is not a philological problem: it is a practical one, and the assertions of the committee run contrary to plain facts. Had the committee looked for a moment at a language map of Europe, they would have discovered that "uneducated or imperfectly educated individuals" are not at all in the same position as our own common people, who live in a huge and compact English-speaking community. If you trace a circle two hundred miles in diameter with Vienna, Prague or Warsaw as a center, you will find six or seven languages represented within that small area. In Bielostok, Zamenhof's birthplace, Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews each spoke different idioms; in Salonica and its immediate hinterland, we find Greek and Turkish, Albanian, Rumanian (spoken by the Kutzo-Wallachs), the various Macedonian dialects shading from Serbian to Bulgarian; whilst the commercial class speaks a Spanish brand of Yiddish, with French as a culture language. In many parts of France, there are seasonal migrations bringing in large numbers of Italians, Flemings, and even Poles. The crazy patchwork of states, races, languages, and economic interests in Europe makes complete segregation into homogeneous units a Utopian dream. The common man will have to meet other common men who do not speak his language. Not only is the need a real one: but the desire for an auxiliary language has become very active and conscious among the masses of Europe. The Esperanto and Ido movements have found their strength rather in "the common run of mankind” than among the elite. The desire of the masses will have to be considered: a fact that the aristocrats of culture may deplore, but which they must recognize.

No doubt it would be safer if plain people would always entrust their destinies to scholars and gentlemen. But they show an unaccountable desire to transact their own business through leaders selected from themselves. French and Italian labor unions, for instance, have already, on several occasions, debated together their common interests: they might conceivably wish to be represented at such meetings by actual

labor men risen from the rank, instead of turning their case over to an authority on Propertius. A generation ago, it would have been unthinkable for a man who did not belong to the old political oligarchies, who had not rubbed his shoulders on the hallowed stones of Oxford and Cambridge, who could not speak the language of diplomacy, to rule the British Empire: yet such a portent has appeared in David Lloyd George. His successor may be a Laborite: was not William II replaced by a saddler? Democracy is making appalling strides! Labor organizations, big corporations, even ancient countries with a storied past, may be led by selfmade men, who could not learn Latin when they were lads, and will not start that most difficult study in middle life. Classical Latin, stately and intricate, belongs to the days of spacious leisure-days for which every scholar must feel nostalgic yearnings, but which are gone beyond recall. In our leveling and hurried age, it is as undemocratic as the elaborate etiquette of ancient Versailles.

The classical philologists may yet render the world a service of inestimable value. Instead of sulking under their tents, or offering wares which they know the masses can not afford to buy, they should take the lead in presenting us a boldly simplified form of Latin, acceptable to "the common run of mankind." They should be called upon to select and to define the roots and affixes of a new "Interlingua." Out of the rich fund common to Latin, the Romance languages and literary English, they could evolve, not a purely artificial speech, but a standardized, a synthetic one. Such a piece of "constructive linguistics" would call for all the knowledge and fine discrimination of the best trained specialists.

If they refuse to help, the triumph of a rough and ready solution is inevitable. And such a solution, which they have denounced in advance as "repellent because of its uncouthness" has already made such headway that statesmen, captains of production, scientists, and even philologists are beginning to consider it with favor. Who knows but a rough and ready scheme will not prove the most adequate for our rough

and tumble world? Esperanto may seem strange and even grotesque to fastidious eyes-although not half so strange as Polish or Hungarian are to a Westerner-but it has a wonderful point in its favor: it is alive! We have already exceeded the space allotted us, and can not embark upon the vast subject of artificial languages. But we should like to close with a word of warning to scholars and scientists: Esperanto and its rivals exist. They are not empty schemes to be dismissed with a shrug, or even to be discussed on purely theoretical grounds: they are facts, of vast and ever increasing importance. Who ever dares to write on the subject without a thorough investigation is proving false to his scholarly standards. The League of Nations, the International Research Council, the leading scientific societies in Europe and America, are looking into these facts: philologists should not lag behind.

KATHARSIS AGAIN

BY BENJAMIN MATHER WOODBRIDGE

Professor Noyes' essay on "Katharsis in Literature and in Life" (Sewanee Review, October-December, 1921) seeks to point out larger applications of Aristotle's theory than those usually attributed to it. "Whatever eradicates morbidity, selfconsciousness, egoistic feeling of any type, produces a katharsis that is cousin-germain to the tragic katharsis of Aristotle." Professor Noyes finds possibilities of such an effect in literature other than tragedy, in the fine arts, in nature and in everyday experience. The essay is a pregnant one and sent me back to Butcher's admirable rendering of the Poetics and to his commentary. For Butcher blazed the trail; he interpreted Aristotle, showing the trend of the unfinished thought of the Poetics. He is distinctly on his guard against the intrusion of modern ideas which might vitiate his elucidation; he would perhaps declare utterly foreign to the thought of Aristotle both the essay of Professor Noyes and these notes. I hasten to state, therefore, that I am not supposing any influence, direct or indirect, of Aristotelian thought on the men whom I shall quote. I shall be at pains to point out certain profound differences between Aristotle's conception of the function of tragedy and more or less similar ideas. applied to widely different subjects. But I would suggest that the aesthetic emotion afforded by tragedy-the purging of the soul by pity and terror-has a parallel in modern times, and that while commentators were puzzling over the meaning of the teasing phrase, the principle, as we understand it, was used in the most useful of arts, education. I am encouraged in my attempt by such statements as this, not uncommon in Butcher's commentary: "Yet-as is often the case with Aristotle's saying-it [the formula proposed for the character of the tragic hero] contains a profound truth, and a capacity for adaptation beyond what was immediately present to the mind of the writer."

Tragedy, Aristotle implies, raises men out of and above

themselves by confrontation with a generalized truth. Just how this is accomplished may be shown by further quotation from Butcher. The tragic hero "is raised above us in external dignity and station The pressure of immediate reality is removed; we are not painfully reminded of the cares of our material existence The tragic emotions. are disengaged from the petty interests of self, and are on their way to being universalized. . The spectator

quits the narrow sphere of the individual. He identifies himself with the fate of mankind. We are here brought back to Aristotle's theory of poetry as a representation of the universal. . . . The characters it [tragedy] depicts, the actions or fortunes of the persons with whom it acquaints us, possess a typical and universal value."

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If now, as Butcher holds, this line of argument is the natural outcome of Aristotle's theories, even though he has not clearly expressed it, the way is open for a still wider application. That "all the world's a stage" is a literary commonplace. Montaigne quotes with approval Pythagoras' remark that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, where some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize; others bring merchandise to sell for profit; there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge and regulate their own." And how would Montaigne use the spectacle? As we read the rest of the paragraph we see that he would seek there the expulsion of individual vanity and self importance. "This great world . . is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most attention. So many humors, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions, laws and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which is no trivial speculation. So many mutations of states and