guishes it sharply from historical truth-what has happened. The reason or the artistic sense must determine the boundaries of poetic truth. We may be very sure that no Greek would ever have thought of studying the manners of the "barbarians" in order to arrive at universal truth. With Montaigne we meet a very different conception. He would. have been very distrustful of any universal truth reached by the Greek method. He must needs consult the Cannibals, and ferret out the strangest tales told by Herodotus and Pliny. The more variety the better. One is not a "doctor of relativity" for nothing. Montaigne would arrive at his universal truth by the collection and comparison of particular truth. Of course he distinguishes between idle details-how many steps lead to the Santa Rotunda-and observations of lasting value, as the humors and manners of a foreign people, but he had, as it were, a great card catalogue of (more or less) historical truth. His direct observation and his reading augmented this catalogue, and from it he drew his quintessence. He seeks to discover the universal through the particular, following an inductive method in contrast to Aristotle's deduction.

Men trained in the school of Montaigne were to shape the seventeenth century in France. The idea of the universal as the goal for the individual's striving is constantly met in classic French literature. Every man sought to make of himself a concrete and living embodiment of the universal. But Montaigne's world-wide quest for the elements of universal truth was narrowed sharply. The sense of the otherwiseness of things disappeared before the conception of the esssential uniformity of the human race. The lives of a few men, it was believed, summed up, even composed history. They were sent by God as leaders and models for humanity. The individual existed only in so far as he conformed to the norm. In society, in literature, in religion itself, there was a representative ideal, and any personal eccentricity was doomed to ridicule and annihilation. Katharsis, for the contemporaries of Louis XIV, was to view themselves in the mirror of his court.-On another plane, Pascal, in one of the

Pensées that rings with Montaigne: "Let man but contemplate universal nature in her high and full majesty, etc.,' would purge men of their self conceit by bidding them compare themselves with the universe.

We find Montaigne's influence again in the eighteenth century with its effort to counteract individual idiosyncrasy by the vulgarisation of the omne scibile. I shall cite a single example, chosen because it at once echoes Montaigne and attempts to interpret the seventeenth century in the light of eighteenth century thought. At the end of a long discussion of the religious disputes caused by Calvinists and Jansenists, Voltaire writes: "It would be very useful for those who are fanatically plunged in all these quarrels to cast their eyes on the general history of the world; for, observing so many nations, so many manners, so many different religions, they would realize what a poor figure a Molinist and a Jansenist cut upon the earth. They would blush then at their frenzy for a faction which is lost in the crowd and immensity of things."-Surely Voltaire is one of the founders of our modern conception of the philosophy of history, of which the latest phase is the present day passion for outlines of universal history. May I venture to recall that H. G. Wells, in the preface to his volume says: "A sense of history as the common adventure of all mankind is as necessary to peace within as it is for peace between the nations."

Wells does not mention Mme de Staël and yet she is one of his predecessors. I would link her too in the Aristotelian tradition which, under guidance of Montaigne, I have tried to show across the ages. She sought a "European mind" in contradistinction to a French or a German or an English mind. I am not concerned now with the final results of the quest for universal understanding which Mme de Staël sought, or with the outcome of the attempt at universal sympathy which many of her less intellectual followers substituted. But we have here, in essence, an appeal to a universal truth to correct individual, provincial or national littleness of spirit. The Montaigne tradition is strongly marked in a

famous passage from her book on Literature: "The nations should serve as guides to each other, and all would be wrong to deprive themselves of the light which they can mutually offer each other. There is something very remarkable in the differences of peoples; climate, the aspect of nature, language, government, and above all, historical events-a power even more extraordinary than all the others contribute to these differences. Hence no man, however superior he may be, can guess what is developing naturally in the mind of one who lives upon another soil and breathes a different air. Every traveller may then profit by absorbing foreign thought, for, in this matter, hospitality makes the fortune of him who receives it."

In all these writers and in countless others I would see some application of the Aristotelian theory of katharsis. Aristotle sought an aesthetic and ennobling emotion from the confrontation of the individual with abstract, absolute truth made concrete in tragedy. Montaigne generalized the idea and sought a rational education by rubbing and trying himself against men of all times and races. He has left his mark upon succeeding generations. The later classicists sought polish and balance by cultivating in themselves the representative man. Mme de Staël and the men of to-day seek to further the brotherhood of man by a bond of universal sympathy based upon universal understanding. All are seeking katharsis of troublesome elements in the individual.

To return to my starting point-a bit of literary criticism. I would suggest that katharsis has another application which we might profit by to-day. Let us try it as hellebore to treat the rampant impressionism. Suppose we suggest to the critic, prone to relate the adventures of his soul among masterpieces, that he test his judgments in the light of the verdict of the ages; or, if the masterpiece be contemporary, that he apply as touchstone to his own judgment principles supported by the approbation of thinking men since the beginning of criticism. Let us recall La Rochefoucauld's maxim: "On peut être plus fin qu'un autre, mais non pas plus fin que tous les autres."

NAVAHO POETRY: AN INTERPRETATION

BY EDA LOU WALTON

An appreciation of Navaho song presupposes an appreciation of the Navahoes; an understanding of the quiet simplicity and dignity of the life of these nature-people leads inev. itably to a deeper understanding of Navaho song. People and song are one. Out of the living tribal spirit springs the significant expression of that spirit. Along the steady flow of days lived near to nature, little springs of clear, poetic thought bubble up, invigorating the bordering land, swelling the stream.

For the Navaho Indian, life is serious, but not puzzling; significant but not ponderous. Unto each day for him sufficient is the evil and beauty thereof. He is a natural mystic; yet he is inclined to love the orderliness of ritualization. Through his ritual he arrives at a mechanical adjustment to his environment; through his vision, his adjustment is made beautiful. Two such forces, the power of mystic vision and the tendency to ritualize, when functioning strongly in one race, may be involved in a conflict that is destructive to art, or in a reconciliation that is conducive to its development. The reconciliation of mysticism and institutionalism is the dominant characteristic of the Navaho people.

Navaho mysticism springs from a love of Nature. These people living the nomadic lives of herders, moving across the mesas in small groups from place to place are in constant communion with nature. They know her in her many moods. They worship the Sun-Bearer, who brings them light and heat, Male Water-the San Juan River-and Female Waterthe Rio Grande-because they make verdant their desert lands. The natural and the supernatural are for the Navaho Indian, but two phases of one manifestation. The natural has supernatural power and the supernatural is constantly present even in the milder moods of the natural. Hence, the

Navahoes are true mystics; mystics who live and dwell in the mystic vision.

That they seek this vision at its highest is certain. It is to impart and re-live the realization of the mystic vision that ritualization exists; it is for this that these people sing, dance, and carry through elaborate ceremonies. But it is also certain that the realization of the mystic vision comes to the Navahoes individually, comes easily into their daily lives; that almost always they are intensely aware of dwelling in a god-inhabited world where the god-moment occurs with great frequency. It occurs most naturally in the presence of natural beauty; for a nature people is more susceptible to the mysticism which is a part of nature worship than to the more artificially produced forms such as self-torture and fasting. However, because they have learned to yearn for and to desire the moment of exaltation in which god-contact is realized, the Navahoes, like the Christian mystics, have learned to produce this exaltation by mental concentration, by prayer and fasting. These things become a part of ritual, and ritual exists altogether for the purpose of attaining the feeling of god-nearness, the result of which will be beneficial to the sick and well alike. Because they are natural mystics, then, the Navahoes are ritualistic; through ritualization they attain the consummation of contact with the more than natural.

It is not true, however, that all peoples who are by instinct mystic-and this would take in many of the more primitive races are ritualistic. The gap between the supernatural and the natural may be bridged by other means than religious ritual. It may be bridged by magic, or there may be no gap at all. People who are truly "prelogical" in Levy Bruhl's sense of the word, never distinguish between the concrete and the spiritual. To them a tree is, at one and the same time, a tree and a tree-spirit. But when in a people there are two tendencies functioning in racial progress-the tendency to enjoy exaltation and the tendency to order-then