oddity rather than the sadness of the contrast. We might have gone further. He is the connecting link between the poet, the thinker, the child of the idea, and the practical man,—the man of the world, the Philistine. By instinct he belongs to the former class, but his reason is broad and sane enough to recognize the logic of the Philistine's position. We are all of us half men at best, and the deeper, the more intense, we are, the narrower we are likely to be. We may be narrow and intense as children of the idea, narrow and intense as Philistines. The humorist dimly sees that the whole truth can only be reached by union of two half truths. Material progress is as potent a factor in the evolution of the race as intellectual progress. Food must be raised, clothes must be had, houses must be built, printing-presses must be invented, railroads must be laid down, or the philosopher would starve and freeze, the idea would never be disseminated. If the Philistine were not so deaf to the claims of the idea, if thoughts of the future interfered with his work in the present, he would not be so strenuous a Philistine, and the material progress of the world would suffer. In a very thoughtful essay George Eliot has pointed out the dangers of what she ingeniously calls other-worldliness. Worldliness and other-worldliness may both be pushed to lamentable extremes. It is the humorist who preserves the balance between the two. The humorist does not undervalue the deeper side of human existence, he is keenly alive to the claims of the mystical and the supernatural; but he cleaves, also, to practical life, to the enjoyments of the world, to all that is genial and good-humored, useful and honorable. Goethe enforces this truth in "Faust," where he gives Mephistopheles to his hero as a constant companion from the very moment when the latter abandons the extravagant idealism of his youth and recognizes "the need of a world of men" for him.
It is this idea, especially, which Mr. William S. Walsh has sought to expound in his monograph on " Faust, the Legend and the Poem," which the Messrs. Lippincott have kindly laid upon the Reviewer's desk. Were not the paternity of this department revealed on the cover of Lippincott's Magazine, the Reviewer might find it in his heart to say for this booklet the good word which mayhap it doesn't deserve. (It was Howells—was it not?—who suggested that an author would make the best critic of his own books.) As this solace is denied him, he may be allowed to mention that the binding is handsome and the printing excellent, and that the six etchings with which the book is adorned have been a labor of love with the artist, Mr. Herman Faber,—one of them in particular, the "Faust in his Study," not only being, in advertising parlance, "worth the price of the book," but actually leaving a margin of profit in the hands of the investing capitalist. This, however, is a digression.
The gentlest-hearted and the broadest-minded of all modern humorists was William M. Thackeray. Some one has said that he was as good a poet as could be made out of brains. In truth, he had just too much brains to be a poet. A keen sense of the thin partitions between the sublime and the ridiculous may debar a man from attempting the sublime, yet a sense of the ridiculous is an addition to the mental equipment. "The saints were all a little cracked," says one of the characters in Henry James's "The Madonna of the Future." And so. it may be added, are the poets. Poet and saint often insist on closing one eye and seeing only out of the other. Thackeray kept both open, and he had all the breadth of mind, the generosity, the tolerance, the irresolution, the lack of intense conviction,
