Since he is dead who once was so alive, And all is living that in life he saw, His written words provoke in me an awe And wonder if he still unseen doth thrive— His inmost being true to life and law. LOST JOY. Whence joy came I do not know, But she left me long ago; In a heart that still is free She abides—and loves not me. EDWIN R. CHAMPLIN. WHERE IS LITERATURE AT? At any time the sight of a Don Quixote leveling an earnest lance at a mill is inspiring, hence a book called _Degeneration_, by one Max Simon Nordau, is worthy of attention. The book has been discussed pro and con as fully as it deserved. If not forgotten it is reserved for another generation to adjudicate its value. Enough that it has stirred up a valiant mess, out of which can come nothing but good. As a whole it is worthless—it might well have been written by a son of Robert Elsmere and Mrs. Nickelby—for the mosaic of clever observation is wrought into a most grotesque picture. The perception of Mr. Nordau is fine, but his perspective is absurdly jumbled. The premises, logical enough, are made to form an absurd conclusion—yet the half-truths in the book are well worthy of note. Genius was an abnormality long before Nordau found it out from Lombroso. Granted that everybody who has risen above the dead level of mediocrity is a maniac, let us head the list with Jesus of Nazareth. But does that detract from the value of their work or the good of their mission? Moses may have had asymmetrical ears, and Blind Homer been possessed with all sorts of mental afflictions. That is not the point. What Mr. Nordau does show us is that the literature of this decade is self conscious and that it is marked in general by a hopeless lack of unity. Not that these facts were discovered by the captious German: Good lack, they are apparent enough, but he has surely emphasized them. And the object of this is to say a say about the present non-importance of modern literature’s self consciousness and its lack of unity. When one talks with a decrier of modernity, when our ears are stuffed with the prattle about self consciousness, should there be an attempt to say a word it is met with a flaunting statement about Homer. Homer is undeniably the great unsullied spring, the rock struck in the desert which pours forth a clear limpid stream. But the example does not serve. If Homer is pristine he is also primeval. Self consciousness in these days means nothing less than that one comprehends in part that momentous question of where we are at. Underlying which it means that it has a realizing sense of battles to fight and wrongs to retrieve. Marry and up, we might all be Homers had literature no past. The past is a millstone that has hung around the neck of many a sturdy man.