where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful.

In the same way, a person of melancholy temperament will make a scene in a tragedy out of what appears to the sanguine man only in the light of an interesting conflict, and to a phlegmatic soul as something without any meaning; - all of which rests upon the fact that every event, in order to be realized and appreciated, requires the co-operation of two factors,- namely, a subject and an object; although these are as closely and necessarily connected as oxygen and hydrogen in water. When therefore the objective or external factor in an experience is actually the same, but the subjective or personal appreciation of it varies, the event is just as much a different one in the eyes of different persons as if the objective factors had not been alike; for to a blunt intelligence the fairest and best object in the world presents only a poor reality, and is therefore only poorly appreciated, like a fine landscape in dull weather, or in the reflection of a bad camera oscura. In plain language, every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness, and cannot directly get beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin; so external aid is not of much use to him. On the stage, one man is a prince, another a minister, a third a servant or a soldier or a general, and so on,- mere external differences: the inner reality, the kernel of all these appearances, is the same, a poor player, with all the anxieties of his lot. In life it is just the same. Differences of rank and wealth give every man his part to play, but this by no means implies a difference of inward happiness and pleasure; here too there is the same being in all, a poor mortal, with his hardships and troubles. Though these may, indeed, in every case proceed from dissimilar causes, they are in their essential nature much the same in all their forms; with degrees of intensity which vary, no doubt, but in no wise correspond to the part a man has to play,-to the presence or absence of position and wealth. Since everything which exists or happens for a man exists only in his consciousness, and happens for it alone, the most essential thing for a man is the constitution of this consciousness, which is in most cases far more important than the circumstances which go to form its contents. All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull

consciousness of a fool, is poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his 'Don Quixote' in a miserable prison. The objective half of life and reality is in the hand of fate, and accordingly takes various forms in different cases; the subjective half is ourself, and in essentials it always remains the

same.

Hence the life of every man is stamped with the same character throughout, however much his external circumstances may alter: it is like a series of variations on a single theme. No one can get beyond his own individuality. An animal, under whatever circumstances it is placed, remains within the narrow limits to which nature has irrevocably consigned it; so that our endeavors to make a pet happy must always keep within the compass of its nature, and be restricted to what it can feel. So it is with man: the measure of the happiness he can attain is determined beforehand by his individuality. More especially is this the case with the mental powers, which fix once for all his capacity for the higher kinds of pleasure. If these powers are small, no efforts from without, nothing that his fellow-men or that fortune can do for him, will suffice to raise him above the ordinary degree of human happiness and pleasure, half animal though it be: his only resources are his sensual appetite, -a cozy and cheerful family life at the most, low company and vulgar pastime; even education, on the whole, can avail little if anything for the enlargement of his horizon. For the highest, most varied, and lasting pleasures are those of the mind, however much our youth may deceive us on this point; and the pleasures of the mind turn chiefly on the powers of the mind. It is clear, then, that our happiness depends in a great degree upon what we are, upon our individuality; whilst lot or destiny is generally taken to mean only what we have, or our reputation. Our lot, in this sense, may improve; but we do not ask much of it if we are inwardly rich: on the other hand, a fool remains a fool, a dull blockhead, to his last hour, even though he were surrounded by houris in Paradise. This is why Goethe, in the West-östlicher Divan,' says that every man, whether he occupy a low position in life or emerge as its victor, testifies to personality as the greatest factor in happiness.

Translation of T. Bailey Saunders.

OLIVE SCHREINER

(1863-)

N THE summer of 1883 a little unheralded book, by an unknown author, appeared in the rank and file of contemporary fiction. Its title, 'The Story of an African Farm,' arrested attention, for the ostrich farm of South Africa was then virgin soil; not only virgin in its solemn monotony of unbroken plain and fierce sunlight, but virgin in its traditions and its customs.

The most cursory glance at the first chapter was enough to show the author of The Story of an African Farm' to be a virile and dramatic genius, independent of her choice

Miss

of setting. Two facts, somewhat disguised (for the book was written under the penname of "Ralph Iron," and incident and character were treated with masculine boldness), betrayed to the omniscient critic that the writer was a woman and young. Schreiner has a remarkable intuition regarding the thoughts and feelings of men; but she reveals her sex by her profound preoccupation with the problem of its relation. to the world. Moreover, only a girlish Amazon of the pen could have written a story so harsh and hopeless. Only to eyes of youthful intolerance could compromise and extenuation (qualities rich in the temperance which Hamlet loved) have been so immeasurably remote.

OLIVE SCHREINER

The girl author, it is plain, was enamored with the bottom of things; she had made straight for the central mysteries of life and faith, and looked, unblinking, at naked truths that wrest the soul.

So far and no farther, however, do age and sex affect the story. There is none of the negligent superiority to the received dictums of style, in which her literary kinswoman, Emily Bronté, expressed the conventionally impossible. In strong, brief words and telling phrase the tale is told. A few bold, masterly strokes-as though from very familiarity she had wearied of local color, or disdained to use itindicate the hueless, treeless, monotonous landscape of the ostrich farm, the grotesque, terrible caricature of deity that broods over it,

and the strange, vulgar, elementary people who live there. These she draws with bitter and cynical humor, sparing nothing of coarseness or repulsiveness in the broad, high-light portraits. The rose has scent and thorn, but she takes the thorn; and line by line sets down the mean, ugly life, its commonplaceness, its gross content. Walsingham wrote, "Her Majesty counts much on fortune, I wish she would trust more to the Almighty;" and as we read this young girl's story, we feel her to be another Elizabeth. The horoscope of her characters once cast, they have no more power to divert it than to reverse the laws of gravitation.

To three unhappy beings - unhappy because they are of finer mold, physically and mentally, than the rest she commits the task of showing the relentlessness of fate. The boy Waldo worships the fetish he has been taught to call God, and pours out his whole innocent, ignorant soul into its deaf ear; the little English girl, Em, begs for love; the beautiful, proud child Lyndall asks only for freedom to experience- to know. They beat their wings against the bars and fall back,—the one despairing, the other rebellious, the third exhausted; but all fall back on the dull animal existence, wounded unto death.

Only at the last does a certain drowsy calm rest on their tired eyelids. In the author's hopeless creed there is a single sweet narcotic for the soul's unrest. «< Come," she says, "to Nature, the great healer, the celestial surgeon, who, before quenching forever conscious identity, will, if thou wilt, fold thee in her kind arms."

The dramatic power of The Story of an African Farm' takes hold of the reader from the first chapter-when the African moon pours its light from the blue sky to the wide lonely plain, and the boy Waldo cries out in agony, "O God, save thy people, save a few of thy people"-to the sculpturesque scene where the dying Lyndall fights her last fight, inch by inch, along the weary road. In her gospel, ardor and hope are put to shame, and all men are equal only in the pity of their limitations and the terror of their doom. The austere young dramatist fights a dark and sinister world with incalculable and unclassified energy.

A period of characteristic silence followed the immense popular success of 'The Story of an African Farm.' In 1890 the curiously effective but unequal 'Dreams' appeared; and in 1893 'Dream Life and Real Life,' a little African story, whose theme was the selfsacrifice, the martyrdom, the aspirations of woman. Trooper Peter Halket' was published in 1897. More than an exercise in polemics, it is a scornful presentment of the policy and methods of the Chartered Company in South Africa. The experiment of writing a modern gospel is ambitious work, even for so bold and original a writer

as Olive Schreiner: but it must be conceded that she has blended the baldest realism and the ideal and the supernatural with such powerful dramatic handling, that the struggle between the forces of good and evil, between Christian obligation and the way of the world, becomes an absorbing, exciting conflict; while the tragedy of the end, the old hopelessness that bounded and pervaded 'The Story of an African Farm,' is its most pathetic episode. The author of these remarkable books is as artistic in construction as she is strong in dramatic power.

Olive Schreiner was born in 1863 in Cape Town, Africa. She was the daughter of a Lutheran minister, and at twenty years of age published her first book. In 1890 she married Mr. Cronwright, an Anglo-African resident of her native colony.

THE

SHADOWS FROM CHILD LIFE

From the Story of an African Farm›

THE WATCH

HE full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted "karroo" bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.

In one spot only was the solemn monotony of the plain broken. Near the centre a small solitary "kopje " rose. Alone it lay there, a heap of round ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant's grave. Here and there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among its stones; and on the very summit a clump of prickly pears lifted thei thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their broad fleshy leaves. At the foot of the "kopje" lay the homestead. First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffir huts; beyond them the dwelling-house,-a square red brick building with thatched roof.

Even on its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty; and quite etherealized the low brick wall that ran before the house, and which inclosed a bare patch of sand and two straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great