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ling, but as regards missions there is a great deal of ill-feeling;" and it may be not amiss to note one or two of the causes they allege. One point is that of extraterritorial privilege. Either prevent missionaries residing in the interior or let them do so subject to Chinese law! They are now allowed privileges from which merchants are debarred. Another charge is that "converts take advantage of the influence of the missionaries to injure and oppress the common people;" and that when litigation arises "the missionaries support the latter, thus obstructing the authorities, which the people strongly object to." The case may be strongly put; but, how much truth or exaggeration soever it may contain, it states without doubt a cause of serious irritation. Roman bishops have been accused of imitating the port and trappings of Provincial Governors. An instance is given of a Roman bishop having a seal manufactured with which to stamp his proclamations. But these are minor matters compared with the alleged tendency to look on converts, if not as Laturalized Frenchmen, as entitled at any rate to a quasi-consular protection. It is easy to understand that if a convert appeals to his priest the priest's sympathies should be enlisted; but it is equally easy to comprehend the irritation that would be caused by any attempt to express those sympathies in official ears.

Another impression, which is not mentioned in this despatch but is voiced by the Chinese exponent of the literate cause, is that missionaries constitute by their organization not only an imperium in imperio, but a hostile imperium in the sense that they are prepared to place influence and valuable information at the disposal of a foreign invader. "Tous les renseignements qui parvenaient au général tant sur les ressources des provinces que nous allions traverser que sur les effectifs des troupes que nous allions rencontrer lui etaient procurés par l'intermédiaire des jésuites qui les faisaient relever par des Chinois à leur devotion." The language is used by a writer who held an official position in the French army during the war that ended with the treaty of Tientsin; and similar testimony has been given to the help yielded the French by missionaries and their converts during the invasion of Tongking.

Nearly all these causes of complaint, as

well as the practices which have been referred to as probably causes of misunderstanding, have reference unquestionably to the Roman system. Protestant missionaries also have their disputes; but they are less serious and less frequent, and are connected more often with the purchase of land or buildings in regions where the local gentry oppose their presence. There can be no doubt that the Roman Catholics, and especially the French, are objects of much greater dislike. But the two systems appear inextricably entangled so far as diplomacy is concerned. Neither France nor England would permit the imposition, on either, of restrictions that were not common to both. The very need, indeed, for such precautions would not improbably be denied; but their enactment, in that case, could harm none, and Chinese Statesmen may perhaps manage to gain a hearing for their propositions when satisfaction for the recent outrages has been given.

It is possibly difficult for high Chinese officials to appreciate the feeling in favor of missionary enterprise which prevails among a large section of the English people, and more difficult still for them to reconcile the attitude of France toward clerical institutions at home with its willingness to support them in the East. But Sir Thomas Sanderson was undoubtedly right in impressing on the Chinese Minister that, if public opinion once became alarmed and indignant in France and England, a cry for intervention might arise that might have very serious consequences." It would be useless for the Chinese to retort "that our people object to the propaganda as much as your people desire it," because religious enthusiasm declines to admit argument. We shrink in horror from the doctrine of the Koran or the sword. Europe would not tolerate, now, a campaign against the Albigenses : even the most enthusiastic would recoil from a naked proposal to impose Christianity on any heathen nation by force of arins. But a volume of public opinion which has to be reckoned with does approve of compelling China to admit and protect missionaries, how distasteful soever their presence may be to certain classes of the population. The treaty right will be upheld; and the mistake will not, it is hoped, be made of accepting money and a few heads as adequate reparation for the organized outbreaks that have been described. The conspirators who inspire the riots must be produced, the officials who fail to hinder them degraded, and pledges given of the existence of both will and power to exert a more efficacious protection over missionaries in future. The inflammatory literature must be restrained, and Mr. Gardner's suggestion that, "failing fear of war, our best means of insuring the safety of our countrymen in any Consular district is causing it to be more disagreeable for the officials to neglect than to perform the duty of protecting British subjects," may well be borne in mind. The officials' remissness need not be always and altogether ascribed to ill-will. Having attained office after a long period of waiting, and having borrowed freely to pay the fees incidental to its attainment, they are naturally anxious to retain it in order to recoup their outlay. And their best chance of retaining it is to keep order in their district. But there may be considerations more urgent than even the dissatisfaction of their superiors. If they run counter to the wishes of the literati and the gentry, these will certainly find means to subvert them; and the fear of such an event may occasionally terrify them into acquiescence in plots which they really disapprove. All that, however, does not concern us. The Imperial Government must manage its own people. It must support its officials in

doing their duty, and it must punish those who are primarily responsible for the flow of placards which are the cause of mischief. There is said to be a project to strike at the heart of the octopus, by insisting on the opening of Hunan. The idea is good, and might be accomplished, perhaps, by the opening of the Tungting Lake to foreign commerce. But we must be prepared, in that case, to make good our own entry. If the Government stands so far in awe of the Hunanese soldiers in the valley of the Yangtze that it dares not employ force for their repression, if it has witnessed the expulsion of its own emissaries from Hunan when the question was only about setting up a telegraph, it would probably not dare-at least at the present moment to insist on the right of foreigners to travel and reside in the province. The appearance of a few foreign gunboats on that lake, however, which is embayed in the obnoxious province, might prove an efficacious means of bringing various people to their senses. Whether Peking Statesmen would object, in their secret hearts, to our accepting the work of coercion is a question that few would care to answer. They might resent the shock to their prestige, yet not be altogether unwilling that the Hunanese should receive a practical lesson, the odiem of teaching which they themselves had not to incur. -National Review.

MR. HENRY JAMES.

No more considerable interest has lately attended the appearance of any play than that excited by the production in a London theatre of Mr. Henry James's dramatic version of his own novel, "The American." The reason of that interest is not far to seek. Whatever the merit and the success of our English writers of plays in general, it will not be disputed, we believe, that English literature, in the strict sense of the word, is not, as a rule, greatly enriched by their efforts; when, therefore, it was known that an eminent man of letters, a novelist of the first distinction, had turned his attention to the stage, the event, it was felt, was of an importance to arouse the most legitimate curiosity. It is not our purpose to comment here in any

way on Mr. James's work as a dramatist, which, indeed, lies chiefly in the future; but the admirable and lucid style, the command of witty and epigrammatic dialogue with which his readers are already familiar, probably justify the highest hopes of those who care greatly for the renascence of literary excellence in the English drama. It can be no secret to any one who has studied Mr. James's writings, that he has an almost passionate appreciation of fine plays and fine acting; a hundred passages in his critical work give evidence of his close and careful study of the stage and its requirements, while the point, always to be largely insisted on in any consideration of his work as a novelist, that he is a consummate artist, should have no less significance, it may be supposed, in the dramatic world than in that of fiction, as the term is usually understood.

In speaking of the work of Mr. Henry James, the first, the imperative thing to be said about it is that it is the work of an artist, and of one with a complete and exhaustive knowledge of his art and its resources. While no writer is more vividly modern, Mr. James is, in a sense, an artist as an ancient Greek was an artist; he represses systematically, that is to say, his own personality in view of the work on which he is engaged. By the public, and-shall we say?-by the English public in particular, this supreme quality of workmanship is one of the qualities least esteemed and least appreciated. The generous public hates the Augur's mask; it likes to peep and see the human countenance behind, to shake hands, so to speak, with the wearer, and congratulate him on having a soul like its own. Mr. James never, or by inference only, allows us the smallest peep; his reserve is impenetrable; he invariably treats his characters and his plots with the impartiality of the workman who apprehends that the truth of a thing, and not his own coloring of it, is what, before all, is need

ed.

We so far share the feeling, while absolutely disclaiming any share in the opinion of the public, on this point, as to find a particular pleasure in those impressions de voyage, those little sketches of travel collected under the various titles-" A Little Tour in France," "Portraits of Places," " Foreign Parts"-in which the writer, in the easiest, simplest, most genial manner imaginable, lets us into the secret of his personal impressions, his fine artistic discriminations, his good inns and his bad inns, his chance comrades, his satisfactions and disillusions. It is the charm of individuality that pervades these charming pages, and which, by the happiest in. stinct, the author has known how to convey without a touch of obtrusive egotism or fatiguing iteration of detail. It needs indeed but a glance over a hundred dreary and futile impressions de voyage, to borrow again that convenient term, to understand the rare and consummate skill that goes to the composition of these little articles in which, without any uneasy selfconsciousness or self-assertion, the writer

takes us into his confidence, shows us what is best worth seeing and the best way to see it, quotes his guide-book with a humorous guilelessness, and makes himself, in short, through his books, the most delightful travelling-companion in the world.

In putting forward these little volumes first, however, we are not doing Mr. James's work, and what we may imagine to be his own estimate of it, the injustice to rank them among his foremost productions. The field of literature that he has traversed is wide; both as critic and essayist he has gained particular distinction, no less than by the charming papers just mentioned. But it is as a novelist that he has found a foremost place among modern writers; it is his unique and delightful gift of fiction that, above all, claims consideration in treating of his work.

I.

Every writer of original excellence has one or more distinct lines along which his genius develops itself, and with which he becomes, as it were, identified. Mr. James, as we shall endeavor to show, has that larger outlook on the vast human comedy that distinguishes the great masters of fiction; but his earliest stories have a certain character in common that intimately connects them with what for convenience has been termed, the International novel. Mr. James, in fact, might not unreasonably claim to be the inventor of that particular form of romance; and though it would be manifestly unjust to consider him exclusively or even principally in relation to it, since much of his most masterly as well as his most delicate work does not touch on the International question that is to say, the interfusing influences of America and Europe-at all; yet there is no doubt that it was his earlier productions, "The American," "The Europeans," "Daisy Miller," "An International Episode," and half a dozen other tales on the same line, that won for him in the first instance much of the wide reputation he enjoys. Mr. James must at some time have studied his countrymen and countrywomen with extraordinary minuteness and detachment of vision. To him might be applied what Sainte-Beuve somewhere says of La Bruyère: "En jugeant de si près les hommes et les choses de son pays, il paraît désinté

ressé comme le serait un étranger, et déjà un homme de l'avenir." This disinterested view has, we believe, brought Mr. James into some discredit with a certain section of his compatriots; the fresh perception and keen insight he has brought to the contemplation of his country and theirs has not always pleased them. They are probably unaware of the debt of gratitude they owe him. It is more apparent to the English mind, which, contrasting its knowledge of America now with what it was some twenty or thirty years ago, perceives how largely, among other causes, Mr. James has contributed to that knowledge; how clear a light, and how favorable a light, has been thrown upon the subject by his interpretations. This is the more valuable that there can be no suspicion of the author's impartiality; that if, as is the fact, there is in the course of his stories hardly a contest between an American and a European in which the American does not show the finer of the two, it is, we are persuaded, because, given the characters and the circumstances, the American must of necessity show the finer of the two. Nothing, indeed, could be more impossible than to treat Mr. James as even remotely a partisan; nothing could be further removed from his method, from the large and even glance he turns on one character and another. When he convinces us, it is through his presentment of the truth of things, never through the expression of his personal bias. He himself tells us somewhere that it is his constant habit to tip the balance; and, if he had not told us, we might have divined it from his work. It is probably a natural quality that he has cultivated to a degree that makes it impossible for him in contemplating a subject seriously to look at it from one point only; he turns it in his hands, so to speak, as one turns a globe, considering it from every side. This habit of mind is, of course, one of the finest and most essential that a writer can bring to his work; and if it occasionally exhibits the defect of its quality in carrying disinterestedness to the verge of coldness, it has the supreme merit of leaving the reader's judgment free, of never affronting him by undue insistence on one point to the hindrance of another.

It results naturally from the perfection to which Mr. James has brought this particular method of observation, that the

men and women of his tales should have, both physically and mentally, an air of solidity and reality only occasionally attained to in the same degree; he sees them impartially, he depicts them unerringly, with an extreme delicacy and distinction; they are set in clear and open daylight, in a perspective as wide, in an atmosphere as free as those of the two continents of which he treats. His characters are types and yet individual; they belong at once to the universe and to their own epoch; they have, in short, that combination of the general and the particular that is indispensable to the complete vitality of a creature of the imagination; and they stand out in a relief that is the bolder, perhaps, that they are, as a rule, provided with little more scenery for their surrounding than is requisite to indicate the local coloring of the story. To Mr. James, we gather from his novels as a whole, life presents itself not pictorially, as a number of pictures, that is, in which human action displays itself against the vast scenic background of the world, not dramatically, as a succession of scenes culminating in a logical catastrophe (though both these points of view are necessarily included in his scheme of work), but primarily as a series of problems, moral, social, or psychological, to be worked out and solved. An involved situation, a moral dilcınma, the giant and complex grasp of society in its widest sense, upon the individual-these and such as these are the problems to the tracing out and solution of which he brings an extremne fineness and subtlety, subtle and fine as the workings of the human mind hardly conscious of its own movement from point to point. It may be said at once, that in exercising his admirable gift of psychological insight and imagination, Mr. James frequently presupposes great attention on the part of his readers, and an intelligence of reception hardly less than his own intelligence of representation. He is one of the finest of analysts; but nevertheless he not seldom reaches a point where he ceases to analyze and simply suggests with a delicacy conveying the flattering assumption that the reader has keenness and imagination enough of his own to follow up the writer's suggestion with as much certainty. as when, a hand being seen at a window, it may be inferred that a human being stands behind it. As a fact, we believe

that Mr. James flatters his public too much. The average reader has neither brains nor imagination to follow out a suggestion; he yawns at psychology; he is apt to resent explanation and non-explanation alike. He loves a good downright legend : "This is a wood," "This is a barn-door," which he who runs may read; he loves an obvious plot, an honest mystery, a conclusion that rounds off everything. All that is a point of view already over-discussed perhaps, and for which there will doubtless be always much to be said; we only refer to it now, because while the lovers of Mr. James's stories find a charm beyond that of any other, in his method, at once delicate and powerful, it may probably always forbid his volumes the honor of the railway bookstall, or the seventy thousandth copy of the cheap edition.

In using the word "powerful," it must be understood in the wide sense in which it is applicable to Mr. James's work. There is a usual and perfectly legitimate sense in which it is employed, as expressing a certain movement of passion or energy on the writer's part, through which certain scenes stand out from the remainder of the work, and move the reader in his turn to an emotion that forever remains

in his memory. Such scenes as these are rare with Mr. James; it is perhaps an excess of the artistic sense of detachment, that occasionally compels him, when we should expect him to be most emotional, to be most restrained. His power is of another kind altogether; it arises from a profound knowledge of what he is writing about, from what seems sometimes an almost exhaustive knowledge of human nature; his anatomy is perfect; every hidden bone and muscle is in its place. His surface (to change the metaphor) may be level, but it never rings hollow; its foundations are deep as those of the life of which he treats; the result is that impression of sustained power that is met with only in the great masters, that is the distinguish ing mark of the great masters. Others may charm us and claim our eterna! gratitude for the charm-by their imagination, their fancy, their genius even; but somewhere or other there is a gap in the carpentry, and through the chink the light of disillusion shines. With Mr. James, we tread solidly and look at his presentment of life without a misgiving. It is

the first in quality, it is the most essential boon a writer can give us.

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We might refer in this connection, and as being among the most perfect presentments of his art, to two of Mr. James's earlier and less well known stories"Madame de Mauves," and Washington Square." The first of these is a story of no great length, with hardly any plot; one of those subtle problems of character and situation in which the author takes pleasure, and ended finally by an epigram, as his stories occasionally find themselves ending, after a fashion somewhat disconcerting to the reader. It is, in brief, the story of a young American girl married to a French roué, M. de Mauves, with whom one of her own countrymen falls passionately in love. The point of the story lies in the fashion in which this passion is treated by the husband, the lover, and Madame de Mauves herself; and one has only in reading it to consider what might be made of this apparently hackneyed theme by a superficial, a commonplace, or a vulgar writer to appreciate the delicate originality and powerful handling Mr. James has brought to its treatment. The whole story is in low relief, without a salient incident; its strength lies in the sense that the roots of the faintly-blooming flowers of the little drama reach down to the deepest springs of human action; that the underlying strata of life presupposed by the surface are familiar to the writer as the surface itself. The other story, Washington Square," is much longer, but its motif, given in abstract form, is hardly more novel than that of "Madame de Mauves." The scene is chiefly laid in New York, and it is the history of a young girl, who, accredited with the prospect of inheriting a large fortune at her father's death, is pursued by a needy adventurer, with whom she falls blindly in love. The father, as in duty bound, opposes the marriage; the young girl, after many struggles, consents at last to put her lover to the test; he disappears, and the girl lives and dies an old maid. That is all the plot; but this little history, that for sustained and masterly treatment may be compared to Eugénie Grandet" (which for the rest it does not in the least resemble), holds the reader's interest from beginning to end. It has not the special charm of Balzac's masterpiece; the heroine, Catherine, a diffi

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