is very English, and our imaginary foreigner would be infuriated with it. He would read, for instance, that splendid passage in Mr. Watson's "Apologia," in which the poet, taunted with his classicism, turns dramatically on the decadents:

For though of faulty and of erring walk,

I have not suffered aught of frail in me To stain my song; I have not paid the world

The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness as a gift.

But he would not feel the thrill that an Englishman feels at that burst of ethical scorn. He would say, "Oh, I know what that means. It means not bringing a blush to the cheek of the young person. It means no convincing passions, no biting facts, no stirring of the terrible underworld of life: no fierce and graceful nudities, no strange colors, no fantastic forms-or, in a word, as far as I am concerned, no art." And then with what relief he would find himself reading some other English writer, who had none of these vices of pomposity or vagueness, or a perpetual ethical test. And he would find such an un-English English writer. He would find a man of superlative genius writing in our language, in whose work there would be no lack of biting facts, of fierce nudities, of strange colors, of the underworld. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, our one Continental writer, would be a godsend indeed to our Continental critic. Mr. Kipling's splendid realism and picturesqueness would appear original in any country. But they would not appear one half so original in France as in England. When Mr. Kipling startles us it is simply because we are English. All his methods have long been employed in French literature, though it must be said scarcely ever with more talent and effect. His slang poems are an old deVOL. LXXIX. 564

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vice to the great French decadents who wrote verses in the argot of the criminal quarter. His vivid pictures of physical sensations are part of the first lesson of the Zolaist. His quaint and fascinating insistence on smell is already palling on the erotic Parisian æsthete. His sharp, cruel short stories are as good as Maupassant's. His Orientalism is perfectly French. One change any one must feel in passing from Watson to him. It is passing from a cool climate to a hot one. In one of his admirable tales, Kipling uses the phrase, "sultry stories." He means smoking-room stories; but without any reference to this meaning, we may say that his stories are all sultry. I am not, of course, comparing the merits of these writers, either literary or political. I am merely pointing out differences that are matters of impartial fact. And in order to avoid the appearance of special sympathy with Mr. Watson, I have chosen the standpoint of a man who disliked his splrit and his art. Now let us suppose the contrary case-that of a man, either English or foreign, whom the whole air and smell of England exalted like a great wine; a man who knew, as we know, that her pomposity is only an old and innocent dignity, that her vagueness is only an ingrained reverence and liberality, that her Puritanism is a concern for the things that matter. He would move easily in the landscapes of these poems. Every poet has a landscape at the back of his soul. Mr. Watson's is a Northern and English landscape-a landscape of great uplands and huge pale dawns. It is so as surely as Mr. Kipling's is an alien landscape, with a stretch of dry places, palms, and a floor of fire. And this the lover of England would feel at once in Watson. He would feel in the misty hills the vague practicality, the vague reverence, the vague and exuberant generos

ity of England. He would feel the peculiar English virtues, such as magnanimity and geniality. Mr. Watson is perfectly right, wild as the patriotic claim may seem, when he puts England

All lands above,

In Justice and in Mercy and in Love.

Justice is perhaps an exaggeration: the English are not logical enough to be just. But England is certainly (when foreign “Imperialists" let her alone) the most merciful of nations. The Majuba policy may or may not be the most wise, but certainly it was the most English. No one at all acquainted with popular French fiction can fail to remember an element in it which we find unnatural, the element of revenge. How easily a kindly and ordinary man, when wronged in his capacity of husband, becomes a fiend, a torturer. This element is not English, but the gust of foreign fiction has had a secondary effect in attracting into our politics the conception of "la revanche." The great quality of easiness and forgiveness we had of nature; but Mr. Kipling and his school with their tropical tendency, seem bent on infecting our statesmanship with the Southern ethic of the knife.

It is not probable in the nature of things that Mr. Watson will ever be a popular poet. Two reasons chiefly hinder it, and I have no doubt I have laid myself open to the charge of paradox by mentioning the more obvious of them: he is locally and traditionally English. A purely national poet must be neglected at a certain stage of overcivilization, for when men have become very luxurious, novelty is the last and only luxury. Hence the enormous inundation of French, Russian, American, Anglo-Indian influence on England and England's books. The second cause of his necessary isolation is that he is fundamentally democratic. I know

that the word will be misunderstood. With music-hall refrains ringing in our ears, with torrents of books about the brutality and ignorance of the East End flooding the market, with every half-penny paper peppered with slang, and every public speech filled with appeals to the common-sense of working men, it seems ridiculous to point to the most lonely, the most polished, the most academic and elaborate of modern men of genius and call him democratic. But he is democratic. He does not appeal to the lower classes, which is appealing to an oligarchy.

Democracy must always be severe, without either desire or dread of paradox, we may go even further. Democracy must always be unpopular. It is a religion, and the essence of a religion is that it constrains. Like every other religion, it asks men to do what they cannot do; to think steadily about the important things. Like every other religion, it asks men to consider the dark, fugitive, erratic realities, to ignore the gigantic, glaring and overpowering trivialities. It rests upon the fact that the things which men have in common, such as a soul and a stomach, such as the love of children or the fear of death, are to infinity more important than the things in which they differ, such as a landed estate or an ear for music, the capacity to found an empire or to make a bow. And it has, like any other religion, to deal with the immense primary difficulty that the unimportant things are by far the most graphic and arresting, that millions see how a man founds an empire, and only a few how he faces death, and that a man may make several thousand bows in a year and go on improving in them, while in the art of being born he is only allowed one somewhat private experiment. In politics, in philosophy, in everything. it is sufficiently obvious that the things that are seen are temporal, but the

things that are not seen are eternal. And the thing which is most undiscoverable in all human affairs, the thing which is most elusive, most secret, most hopelessly sealed from our sight is, and always must be, the thing which is most common to us all. Every little variety we have we gossip and boast of eagerly; it is upon uniformity that we preserve the silence of terrified conspirators. There are only two things that are absolutely common to all of us, more common than bread or sunlight, death and birth. And it is considered morbid to talk about the one and indecent to talk about the other. It is the nature of man to talk, so to speak, largely and eagerly about every new feather he sticks in his hair, but to conceal like a deformity the fact that he has a head.

This is the secret of the permanent austerity of the democratic idea, of its eternal failure and its eternal recurrence, of the fact that it can never be popular and can never be killed. It withers into nothingness in the light of a naked spirituality those special badges and uniforms which we all love so much, since they mark us out as kings or schoolmasters, or gentlemen or philanthropists. It declares with a brutal benignity that all men are brothers just at the very moment that every one feels himself to be the good grandfather of every one else. To our human nature it commonly seems quite a pitiful exchange to cease from being poets or vestrymen, and to be put off with being the images of the everlasting. That is the secret, as I say, of the austerity of republicanism, of its continual historic association with the stoical philosophy, of its continual defeat at the hands of heated mobs. It strikes men down from the high places of their human fads and callings, and lays them all level upon a dull plane of the divine.

Now this stern and absolute character in the republican sentiment must of necessity have its effect in literary form. Thence arose that august and somewhat rigid school of eloquence and poetry which has been associated with republicanism almost from the first twilight of the pagan era. So far as one broad distinction may be said to run like a chasm from end to end of literary history, it is this, that the literary weapon of popular government has been classic literature; the literary weapon of judges and pontiffs and the great princes of the earth has always been frivolity. One might almost say that their literary weapon had always been slang. If we want exhilarating vulgarity (and we often do want it), we go to some good Conservative, such as Aristophanes or Mr. Anstey. If we want a gay and gross picture of the real turbulence of the real rabble of the seventeenth century, say in England, we go to some cavalier like Dekker or Wycherley. To John Milton, the republican, we go for something quite different. We go to the republican not for a comedy about men but for an epic about man.

Of this great tradition of the union of a democratic policy with a classical style the great living representative in England is Mr. William Watson. And he stands alone. A violent reaction towards realism in literature has in our time gone hand in hand with a violent reaction towards Toryism in politics: it may seem strange to connect the vivisections of Zola with the admirable public speeches of Lord Salisbury, but they have this profound kinship, that they both make utter sport of all human dignity. In Mr. Watson's political poems may be found what can be found nowhere else in modern England-the old and authentic voice of the England of Milton and Wordsworth. Nothing is more striking than this parallelism between Mr. Watson's

(Being an extract from the memoirs of Count Luca della Riva-knight of the Order of the Annunciation-member of the Venetian parliament during the revolution, 1848-49.)

It was in the early spring of 1851 that Prince Mario d'Ivrea brought his young English wife home with him to Venice. I received a hastily scrawled note from him early one morning informing me of their arrival and telling me to: "Hurry up and be the first to welcome Edith to her new home."

I had been the recipient, at frequent intervals during the past winter, of letters from Mario, bearing the postmarks of various country towns and villages in England, where he had been visiting friends-letters full of a lover's, and an Italian lover's enthusiasm for the eyes, the hair, the white skin, the exquisitely modulated voice of Lady Edith Alvanley, daughter of the Earl of Stanes. I had read these letters, which had never contained less than two dozen "exclamatory notes" with considerable amusement, slightly tempered with a young man's natural regret that a friend should renounce the delights of bachelordom, and with a certain anxiety as to the possible consequences of bringing an English girl

to Venice in those troublous times, when the workmen were still occupied repairing the damage done to our palaces by Austrian cannon, and the white-coated Austrian soldiers were still seeking, arresting and putting in prison, without even a pretence of judicial proceedings, any poor wretch, whose ill-chance made him incur the suspicion of desiring the liberty of his country.

Well! Mario and his wife would be safe enough, I reasoned, as I read his note, provided they kept on good terms with the Austrian officials; for he had interest at the court of Vienna, and, besides, he came of a great race, the greatest in Venice after the Dandolos, and it would be dangerous policy to molest him; even Metternich had admitted as much.

I was in a somewhat similar position, owing to the amount of my income; I was too rich for it to be convenient to banish me, I was worth a king's ransom to them annually in taxes, and their officials were not above accepting a bribe when I wished for a free hand to help my poor countrymen in their difficulties; otherwise, I flatter have myself, Mario and I would shared the fate of the forty pa

exiled

after the Mario had fought

triots who were siege of '49, for like a hero for his country, and the Austrians knew it only too well. Nor were they ignorant of the fact that during those terrible months in which we had fought so desperately for the republic nearly all the arms and ammunition had been supplied at my expense.

I have since been asked, not without malice, how it was that we elected to remain in Venice during those days, when so many better men were pining under foreign skies; Manin in Paris, Vare at Lausanne, Comello in Poland, and the others-God knows where? The reason was not far to seek; we were needed, both of us, in Venice, heaven knows how much we were needed, Mario with his influence and I with my money (and never, I swear, was money put to better uses). Who else could have kept the Austrian officials in check and shielded the unhappy Venetians from their revengeful malice? But I am wandering from my story.

On receiving Mario's note, I had ordered my gondola to be ready by ten o'clock, and had sent a servant to buy a large bunch of roses to offer to the newly-arrived princess. It was a lovely morning, and as I was rowed down the Grand Canal towards the Palazzo d'Ivrea I thought that Mario's wife could hardly have arrived in Venice at a better season. A light breeze from the south broke the blue waters of the broader canals into dancing wavelets that seemed to catch and to reflect the bright spring sunshine as they leaped and splashed against the many-colored walls and steps; flowers showed brightly against the open windows; the pigeons, the swallows and the gulls all circled together high up against the light azure of the sky. Even the white coats of the Austrian soldiers, as they flashed past in gon

dolas or strolled about on the bridges and open squares, served to give an added brilliancy to an already brilliant

scene.

I lay back in the gondola, smoking a cigarette, with the large bunch of roses I had ordered by my side, when, as we came round a bend of the canal and in sight of Mario's palace, I saw that there were two figures on the steps that led down to the water; one I recognized, even at that distance, as being Mario himself, and the other-it was a woman's figure dressed in white-I guessed to be Mario's wife.

The gondola swept round the curve, and Mario, recognizing the blue and white liveries of my gondoliers, came down the steps to the water's edge and waved his hand to me. His wife stood on the steps above him, shading her eyes with her hand, the sunlight gleaming in her hair, that was the color of burnished gold; she had stuck a little bunch of scarlet leaves into the belt of her white dress, and she held a larger bunch in one hand. Never shall I forget the picture they made, she and Mario, as they stood waiting for me in the morning sunlight, he tall and dark, his bronzed face smiling welcome, and his princess in her white dress with her crimson leaves, and golden aureole of fair hair.

So I was presented to Milady (that was the name we all gave her from the first) and bade her welcome to Venice, and for the next few days rowed about in a gondola showing her the beauties of her new home. Though the memory of past disasters, and some vague foreboding of great events yet to come, gave our amusements a rather grim background of anxiety, the season was a brilliant one in Venice, and Milady, who had an English girl's enthusiastic capacity for enjoying herself, went to balls, theatres and receptions, managing even to inspire Mario and myself, much as we hated such forms of entertain