Quintilian and Horace's Art of Poetry shows the new interest in rhetoric, while the supersedence of logic by rhetoric may be illustrated by the fact that The Praise of Folly is against logic and draws justification from the Rhetoricians3 both in authority and in method, for irony is a rhetorical device.

In the attitude toward knowledge The Praise of Folly has left little of the idea of hierarchy. Scriptural writer, classical author, Church father, all meet on a democratic plane whose one standard is humane learning. All testimony in the praise of folly is admitted, and none has greater relevancy than the relevancy of reason.

All this is as it should be, for the center of man's thinking has shifted from God to man, and the worth of his thought is judged chiefly from its humanity. In The Praise of Folly the divine syllogism no longer dominates man's thinking; all things do not come from God and return to Him. This shifted center of thinking can be seen in Erasmus' charge that the Creator "put into the composition of our humanity more than a pound of passions to an ounce of reason." The implication becomes clearer if we remember his underlying belief that reason urges to virtue and if we heed his warning not to take his jeering too lightly. This is man critical from the point of view of man, and the center from which the praise of folly issues. The shifted center is nowhere more apparent than in the whole trend of a mind more intent on improving this world than on preparing for the next. This satire medicined the ills of man, while the Mirror embalmed them in the knowledge of God.

Perhaps the one trait obviously common to both books is the scorn of money except as a help to those in quest of knowledge. And perhaps the most strikingly new trait in The Praise of Folly is the tone of urbanity which is the distinctive voice of the humanistic learning. The nothingtoo-much of reason, the finesse of a classically bred mind, and the quiet irony of the man of the world stamp this book as the product of a mind which has learned that one can The Praise of Folly, p. 121.

damn as effectively with faint praise as with violence and metaphysical subtlety, and that levity and seriousness are not incompatible.

Turning from Caxton to Erasmus, we see with unusual clearness how the shifted center of the Renaissance mind rendered impossible a full return to the high seriousness and naïve attitude with which the Medieval mind turned its eyes now to God and now to His image. Virgil's yearning for the farther shore, beautiful as it may have been to the Church fathers and is yet to us, gave way to Horatian worldliness till man could pay this compliment to beauty and give this warning to the Old Adam:

Stand close around, ye Stygian set,

With Dirce in one boat convey'd!

Or Charon, seeing, may forget

That he is old and she a shade.

Although the words are Landor's, the spirit was born again somewhere between Caxton and Erasmus.

My fathers built a grisly hell,

And throned it with an evil peer;

Their sweetest joys breathed brimstone smellNaught else but worship was their fear.

But worship stabs the heart awake,

Be it from love or ghostly terror;

And happier they who praise and quake
Than I who coldly mock their error.

LOW TRAGEDY

ROBERT P. UTTER

In the days when McKinley was a martyr and Roosevelt was the star of the morning, when skirts had to be held up (but not too high) and the Doherty brothers were the last word in tennis, we used to go to the Bowdoin Square Theatre and occupy lounge seats at thirty cents each to see the melodrama. We went as highbrows, neither to scoff nor to pray, but to laugh.

She

At the time, we wondered how anyone could take it seriously, as so many did. There was, for example, the priceless scene in No Mother to Guide Her. It was in a "road house" (obviously it never could have happened in a "wayside inn"). The heroine was locked in a room. broke a window, but found it barred outside. Hearing the approaching steps of the villain, she selected a long-pointed sliver of glass, wrapped her handkerchief round it for a handle, and held it behind her ready to use as a dagger. With a lofty sentiment, she presented it at the villain's chest, but he shattered it with a flick of his impudent bamboo cane. She fled round the room; he pursued her. She crossed the folding bed which stood open (left upper stage); he crossed close behind her. She crossed it again, and when he in his pursuit was in the middle of it, she doubled round the foot and closed it, trapping him with his head sticking out of its jaws like a crocodile trying to swallow a nigger baby. This left the audience gasping—all but us; we choked and gurgled.

I do not recall that I analyzed at the time the effect of this noteworthy scene and of others less noteworthy of its type, but it has lingered long in my mind through years in which I have formed the habit of thinking of it and its kind, and of its kindred in other families of art, as Low Tragedy. The type has not died since melodrama shifted its ground from the dusty boards to the silver screen. Indeed, since I have found a name for it, I have learned to recognize its deep roots, its rank stalk, and gaudy blossoms, as those of a hardy perennial in all ages and in most of the arts. I offer the term, together with such distinctions as it involves, merely for what it may be worth. I am not inventing a new disease from which literature is now and hereafter called upon to suffer, but merely directing attention to what I conceive to be parallelism between certain phenomena in various forms of art. I have tried to base my comments, not on the so-called rules of the various arts, which are always generalizations and never universals, but rather on what I believe to be the purpose and effect of the work itself.

I call it tragedy because I believe that it seeks to exercise the tragic emotions, the emotions on the serious side of the scale which are not incompatible with æsthetic pleasure. I call it low because it seems to me to bear the same relation to high tragedy that low comedy bears to high comedy. The term low need not carry more disparagement than is inseparable from it in the sense of "vulgar," "belonging to the crowd"; no more than the crowd itself attaches to it by implication in the opposite term "highbrow." If the lowbrow scorns the thinker, he ought to be willing to accept the term "low" as meaning "belonging to the elementary mind." It is low also in the sense in which the word is applied to cost and price. The maker of low tragedy seeks the effects of high tragedy at lower cost to himself and his audience or consumers than high tragedy demands; he seeks to bring tragedy within the reach of the meanest intellect and imagination, just as manufacturers and merchants seek to bring every article of luxury which wealth can buy within the reach of the patrons of the ten-cent store. And just as the