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their readers into side-lines. Thus Becky becomes the central figure of Vanity Fair, and not Dobbin or Amelia, because it is, after all, imperfection and not stainlessness which evokes human sympathy. It is the movement, the current, the broken water of life, that interest us, not the placid and unstirred pool. The difficulty, then, in romance, is how to individualize the central figures. The Romancer sometimes endeavors to effect this by introducing the main characters at first as disfigured by some superficial fault; some calamity such as an illness or a bereavement intervenes, which strips off the unpleasing attributes. To revert to my former instance, young Martin Chuzzlewit is subjected to discipline in his American experiences, Mercy Pecksniff is exposed to the cruelty of her husband; but the trial over, a new self emerges from the ashes of the old. But there is no real continuity in either case. The purged Martin, the widowed Mercy, have no resemblance whatever to the self-sufficient and condescending young spark, and the giggling charmer; one character is simply substituted for another.

But in the hands of the skilful Romancer, the secondary characters can be more easily individualized, because the object is to produce types with various degrees of unpleasantness. With Dickens and Thackeray, the secondary types have an immense distinctness and vitality. They are full of salient, odious, grotesque, humorous characteristics. But if one looks a little closer, one sees that there is no development about them. One cannot, as I have said, imagine them as having any real life of their own except on the stage. The imagination boggles at the thought of Mrs. Gamp on her knees remembering Mrs. Harris in her prayers, or at the idea of Mr. Pecksniff attempting to draw an architectural design of his

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manifest their own characteristics, or to evoke the characteristics of others. They do not affect each other in any direct or indirect way.

And then to go further down, the whole scene, the background of nature, is all a setting for the action. It does not affect the action, it merely contributes to it-every twig and leaf of the wood in which Jonas murders his victim are in at the death, pointing to the soaking blood, infected by horror, alert with significance. The author is behind it all, pulling the strings, controlling, arranging. Nothing has a secret and sustained life of its own; it is all called into being to emphasize the central motive.

Now, in saying all this, I must not for a moment be understood to mean that romance is not true art. It is a perfectly legitimate and admirable kind of art, as long as it is realized by the writer, as long as that is his aim, as long as he knows what he is doing. Where it becomes false art is when the Romancer believes that he is doing something else; and here lies the great difficulty of dealing with so many of the novelists of the century, that they did not always know what they were doing. Sometimes, it is permissible to say, they were trying consciously to be realists, and thought that they were reflecting life when they were really creating it. Sometimes they were each by turns. What was lacking both in writers and readers was any definite theory of art, any precise understanding of the necessity of having an aim and a point of view. But one must not be misled by any vividness of portraiture, any fineness of individulization, into thinking that this subsidiary handling constitutes any claim to realism.

The thing is all full of complexities. What one has to determine, if one can, in the critical apprehension of a work of fiction, is, as I have said before,

whether the central conception is idealistic or not, whether the aim is the development of character or the manifestation of typical quality; and the success of the Romancer from the critical point of view depends upon the extent to which he can enforce an unquestioning acquiescence in his methods on the critic's mind.

But where we suffer, as I have already said, is in the lack of a critical tradition of art. It has been objected that at epochs such as the best period of Greek literature, there is no written evidence of any critical tradition. There is no literature of criticism at the finest period of Greek art; but it is clear that there was a tradition abroad which probably represented itself in conversation. It simply did not occur to anyone to record it. The competition for the production of plays, the mere fact that the finest works of art won an instant recognition, shows that among the Greeks the mental atmosphere was keenly if unconsciously critical. The Victorian age is characterized by immense energy in literature, great volubility, large profusion, tremendous gusto; but it has not been characterized by critical apprehension. The result is visible in the extreme individualism of our great writers, in the want of literary development, in the ready acceptance of base and sentimental writing. Our great writers have been in a sense splendid amateurs, and \ their books have been breathless and diffuse narratives, full of life and invention and characterization, but without control and economy. I am not now recommending a sterile and pedantic criticism, for ever censuring and stemming the current and blocking the way. What I rather desire is an alert and sympathetic criticism, which does not allow great resources to be wasted and dissipated, but husbands them and makes them effective. For it is certain that art, like all other processes, has

its laws, and the more we can perceive and recognize and admire these laws, the more vital and effective the art will be.

Let me once more attempt to state
my conclusions. Romance is a per-
It orig-
fectly legitimate form of art.
inates in a perception of life at its most
vivid and impassioned moments. It de-
picts a kind of sublimated humanity:
it isolates certain emphatic characteris-
Then
tics and it individualizes them.

it ceases to have anything to do with
life at all. It represents a collision of
forces, a battle of types; its aim is
not to blur and dim the current, as life
is blurred and dimmed, but to make a
scenic display of qualities. It succeeds
if it carries out its programme. Where
the apprehension of it fails is, if the
reader is misled into thinking that life
is at all like that, and can be lived on
such lines. It is true that romantic
writers, or men and women with ro-
mantic beliefs, may raise the moral
temperature of life, but that is not my
point here. I am regarding the ques-
tion from a technical, and of course a
narrower, standpoint. But just as the
ideal of the engineer is to produce
perfect stability in a bridge, without
reference to the beneficent results of
the commercial products which may
pass over it, so the aim of the writer
must be to produce a work in obedience
to the canons of beauty and of art,
without reference to its possible ethical
results. If he regards the latter, he
may be a great philanthropist, a great
moralist, but he is not a great artist;
and probably the best way in which the
artist can contribute to the well-being
of the world is not to concern himself
with it at all, but to do his own work
as intently, as faithfully, and as di-
rectly as he can.

There follows a very serious question, as to whether art has the right to separate itself wholly from moral ideals. Whether it is justifiable to se

clude oneself in a delightful dream of impossible conditions, and visionary fancies. It seems to me that the question can best be answered by an appeal to the principle which I have tried to indicate the principle, that is, that there is a vital law of art, and that art is good art in proportion as it conforms to that law. The idea of morality seems to be deeply rooted in our own nation. Some of the greatest writers of the last century have been moralists at heart-Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, Dickens—and a great French critic has declared that the highest glory of English writers has been derived from the seriousness with which they have treated moral ideas in art. One thing is certain. that national art can never develop apart from the vital ideas of the race which produces it. If the artists of a nation become an æsthetic clique, not penetrated by and not sympathizing with the deep-seated forces of their generation, art can never be a real thing at all. The point is not to superimpose an artistic ideal upon a nation, but that its art should develop from inside, and express its own vital ideas. William Morris, who held that salvation came by art, held also that that art was useless which was an exotic thing, the inheritance of a small leisured class, and that it must grow up naturally out of the temperament of the nation.

We must not, then, lay down any rule as to what the artist must or must not do. The only chance for the purity of art is that it must be a sincere expression of artistic personality; but we may expect, I believe, to see that fruitful, vital, genuine art will in EngThe Contemporary Review.

land develop on more or less ethical lines, and that the art which will appeal to the English temperament will be art which deals ultimately, if not directly, with moral problems. I do not at all mean by that that art in England will continue to concern itself with social problems-very far from it; but it will have underlying it, and as its basis and mainspring, a consciousness of the duality of human nature, its capacity for realizing the beauty of moral qualities, its strange power of scrutinizing and condemning itself, its power of setting up some ideal, some standard

Above the howling senses' ebb and flow.

I believe that the view which would isolate art from morality is a narrow view, and, if I may say so, a pedantic view. That theory is in reality a protest, a rebellion against the puritanical spirit which would degrade art to the status of a dangerous kind of diversion, and rule out every manifestation of human energy which has not some rigid sort of self-repression in view. That kind of Puritanism is just as much a menace to liberty as any other kind of dogmatic tyranny; but to confuse righteousness with Puritanism seems to me as stupid as to confuse art with immorality.

But we may boldly claim that art exists in and for humanity, and that its authority lies there. We may demand of it that it shall be inspired by the beauty of which Plato said that "it meets the sense like a breeze, and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into harmony with beauty of reason."

the

A. C. Benson.

THE LANTERN BEARERS.

BY MRS. ALFRED SIDGWICK, AUTHOR OF "THE SEVERINS," ETC.

CHAPTER XVII.

Neither Conrad nor Helga knew how thin the dividing line was in Mr. Byrne's household between the modest comfort of it and the grim threat of want. It was not Conrad's business to know, and Mrs. Byrne had never let Helga's youth be overshadowed by the cares lurking a week or two ahead in case of her husband's illness or dismissal. So that when he seemed to fail, her anxiety was of a different quality from yours, who see in illness some expense and fatigue, possibly some pain, but not a sudden end to your daily bread. For ten years now Mr. Byrne had never had a country holiday, and had never, even for a week, thrown off the sense of living from hand to mouth, that came to him too late in life to sit easily. Indeed, he felt his poverty more acutely as the lapse of time justified his gloomy certainty that never again would he climb the ladder on which men rise above the slough of financial despond. She could look back to days soon after his ruin. when although he was bitter, and bent on solitude, he still saw channels of enterprise within his reach, and fitted to his steering. He had talked about men he knew who, without capital, had imagined rather than seen an opening, had acted on imagination, and by sheer self-confidence and pluck had made it real. But his pluck had gone. A man whose wife and child will starve if he starves sees the folly of risks more plainly than the chances. The berth he occupied brought him three pounds a week, and he sat there year by year growing bent and careworn sooner than men who can look at the future with tranquillity, and at the past with satisfaction. He had never seen a .chance of a new venture, or even of a rise.

Helga's idea of her father was of an elderly, sad, kindly man who read his paper while he ate his breakfast (you mustn't chatter at breakfast because it disturbed him), went to the city by an early train and came back so tired that he wanted to go to bed by ten. On Sundays there was no City, but that somehow did not make the day any livelier. You went to church in the morning, you came back to an early dinner, and you read all the afternoon. To be sure reading took you anywhere you pleased, so that you came to tea with shining eyes and your head full of brave adventures in remote romantic lands. If you had been left to yourself you would have been happy, believing, without any reason but with a sustaining hope, that your own flight into some such golden world would happen this year, next year, now; it was the elders who sighed when they talked of the future, and said in sighing, Never!

Helga had known the checks of poverty most of her life but never its worst stings. Like other young people she took her daily bread for granted and did not understand that it was as insecure as her father's health; or that the accident of a moment might place them in sight of actual want. She did not look forward at all or expect her life to change much. Even now that the lantern of love was lighted she thought of its flame with secret joy but not of its effect on her future. Once in a while she would picture herself hand in hand with Clive for better for worse, blessed by priests, for all the world to see. But she would not allow herself to dwell on such a close to their mad venture. For the present its tale was told and ended. She refused to look beyond.

As to the right or wrong of what she

had done she was still in two minds about it. Sometimes she went back to the fog that had shut her in with her man and made the whole world outside of no account. Sometimes it was Clive who joined the shadows, and then his claim weighed as a feather against her duty to her parents. Helga's inner life had become a life of stress and conflict. The lantern she had lighted was not the innocent toy she had meant it to be. She carried it, she rejoiced in it, but the flame of it burned her. Her longing to see Clive had not been stilled but increased. It consumed her, took her sleep and strength away, affected her health. She fought hard against such foolishness, but when a girl fights love the battle will be to the god and not to the girl.

However the lantern served one purpose well. Helga derived light and help from it in her dealings with Conrad, whose intentions became plainer every day. Tante Malchen's letter acted like a key, if the Brynes had needed one, interpreting some of the little things he did and said. He could not declare himself officially yet because his father and mother had both written in the strongest terms urging him to give up all idea of such a marriage. Their objections were ostensibly founded on Helga's connection with Tante Malchen rather than on her want of money; for like most of us they had to learn that people may be of the same blood and yet in nature wholly different. Frau Peters they assured Conrad was one of the most selfish, ill-tempered women who have ever made a worthy man miserable, and to see their only son share the fate of dieser gute Mensch her husband, would break their hearts. "Ach was!" they said, when Conrad answered by the page, describing Helga's beauty and sweetness; and they wrote to their English cousins again begging them to reason by word of mouth with their

son, begging them if possible to see the undesired siren and report on her. "It is not our business," said the English Mr. Hille.

"It is not," said his wife. "We can ask the young man to dinner. More we cannot do."

"I hope he will not eat with his knife," said Mr. Hille, "or tuck his serviette into his collar."

So the Hilles, who were established in Holland Park for the winter, asked Conrad to one of their second-best dinner parties and found that he knew as well as any one what to do with his knife and his napkin. They sent him in with Marcella Stair, who was staying with them, and had been present at the superior dinner-party the night before as well as at this one. She had been told of Conrad's peril because it was known that she could see the siren's garden from her back windows, because she had been heard to call Mrs. Warwick a "crank" who encouraged tiresome unprofitable people, and because Lilian Hille was a chatterbox and told any one everything.

"Perhaps he will confide in you when he finds that you are a near neighbor," said the Hilles. "Perhaps, after all, there is nothing in it."

But Marcella's report of what had passed between Conrad and herself was not reassuring. She said that she feared the nice little man really was entangled. He had described the flat in which he meant to live when he was married, and he had asked Marcella's advice about putting English chintzes on German chairs. She had asked him if he was going to be married, and he said he hoped so, soon, and when she took for granted that the lady was a German he replied that she was only half a German by birth but a whole one by virtue of her beauty and goodness. Did she live in Germany? Marcella had asked; and Conrad had answered that she had never seen the

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