ences to a college graduate as having finished his education are beginning to fall strangely on our ears. The spread of this very important idea of education as a thing continuous and unceasing can be most effectively helped, however, by emphasizing on every occasion the relation between scholastic training and business or recreation. It is too much to expect that a man either exceedingly busy or rather indolent will, of his own volition, pursue further the investigation of school subjects which seem to him at best to be merely decorative and at worst to lack even that doubtful merit. The only hope of making education, as it should be, the primary concern of the community lies in showing ordinary citizens how they can find in school books the answers to their ordinary problems.

In some cases, of course, and for some subjects it is difficult to demonstrate a direct useful application. Recourse must then be had to indirect methods and to that emphasis of the real and surprising unity of the curriculum to which extended allusion has already been made. For example, every man engaged in business, whether his rank be high or low, has a natural interest in present business and financial conditions and future prospects. Business conditions here depend, in a large and growing degree, on foreign trade opportunities. Those opportunities depend on the political and economic status of the foreign states, and a clear understanding of their politics can only be based on knowledge of their history. The interpretation of history, in turn, drags in geology and climate, racial variations and linguistic differences, and so on almost without limit. The links that bind these multifarious branches of knowledge together are no finespun webs of theories, but are very real and palpable chains of mutual and successive causes and effects. When American teachers begin definitely to center their attention on such chains as these, treating them as veritable life lines, a new vista of opportunity for service will open before our secondary schools.

EDWARD P. WARNER.

A BACKWATER OF ROMANTICISM

BY ARNOLD WHITRIDGE

THE Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, one of the most unsavory streets of Old Paris, no longer exists except in the lithographs of Gustave Doré and Celestin Nanteuil. Its place is now occupied by the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt. No one regrets its disappearance, for it had no claim on the affections of antiquarians. It was famous, or rather notorious, for only one thing-the suicide of Gérard de Nerval. On the morning of February 26, 1855, a man was seen hanging from one of the lower windows of a sordid rooming house. If the first passer-by had been quick enough, he might still have found traces of life, but by the time the gendarmes arrived it was too late. There was nothing to do but cut down the body, send it to the Morgue, and search the pockets for identification. Who was it? Evidently an author, a dreamer of strange dreams to judge from the manuscript found on him, one who had known the inside of a parently been allowed out too soon. Gautier recognized the body as that no reason to suppose that he was the victim of foul play. Gérard had no enemies beyond his own dreams, and besides, his thoughts were known to have been running along dangerous channels for a long time. The very letters in his pocket told of an impulse to throw himself into the Seine, and obviously when the suicidal mania attacked him again he had succumbed. Romanticism, the longing for the unknown and the invisible, had reached its logical conclusion.

maison de santé and had apLater in the day Théophile of le bon Gérard. There is

"Dans l'armée romantique," says Théophile Gautier, "comme dans l'armée d'Italie tout le monde était jeune." Napoleon was only twenty-six when he led his ragged soldiers into the plains of Lombardy; Victor Hugo was under thirty when he rocked the literary world with Hernani. Without pressing the parallel too far, it is surely not fantastic to see some resemblance between the

promised land of Italy and the rich pastures of romanticism. Granted the brilliant leadership, both could be won by enthusiasm and courage, but in neither case could assistance be expected from the outside. If the Army of Italy succeeded, it was not thanks to the wiseacres in the Directory, nor was Victor Hugo indebted to any literary patron for his victory over the outworn forms of classicism.

In the year 1830 France was blessed or cursed, according to the point of view, with a bourgeois King. Louis Philippe walked about the streets in plain clothes, carried an aggressively plebeian umbrella, and wore a shabby hat pulled down over his eyes. If he had been acting the part of a commercial traveller in private theatricals he could not have succeeded better. It was a bold bid for popularity, but it showed a pitiful ignorance of national psychology. The generation that had been, as Musset puts it, conçus entre deux batailles, élevés aux roulements des tambours," was not likely to be fascinated by an insignificant little man who clutched at his horse's mane with one hand while returning the salute with the other. Is it to be wondered at that the young men born during the Consulate and the Empire should have inherited an appetite for glory? And is it surprising that with their splendid heritage of adventure they were not content to follow the great high roads of tradition?

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In the 'thirties youth was almost a synonym for extravagance. Epater les bourgeois" was the dearest wish of every young man who felt a spark of genius within him. To be sure, it was not a very difficult task. Gautier's crimson waistcoat, Victor Hugo's preface to Cromwell, announcing his adherence to Shakespeare rather than to Racine-these were the things that shocked the sensibilities of the whole community. Night after night the Théâtre Français went into an uproar over the line, "Est-il minuit? Minuit bientôt." The idea of a King asking what time it was in the very words a shopkeeper might use was preposterous. And then the reply, "Minuit bientôt," who ever heard of a rustic answering a King so informally? To us it is almost incredible that such excitement should have been aroused over the minutiæ of form. Indeed it is not easy to understand the overwhelming success of Hernani. The story of that eventful first

night has repeatedly been told, and never better than by Gautier in his History of Romanticism. How Victor Hugo scorned the support of a paid claque, how his own friends and admirers, headed by young Gautier, thronged into the pit and gallery hours before the performance was supposed to begin, and sat there munching sandwiches, humming the lyrics of their master, and in every possible way outraging the feelings of the bons bourgeois, suffers no loss of picturesqueness in Gautier's reminiscences. But there were others besides Gautier. Petrus Borel, with his long silky beard, in itself an outrage to society, and a young poet named Gérard de Nerval. What happened during those twentyodd years between the first night of Hernani and the tragedy in the Rue de la Vieille Lanterne? In 1830 Gérard Labrunie, as he was then known, was one of the most enviable young men in Paris. He had published several volumes of poetry before leaving school, and his translation of Faust had received a very genuine compliment from Goethe himself. "I have never understood myself so well," he wrote to the young poet, "as in reading your translation." At the College Charlemagne, where his father had sent him to school, he was equally beloved by masters and students. His father was probably the one cloud in his horizon. Labrunie, or rather Dr. Labrunie, for he had been a médecin majeur in the Grande Armée, did not look with sympathy on his son's literary successes. He would have liked him to be a diplomat or a doctor, instead of which the boy was steeping himself in German mysticism. Perhaps if Madame Labrunie had lived, he might have understood his son better, but she died of a fever at the time of the Retreat from Moscow, leaving the boy at the age of five to the kindly but inflexible old doctor.

For the first few years of his life Gérard Labrunie led a delightful, Arcadian existence in the village of Loisy in Valois. Perhaps he suffered afterwards from the almost exclusively feminine society of those early days, for he was brought up by his aunt and his only companions were her daughters and their friends; but he was still a child when his father came home from the wars and took him away to Paris. He was not so young, however, as to forget his beloved Valois. During the holidays he went back regularly to renew the old friendships, and in par

ticular to see Sylvie, with whom he had kept up a running flirtation ever since they had dressed up as "des mariés du vieux temps" for the delectation of an old grandmother. Eventually she married a pastry-cook, but that made no difference in Gérard's feelings for her. He was always falling in love in a delicate imaginative way with women who were incapable of understanding his emotions. That they all married some one else was of little importance. The tragedy lay in his own habit of etherealizing the ladies of his affection regardless of the fact that to the rest of the world they were very obviously mere flesh and blood. But in those early days, after leaving the College Charlemagne, the memories of Sylvie did not claim all Gérard's attention. The question of his career had not yet been decided. To gratify his father he tried medicine for two years, but his heart was never in it. Luckily he inherited a small fortune, which enabled him to gratify his bent for writing without leaning too heavily on his father's generosity. These were the golden years of his life when he lived with Arsène Houssaye, the author of the charming Confessions, and Camille Rogier, the etcher, in the Rue Doyenné. Next door was Théophile Gautier, who had been a devoted friend ever since they had sat together on the same bench at school. Gautier was still hovering between literature and painting, as indeed was Camille Rogier. Never before had the dividing line between the arts appeared so indistinct. After all, as long as they expressed themselves, the medium adopted, whether it were brush or pen, was comparatively unimportant.

To a close observer it might have been evident that Gérard was not tarred with quite the same brush as his companions. He was determined to be more sane. The flaunting banner of eccentricity under which they were so proud to fight he had long since discarded. His clothes were as inconspicuous as possible. Apparently it was his desire to look more or less like other people, for he affected neither the insolence of the dandy nor the truculence of the bohemian. Even in literature it would seem that his chief desire was to pass unnoticed, for he did not even sign his own name to his articles. The "Nerval," which had been adopted on account of a fancied descent from the Roman EmDeror Nerva, gave place to a variety of pseudonyms. At one