The Portland daily press., 1895-03-28
Mr.. BELLOWS'S TALK.
The Relation of Literature to Social Re-
form.

In beginning his lecture yesterday Mr..
Bellows read the story of Turgenieff,
"The Man with the White Hands, to
show that it is very often the thinker,
the man in literature who has suffered
and sometimes died to make posi- BILE the
reforms which the mass of men are I'M
able to accomplish. 1t is true. as Emer-
son says, thai the intellect too often
separates, but many of our modern poets
and noyelists have deeply at heart the
betterment of the condition of "poor
Humanity" To prove this extracts were
read from Symonds, Rossetti, Walt Whit
man and Tennyson. In 1.-THE Palace of
Artn is shown the sure confusion and
final desolation which shall fall upon
any one who seeks TO hold intellectual.
or indeed any good for himself, and will
not share it with those who most need it.
In our own country coming through
the study of German Transcen-
dentalism, introduced by Coleridge and
ply, especially taught by Charming and
Emerson, of the dignity and greatness of
| the human soul, quite independent of
high or low conditions. This was largely
an outRrowth of the French Revolution
which levelled all ranks and gave the
new watchwurd of Liberty. Equality and
Fraternity. Dickens's Tale of Two
Cities gives tremendous picture of the
sufferings of the poorer classes under
the iron rule of the mobiles, a wrong
which was only to be washed out BY
seas of blood. This Revolution-"T ruth
clad in He'll fire"-was the direct inspirer
of some of our greatest poetry. Words
worth /, III such poems as THE Leach
Gatherer" and "The Affection Of Mar
garrett" shows how deeply he was i'm
pressed by the fundamental idea of hui
man quality-fnding as much inherent
greatness in the humblest peasant as in
crowned king.
| But to go farther back, to find this
| recognition of the need of some higher
| Justice than that which obtains in or
binary human relation, we have only to
recall the influence upon the world of
Plato's Republic" and Sir Thomas
More's "Utopia,n both looking to an
ideal state of society. and from which
many ideas, once derided as visionary, are
now being carried out into daily life.
The remarkable experience fifty years
ago at Brook Farm, where were for q
! longer OF sUOrGef IIme some or OuI
noblest American authors, shows how
deeply rooted is the notion that the
present arrangement of society is not the
best for securing plain living and high
thinking Bellamy's Looking Back.
ward" though it describes much tina,
may be called impossible of execution.
really looks toward something nearer
ideal justice in the relations of man with
man, and the securing of much more Of
happiness and refinement of "the aver.
age man" than now seems possible.
| Such novel as $ Marcella," which has
been recently SO widely reads, has for its
whole motif the question of social reform,
the proper attitude of the rich toward
the poor: and though the ardent heroine
of that novel, through sad experience.
came to lose some of her hopefuIness
| about the good of any cast-iroi system
of progress yet the conclusion of the
whole matter leaves us in no doubt as tc
the high service we are all called upon
to render those who are "next us.n The
work of Tolstoi, the greatest author in
Russia, also is a practical object lesson
of the need of human Eelpfulness-that
the only way TO serve our fellow men is
not to throw charity to them from above
but to go down to live with than tc
raise them to our own level