how to lay out a plot, to evolve his central hero and keep minor characters in relation, play the comic against the serious, and preserve the balance of the whole. Had his life been spared it is not improbable that his fiction would have stood in relation to his verse as the novels of Walter Scott do to his poems. He also essayed to be a dramatist. He wrote at least one short play, which is still in manuscript. His last strong wish was to see it put upon the stage. He said to a friend, "How I long for the night which shall be 'first night' for my dramatic effort." He expressed more interest in it than in his fiction or verse.

It was a pedagogic axiom of John Ruskin that poor cerebral soil should have comparatively small attention, for it has its limitations and not much can be expected of it at best, but that for good soil every endeavor should be made because of its comparatively limitless powers of production. On this hypothesis one thinks regretfully that this young genius of delicate frame and intense sensibility need ever toil as a factory hand and have his schooling abruptly terminate at twenty. Suppose Dunbar's frail health could have been conserved, and he have been given a university and post-graduate course and European and Oriental travel, how the world would have been repaid a hundred fold. But some one would say, "Would not this have spoiled him?" No! A true gem, as he was, takes the grinding. Only paste goes to powder. Another will say, "Must not the poet learn in suffering what he teaches in song-and must not the terms on which the singer gathers his laurels always be obdurate?" Again, No! A keenly sensitive soul can sympathetically diagnose and faithfully portray the sufferings of others without a personal ordeal of pain. The contention is just this: if the admirers who now propose to rear a marble shaft, utterly useless to him now that he is dead, had clubbed together to give him when alive the facilities suggested, Paul Laurence Dunbar, humanly speaking, might be alive and doing more and better work than ever.

William Dean Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Eugene Field, James Whitcomb Riley, James Lane Allen and Robert Ingersoll is the jury which named Paul Laurence Dunbar poet laureate of the Negro Race. But when all is said his true

distinction lies in the fact that he interpreted the particular to the universal; the Negro to the whole human race. He also demonstrated by his own genius that the negro also belongs to the divine family on earth in spite of all prejudiced denial. He easily molded the white man's language into the modes of thought of the black man, and vice versa; thus showing that they are interchangeable. So the community of genius is illustrated and proven. The accident of his seniority as the poet of his race would alone insure him a permanent place. He is the first among ten million. Again, he did not inherit, he originated. His race had nothing to transmit in the way of literary or poetic instinct or training. That this young negro should take up what has heretofore been the white man's own distinctive art, and excel and surpass in it, is the marvel of the hour. The Caucasian's wealth of literary inheritance and training of several millenniums seemed to give him no advantage over the meagerly furnished and heavily handicapped son of Ham. Right worthily is Paul Laurence Dunbar laurel-decked.

PERSONALIA

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Born, Dayton, Ohio, June 27, 1872.

Died, Dayton, Ohio, February 9, 1906.

Age 33 years.

Mother, emancipated slave.

Father, slave, escaped from Kentucky to Canada via underground railway.
Educated, Dayton Common Schools.

Graduated, Steele High School, Dayton, 1891.

Wrote Class Poem.

Editor-in-chief High School Times, 1891.

President Philomathea Society, 1891.

Only colored man ever elected to above two positions.

Clerk in Haytian Building, World's Fair, Chicago, 1893.

Tour of England, reading and reciting, 1896, eight months.

Employments while in school, and early part of literary career, were elevator boy, court page, and position in Congressional Library, Washington, D. C. Married Alice Moore, New York City, 1898.

Miss Moore was school teacher, short-story magazine writer and author of two volumes: Violets and Other Tales, and The Goodness of Saint Roque.

Separated by mutual consent, 1900.

Pathetic Poem, End of the Chapter, commemorates this event.

His Last Work

His last dialect poem was entitled "Sling Along."

Among his last English poems was one entitled, "Equipment." Four stanzas refer to himself.

His last poem, one stanza, was addressed to his friend, Dr. Burns, who was also his physician, and who died three months before Dunbar. These as yet unpublished.

Dates of Publication of Dunbar's Several Volumes

1893. Oak and Ivy. (Poems.) United Brethren Publishing Company. Out of print. Single copies now sell at $4.00.

1895. Majors and Minors. (Poems.) Hadley & Hadley, Toledo, O.

1898.

Folks from Dixie. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co. The Uncalled. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1899. Lyrics of the Hearthside. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. Poems of Cabin and Field. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1900. The Strength of Gideon. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co. The Love of Landry. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1901. Candle-Lighting Time. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. The Fanatics. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1902. The Sport of the Gods. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co. The Jest of Fate. (Same book under different title.) (Prose.) Jarrold & Sons, London.

1903. Lyrics of Love and Laughter. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. In Old Plantation Days. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co. When Malindy Sings. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1904. Lyrics of Lowly Life. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. Li'l Gal.' (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. The Heart of Happy Hollow. (Prose.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

1905. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co. Howdy, Honey, Howdy. (Poems.) Dodd, Mead & Co.

Two books were written and the publication anticipated before Dunbar's death. One book poetry, illustrated, and one prose, novel.

ART. IV. THE TYPE AS THE SUBJECT OF GREEK ART IT is a matter of common knowledge that Greek art deals, not with the individual, but with the type. Regarded by some as a defect, by others as constituting its chief title to supremacy, this quality has not always been understood. The following discussion will be an endeavor to define the sense in which the type may be said to be the subject of Greek art and to correlate with this principle certain aspects of Hellenic thought and criticism not commonly regarded in that light.

Greek art, perhaps beyond that of any other people, is frankly humanist. When one speaks of it one thinks not of landscape, but of man. From the earliest period of their history to the latest, man was at the focus of the Greeks' interest, whatever the sphere. The artistic representation of man, as of other subjects, calls for the adjustment of several factors. In every art there are certain traditions or conventions: the first artist did not by one creative act present his subject in a manner exactly reproducing nature, nor have any of his successors been able to escape the resort to makeshifts and compromises. Quite apart from any consideration of the question, in itself sufficiently perplexing, as to the end to be attained-whether, that is to say, art should copy nature realistically or content itself with a summarized and idealized transcription-there arises the practical problem of the means to be employed in executing it. Here the adaptation of habits already established to the newly-conceived purpose is a task of the first importance. Yet these refinements of method plainly correspond to a clearer definition of the mental image. The discovery of the laws of foreshortening is a case in point. Heraclitus could believe that the disk of the sun was no larger than it looks; even so great a thinker as Democritus could suppose that if the atmosphere were pure enough we might descry an ant on the vault of heaven. Polygnotus had a correspondingly naive mode of representing the differences between foreground and background, figures being drawn to the same scale, the more distant raised to a higher level. Plato was aware that distant

objects look smaller, and it was during the course of the fourth century that geometers solved the simpler problems of optics and scene-painters applied the principles of perspective to the stage. Thus there comes gradually into existence a complex of artistic habits, which at its worst, we may call convention, or style, at its best. This distinction is not a rigid one, nor are the limitations thus imposed upon the artist to be regarded as restrictions. They constitute in fact his guides to the discovery of beauty; for into the conception of the subject as defined by style there inevitably enters in some measure the standard of taste and beauty recognized by the community. It is therefore as a positive, directive principle that the conception of beauty is to be regarded; and, though the artist may rebel against this form of social control, it will be found operative even when least acknowledged. No true work of art is, however, solely the product of style. It is rather the resultant of this, the generalizing and normative force, in conjunction with the individual, which is either personal self-expression or the direct observation of nature. Without style this expression would be inarticulate, without the individual it would lack meaning. It is the indissoluble union of conventional language and of the seer's particular insight that constitutes the message. Hence all art is confined within limits clearly drawn, but the art of different ages and peoples has approached more closely now to this limit, now to that. Egypt came dangerously near to the dead-line of rigidity and enslavement to tradition, while modern art of the impressionist sort threatens to become an inarticulate speaking with tongues that demands an inspired interpreter.

In Greece the two factors, style and nature, conspired in singular harmony to produce a balanced art. It may be useless to inquire into the reasons, and perhaps it is best to say, as has indeed been said, that as there are men of genius so too we are to regard the Greeks as a people of genius. But a sufficient explanation may be found in the sanity of Hellenic life and in the predominance of the intellectual temper. The Greeks, as is commonly the case with men strongly intellectual in character, were visualizers, and possessed as a consequence a plastic