LITERARY NOTES

"Letters of Henrik Ibsen," published by Fox Duffield & Co., New York. Price, $2.50.

These letters do not belong among those of great men which prove to be disappointments. In reading them one is not inclined to ask as of Schopenhauer's letters, why a philosophic genius of such depth should be laden with thousands of philistine trivialities.

Ibsen reaches far beyond his surroundings in his letters. What he writes is a continual protest against shallowness and mediocrity. The misery of petty state affairs, of patriotism with a board on the forehead bothered him greatly. This is shown on every page. Whatever he expresses, he always aims at expanding the horizon; as he himself once remarked: the revolutionizing of brains. His sentiments are European, and he must often hear that even the wish for combining the Scandinavian countries borders on treason. Thus he becomes a "solitary soul." He has even nothing in common with the radicals; he not only hates the state, the enemy of individuality, but he is averse to all attempts which aim at the drilling of the masses. He loves Björnson as a poet, but he wants to have nothing to do with him as a politician. In a letter to Brandes he writes:

"Björnson says: 'The majority is always right.' And as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, must of necessity say: 'The minority is always right.' Naturally, I am not thinking of that minority of stagnationists who are left behind by the great middle party, but I mean that minority which leads the van, and urges on to points which the majority has not yet reached. I mean that man is right who has allied himself most closely with the future."

"Under the Wheel" is the title of a German story by Hermann Hesse, in which he severely criticizes the incompetency of the present school system to fully develop the youth. The characterization of the teachers' profession as Hesse puts it, does not only serve for Germany, but for all modern states in which governments strive to train the young for the purpose of making patient subjects and hurrah-screaming patriots of them. The author says with fine irony of the teacher: "It is his duty and vocation, entrusted to him by the state, to hinder and exterminate the rough forces and passions of nature in the young people and to put in place of them quiet moderation and ideals recognized by the state. Many a one who at present is a contented citizen or an ambitious official, would have become without these endeavors of the school an unmanageable innovator or a hopeless dreamer. There was something in him, something wild, lawless, which first had to be broken, a flame which had to be extinguished. The school must break and forcibly restrict the natural being; it is its duty to make a useful member of society out of him, according to principles approved by the state's authority. The wonderful work is crowned with the careful training in the barracks."

We regret that several of the contributions, while having merits, were not of the form to be used for a magazine.