the evils. Temptation (to take the examples just used) exists for us only so long as we desire holiness; we should be unaware of our weakness did we not long for strength; only the lover can experience loneliness; and we can fail only so long as we try to succeed. The animals, as Walt Whitman keenly says, are neither respectable nor unhappy; for having no ideals, they cannot fall short. "The conscious ills which beset our fortune," writes Professor Royce, "are in a large measure due to the very magnitude and ideality of our undertakings themselves, to the very loftiness of our purposes, and even to the very presence of our active control over our deeds. For all these more ideal aspects of our consciousness mean that we set our standard high, and strive beyond the present more ardently. And in such cases our ideals actually imply our present dissatisfaction, and so contribute to our consciousness of temporal ill." It is true, then, in a very real sense, that our ideal aims not only react to modify the nature of evils, but actually produce some of the most significant evils we experience. Even so, we have seen, the melodies in a piece of music not only influence our attitude toward the dissonances they encounter in their progress, but actually create these dissonances by following out their chosen paths. They must, as melodies, be significant, interesting, thematic; and that involves many momentary complexities of harmony. Our ideals, in their turn, make high demands upon us, demands which often bring us into painful conflict with our environment. Ideals, then, create and justify the sort of evil we have called ethical, just as melodies create and justify disso

nance.

Finally, the ethical evil thus created and justified by ideal aims reacts to give these aims an immensely increased vitality. And here we touch at last upon a peculiarity of ethical as opposed to external evil, which has, more strikingly than any other, suggested the analogy with musical dissonance. Dissonance, we saw,

was a harshness or complexity, resulting from the carrying out of melodic purposes, which in turn actually stimulated and vitalized those purposes. Similarly, are not ethical evils those birth pangs of the spirit which, primarily caused by the conflict between our ideal aims and our circumstances, end by impelling us all the more irresistibly along our path, filling us with a new and immeasurable vitality? Do not the very obstacles to our progress develop in us a strength by which we not only overleap them, but are prompted to seek worthier goals? Is not our very ignorance of the final issues of life, pathetic as it is from one point of view, the condition of a courage which could not be so noble if it fought no fears? Does not the dignity of our faith depend on the limitation of our knowledge? The more we study the facts of our inner life, the more convinced we must become that our misfortunes and our sufferings, be they only clearly understood and firmly handled, are the sources of new moral momentum in us; that they initiate and foster our ideal aims, unfolding before us like a panorama new consummations and fulfillments.

Are there then, nevertheless, no such things as blind and fatal evils, unamenable to character, wholly stubborn to ideal uses? Not absolutely, perhaps; bu relatively there surely are, as we know to our sorrow. We constantly do encounter evils we cannot comprehend, evils which for us are opaque, diabolic, and disastrous. To trace the relation of such evils to spiritual life would mean to delve deeply in the researches of metaphysics, to define types of consciousness both higher and lower than the human, and to see whether what is for us fatal and terrible may not be for these other minds necessary and right. But this we cannot attempt. We can here only suggest that, harsh as much of our experience irremediably is, we are ever, with surprised delight, discovering in it, now here and now there, supposed discords that on further acquaintance turn out to be dis

sonances. Who can tell where the process will end? So long as our evil remains external it is, alas, an accident, a chaos, a prank of destiny; but once let it be perceived as in a relation to our inner purposes, even if only in the relation of an enemy that may be conquered, and it is won over, reclaimed, domesticated. Our one skill, then, in life as in art, is the skill to perceive; and the great business of our lives is the training of perception. The one irremediable misfortune is to be blind; the one ever serviceable technique is insight.

If, therefore, our conceptions of dissonance and of evil depend in so large a measure on our intelligence, on our power to penetrate their tissue and hold clearly in mind the aims which justify them, should we not expect these conceptions to change from age to age and from individual to individual, reflecting accurately various stages of training and faculty? The answer is definite enough on the musical side, if somewhat problematic on the ethical. Nothing in musical history is more surprising than the constant unfolding of the power to discriminate dissonance from discord. When men first combined tones together they could tolerate hardly any interval harsher than the octave, the fifth, and the fourth. Gradually the thirds and sixths were introduced, but with many strict regulations and conditions. Even in Mozart's time the third was often omitted from the final chord of a composition, as too opposed to the sense of restfulness desired; and Bach generally ends his fugues written

in minor keys, not with the minor third, but with the less dissonant major interval. Beethoven horrified his contemporaries by the harsh combinations he delighted in, and Schumann and Wagner have accustomed our ears to sounds that would have seemed quite intolerable to Palestrina, if not even to Haydn. All this means that as the musical perceptions of men gradually became sharpened they learned to hold clearly in mind combinations of tone constantly more complex, and to perceive their relations and functions so clearly that they could tolerate greater and greater momentary harshness, so long as it was felt as necessary to melodic progress, and useful to melodic vitality. In our own day the development is more rapid than ever, and no man can say where it will stop.

When we turn to the history of ethics the analogous process is harder to trace. Certainly, however, the lesson taught by the greatest moralists, from Marcus Aurelius down to Maeterlinck, is that happiness springs not from pleasure or the avoidance of discomfort, but from self-mastery and the unfolding of the inner powers. There are still, and probably always will be, those who can conceive human progress only as a gain in material welfare; but, on the whole, the consensus of feeling seems to be more and more moving toward a moral or idealistic interpretation of life, and men are slowly learning that evil is to be controlled and spiritualized rather than abolished, and that it is possible to be happy without being comfortable.

A BLOWING September day of sunshine and high-piled white clouds greeted us as we stepped out on the platform of Alton Station. We were just escaped from a week of London fog and London mud, and the country air smelt sweet, freshened as it was by the wind driving in from the sea, twenty miles of lowland and down away. The hunt for an inn, lunch, and the hiring of a team detained us but a short hour, and it was hardly more than midday when we drove down the high street of the little town, famed in White's day for its manufactures by "the people called Quakers," on our way to Selborne. It had rained steadily for six days, mossing the roofs of farm-buildings with a green as deep as that of the lush pastures. In the hollow lanes pools of water still lay, rippled and glittering with wind and sun. From the high hedges, blown dry hours since, chiff-chaffs said their simple say persistently, white-throats lifted themselves in dizzy spirals, singing excitedly, and from all sides came indiscriminate snatches of song, surprising at the time of year, but confirmatory of old Gilbert's testimony that in Hampshire bird-song is not over by midsummer.

We were soon among the hopfields, in which scores of men and women and children were busy harvesting,- Londoners drawn all the fifty miles by promise of the high pay, villagers from far and near, and gypsies from everywhere. The gayly painted vans of the wanderers stood in sheltered roadsides that offered a stretch of grass for their horses, but all were now deserted by everybody but the oldest women and the children too young to harvest. A very respectable lot nowadays, the gypsies, our driver told us, not given to pilfering and drink as the Londoners.

Hills had been before us to the south

east almost from our start, but it was not until our guide told us that Selborne was only a mile away, and I knew the farm we were passing must be Norton Farm, that I felt sure that these hills must be the Hanger and Nore Hill. It is downhill from Norton Farm to "the small rivulet" at the northwest end of the village, the one that, even in this rainy spot, frequently fails, as I know from the Natural History of Selborne. A sharp climb and we are in the quaint old village of thatched and timbered cottages. This open space to the left is, for sure, the Plestor, - from the point of view at which our dog-cart stops, hardly changed from the print of it in the quarto of 1813. From this old cut and many readings in the Natural History, I had for years pictured to myself Selborne; now the reality was before me, to prove very like the picture, but far better. The village, as White says in his accurate eighteenth-century way, "consists of one single straggling street, three quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered vale, and running parallel to the Hanger." It is hardly larger now than it was when he wrote, and, while changed, in essentials is the Selborne he knew. We had scarcely stopped when our driver pointed out, to the right and farther down the street, the Wakes, the naturalist's home for so many years and the birthplace of the Natural History. I should not have recognized it, for the old prints I was familiar with represented it from its own lawn, and, indeed, even from that point of view it is hardly now recognizable, so much has it been added to since his day.

We were not granted admission to the house, for it was then in the hands of those who, humanly enough, wished it entirely to themselves and discouraged all pilgrimages. A little later it was for sale, and the lovers of the Natural His

tory trying to raise by public subscription the amount necessary to purchase it for the world, as Wordsworth's Dove Cottage had been purchased. But the effort failed, and it passed again into private ownership. We were admitted to its "outlet,' as Gilbert White, somewhat provincially, perhaps, for a Fellow of Oriel, called the lawns that lie between his house and the fields under the Hanger, lawns that he was always dividing anew with paths, or breaking with hahas, or clearing of shrubberies to open up new vistas of the Hanger, or of Baker's Hill. It was the day of the triumphs of William Kent, and White was an interested experimenter with the new landscape art. Here in his "outlet" we saw an oak that it is said he planted, though in its size and dilapidated age it looks older; his veritable sundial; the circle of trees grown up about the site of his summer-house. As we looked out over the fields "stiff clay (good wheat land)" that lie between the Wakes and the Hanger, admiring the beechen covert of the hill and the quiet of this typical English country home, it was not difficult to restore in imagination what it all was like in his day. That is the same wood of beeches hanging on the steep chalk hill; these the same fields, although they are now not plough land, but pastures; this was just such a September sun as ripened his grapes; these cumulus clouds above us were just such as rolled up from the Channel over the Hampshire downs, his "vast mountains" three hundred feet high, in the first autumn of his permanent establishment in the Wakes, one hundred and fifty-seven years ago [1902]. We can well imagine his content when, in 1763, the Wakes came into his own hands, the comfortable house with its little fat acreage behind, and the flutter his inheritance must have caused among the ladies of the neighborhood; for this is Jane Austen's as well as Gilbert White's country.

As we looked at the Wakes from the lawn we could pick out the gables of the

house that White fell heir to among the many gables of the present structure; these timbered cottages to the right were his neighbors'; that church tower to the left rose over the church he ministered to so faithfully the last nine years of his life, the very church tower where he observed so closely the breeding habits of the swifts. It comes to me to think of his ministry before his observation of natural history as my eyes fall on the tower, for I have always held it proven that, although he was an absentee from Moreton-Pinkney, as curate of Faringdon and afterwards of Selborne he thought of himself as pastor and then as naturalist. How any one who knows his letters can believe him slipshod in his clerical duties I am at a loss to understand, so intiImate is he with the affairs of all in his neighborhood, peasant to gentry, and so solicitous is he for their welfare. He doubtless did preach the same sermon thirty-six times, but he never preached it in the same place more than once a year, and generally only once in two. Let the guiltless among the clergymen, his critics, cast the first stone. He buried the dead to the satisfaction of their relatives, not a little feat in a small country village, and he married couples when they asked him to, and sometimes when they did not, if he thought them better wed.

It is an Old-World, leisured life that he led, this country clergyman, a very happy life, for all that he grew deaf in his last years; and the secret of the popularity of his book, that has gone through almost as many editions as there are years since it was published in 1789, seems to me to rest more on the leisure and content and happiness it wins the reader to share, than on any other of its many attracting qualities. But it was not this quality that, almost a century after its publication, so interested a boy of ten far off in America, that he laid out on the garret floor a plan of Selborne. The Hanger at its back was a horsehide trunk, its flanking streams were formed each of two sides of a quilting frame, and

Dorton Priory below their junction was a ruined Noah's Ark. He played hunting for churn-owl eggs on the Hanger slopes, and made excursions far out of the charmed triangle to play dredging for Roman coins in Woolmer Pond, or digging old Timothy the Tortoise out of his sleeping-place in the Ringmer garden. Churn-owl eggs he had first chosen for play-hunting because there was something he liked in the word "churn-owl;" it was of impressive sound and mysterious; then he looked up churn-owl in the encyclopædia, and found it was a bird like his well-known nighthawk and often-sought whippoorwill, and he played the game with renewed zest. The boy had once picked up an Indian arrowhead along the Delaware. Treasuretrove was treasure-trove, whether of Marcus Aurelius or of the Lenni-Lenapes, and there was he never troubled to follow it out exactly-some sort of connection between these differing mementos of vanished races. He had always a box tortoise in his own Germantown garden, and he liked to "play Timothy," for there was something mysterious in the creature's going under ground and staying there all winter. His own tortoises generally escaped before it was time for them to hibernate, so he had to content himself with just playing they were burying or unburying themselves. In short, the boy liked to read the Natural History because in it were records of little things, incidents, experiences, similar to those in which he himself had a share, but which he had not found elsewhere in a book, and because it was about animals, and all boys and all men like animal stories. As the boy grew older and read White's account of the different ways which a field mouse, a squirrel, and a nuthatch eat hazel nuts, he followed the next red squirrel with nut in mouth that he met on the Wissahickon Hills, and found it took the squirrel just twenty-three minutes to completely clean out the nut. It was a butternut, perhaps a particularly hard one, or perhaps the squirrel was a

in

trifle nervous in his presence, for since then he has noted red squirrels make much better time with the same kind of nut. White taught him to observe minutely. As men grow older White's Natural History takes them back to boyhood, and they love it for that; they love it for reasons that make them love Izaak Walton, because it takes them out of doors in good company; they love it for the reason they love Elia, because it reveals a lovable, a winsome personality; they love it for its precise old English; they love it because it recalls a state of village society that has to them the charm of old china and Chippendale furniture; they love it because its material is in part familiar from their own experience, and because they learn more of things only partly known, things, therefore, of tantalizing interest; very, very many love it for this reason, perhaps as many as love it because it wins for them some part of its maker's delightful leisure, a leisure with enough of necessary routine to prevent it palling, a leisure of happiness and content! Time moved so slowly in Selborne that White could sow beechnuts on the downs in expectation of seeing a wood there, and could busy himself so carefully with his book that it was eighteen years in the making after he, at fifty, determined upon publishing.

The Natural History cannot appeal with the qualities that charm most in many latter-day nature books. It expresses none of the romance of nature, as does Thoreau's writing so often, and Jefferies's. Much of Thoreau is interesting because of the inherent interest of observed fact, as is all Jefferies's early work, but both these men are at their best when writing of the romance of nature. Yet the Natural History, without this romance, has appealed scarcely less to the poets than to the naturalists. Some of the latter smile indulgently when it is mentioned, because it is unsystematic and confident of theories now proved untenable. Yet accepted scientific facts of yesterday, arrived at after the most system