the grand idea of man's dual nature, and the many beautiful forms in which it has been embodied. We said then that, from the lovely modern story of Arsène Houssaye, where a young man, starting along life's road, sees on a lawn a beautiful girl and loves her, and afterwards-when sin has soiled him-finds that she was his own soul, stained now by his own sin; and from the still more impressive though less lovely modern story of Edgar Poe, "William Wilson," up to the earliest allegories upon the subject, no writer or story-teller had dared to degrade by gross treatment a motive of such universal appeal to the great heart of the "Great Man, Mankind." We traced the idea, as far as our knowledge went, through Calderon, back to Oriental sources, and found, as we then could truly affirm, that this motive from the ethical point of view the most pathetic and solemn of all motives --had been always treated with a nobility and a greatness that did honor to literary art. Manu, after telling us that "single is each man born into the world-single dies," implores each one to "collect virtue" in order that after death he may be met by the virtuous part of his dual self, a beautiful companion and guide in traversing "that gloom which is so hard to be traversed." Fine as this is, it is surpassed by an Arabian story we then quoted (since versified by Sir Edwin Arnold)-the story of the wicked king who met after death a frightful hag for an eternal companion, and found her to be only a part of his own dual nature, the embodiment of his own evil deeds. And even this is surpassed by that lovely allegory in Arda Viraf, in which a virtuous soul in Paradise, walking amid pleasant trees whose fragrance was wafted from God, meets a part of his own dual nature, a beautiful maiden, who says to him, "O youth, I am thine own actions." And we instanced other stories and allegories equally beautiful, in which this supreme thought has been treated as poetically as it deserves. It was left for Stevenson to degrade it into a hideous tale of murder and Whitechapel mystery-a story of astonishing brutality, in which the separation of the two natures of the man's soul is ef fected, not by psychological development, and not by the "awful alchemy" of the spirit-world beyond the grave, as in all the previous versions, but by the operation of a dose of some supposed new drug. If the whole thing is meant as a horrible joke, in imitation of De Quincey's "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," it tells poorly for Stevenson's sense of humor. If it is meant as a serious allegory, it is an outrage upon the grand allegories of the same motive with which most literatures have been enriched. That a story so coarse should have met with the plaudits that "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" met with at the time of its publication-that it should now be quoted in leading articles of important papers every few days, while all the various and beautiful renderings of the motive are ignored-what does it mean? Is it a sign that the "shrinkage of the world," the "solidarity of civilization," making the record of each day's doings too big for the day, has worked a great change in our public writers? Is it that they not only have no time to think, but no time to read anything beyond the publications of the hour? Is it that good work is unknown to them and that bad work is forced upon them, and that in their busy ignorance they must needs accept it and turn to it for convenient illustration? That Stevenson should have been impelled to write the story shows what the "Suicide Club" had already shown, that underneath the apparent healt which gives such a charm to "Treasure Island" and "Kidnapped" there was that morbid strain which is so often associated with physical disease. Had it not been for the influence upon him of the healthiest of all writers since Chaucer - Walter Scott Stevenson might have been in the ranks of those pompous problem-mongers of fiction and the stage who do their best to make life hideous. It must be remembered that he was a critic first and a creator afterwards. He himself tells us how critically he studied the methods of other writers before he took to writing himself. No one really understood better than he Hesiod's fine saying that the muses were born in order that they might be a forgetfulness of evils and a truce from cares. No one understood better than he Joubert's saying, "Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality: in literature the one aim is the beautiful; once lose sight of that, and you have the mere frightful reality." And for the most part he succeeded in keeping down the morbid impulses of a spirit imprisoned and fretted in a crazy body. Save in such great mistakes as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and a few other stories, Stevenson acted upon Joubert's excellent maxim. But Scott, and Scott alone, is always right in this matterright by instinct. He alone is always a delight. If all art is dedicated to joy, as Schiller declares, and if there is no higher and more serious problem than how to make men happy, then the "Waverley Novels" are among the most precious things in the literature of the world. public love is a fault; but in portrait painting so important is it to avoid hardness that unless the picture seems to have been blown upon the canvas, as in the best work of Gainsborough, rather than to have been laid upon it by the brush, the painter has not achieved a perfect success. In the imaginative literature of England the two great masters of this softness of touch in portraiture are Addison and Sterne. Three or four hardly-drawn lines in Sir Roger, or the two Shandys, or Corporal Trim would have so completely ruined the portraits that they would never have come down to us. Close upon Addison comes Fielding, and then Scott, in whose vast gallery almost every portrait is painted with a Gainsborough softness. Scarcely one is lined with those hard lines which are too often apt to mar the glorious work of Dickens. After Scott comes Thackeray, unless it be Mrs. Gaskell. We are not in this article dealing with, or even alluding to, contemporary writers, or we might easily say what novelists follow Mrs. Gaskell. Whether or not Stevenson's instinct was for hardness or softness of touch, the "New Arabian Nights" show that he did not at first achieve softness. His imagination, though not robust, was fine, and it was based on reason. He was always able to give a good account of his incidents, and ready to do In a letter now before us he says, speaking of the fight on board the Cov-. enant in “Kidnapped.”— It is in literary criticism especially that the wise man refuses to prophesy unless he knows, and no man knows anything about what the future will do with any writer or any book. But in the long run the work of every artist in imaginative literature, from Homer to Dickens, is remembered by his characters, and by his characters alone. And the secret of the character-drawing of the great masters seems to be this: while moulding the character from broad general elements, from universal types of humanity, they are able to delude the reader's imagination into mistaking the picture for real portraiture, and this they achieve by making the portrait their side, position, arms, training, a good seem to be drawn from particular and peculiar individual traits, instead of from generalities, and especially by hiding away all purposes-æsthetic, ethic, or political. Stevenson as a critic was fully conscious of this law imaginative art. of One great virtue of the great masters Stevenson appreciated to the full, their winsome softness of touch in character drawing. We are not fond of comparing literary with pictorial art, but between the work of the novelist and the work of the portrait painter there does seem a true analogy as regards the hardness and softness of touch in the drawing of characters. In landscape painting that hardness which the general So. David and Alan had every advantage on conscience; a handful of merchant sailors, But with all his undoubted talents, and with all his study of and insight into the artistic methods of the masters, has Stevenson created any characters so new and so true that they will take their places in the great portrait gallery of classic English fiction? Certainly there are one or two that ought to live if room can be found for them. Among these we are not sure that we can place Alan Breck. He is delightful, but a delightful bit of Sir Walter's imagination. If the Master of Ballantrae does not survive, it will be partly because of hardness of touch. Except for the feeble impression that the character made upon the critics (who must, in some degree, be taken to express the general feeling), we should have prophesied a long life for Catriona. She is a perfectly delightful character, delightfully rendered. The discussion of Stevenson's poetry we must leave till next week. my own part, I should sincerely pity the man with mind narrow or sight short enough not to have discerned in this great spectacle, beside the picturesqueness, the state and splendor, the inmost sense of a people's festival. How much more should I not pity a man with a heart too low, with a fancy too mean, to be attuned to noble sensibilities, and to feel what in this Jubilee has appealed to generous natures and moved them to their depths. A great people have celebrated worthily the great reign of a justly beloved queen. It has been the glorification of a sovereign. It has been, chiefly, the selfglorification of a people. First, as to its splendid past. Then, as to its intoxicating present. Finally, as to its unique future. Of course Victoria has been the rightful addressee and the lawful receiver o. all this service and of all this in cense. Her loyal subjects have been right in extolling the private and public virtues which have so much altered popular feeling that there is some risk of forgetting how shaky was the throne when she ascended it. After the small-mindedness, the narrow obstinacy, the foolish prejudices and the grasping selfishness of a George the Third, for whom even the heart-rending melancholy of a life closing behind the double-barred wall of blindness and of lunacy was not able to command our sympathy; after the craven profligacy of the fat, bald-headed Adonis, the betrayer of Mrs. Fitzherbert and of all the private and political friends of his youth, the only man able to make Queen Caroline interesting; after the bluff, coarse good-nature of an old Jack-tar; it wanted the girlish innocence, the maidenly graces of a seventeen-year queen to cleanse and freshen and sweeten the court atmosphere. Englishmen have not been slow in thankfully acknowledging how much the last half-century has owed of its prosperity and glory to what Victoria has done and yet more to what she has been. Truly, an enviable praise! Yes, by what she has done and by what she has left undone Victoria has been the perfect constitutional queen. She has never been by an inch below her duties or above her rights. She has known how to be a loving, obedient, dutiful wife at home, in the circle of her domestic duties, and a sovereign lady by her own birthright in her kingdom. Sometimes she has let appear her inmost feelings-either in youth when, under the faithful guardianship of Lord Melbourne, she was become at heart more than half a Whig and she resented bitterly the stiff, uncourtierlike peremptoriness of Sir Robert Peel in the Bedchamber-Women's business or the deliberate, insulting niggardliness of the Tories in the vote of the prince consort's annuity-or, later, in her old age, when, under the fostering care of that Semite of genius, Lord Beaconsfield, she developed, as to persons and policy, the natural Conserva tive prepossessions of her kingly trade. What influence has she not discreetly exercised on the external relations of her kingdom, either on account of the unparalleled experience of sixty years in the thick of the plot, or because of the unique position of the mother and grandmother of the heads of nearly all the great Western dynasties! Certes, such a life is worthy of all honor, and even those of us who do not fancy it possible for people, when they have outgrown the anthropomorphic monarchical phasis, to turn back and to raise anew what at the best would be a Brummagem counterfeit of true royalty, cannot but look with some envy on the spontaneous, unanimous enthusiastic manifestation of loyalism Great Britain has just witnessed. However, it would be mere shallowness to rest satisfied with this personal aspect of the spectacle. After all, what people most willingly glorify is themselves. They are the true heroes of all sincerely popular feasts. So it was the other day. They have solemnized in London a kind of semi-secular retrospect. They have passed with a proud contentment the review of sixty years of change-of radical, organic, thoroughgoing change-of revolution, political, social and moral, which have been also sixty years of perfect internal order, peace and prosperity. They have, above all, taken possession of a new fact; the Empire in all its greatness; and of a new feeling, Imperialism in all its intoxicating freshness. Such has been the special originality of this Jubilee. Everywhere, among the pomp and the state of the gala functions, among the splendor of the court dresses and the military uniforms, the cynosure of all eyes has been the small group, modestly and sombrously attired in broadcloth, of the Premiers of the self-governing colonies. These men have been the lions of the season where so many lions of the first order have roared. They have been breakfasted, lunched, dined to death. They have been put to every sauce. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the French Canadian, who was their spokesman as the prime minister of the Dominionthat is to say, of the first federation of autonomous colonies-has been put on his mettle to do honor to all the calls on his time, his strength and his eloquence. In fact, what remains of the Jubilee, in the public mind, in the every-day preoccupations of the man in the street, is the advent of the Empire as a portent of the first order, as an immense force to be put to use, as a brand-new ideal to be gradually realized. It was natural, even legitimate between certain bounds, that the revelation of the Empire should be followed by the birth of Imperialism. It is already some time since some far-seeing, keen-smelling men have foreseen the new departure of public opinion, and have tried to get betimes a good footing on the new platform. Lord Rosebery has been one of the prophets of Imperialism. Sir Charles Dilke was, if not the discoverer, at any rate the godfather, of Greater Britain. Mr. Chamberlain, now so very far off from his salad days of radicalism and vestry politics, has, for good or evil, put his venture on board the good ship Empire. Everybody now has always been on the winning side, except the unfortunate Little-Englanders. There is something very amusing in the strange perversion of facts with which parties or individuals try to make out they have never been shaken in the true faith. For instance, it is now accepted as gospel truth that Disraeli was the maker, if not of the Empire, at any rate of Imperialism. On the other side, the Manchester men, those doctors of a school now utterly repudiated, the Cobdens and the brights, are reproached for their utter want of intelligence and sympathy for this great thing; they are accused of having looked with equanimity, nay, with pleasure, to a time not very far off when, by the accomplishment of a law of fate, the colonies would have conquered their independence and broken the Empire one and indivisible. pleasant manner, truly, to write history! Thes severe critics forget two A things; the first, that everybody-Disraeli and the Tories as well as the others, or rather much more than anybody-partook of this feeling of diffidence about the future of the Empire. and predicted its unpreventable dissolution. Secondly, who, though unable to believe in the perpetuity of so artificial an agglomeration, has made possible the consolidation of its parts, and the birth of a new imperial feeling? Who, if not precisely these selfsame radicals of Manchester, these Cobdens and Brights, who were instrumental in obtaining for the colonies the beneficent institution of self-governmentthat birthright of every Anglo-Saxon. without which there is no order and under which the utmost degree of freedom is perfectly compatible with the unity of the Empire? It is necessary to recall these facts, because nothing would be more dangerous—I mean for the Empire itself-than the constitution of a false feeling about the conditions of its existence. After all, the sincere friends of Greater Britain as she is and as she may become ought not to forget that Imperialism is not empire, that the Empire has been created, not by Imperialists, neither in a fit of absence of mind, but by those healthy vigorous, liberal-minded generations who took for their first duty the conquest and the preservation of freedom at home and abroad; that perhaps the worst foes to this great fabric would be so-called Imperialists, trying to tighten purely ideal bonds which cannot be shortened or materialized without becoming shackles. Some colonial statesmen have given timely advice about this point. Mr. Reid, of the parent and model colony of New South Wales, has spoken some weighty words. It is to be sincerely hoped that they will be taken to heart by the destined leaders of a great movement, and that the dissociation of the Empire-perhaps a contingency not to be prevented, but at a very long distance-shall not be precipitated by the clumsy and self-seeking promoters of Imperial Federation. I have purposely confined my remarks thus far on this all-important subject to the internal point of view. It seems to me that, if it is true, as I am quite disposed to believe, that the advent of the imperial factor is the accession of a new force and is perhaps to inaugurate a welltimed renovation of party and parliamentary politics, now in full decay and weighed down with the burden of antiquated dead questions, the first necessity is to prevent a wrong departure. and the perverted use, at home, in British policy of this new great power. SO I do not mean that this upheaval of the imperial feeling has nothing to do with external politics. On the contrary I hope to show in the second part of these rapid considerations that it is possible to find there a kind of indication of the true orientation of British diplomacy, and that this new fact, brightly put in evidence in the Jubilee feasts, so eagerly taken to heart by the public, is perfectly consonant with the most harmonious development of international relations. That is what I have now to try to point out after having taken a short account of this great historical event; the rising above the hori zon in its full-orbed majesty of the British Empire and the simultaneous advent in the popular soul of the imperial feeling. II. It would be rather too bad a joke to compare what is going to take place in St. Petersburg with what was done last June in London. The Neva has no mind at all to compete with the Thames. It was last year, at the crowning in Moscow, that the whole Russian people gave out the inmost feelings of their soul, and took the sacrament of loyalism. Nothing-not even one of those dreadful catastrophes which live forever in the memory of a nation-was wanting to consecrate this feast. This time it is not to be the public betrothal of a sovereign and a nation which embodies the thought and the will of one hundred and twenty millions of subjects, and of a people conscious of having but one head. Petenurg will see something of a |