yet too late to retrace our steps, but it soon will be too late.

The reforms proposed by President Eliot and President Harper are in the nature of compromises. The fundamental question is whether our colleges shall continue to offer instruction in such subjects as in other countries, and in former times in this country, have been thought to belong only to the university. If students are not to be required to take this instruction, that is, to elect from such subjects,-it would next become a matter for consideration whether these courses should be offered at all, except in universities. To maintain them for the handful who would remain after the graduation of their class, would be beyond the means of most colleges, if not beyond the functions of all.

The opposition to shortening the time required for a college education is largely supported by public sentiment among the students. Theirs is a pleasant life. Their circumstances and surroundings are all favorable to their improvement. They feel, and exult in feeling, a steady growth in mental power. They have formed friendships which parting may chill or disturb. They are accustomed to respect the opinions of their instructors, and the collegiate system is the expression of those opinions.

Here, indeed, is the chief obstacle in any reform. It is natural and inevitable that an unfriendly attitude towards a reversion to the original policy of the American college should be taken by many of the members of the college faculties.' Their importance would be diminished if their opportunities for imparting the higher learning were to be abridged. It would also tend to reduce their numbers by cutting off those least capable of giving good elementary instruction. To dock a quarter of the college course is to render unnecessary the services of a quarter of the college faculty.

These influences will delay, but can hardly defeat, the restora

(1) See a discussion of this point in an address on the Readjustment of the Collegiate to the Professional Course, published in the Report of the American Bar Association for 1898, p. 597.

tion to a large and most important class of our young men of that year of their active manhood which our present collegiate system has virtually taken from them.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, the American Philosophical Society offered a prize for "an essay on the best system of liberal education adapted to the genius of the government of the United States." A treatise by a Maryland schoolmaster, Samuel Knox, was the result, which was published in 1799.1 He would have had each State maintain a college with a three years course, and the United States a university, with one of the same length, from which a diligent student might be graduated, at twenty-one, with the degree of Master of Arts.

The prize was divided between Knox and another competitor; and Jefferson, in mapping out the University of Virginia, appears to have profited by some of the suggestions thus made. If the main proposition of a reduction of the term of college study had then received the unqualified endorsement of the Philosophical Society, it is not impossible that the change of policy advocated in this article might have come a century earlier.

(1) Report of United States Commissioner of Education for 1898-9, i., 577.

GERMAN CRITICISM

RICHARD M. MEYER, Berlin.

(Concluded from May number.)

ND now the time was ripe for Germany. On the men who created for us the critical method Vico has had no influence, on Winckelmann, on Lessing, on Herder. They have all racked their brains over the question which he, in his prophetic way, had already answered. On the other hand, after them, the principle, which in Italy the divination of genius had reached only once, and in a single isolated example, stood firmly established and accessible to all.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) is the founder of the German conception of history. The poor cobbler's son from the little town of Stendal in the barren Mark, was dazzled, hypnotized, by the splendor of the ancient world that shone on him at first only from its writings. An immense longing drove the poverty-stricken school-teacher, the indefatigably industrious. custodian of a private library, to Rome. What happened there can best be told in the words of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorf:

"To try to know the divine charm of Greek beauty from books was, perhaps, in any case, a superhuman task; it was necessary to see the works of sculpture with the bodily eye, and this must be united with travel on the ancient soil. Poetry was able only to wake longing for the actual sight of those divine Copyright, 1901, by Frederick A. Richardson.

forms and for the South, and to make it an irresistible power. This Homer and Plato did for Winckelmann. When he finally stood on the soil of the Eternal City, he proceeded to develop his doctrine of the lofty beauty of the real world of Greek art; and he who knew how to learn of him, could grasp in theoretic form the common element in all the Hellenic arts. The smallest relief on a grave of the Sacred Way, the most hasty sketch on a vase of the fifth century, the most careless canto from the Iliad and Odyssey, and the dullest comic fragment in Athenaeus, has a gleam of this rare beauty. Winckelmann taught men to see this; but he taught them, also, to understand it by putting before them the evolution of art, by making not the finished object, but its growth, the subject of investigation. For the first time, the laws of organic life were applied to a realism of creative activity. What the task of history is, and that the comprehension of any object must be an historical one,—that Winckelmann fixed once for all."

In this, then, lay his greatness. Winckelmann discovered the idea of style, which had hitherto been known, indeed, in its naïve application, but not with conscious clearness. Even Vico had distinguished only three stages. Winckelmann took up seriously the idea of organic life. For style is that which shows a definite, historic, collective personality, people or school, age or generation, with inner necessity in all the manifestations of its life; and inner necessity is found only where there is organic life. "Beside the critic Lessing," says Erich Schmidt, "place Winckelmann, the seer, intoxicated with beauty, who has fructified the history of literature, as well as that of the plastic art, by the watchword of Style, which shows, amid the confusion of details, connection, school, development."

What is the meaning of this magic word "style"? in what does its marvel consist?

Ancient æsthetics talked of "style" and "styles." Aristotle and Cicero knew that a lofty and a lowly style could be distinguished; that one style was adapted to tragedy, another to comedy, a third to denunciation, as, for instance, to a plea

before a court. But this was always understood to mean a mode of expression belonging to a definite species, as it were, native to it. It had as yet dawned on no one that style was the organic expression of individual quality, and that it sprang as necessarily from definite individual or collective personalities as the rose, and the rose only, from the rose-bush. Even Buffon's famous saying, "Le style c'est l'homme," has a wholly different meaning. In this lies the theoretical significance of the concept "style." To it corresponds its practical worth.

The demand that each individual part of the great whole be put before us, is justified only by the fact that there are certain powerful forces diffused through this same whole. Were this not the case, the consideration of the immediate environment of the artist or the work of art would be enough: the friends, patrons, teachers who influenced the artist, the conditions under which the work arose. But this is not enough. Certain great forces are present, sometimes evident, oftener invisible, which influence all the artists or all the works of an epoch. These find their expression in style. Sometimes we can state clearly how they find expression; for instance, Winckelmann used the phrase, valid for a certain period of ancient art,-" noble simplicity and calm grandeur." More often we can attain only the feeling, not the definite formula, of that in which the stylistic character consists, just as certain persons always make on us the same impression, which, nevertheless, we cannot formulate.

Style, then, is the intermediary between our view of the whole and of the single case. It enables us to realize from the individual phenomenon the character of the whole epoch to which that phenomenon belongs; it calls up in our memories before each separate work kindred phenomena and the whole art of the time. In this lies the immense importance of the conception for art and for the history of literature. It has been developed, analyzed, and equipped with a mass of detailed proofs, chiefly by Germans, like the æsthetic critic F. T. Vischer and the architect Semper. But among all nations it has become the indispensable tool of all historical criticism. Only since Winck