be interesting to note how literature is affected by this movement, or rather what is the relation of literature to this readiness for action. It is proper, in the first instance, to realize that the condition which has enabled Great Britain to thrill so suddenly with a defensive patriotism, is not entirely new. Our memories are so short that we take each surprise for something unprecedented. I borrowed, therefore, at the opening of this article, my little illustration from the siege of Chitral, because, although a new, a more critical, danger has abruptly attracted our attention now, for years past we have been in the position of a beleaguered town, which no one has quite liked to be the first to attack.

Without intruding an inch further into politics, but keeping to our own province of literature, it appears to me to be of interest to note that this besieged attitude of Great Britain among the European nations, which has almost insensibly become accentuated, has been accompanied by a certain literary movement. If we look back to the years before the first Egyptian campaign, we shall be surprised to see how pacific our tastes were, how little encouragement was given to the literature of action. There was a distinct dislike, early in the eighties, to any narrative which exalted the boisterous part of man. Fiction, poetry and drama were expected to be idyllic or reflective. Even history, amusingly enough, had its romantic coloring washed off it, and its exciting incidents reduced. It was said that if young people studied history they should concentrate their attention, not on battles, but on the Constitution; and Dr. Stubbs supplied the learned want.

The revival of active romance may be roughly dated from the publication of Stevenson's "Treasure Island," a book which it was my privilege to watch through all its stages of creation. "Treasure Island" was so completely foreign to the spirit of the time, that it was only a very third-rate boys' newspaper that would consent to publish it at all, and it is a curious circumstance (of which I could give documentary proof) that it was found too romantic a tale of action for the boy subscribers to this silly print. If the editor could have broken off his contract, the end of "Treasure Island" would never have appeared. It was reprinted as a volume, with the overwhelming vogue which all the world is aware of; for a new taste was germinating in the public, and this graceful story of adventure was exactly the thing to foster it.

In "Treasure Island" the British public became habituated to

violent death and breathless incident in a romance; but it was in "King Solomon's Mines" that these condiments first began to be used with a free hand. Mr. Rider Haggard had been writing for two or three years when, in 1886, he suddenly took the public by storm. In the very ingenious story I have just mentioned, English readers were given a rougher and fierier liquor than had been offered to them since the Crimean War, and Stevenson's romances, which became more serious and more adult than "Treasure Island," never equalled those of Mr. Rider Haggard in bloodthirstiness. The latter writer discovered that he supplied a demand which he seemed to have created; in some of his later African romances, which are little more than colonial butcheries, he distinctly oversupplied it. "Nada, The Lily," with its innocent name, is unquestionably the bloodiest book in the world. This was extravagant, and Mr. Rider Haggard's vogue for this class of romance declined. It is improbable that this very clever novelist--whose powers of invention are most unfairly depreciated at the present moment-will ever return to that sort of work. But his influence in awakening a taste for violent and sanguinary action is not to be underestimated.

Then came a period of materialistic awakening. Everywhere in the Empire the natural elements-the barbarian elements, if we will-found expression. Our incessant "little wars were followed with a sympathy which had constantly been denied to them in the Middle Victorian period; and each little war increased our appetite for another. At the same time there began, and flowed over the country like a wave, an unexampled enthusiasm for every kind of athletics. A fresh interest in the navy was awakened, and as the peace party subsided and disappeared throughout the country, greater and greater sacrifices were cheerfully made for the support of our ships. If nowadays we read Matthew Arnold's old diatribes against our upper classes, we may smile; there is no question now of upper, middle or lower, for the Barbarian holds the field undisturbed. We have become, in a dozen years, a nation but faintly interested in any subject which does not bear upon the training and development of the muscles, individual or politic. England has gone to school under a colossal Sandow and has no time, for the moment, to think of anything else.

However much the philosopher and the dreamer may regret the necessity of this strange obsession in physical strength-and

the present writer, himself a useless dreamer, sighs beneath it— no one with a grain of sense can doubt that circumstances point to its being an unavoidable preparation for a crisis in national history by no means far ahead. That being the position, it seems obvious that all that can in any wise direction be done, is to try with all the feeble force at our disposition to point readers-who insist, by a healthy instinct, on the literature of action-to books of adventure that encourage the best sides of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. In the feverish demand for entertaining narratives of the adventurous class, two distinct tendencies may be seen. One is towards the entirely monstrous and fantastic, in which real life and the genuine spirit of man are subordinated to a mere dram-drinking of foolish horrors. This autumn, we have seen in London the most preposterous example of this ever foisted on a gaping public, the fabulous exploits of a Swiss courier, masquerading as a man of science, and taking thousands of foolish readers captive with tales of wombats soaring in the sunset sky, and faithful colored wives who eat their children that they may nurse their husbands with a more devoted freedom. It is plain that the craving for monstrosities of this sort, and the easy credulity which will swallow such traveller's tales, are unwholesome symptoms of the public love of the literature of action.

Fortunately, there is a reverse to the medal. We have had the signal good fortune to see, at this opportune hour, the development of perhaps the most purely patriotic talent that ever flourished in England. The most powerful and distinguished British author, under thirty-five years of age, is unquestionably Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and his whole literary career is one unflagging appeal to the fighting instincts of the race. We see nothing in the general trend of his genius, if we do not see that it makes directly for the preparedness of the English people in an eventual crisis. Mr. Kipling is not correctly styled a Jingo or a Chauvinist. He does not provoke war, or underestimate its afflictions, but he preaches forever in our ears "Be ready!" He marshals us by land. and sea, he brings outlying kinsfolk up into line with us, he questions us incessantly as to the state of our sinews and of our guns. The influence of this one young civilian, without external prestige of any kind to help him, has been simply prodigious. His breath has stirred the veins, not of hundreds of men, nor of thousands, but of a cluster of nations.

The peculiar gravity of Mr. Kipling's appeal to the English speaking races-for even America is surely not unaffected by his voice has been met in Great Britain by the inevitable chorus of imitators. Every song writer, every leader writer, every story teller has a little touch of his magic to-day, a little strain of what the Germans might call Kiplingismus. His appearance in our literature at this crisis, with its sweeping away of the graceful, but slightly effeminate, cult of beauty and harmony which preceded it, is one of those extraordinary coincidences which occur in the history of the mind. For who shall say whether athleticism created Mr. Kipling, or whether Mr. Kipling has encouraged athleticism? The two grow side by side, and to what harvest who can tell?

We have said that with the growth of a wholesome literary patriotism an unhealthy love of horrors for their own sakes has grown up among us. But happily the antidote grows side by side with the poison; and the very month which disposed of M. Grien has seen the publication of one of the sanest and the most invigorating books of adventure which the English language contains. It is not by a mere accident that Sir George Robertson's "Chitral; The Story of a Minor Siege," appears at the very moment when the national tension is at its highest. We find that Englishmen are face to face with a problem of the greatest delicacy and gravity. Is it not natural that we should look about us to see how Englishmen may be expected to behave at crises of the most violent kind? Is it not salutary that we should ask how the young men trained upon football and cricket, who have tried to shoot and climb and ride, can use their physical fitness when they are called to act in the face of destiny? With a peculiar poignancy, therefore, as a man watching the starry heavens reflected in a little pool, we look to a narrative like that of Sir George Robertson to discover what qualities we may expect to see widely developed in facing a solemn national decision.

Four years ago very few people in England or America knew where Chitral was. It is a little fortified town planted on a steep river bank in the centre of Asia. The vast snow peaks of the Hindu-Kush divide it, like a rampart, from the most mysterious country in the world, Kafiristan. Round this fort, in its grim, cold isolation, lies the principality of Chitral, with an area about equal to that of Wales. Cabul is so near to it on the west that it has been naturally to the terrible Amir of Afghanistan, and not to the

vague and distant government of India, that its hill tribes looked. If you examine a map of six or seven years ago, you find Chitral in a white no-man's land, far to north and west of the red frontier of British supremacy. It was ruled in those days by a family of treacherous princes, each of whom successively waded to the throne through the blood of his uncles and his brothers.

The Government of India, in its infinite wisdom, determined that the moment had come to interfere with the little tyrants who stabbed and squabbled among the picturesque population above the glacier-fed torrents of Chitral. In January, 1893, it sent Dr. (now Sir) George Robertson on a mission thither from his residency in Gilgit. It was a highly adventurous expedition, for the tribes were violently prejudiced against Europeans, and their unbridled treachery was a notorious matter. He took with him three English officers and a little escort of 50 Sikh soldiers. They arrived at Chitral to find the hereditary prince, or Mehtar, palpitating with fear, not of the English, but of his own family. Presently, after the English mission had left Chitral about a year, this Mehtar had the usual accident out hunting; he was shot dead in the back by his own half brother. This sinister news reached Gilgit on January 6, 1895.

The Chitralis had by this time come to recognize the might of the Government of India, and they were very anxious to have their new ruler's little escapade commuted. But the position was a very serious one, and extremely difficult to understand at a distance. Dr. Robertson, therefore, was ordered once more to go over to Chitral, and examine its perilous politics on the spot. The journey, made in conditions of Arctic cold through some of the roughest country in the world, was not at first embarrassed by any unfriendliness of the natives; but Dr. Robertson was presently galvanized by news that Umra Khan, a very formidable mountain character, had proclaimed a holy war, was marching into Chitral territory with from 3,000 to 4,000 men, and had called upon the new Mehtar to join him. Moreover, a dangerous pretendant, Sher Afzul, this Mehtar's uncle, was also moving upon Chitral with unknown designs. Dr. Robertson received, meanwhile, orders from India to hold Chitral and drive Umra Khan out of its territories.

Here, in a moment, full and almost imperial responsibility fell upon Dr. Robertson. The first thing he did was to depose the Mehtar who had murdered his predecessor, and who was hated in