idea of man and his
destiny.
Much has been
said about the influence of example on others, and there
is a plain truth underlying this idea, sadly as it has
been abused. We have been taught in many quarters that
man should live good so as to be an example to others.
With many biographers such a simile as this is the chief
motive, and they are right in a sense, but also gravely
wrong. They are right in saying that example is a stimulative
to better life. But they fail in not discriminating
between examples and examples. All the strength in this
position is got from quoting the lives of great men,
not men who have consciously striven to be known as
good, but whose lives were great and hence good. True
greatness must always precede true goodness. And the
best biography, or in fact the only moral one, to speak
plainly, is the realistic biography, which gives a man's
life as he really lived it, or as near as it can be
got at for the purpose to be attained. It is not necessary
to gloat over a man's weaknesses and follies in order
to avoid them ourselves, but at the same time a man's
life, if it is worthy of being studied, must have some
greatness in it, and our true experience is that in
all great natures there is what some call an alloy.
The true value of the biography as a stimulus lies in
the greatness which inspires us, but another work the
biography does is to convey a knowledge of human life,
so that it is necessary for us to know the good and
ill, the strength and weakness, and in their natural
relations, or else we will fall into the error of hero-worship
and cultivate a false idea of life, and become, in a
sense, saint-worshippers. The old and foolish idea of
padding up a good life till the goodness was nauseating,
and of exaggerating a bad life, after the manner of
the hero and the villain in the show, may have been
convenient to the teacher in enforcing his lesson, but
it had its evil effects all the same, and has largely
resulted in turning the sympathy completely over to
the other side, the villain becoming the most interesting
character. We have a startling example of this in one
of the masterpieces of literature—Milton's "Paradise
Lost"—where, whether unconsciously or not,
the great poet makes the majestic fallen angel the great
central figure of the play, and the reader becomes impressed
with the idea of his greatness as the most interesting
personage in the poem. In truth, take Satan out of "Paradise
Lost" and the poem is a mere shell. The great power
and interest here lies in the human qualities ascribed
to the fallen one, as a rebel against authority, but
we are also impressed with a certain sympathy for the
soul that grew sick of the ever-monotonousness of the
Miltonic heaven. Satan here is nothing more or less
than a great human military leader. And there is no
doubt that Milton had Cromwell in mind when he was writing
his majestic epic. In this sense, "Paradise Lost"
is one of our most remarkable biographies, and as such
it has had an unconscious influence on more minds than
ever suspected it, even to the extent of a theological
reform. As a biography it is akin to those of Plutarch,
which while largely imaginative were truer than is common
to the real greatness of human life in its relation
of good and evil in the human heart. Many of Shakespeare's
plays and many of the characters in the greater novelists
partake of this character and are of the highest value
as biographies of human character. The mingling of the
good and evil in character is becoming more evident
all the time, where the old idea was an almost childish
and most unnatural distinction into purely good and
purely evil. But the reader's common sense outgrew this
stage, until we have reached this age of realism when
we like to take men as they are. We have found out that
even men like Washington used occasional bad language,
and the story of the cherry-tree, with its accompanying
moral, is an imagination, but none the less do we respect
the first great President of the great republic. We
may not worship him, but we have more sympathy with
him for having, as a biographical figure, stepped down
a peg lower, and become a little more like ourselves.
I do not think, even with much of the evil around us,
that the world has not gained a little at any rate,
and that it has gained a good deal by desiring to know
the truth as it is. For this reason the realistic biography
is of the greatest importance.
C.
It
is at this season that the streams—those streams
that loiter slowly through low-lying meadows—put
on their utmost beauty. Bordered by trees and exposed
in little reaches to the sun, the golden heats and full
shadows of August lie upon them. The bitter sweet hangs
from the close branches of the alder and ripens its
berries. Innumerable water weeds and mosses float and
sway in the sluggish stream, and the swift spiders upon
its surface flit hither and thither, throwing their
spotted shadows upon the bottom. The loose-strife, knotted
with ruby bloom, curves down its willowy stems to meet
the water. Masses of blossoming plants line its edges;
golden-rod in miniature slender groves arching into
gold, purple bone-set or trumpet weed, in whose soft
and woolly heads the bees love to trample and burrow;
tall stems of chelone or turtle-head, with their white
spout-like blossoms; tangled drifts of white-starred
bed straw; jewel-weed in delicate profusion of translucent
stems and rich-tinted, sensitive bloom; cloudy spots
of white snakeroot; tufts of closed gentian, whose long
violet corollas that never open the bumble bees spread
asunder with their feet, thrust themselves into them
and almost disappear; these, with patches of yarrow,
many shades and sizes of aster, delicate blossoms of
arrowhead that seem made of snowflakes that may melt
as you look at them, and an occasional bed of purple
pickerel-weed springing from the shallow edge of the
water, almost cover and conceal the little stream with
their wild vigor of growth and mingled splendor of color.
it is in the midst of some such scene as this, in a
late August afternoon, when the sun rests hot upon the
harvested fields, and the woods are deep with mellow
glooms, and the elms cast long shadows, that the season
seems to present herself to us like a divine personality
in all the gracious joy of her prime and the calm confidence
of perfect achievement.
L.
Since
Mr. Aldrich left The Atlantic Monthly his verse has
appeared more frequently than of old in the magazines,
a circumstance which has added much to the interest
of the magazines for lovers of poetry. Mr. Aldrich's
fame as a poet has been one which has grown slowly,
and his gift, though indeed very genuine, will probably
never command wide popular applause. He is one of those
literary poets of a high order, like the late Lord Houghton
or Coventry Patmore, whose work will live because it
gives an exquisite, if not very passionate, pleasure
to a certain order of minds whose tastes and inclinations
are guided by the pure love of beauty. Mr. Aldrich has
in a pre-eminent degree that gift of beautiful phrase-making
which has been enough in itself to make some delightful,
if not actually great, poets. The mass of the public,
however, is somewhat indifferent to delicate artistic
power and beauty of form and phrase, and is likely to
be better pleased with Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, another
writer of the second generation who has come prominently
into notice, and bids fair to absorb the common affection
of the people. Mr. Riley stands almost at the opposite
pole from Mr. Aldrich. With him the desideratum is not
a motif which promises artistic success, but one which
touches some homely, popular chord. To this love for
the homely, the popular, the emotional, he adds a certain
nimble wit and whimsical cleverness which are delicious
to all, and render his poems especially irresistible
to his own people, whose mood they thoroughly represent.
With Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Riley at the head, American
poetry is perhaps not quite so dismally on the decline
as many people just now imagine.
L.
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