There was no sign of the sea-shell, but in its place there extended over the whole level extent of the heavens a tapestry of cirrhous clouds sweeping on and sweeping on. The sky was growing blue and luminous, and with tenderness and less of mystery it answered his question.

'No,' he said to himself, however good this simple laborious life may be, I cannot bring myself to it. I love her.'"

everyone.

Now if we let our minds revert to the famous scene when Rawdon Crawley knocks Lord Steyne down, and flings the jewellery the Marquis has given Becky in his face, we must perforce be struck with its hollowness. For what sentiment do we gather from it? None, save one of violence. The scene is, as I have said, a gesticulation. Perhaps the scene when Anna is believed to be dying affords a closer parallel. She sends for her husband, and bids him be reconciled to Vronsky. She will die more easily if she knows that with her death their feud will cease. . . . They are reconciled, but she recovers; and with her life their hostility recommences. I need not quote; for told even thus simply its significance will be apprehended by Or shall I refer the reader to the wonderful scene in "The Maid's Tragedy," where the courtier is told by his wife on his wedding-night that she is the king's mistress and loves the king? Or shall I choose one of the many beautiful scenes in Racine, where, though the vehicle of expression be courtly formula, the soul confesses its deepest secrets ? Or shall I turn to Cervantes' great symbolic tale for further illustration? Or shall I take one of Ibsen's dramas—“The Master Builder," for instance? But never will my point be conceded, whatever evidence I bring in support of it, for to do so would be an admission that hitherto England had not produced a great novelist. Yet, however we look at it, it seems clear that since the Elizabethans the Saxon race has abandoned primary ideas for secondary. My critics will therefore engage in argument showing that great literature can exist independently of ideas, or they will admit that late Saxon. fiction must be considered on a lower plane than Celtic and Slav. And with the late Saxon, I fear I must include the Scotch Celt. For have Scott and Stevenson been really more concerned with the inner life than Thackeray or Trollope? In adventures they

have indulged, but the narration of picturesque anecdotes brings us no nearer to the secret trouble of life than descriptions of material enjoyments in English country houses. Nothing is really effected by changing the circumstance from a pleasant armchair to a pirate ship on the Spanish Main. The same literature is often produced in both circumstances. In neither need there be (Thackeray and Stevenson are proof of it) any of that secret inquietude which never ceases in the soul of man. Twenty thousand pounds to our credit at the bank do not silence it; and if we are not killed in the boarding, the question comes, What then? There shall come a day when we too shall be overthrown. There is no moment when the secret fear of life is wholly dead; a faint tingle never dies out of our ears. Lovers clasp each other and vow that nothing shall part them. Why do they vow? It would be useless to explain myself further. I pass on to another point. . . . If in Thackeray and Fielding, and Scott and Stevenson, there is very little sensation of life's inquietude, there is none whatever of the eternal mystery, and that is what is most human in man; his soul is full of it, and any accident may cause it to overflow-the mere sight of the sky, the high, cloudless sky, that it should exist, that he should see it and be able to think it, is enough.

"Do not I know,' thought Levin, 'that that is infinity of space, and not a vault of blue stretching above me? But, however I strain my sight, I can only see a vaulted dome ; and in spite of my knowledge of infinite space, I have more satisfaction in looking at it as a blue vaulted dome than when I try to look beyond.' Levin stopped thinking. He listened to the mysterious voices which seemed to wake joyfully in him. Is it really faith?' he thought, fearing to believe in his happiness. 'My God, I thank Thee,' he cried; and he swallowed down the sobs that arose, and brushed away with both hands the tears that filled his eyes."

Scott has sent forth many heroes to die, but what do we learn but the bare fact that they died from a terrible thrust or blow? Of the yearnings of dying eyes for the sky and grass and sunshine, and the fear of a dying brain of the dark loneliness of death, we are vouchsafed hardly a word. The intimate pictures of the soul, intense and true as Prince

Andrie's death in "War and Peace," are not to be found in Scott or Stevenson.

"Prince Andrie not only knew he was going to die, but he also felt that he was dying, that he was already half way towards death.

"He experienced a consciousness of alienation from everything earthly, and a strange, beatific exhilaration of being. Without impatience, without anxiety, he waited for what was before him; that ominous Eternal Presence, unknown, far away, which had never ceased all through his life to haunt his senses was now near at hand, and by virtue of that strange exhilaration which he felt almost comprehensible and palpable." And what revelation of the under life do we find in Thackeray or Fielding, of that vague, undefinable, yet intensely real life that lies beneath our consciousness, that life which knows, wills, and perceives without help from us? Surely it is in this under life, this unconscious will, that resides the true humanity, the humanity of the ages, of the long, long circumstances that preceded birth. It is there that we find the wonder and mystery of life. Thence proceeds all faith, all mission, and the inexplicable warnings, appellations, and impulses which we must obey. It is in the under life that the great novelist finds his inspiration, and the business of his art. He regards the brief circumstance of actual life as the raiment. The events which fill the great canvas of "Anna Karenina," and the still vaster canvas of "Peace and War," are only important so far as they reveal what is passing beneath the surface. They are but signs and symbols, and the beauty of Tolstoi's art is that nowhere can we determine the limits of either life; so beautifully are they interwoven that they are in the book as they are in life, indivisible forms of one and the same thing. The subconscious is the real life, out of which chance has beckoned us for a while; it is the life of the ages, and through it Tolstoi enables us to perceive affinities in all things. With what effect the wolf-hunt comes upon us in "Peace and War," the capture and the binding of the savage animal. Does Tolstoi mean Napoleon, or is the likeness a chance one? Nothing in Tolstoi is disconnected, though we cannot point to the line of intersection. No one has pushed

the principle of homogeneity so far.

Organic matter is on the way to becoming vegetable, and vegetable matter is on the way to becoming animal, the animal is rising up to man, and man aspires towards God. In the wonderful scene of the mowers we have man in happy communion with the earth, of which he is but a part all is in evolution. Yet not a trace of bleak positivism, rather a sublime pantheism, which seems to exalt all things to a vast spirituality. The chapter in which Levin goes out snipe-shooting thrills with a sense of this spirituality of man and things. The cold air, the shaking boughs of the birches, the restless clouds moving through bright spaces of wintry blue, the moss and peat and rushes under foot, the cry of the startled birds, and the quickening of man's soul to the very rhythm of life. Such is Tolstoi's interpretation; yet the scene is as vivid as anything in Flaubert, and more completely part and parcel of the whole. No part of the picture is given undue relief; nowhere a shadow of parti pris, of trick, or even method. The picture seems to exist merely in the result.

Of landscape nature "Vanity Fair" has nothing to show, not even Hyde Park, nor the beautiful spectacle of the season flowers in the window-sills. Does this conclude the list of Thackeray's omissions? Not quite, for I cannot conclude without remarking that Tolstoi's choice of a large canvas is more clear than Thackeray's. Tolstoi wished to display life, not in detached figures, but in its endless co-relations; complexity is part of its mystery, and the mystery of life was always foremost in his mind. He wished to exhibit life in its wonderful continuity; he wished his picture to vanish at the covers and not to break off. There is something of this in "Vanity Fair," but not enough to justify the size of the canvas the scene in which Amelia accepts Dobbin, and where Becky Sharp is seen for the last time in company with Joe Sedley. There is also a scene surely where Rawdon goes to see his aunt. That too was conceived in the same intention. But

GEORGE Moore.

MADAGASCAR AS A FRENCH

COLONY.

I.

ON August 6, 1896, the Journal Officiel promulgated throughout the Republic the following law :-" ARTICLE UNIQUE.-Est déclarée colonie française l'ile de Madagascar avec les îles qui en dépendent." By such brief declaration was the great African island incorporated as the fourth cornerstone of that ideal quadrilateral-Tunis, Tonkin, Congo, and Madagascar-which form the base of that wide French colonial dominion dreamt of by Richelieu and Colbert two centuries ago, but only realised in modern times by the self-sacrifice of men like Jules Ferry and the prowess of French soldiers and sailors under leaders like General Duchesne or Admiral Courbet. Now that Madagascar has fallen into her hands, it is our task to inquire what the Republic will do or can do with this her latest colonial acquisition. A question, or rather a problem, which is interesting to the friends and rivals of France, but which is incomprehensible unless the previous history of the great island and its inhabitants be taken into account.

Indeed, it is necessary to go back some little distance into the history of the tribes who inhabit Madagascar, to explain the true origin of the many difficulties which the new rulers of the land have had to encounter at the very outset in establishing law and order among those diverse peoples, spread so irregularly over the face of the country. The island has ever been but sparsely inhabited; nevertheless, in certain highland regions, the population of late years has much increased, and here and there become concentrated, especially in what is now