admirers when the Little Minister reappeared in Sentimental Tommy as a little and trivial minister indeed. Babby and Gavin Dishart should, of course, have both been drowned, and Mr. Barrie incurred a serious responsibility in allowing them to be rescued by the editor of Good Words. It is not a case where humanity should be rewarded. Mr. Barrie is hardly at his best in the construction of a plot. Perhaps it is the vice of the age to abhor finality, as it is the vice of nature to abhor a vacuum. Most novels now begin well. A good beginning has become a bad sign. Few, very few, have, from the artistic point of view, a satisfactory end. Mr. Barrie is a child of old age, the old age of the nineteenth century. He has written as yet no great book, though Sentimental Tommy is very nearly one. His pathos and his humour, his sympathetic portraiture and his exquisite style, are best appreciated in single episodes, in short stories, and in personal digressions. The art of description Mr. Barrie has almost overdone. It was said of a disciple of Dickens that he would describe the knocker off your door. If there were ever any knockers in Thrums, there cannot be many left now.

Mrs. Oliphant, who was a popular and successful novelist before. Mr. Barrie was born, continues her wonderful activity. Few writers in any age have maintained so high a level over so large a surface. The Chronicles of Carlingford have for the modern novel-reader an almost mediæval sound. But the author of Salem Chapel and Miss Marjoribanks is still supplying the public with stories which are always full of interest and often full of charm. Miss Broughton has produced a great deal of work since Cometh up as a Flower impressed the hall and the parsonage with a vague sense that it was dreadfully improper. The imputation of impropriety without the reality is an invaluable asset for an English novelist. It is not, of course, Miss Broughton's sole capital. The 'rough and cynical reader,' always rather given to crying over cheap sentimentalism, has shed many a tear over Good-bye, Sweetheart, and Not Wisely but too Well. The very names are lachrymatory. Then, Miss Broughton is witty as well as tragic. She first discovered the possibilities of humour which had so long been latent in family prayers. She is an adept in the comic misapplication of scriptural texts, as well as in other forms of giving vent to high spirits. If there were no Miss Broughton, it would be necessary to invent one. The fertility and talent of Miss Braddon and Mr. Payn, who aim at giving amusement, and succeed in what they aim at, are obnoxious to no censure more intelligible than the taunt of being Early Victorian.' Sir Walter Besant and Mr. George Gissing are Victorian without being Early. For a novelist to be made Sir Walter is a hard trial. But Sir Walter Besant has not cultivated the Waverley method, and his capital stories can afford to stand upon their own footing. Mr. Gissing's books are not altogether attractive. They are always rather cynical.

They are often very gloomy. They do not enable the reader to feel at home in fashionable society. But their literary excellence is not far from the highest. They are complete in themselves. They are perfectly, sometimes forcibly, actual. There is an unvarnished truth about them which compels belief, and an original power which, once felt, cannot be resisted. A little more romance, a little more poetry, a little more humour, and Mr. Gissing would be a very great writer indeed.

At nos immensum spatiis confecimus æquor,

Et jam tempus equum fumantia solvere colla.

It is impossible to attempt an exhaustive catalogue of contemporary novelists. The time would fail one to tell of Dr. Conan Doyle and Mr. Stanley Weyman, Lucas Malet also, and Mr. Anstey and Mr. Zangwill. Their thousands of readers testify to their popularity, and their praise is in all the newspapers. Mr. William Black, if he does not write so often, still occasionally delights the many admirers of A Daughter of Heth and A Princess of Thule. Mrs. Clifford has shown in Mrs. Keith's Crime and Aunt Anne that a really imaginative writer needs no other material than the pathos of everyday life.

But a word of recognition must be given to Miss Yonge, who has treated the problems of life in a commendably serious spirit. Dr. Whewell, who was at one time supposed to know everything, used to say that the Clever Woman of the Family was the first of English novels. He did not live to read Robert Elsmere. One might be misunderstood if one suggested that Miss Charlotte Yonge was the spiritual mother of Mrs. Humphry Ward. Yet daughters are often more learned and usually less orthodox than their parents. Miss Yonge wrote stories, and even religious stories, without an exhaustive study of Biblical criticism as made in Germany. Mrs. Ward has indulged in something very like original research, and is certainly the most learned of female novelists since the death of George Eliot. Her novels are entitled to the highest respect for the evidence of industry which they always display. They are also an interesting ' end-of-the-century' example of the art of separating instruction from amusement. The frivolous people who want to laugh, or even to cry, over fiction must go elsewhere. Mrs. Ward requires attention while she develops her theories. Since the publication of Robert Elsmere no unbelieving clergyman has any excuse for remaining in holy orders. David Grieve taught married people that neither husband nor wife has any right to talk in a style which the other cannot understand. From Marcella we learn political economy, and in Sir George Tressady the private life of the aristocracy is held up for the admiration of the middle classes. In the Early Victorian novel there may have been too much sentiment. In the Late Victorian novel there is apt to be too much of everything. The 'smooth

tale, generally of love,' has become a crowded epitome of universal information. In Sir George Tressady we see the House of Commons in Committee, and tea on the terrace, and dinner in an under-secretary's room, and public meetings, and declarations of the poll. We may even notice a vast improvement in the evening papers, which report speeches delivered at ten o'clock. If novels are to contain everything, the world will not contain the novels, and all other forms of literature will be superseded. The Plan of Campaign was the subject of a very clever novel by Miss Mabel Robinson which actually bore that name. Mr. George Moore's Esther Waters is credited with having inspired the decision in Hawke v. Dunn. Miss Emily Lawless has kept Irish politics out of her sad and beautiful stories of Irish life. But Miss Lawless is an exception. She is no realist. When Nicholas Nickleby was employed by Mr. Vincent Crummles to write a play, it was made a condition that he should introduce a real pump and two washing-tubs. That's the London plan,' said Mr. Crummles. They look up some dresses and properties, and have a piece written to fit 'em.' It is the London plan still. But it is now applied to novels, and not to plays.

6

HERBERT PAUL.

THE SPEECH OF CHILDREN

A DICTUM generally accepted among biologists says that ontogeny repeats phylogeny; ' in other words, the stages of development observable in the individual recapitulate, more or less exactly, the stages of development which have occurred in the history of the race. Bringing this to bear on language, it may be assumed, as a workable hypothesis, that the genesis of language in the individual might recapitulate, and therefore yield a clue to the genesis of language in the race from the time when our simian, or rather pre-simian, ancestors acquired the power to make a noise. Truly so great an authority as Professor Max Müller has said, 'I fear it is useless to watch the first stammerings of children; but, from the results obtained in biological research, these first stammerings should be of supreme importance. The object of the present investigation is to learn what are the first stammerings of children and how they are developed; then from these ontogenetic details to see what deductions may be drawn in regard to the phylogenetic origin of language.

A definition of language' is necessary; and it may be stated in the following terms: a sound or sounds made by one individual for a specific purpose to convey to another individual a particular meaning. The connection of the word with lingua, 'tongue,' might confine the term to sounds uttered by the use of that organ, so that, strictly, correspondence by gesture or by writing ought not to be called 'language.' Such correspondence is, however, generally termed 'language;' but, on the other hand, the sounds made by animals other than man are not so described.

2

Max Müller says in a famous passage: The one great barrier between the brute and man is language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.' This is a remarkably dogmatic assertion. It entirely overlooks the fact that the sounds made by cats, dogs, hens, rooks, &c., are strictly language, because they are uttered purposely, they vary according to definite circumstances, and, as they incite

1 Science of Language, i. 394.

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793

2 Ibid. i. 403.

3 H

3

particular actions among the auditors to whom they are addressed, they are certainly sounds made to convey particular meanings. There are more than twelve different words in the language of fowls, some half-dozen in the language of cats, as many or perhaps more in the language of rooks; while Professor Garner reports two hundred or more words in monkey language. That such sounds are uttered with intent and purpose to convey definite meanings to their auditors may be learnt from the words used by hens, and their effect upon the chickens, if any large bird, suggesting a hawk to their ideas, fly over

their heads.

In the speech of children it may be noted that one of the earliest sounds or words formed by a baby is the word agoo, made, as regards the a (the sound as in French), by inspiration, and as regards the goo by expiration. In later achievements expiration alone is used, and there follows the ability to pronounce what I will call the ta-la-ma-da series. This consists of a radical or primitive ah sound, the result of the expiration of breath through the wide-open cavity of the mouth modified according to the state of the child's feelings-the various feelings causing it to shape the mouth and move the tongue somewhat differently in giving forth the sound. Generally the first sound to be acquired is ma, but there may not be much, if any, priority in this respect. The reason for ma is obvious. If the child require attention it makes the loudest noise which it can produce: the parting of the lips and opening the mouth to the widest extent while the full volume of breath is emitted produces the sound ma. But if the infant require attention it is its mother whom it wants, and from whom it receives the attention; therefore ma very soon came to be recognised as the call for mother, and, by a further step in development, as the name for mother. We may picture to ourselves the time when our ancestors possessed only this one cry for succour both in young and old; we may next picture to ourselves the time when they had this cry in the youth and another cry among adults, by analogy with sheep. There the lamb, greatly excited to make itself heard, says ma; while the mother, not moved by such strong feelings, answers ba. A later stage of development would find the young in possession of ma, and of another sound for use according to its state of feeling; and then the distinction would arise that ma was the call, and next the name, for the mother only.

ana.

The following words may be noted in a rookery: ark, wa, waor (deep bass), ah,

A newspaper report. I have tried to obtain further information, but even Mr. P. L. Sclater, Sec. Z.S., could not help me.

5 Country folklore has it that if the child say ma first, the sex of the next baby will be feminine; if da or ta, masculine.

* If the noise be commenced while the mouth is being opened, the result is ma; but if the mouth be open before the sound is made, then ah is heard.