To admire by tradition is a poor thing. Far better really to admire Miss Gabblegoose's novels than pretend to admire Miss Austen's. Nothing is more alien to the spirit of pure enjoyment than simulated rapture, borrowed emotion. If after giving a classic a fair chance you really cannot abide him, or remain hermetically sealed against his charm, it is perhaps wisest to say nothing about it, though if you do pluck up heart of grace and hit him a critical rap over his classical costard it will not hurt him, and it may do you good. But let the rap succeed and not precede a careful study, for depend upon it it is no easy matter to become a classic. A thousand snares beset the path to immortality, as we are pleased to call a few centuries of fame. Rocks, snows, avalanches, bogs-you may climb too high for your head, you may sink too low for your soul; you may be too clever by half or too dull for endurance, you may be too fashionable or too outrageous; there are a hundred ways to the pit of oblivion. Therefore, when a writer has by general consent escaped his age, when he has survived his environment, it is madness and folly for us, the children of a brief hour, to despise the great literary tradition which has put him where he is. But, I repeat, to respect tradition is not to admire traditionally.

6

Tradition is the most trustworthy advertisement and the wisest advice. Ah, advertisement! there indeed is a word to make one blush. Ruskin has somewhere told us that we are not to buy our books by advertisement, but by advice. It is very difficult nowadays to distinguish between the two. Into how many homes has the Times' succeeded in thrusting the Encyclopædia Britannica' and the 'Century Dictionary'? The Daily News' has its own edition of Dickens, whilst the 'Standard' daily trumpets the astounding merits of an Anglo-American compound which compresses into twenty volumes the best of everything. These newspapers advise us in their advertisement columns to buy books in the sale of which they are personally interested. Is their advice advertisement or is their advertisement advice?

The advice given you by literary tradition is at all events absolutely independent. I therefore say, be shy of quarrelling with tradition, but by all means seek to satisfy yourselves that tradition is sound. We criticise by caprice: this is the other half of Landor's saying. The history of criticism is a melancholy one. What are we to say to the blank indifference of your fathers to 'Sartor Resartus,' to 'Bells and Pomegranates,' to the

early poems of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and William Morris, to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel'? Are we likely to be wiser than our fathers? All we can do is to keep hard at it crucifying the natural man. This is best done, as Burke said, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.

In extending our knowledge we must keep our eye on the models, be they books or pictures, marbles or bricks. We must, as far as possible, widen our horizons and be always exercising our wits by constant comparisons. Above all must we ever be on our guard against prejudice, nor should we allow paradox to go about unchained. I go back to Hume. Strong sense united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice can alone entitle critics to be judges of the fine arts; and again he says, 'It is rare to meet with a man who has a just taste without a sound understanding.'

Go get thee understanding, become possessed of strong sense, if thou wouldst know how to tell a good book from a bad one. You may have though it is not likely-Homer by heart, Virgil at your fingers' ends, all the great models of dignity, propriety, and splendour may be on your shelves, and yet if you are without understanding, without the happy mixture of strong sense and delicacy of sentiment, you will fail to discern amid the crowd and crush of authors the difference between the good and the bad; you will belong to the class who preferred Cleveland to Milton, Montgomery to Keats, Moore to Wordsworth, Tupper to Tennyson.

Understanding may be got. By taking thought we can add to our intellectual stature. Delicacy may be acquired. Good taste is worth striving after; it adds to the joy of the world.

For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun's hot eye,

With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly

Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall;

And as year after year

Fresh products of their barren labour fall

From their tired hands, and rest

Never yet comes more near,

Gloom settles slowly down over their breast,

And while they try to stem

The waves of mournful thought by which they are prest

Death in their prison reaches them,

Unfreed, having seen nothing, still unblest.

From this brazen prison, from this barren toil, from this deadly gloom who would not make his escape if he could? A cultivated taste, an educated eye, a pure enthusiasm for literature are keys which may let us out if we like. But even here one must be on one's guard against mere connoisseurship. 'Taste,' said Carlyle— and I am glad to quote that great name before I have done-' if it means anything but a paltry connoisseurship must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, and goodness, wheresoever or in whatsoever forms and accomplishments they are to be seen.' Wordsworth's shepherd, Michael, who

had been alone

Amid the heart of many thousand mists

That came to him and left him on the heights,

had doubtless a greater susceptibility to truth and nobleness than many an Edinburgh' or 'Quarterly' reviewer; but his love, as Wordsworth tells us, was a blind love, and his books, other than his Bible, were the green valleys and the streams and brooks.

There is no harm in talking about books, still less in reading them, but it is folly to pretend to worship them.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from letters to be wise.

To tell a good book from a bad one is, then, a troublesome job, demanding, first, a strong understanding; second, knowledge, the result of study and comparison; third, a delicate sentiment. If you have some measure of these gifts, which, though in part the gift of the gods, may also be acquired, and can always be improved, and can avoid prejudice-political prejudice, social prejudice, religious prejudice, irreligious prejudice, the prejudice of the place where you could not help being born, the prejudices of the university whither chance sent you, all the prejudices that came to you by way of inheritance, and all the prejudices you have picked up on your own account as you went along-if you can give all these the slip and manage to live just a little above the clouds and mists of your own generation, why then, with luck, you may be right nine times out of ten in your judgment of a dead author, and ought not to be wrong more frequently than perhaps three times out of seven in the case of a living author; for it is, I repeat, a very difficult thing to tell a good book from a bad one.

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL.

SURPRISE IN WAR.

BY SPENSER WILKINSON.

NOTHING is more effective in war than to take your enemy by surprise. Except by surprise, says Clausewitz, the greatest of all writers upon war, it is logically impossible to bring a superior force to the decisive point.

The element of surprise is to be traced through all the operations of war from the smallest to the greatest. It plays its part in each of the three branches into which the conduct of war is subdivided in tactics, in strategy, and in policy. At the present moment there could, perhaps, be no more useful way of reviewing the war, and of finding out exactly where the British nation stands, and how it came there than by tracing through each of these branches the influence of the element of surprise upon the course of recent events.

Troops are said to be surprised when the enemy comes suddenly upon them when they are not expecting him, and are not ready to receive him-that is the primary meaning of the term. If the troops are on the look-out and ready for a fight they are not said to be surprised, even though, in fact, the enemy's appearance is sudden and unexpected. The remedy against surprise consists in precaution. It is the affair of the commander, because no one but the commander can make the arrangements by which the various possible actions of the enemy are anticipated. The precautions themselves are very simple, and are for the most part perfectly understood, yet half the disasters that occur in war are due to these simple arrangements being forgotten. One half of the business of tactics and one half of every text-book on the subject consists of precautions against surprise. The object of outposts is to prevent an army from being attacked while it rests, of an advance guard to gain time for an army on the march to put itself in order of battle, of reconnaissance to find out what the enemy is doing. The British army in recent campaigns has hardly distinguished itself for clockwork regularity in the performance of these precautionary duties. In the campaigns of the early eighties on the Red Sea

littoral there were surprises due to the neglect of the outpost service, and the South African campaign abounds with instances in which reconnaissance, though it may have been attempted, has failed to give the commanders the information which it was indispensable that they should have had. These elements of failure are so palpable that it would almost be waste of time to dwell upon them; they are writ large in the reports of special correspondents, and even in the official despatches.

There is a much more serious kind of tactical surprise, which results from the want of forethought, not on the part of the officers leading the troops in the field, but on the part of those whose duty it was to superintend the training of officers and troops. It consists in the officers and men not having been properly taught the use of the weapons with which they and their enemies are armed. When the first European ships visited the islands of the South Seas there were occasionally, as was natural, misunderstandings between the natives and the new comers, and more than once when the new comers in their ignorance violated what appeared to the natives to be sacred laws, the brave warriors attempted by force to defend the sanctity of their laws or the majesty of their gods. But when the new comers flashed thunder and lightning from the sticks which they carried, the warriors, who had nothing but bows and arrows, spears and hatchets, were dismayed and terror-stricken. What would have been their position if, after being presented with firearms and taught to shoot, they had also been taught that the right way to win a battle was to shoot as little as possible and to run at the enemy with their spears? The tactical instruction given of late years to the British army is not without resemblance to the kind of teaching which is here imagined. The British infantry went out to South Africa armed with two weapons of offence, the bullet and the bayonet. It had been taught to rely neither upon the one nor the other, but upon both. It had to face an enemy who relied entirely upon the bullet, and the result was that which was expected by those who had considered the problem. In a few cases where the British could advance up a hillside, which almost invariably gives a certain amount of shelter to those who ascend it, the Boers were so astounded by the magnificent courage displayed that they ran away. But after the first two or three battles, as they had time for reflection, and as with their first successes their spirits rose, the Boers discovered that the right way to meet a charge was to