of human language. The style, the manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again.— 5 takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence Styles,' says Flaubert's commentator, of the term to its import, will be but ful'Styles, as so many peculiar molds, each filling the condition of all artistic quality of which bears the mark of a particular 10 in things everywhere, of all good art. writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in 15 all its intensity and color. For him the form was the work itself. As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm - the form in all its characteristics.' 20 If the style be the man, in all the color 25 and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense' impersonal.' I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose literature was the characteristic art of the 30 nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature 35 presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here 40 said is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art; then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul that color and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life. (1888) ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894). Stevenson's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were engineers to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and he was educated for the family profession. At twenty-one he asked to be allowed to give up engineering for literature, and his father consented on condition that he qualified for the Scottish Bar. Stevenson fulfilled the condition, but took as little interest in his legal as in his engineering studies, setting far more store 'by certain other odds and ends that he came by in the open street while he was playing truant.' At his chosen pursuit of literature, however, he toiled incessantly. He says: 'I imagine nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world.' As a schoolboy he edited magazines and wrote essays, stories and plays; his first novel was turned into a historical essay and privately printed when he was sixteen. As an undergraduate at Edinburgh he established the University Magazine which ran four months in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.' In 1873-4 he had half-a-dozen articles in various magazines, and his first book, An Inland Voyage, was published in 1878. It is an account of a canoe trip in Belgium and France made two years earlier. About this time Stevenson met and fell in love with Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, an American lady who came to study art in France. In 1878 she returned to California, and thither in 1879 Stevenson followed her. Some of his experiences in crossing the Atlantic and the American continent (though by no means all the sufferings he endured) are told in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. He arrived at San Francisco in desperate straits of health and pocket, and only Mrs. Osbourne's devoted nursing saved his life. After his recovery, they were married, and spent their honeymoon in the neighboring mountains, described in The Silverado Squatters. His first volume of essays, Virginibus Puerisque, was highly appreciated, but only by a few: it was a book for boys, Treasure Island, which made him suddenly famous. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped were equally successful. During these years he was living in various health resorts in Europe and America; in 1888 he went for a long voyage in the Pacific, at the end of which he bought an estate and settled in Samoa. He endeared himself to the natives, and in spite of continued illness, did some of his best literary work. The year before his death he wrote: For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my hand swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on- ill or well, is a trifle: so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.' He was buried at the top of the mountain overlooking his Samoan home in a tomb inscribed with his own Requiem: Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. And I laid me down with a will. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME 'This is no my ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't.' tion, ignorance of his neighbors is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domineering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curi5 ous_nor quick about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the Englishman sits apart, bursting with pride and ignorance. He figures among his vassals. Two recent books,1 one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular con- 10 gruity and force to inhabitants of that United Kingdom, people from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest 15 in the hour of peace with the same disover-population to the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad; there are foreign parts of England; and the race 20 that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. 25 It was but the other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-speaking woman. English itself, which will now 30 plum pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here dainful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare roast beef and we have either pole of the Britannic folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner; nor, when we have the chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American. missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance of the religions they were trying to supplant. frank the traveler through the most of In spite of these promptings to reflec 11881. I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and He wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the 55 bucket. And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view partial, parochial, but it does not stand alone in the experience of Scots. England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in education, 5 and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always widely, but always trenchantly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly; he and I not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to a clique of States; and the whole scope and atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my country folk to their cousins. from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to 10 felt ourselves foreigners on many comlook when I find myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyom- 15 ing, is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England self-sufficiency no better justified than the Britannic. may mon provocations. A Scotchman It is so, perhaps, in all countries; per- 20 haps in all, men are most ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States; he is probably ignorant of India; but considering his opportunities, he is far more ignorant of 25 countries nearer his own door. There is one country, for instance its frontier not so far from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English-of which I will 30 go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once traveled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence, a uni- 35 versity man, as the phrase goes,— a man, besides, who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London; 40 among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had recently encountered, and I observed in my innocence that things were not so in Scotland. 'I beg your pardon,' said he, 45 smock-frocks; chimes of bells and the 'this is a matter of law.' He had never heard of the Scots law; nor did he choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly; every child knew that. At last, 50 to settle matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in 55 long accustomed suddenly awakes and the face and dropped the conversation. This is a monstrous instance, if you like, rapid, pertly sounding English speechthey are all new to the curiosity; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation. One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye — the domestic architecture, the look of streets and buildings; the quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm coloring of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country places; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded; surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous ardor, the better part of the man too 5 often withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with Wood has been sparingly used in their 10 conversational counters and small jests; 20 he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts and experience in the best light. The egoism of the Englishman is self-contained. He does not seek to proselytize. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and being an Englishman, that is all he asks; and in the meantime, while you continue to minded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanor, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders. construction; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeperpitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold, and permanent ap- 15 pearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these brick houses rickles of brick, as he might call them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. This is no 25 associate, he would rather not be remy ain house; I ken by the biggin' o't.' And yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket; but it has not yet, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by 30 his imagination; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly resembling it. But it is not alone in scenery and 35 architecture that we count England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross, 40 and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own long-legged, long-headed, thoughtful, Bible-quoting plowman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems 45 incredible that within the boundaries of his own island a class should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelligent, who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem 50 to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. first shock of English society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot 55 comes looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be in the The Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance checkered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to |