ry, for it was that breathless twilight hour when

All the air a solemn stillness holds,

no less in Japan than where in English latitudes

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea ...

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

though the flocks and herds are conspicuous by their absence in Japan.

Two miles in front the fairy lanterns of our village home glowed soft; behind us the empty silent hills were silhouetted sable-hued against an inarticulate world of burnished archipelagoes floating poised in a sea of irradiate ruddy gold. In spite of the splendor in the sky, there was something more constraining in the round-chinned creature by my side; and when already her bungalow arrived, and those short skirts passed within the door, I resumed my way aggrieved at the narrow limitations of the statute mile.

For

All was hilarity in the inn. It was somebody's birthday, so somebody's table had champagne, and infection caught the whole room; healths were drunk, and peals of laughter roused the air that was usually so sedate. once we all gave the impression of being really glad we were alive-so that the wondering nésan lingered at the door to bequeath approving smiles. Even the lady lately lost upraised her voice above its ordinary calm; while Skipper and Mate, exuberant in random repartee, together soared to a seventh heaven of congenial joy.

It was rather late when our company broke up for bed, but so far as I was concerned the eventful day was not yet over. Beguiled by the glorious weather outside, I had again neglected while it was day to take precautions for the night; and now that Voice was

grievous unto me: for all is vanity and a wrestling with the wind.

Even a man of royal blood should not speak like that,-if he had been to the top of Asama, or had had one walk with a long-striding ardent creature of mere thirteen. Nor would he then have written.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

But perhaps he composed his plaint during a period of saturated air, such as takes the grit out of the strongest white man in Japan-when the month of June lays its steamy choking weight upon our hearts. (About that time the cocksurest Anglo-Saxon drags his big limp frame along the shady side of the street in a manner most unworthy of a Dominant Race; then is the month when suicides occur among prosperous Christian men; and we realize the debt we owe to the crisp climate of our island home.)

The Teacher had just gone by with soft footfall to his hard-earned rest; the inn was very silent as the dirge ran

on:

.. Behold, they had no comforter. Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive; yea, more than both the man that has not yet been, who has not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

The voice ceased a few minutes while its owner sipped some tea, and he must have turned several pages when he resumed:

A living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they ay more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. As well their love, as their hatred and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion

for ever in anything that is done under the sun.

Taking a long breath and heaving a long sigh-because of his age and loneliness-he hastened through the powerful peroration to its unimpassioned close, while in a lowered voice came the sedately uttered final words:

This is the end of the matter, when all has been said: fear God and keep his commandments; therein lies the health of Man.

A dramatic silence reigned now in the corridor: the two white men, preacher and congregation, subsided into sleepmen of that favored breed whose higher inborn energy has caused them to look with contempt upon people of Asiatic race, though it is Asia whose finest moral teaching yet persists, in these enlightened times, the mainstay and cement of every civilized society.

Awaking tardily next morning from a heavy sleep, I found my last day was come, so I gladly joined some others in a saunter up the Usui Pass, for a farewell view of the blue panorama that lies hushed beneath us on that airy height. The summer breeze laps softly here, where the only noise beside our western voices is the hum of incessant myriad insects darting rapid flights through the splendor of rich sunshine; we are out on the edge of the most remote Old World, and a sense of infinite secrets seems to be borne on the silent sweep of voluminous velvety air that pervades Japan from off the vast horizons of the scented warm Pacific. Two thousand years ago an Emperor coming home victorious from a rough campaign stopped at this spot, arrested by the glorious sight; in the same glance came the memory of his young wife, taken by Death along those distant shores; and the two short words of lament that broke from his lips

have clung to the landscape ever since.3 We buy a few trifles from the handful of peasants who-together with a shrine (ça va sans dire in Japan)-keep guard on the brow of the Pass; they occupy poverty-stricken little huts, and must live in extreme destitution, yet they are free from bodily dirt and smell of similar folk elsewhere; and the squalor itself is nearly forgotten because of the gentle ceremoniousness of each ill-fed inmate of these sheds. While they go inside out of the noonday blaze to swallow their poor melancholy meal of millet, we heirs of the ages turn aside by the ancient shrine, ascend a few hundred feet to a finer vantage-point beneath trees, and there unpack our own expensive food, deftly made up with every aid to appetite that our Host's experience of "foreigners" can suggest. Does their blue landscape speak to them with the same mysterious music as to us? or are their nerves, for lack of tonic food through centuries, shut out from half the symphony around? Each day in Japan the white man feels his luck, and knows it more than his deserts.

While we are basking idle on the limpid heights, watching the scene through wisps of lazy smoke, and watching too a proud young creature of thirteen pick flowers as beautiful as herself, down far below in the breathless village within a shady wooden hall the missionaries, come from all Japan, are sitting grave in Conference.

Here

in their annual summer meeting they find themselves confronted with the suspicion-which they indignantly disown-that much of what they are commending to their Japanese audience is not so much "Christianity" as Race. They exhort the Japanese to become "a Christian nation," while yet at the back of their heads the word "Christian" has to them no meaning unless it embodies

"A! tsuma!" ("Oh my wife!"). Azuma is the old name of this eastern district of Japan.

the best characteristics of men who are born white.

They must learn to take the Japanese as they are, a different Race, as distinct from us as horns from violins in an orchestra. But the Christian orchestra is a house of "many mansions," and there they can surely find a place.

We leave the missionaries to think it out. Because we are so "good-looking" compared with the East (the external sign of an inner organic superiority), and our women's bodies so superb, because we have made the world a material garden of Eden (for those who have money), and especially because we have learnt from scientific research the secret of overwhelming national Power, so that we can "teach them a lesson" whenever we wish, therefore we tower above these parent civilizations, and urge them to change their racial spots, to take upon them all our white peculiarities. Yet the missionaries know, when alone in the silence of uncontroversial hills, that the hope which inspires their efforts arose out of Asia. They know that though white men are easily first when there is work to be done and conditions to be improved that is, whenever it is a question of high energy-yet no breed of white men has ever bestowed on the world that store of comfort for the soul which the nations treasure as their chief possession.

Now we must forsake our sunny picnics on the hills, bid farewell to the quiet village, and drop down again into the torrid plain. We have no space left to tell how Tora said good-bye with a hand as limp as clay, though a volcano of a small heart beat beneath her kimono; how the Preacher and his Book were at last ejected from the inn; how a week or two later the village itself was nearly washed away in a furious typhoon; how I paid a visit to the Skipper (where of course I met the Mate) in his high estate that rises like a fort

above the Shinagawa swamp; how the Teacher wrote months afterwards to enumerate the text-books he had purchased with our "tips"; and how on sparkling Christmas Day I received a The Cornhill Magazine.

certain card addressed in a rounded hand, a card with a cow erect on a sunset field, and under it the words, "Lest we forget."

Ernest Foxwell.

The true function of the novel is still one of those vexed questions upon which criticism seems constitutionally incapable of satisfying itself. Other problems in literary ethics come up from time to time, as taste crystallizes, for controversy and decision; undergo their little hour of hesitancy, and are pigeon-holed for future reference; but the question of the whole duty of the novelist is just as open to-day as it was in the age of "Pamela," and "Joseph Andrews." Here perpetually the inextinguishable conflict between realism and idealism-that conflict which began with the birth of criticism and seems likely to survive the taste for creation itself-rages with unabated ardor. Here, alone, in the field of fiction, anything like stability of judgment seems almost unattainable. What should the novel be? What is its proper aim and limitation? Is the novelist to be a preacher, torturing himself to illustrate some dogma or to point some moral; or is he to accept the gentler duty of entertainment, "taking tired people," as Mr. Kipling picturesquely puts it, "to the islands of the blest," and entirely content with his art if he has lured his audience into an hour's forgetfulness of the rush and worry of modern conditions and modern responsibilities? Or, to put it a little differently, is the novelist to interpose between man and his environment some softening veil of fancy; or is he to draw life as he sees

it, coldly and with calculation, sacrificing pleasure to the truth, and telling over and over again a gray, dispiriting story to what must soon become a tired, and perhaps a rather irresponsive world? It is an old problem, and threadbare, but somehow or other time and argument seem to bring us very little nearer to its solution.

And yet the question is really a vital one; for until the novelist has faced it, and decided with which of the forces he intends to range himself, his work is almost certain to lack sincerity and effect. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that that dissatisfying lack of fibre which every critical reader must confess to finding in so much of the well-meant fiction of the time, is entirely due to the failure of the author to get his issues clear at the outset, and to understand the point of view from which he himself regards life and its intricate complexities. Analyze an unsatisfying novel to its radical constituents and you will always find insincerity at the root of all its evil. Obliquity of vision, confusion of attitude, false sentiment, ill-conceived character, blurred proportion-all these elementary faults of the mediocre novel spring, in the first instance, from the author's own want of literary sincerity.

How can a man hope to produce a reasonable picture of our complex and sensitive modern life until he has placed himself in some definite relation

to its problems; until, in short, he has himself felt and lived the passions and incidents which he sets himself to describe; lived them, not, of course, necessarily in the actual arena of action, but at least in that fortified castle of the mind in which sympathy enables a man to bear a friend's infirmities just as poignantly as he would bear his own. Different men, of course, will bear the same infirmity in different ways; and life, no less than art, has room for its realists as well as its idealists. But no man, it is safe to say, will ever live his life out profitably who has not fought, in his imagination, the battles which others have to fight, in reality, from day to day; and no man will ever issue from the study of books an artist of any power or influence, who has not made his peace with that first necessity of the artist, and taken up his own definite and sincere attitude towards the problems which he has to suggest. raises the old cry among her children: "Choose you this day whom ye will serve"; and, until the answer is given and the choice made, she will tell them nothing of her secrets.

Art

George Gissing, whose death within the week of Christmas brought a chilling sense of loss to all who are interested in the literary craft in England, was one of that small body of contemporary novelists whose career leaves no room for question about the sincerity or completeness of their choice. He died in what ought to have been his prime, just at the moment when a long course of comparative disregard and very positive personal discomfort seemed on the point of emerging into high reputation and intellectual ease. For years happiness had been beyond his grasp, and popularity had seemed to evade him. He saw men of much inferior talent pass him in the race for public favor; he knew he must have known-that only a small concession to popular taste,

only a slight deviation from literary sincerity and his chosen path, was needed to place him at once among the vociferously acclaimed, and to bring him affluence and notoriety. But, if the temptation ever presented itself to him, it was never for a moment entertained. A truer artist, a more conscientious and sincere workman than George Gissing never lived. He made no compromise with fortune, permitted no suspicion of disloyalty to his own ideal. He ranged himself from the outset with those who, out of the very integrity of their point of view, are forced, as it were, "to paint the thing as they see it for the God of things as they are"; and it was simply impossible for his open and honest nature to paint or to imagine anything else. The last years of his life were gladdened by a growing sense of recognition: even in the glibber forms of journalism it was no longer permissible to speak of George Gissing otherwise than with respect. But he died too soon to taste that fuller approbation which the best of his work is certain to command from all who are capable of appreciating true and vital literature; he died too soon to enjoy his elementary deserts. And the sense of this prematurity of loss adds an even grayer tint to the atmosphere of a life which, from its start to within sight of the last turn in the road, had more than its share of mist and rain. "The sense of tears in mortal things" was never more keenly felt, or more bravely faced, than it was in this manful, strenuous, and undiverted career of work and sympathy.

It is often curiously instructive to notice how widely a man's first literary inspirations differ from his subsequent development. Gissing, it has been said, drew life as he found it (it is the first truth about him); but, before a man begins to write at all, books have always given the impulse towards literary expression. And no one who has