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less than ten thousand have been killed. It is not physical fear which moves them, but the influence of an imagination always far stronger in an Asiatic than a European, and almost always pessimistic.

But we shall be asked, if the Asiatic as a result of the feelings stated readily runs away, is he not as a man governed by those feelings the equivalent of a coward? Not exactly. There is always the chance of something, be it religious emotion, be it an emotion of pride, be it confidence in a leader or dread of him, or be it much experience of victory, mastering his distrust alike in himself and his officers, and then he becomes in all but science a dangerous fighting man. If he thinks it worth while to go forward he is not afraid either of death or wounds, and occasionally he will go forward in the way which surprised, and indeed appalled, the French in their fight with Chinese "pirates" on the border of Tonquin. We all concede that European training The Spectator.

makes them brave, but there have been Asiatic leaders whose genius or whose cruelty has had all the effect of training. Chaka, the Zulu organizer of armies, was no better obeyed than Jenghiz Khan, and in times nearer our own Hyder Ali and the Mahratta founders of dynasties made heroes of their horsemen. It is the possibility of this sudden change, this precipitation of the something which makes Asiatic courage feeble, that renders every insurrection so formidable, and compels all who would hold dominion in Asia to keep the sword perpetually unsheathed. If something, be it hate of the foreigner, or dread of the Empress, or terror of the powers above, induces the Chinaman to fight, he has no physical fear to stop him. Kill a third of the Wei-hai-wei regiment with bullets, and it will still roll forward, and the impulse which drill has given to its recruits may come from one of many other sources.

SONNET.

As mist along the verdant valley steals,
And veils the view of fertile fields from sight-
As gathering dark the moon's soft ray conceals,
And distant stars are lost in shades of night-
As silent streams lie deep beneath the hill,

Nor storms nor summer suns can set them free

As seed in earth lies buried cold and still

As buds unclose when there are none to see

So in the heart lie hidden, fold on fold,

Thoughts deep and sweet, but never breathed-untold Even to those its pulses hold most dear.

The depths are never sounded-none may know What hoards of treasure moulder there below; The doors are closed-gates barred-as if in fear. C. E. Meetkerk?. The Argosy.

A NOVELIST OF THE UNKNOWN.*

Everyone knows that Mr. Wells, as a novelist, has two fields of vision. Broadly speaking, one is stellar, the other mundane. In the one he looks for big things that may be, in the other for little things that are. He must be a singular reader who is not struck by the divergencies of power which have given us the Time Machine and Mr. Hoopdriver's bicycle; which have shown us the Martians devastating London, and Mr. Lewisham devastated by love. Yet we would remark that the distance between these two fields is more than obviously great. For whenever Mr. Wells returns-we had almost written "homeward plods his weary way" from Mars, or from the forward abysms of Time, to this dull little nineteenth-century Earth, he straightway throws off the trappings of distances and æons and sits down to depict suburban matters. tures no longer connote measureless ether, or a fifth sense. He does not even call the nations into his study, like Mr. Kipling, or desire, with Stevenson, to dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea and be the Ariel of Literature. Unspoiled by the influences of the Pleiades, he dissects the mind of a Kensington draper's-assistant; unblinded by visions of Science in her glory, he tells us how a student jilted science for a poor girl in Clapham.

His ges

Now there is one description which applies to Mr. Wells in both these characters. To discover it would be something of a feat if it were anything

*The Time Machine. By H. G. Wells. (1895.) The War of the Worlds. By H. G. Wells (1898.)

The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday Adventure. By H. G. Wells. (1896.)

Love and Mr. Lewisham. By H. G. Wells. (Harper, 1900.)

But

more than this: that in both he is breaking fresh ground, in both he is an explorer. Not in Mars and not in Clapham has he stepped in another man's tracks. Hoopdriver, with his pins and aspirations, was as much to seek, really, as Graham and his flying Iachine. So far, then, Mr. Wells is revealed as the most enterprising of novelists, exploiting a planet and a draper's shop as calmly as Cinquevalli tosses a cannon ball with a pea. the simile-like every simile-calls for correction, There are profound literary differences to be named and considcred. We deny in toto (to use a loved phrase of Smithers in "Love and Mr. Lewisham") that Mr. Wells's stellar novels are to be compared with his mundane novels. That seems a strong view, but it is our view. We hear an opponent blurt: "Consider the imagination of "The War of Worlds.'" But the word "imagination" does not satisfy us here. Four-fifths of what passes for "imagination" in Mr. Wells's scientific novels is not essential imagination; it is rather the skilful-the absolutely daring and decorative-use of science. It is science in purple; science producing her "effects"-the glory and smoke of the "experiment"; science rehearsing what she will be. When Mr. Wells appears to be soaring, he is really only calculating generously; when he seems to be creating, he is only playing behind the professor's back; and the ladder by which he climbs, immeasurately aerial though it seems, is an extension ladder taken from the laboratory cupboard. Science, taking the bit between her teeth, can run gloriously amok among principalities and powers;

the Phaeton who gives

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but

her

her head is not exercising his imagination-he is merely having a lark. We have a deeper objection to scientific novels. It is that their subject-matter is outside literature, and is, indeed, as noxious to literature as we feel that spiritualism is to life. We have the strongest conviction that scientific anticipations of the future of man and of the universe, even when, like Mr. Wells's, they are brilliantly conceived, have no more to do with the art of the rovel than "The Battle of Dorking."

These our troubles pass like a summer cloud when we turn to Mr. Wells's two novels of human life, "The Wheels of Chance" (1898) and his new novel, "Love and Mr. Lewisham." Here Mr. Wells is doing really fine work, and we use the word in a sense far beyond clever. To call such novels as these "clever" is the first infirmity of ignoble critics. Clever they are; and, if one must dabble in the word, we are prepared to rant with Laertes, and pile Pelions of proof on Ossas of assertion that Mr. Wells is clever. But we dislike the word, and we resent its application to a fine novelist. "Clever" in äealing with flesh and blood! Clever in tracing tears to their springs in the human heart! Clever in justifying the ways of God to men or men to God! No. The great novelists cannot be thought of as clever. They are sagacious, charitable, wise, and tender. Was Scott clever, or Cervantes, or Sterne, or Dickens? No one would use so base a word. It is just a suspicion of cleverness which causes a few minds to see an everlasting ghostly mark of interrogation at the end of every proclamation of the genius of Thackeray. is precisely because we see in Mr. Wells those greater things-the sympathy of one who knows and the big hand of one who loves-that we feel eager about his work. If the analysis of the mind of Hoopdriver, the Kensington draper's-assistant who longed for gen

It

tility, who cajoled and lied and blundered toward higher things, was clever, then assuredly it was a higher quality that saved "The Wheels of Chance" from being one long humorous butchery of Hoopdriver. It is indeed alive with humor, and Hoopdriver is not spared a single shaft of ridicule that a good man may give or take. But there is one thing that Mr. Wells never does, or allows his reader to do, and that is to doubt the essential manhood, dignity, and native sweetness of the man who cannot help sticking pins in his lapels. You have the queerest feelings of regret as you see Hoopdriver's back disappear with his bicycle into the stable yard attached to Messrs. Antrobus's emporium in Kensington—his holiday, his dream of culture, his worship of a beautiful girl, all to be settled and adjusted in the intervals of "Hoopdriver, Forward!"

In "Love and Mr. Lewisham" Mr. Wells's qualities appear to even greater advantage. For one thing, this novel is a higher organism than "The Wheels of Chance." In "The Wheels of Chance" the incidents of a bicycle chase through several counties supply a kind of material or mechanical interest-the easy interest of every chase. The analysis of character triumphs, but somewhat by emergence. In "Love and Mr. Lewisham" character is all; Mr. Wells is doing his best work all along. We are not going to describe the story in any detail. When we meet Mr. Lewisham he is a very young master-in fact, eighteen-at Whortley's Proprietary School, Whortley, Sussex. There he "hears his years before him, all the tumult of his life"; sees it every morning as his head comes through his shirt, and his eyes fall on the magnificent schema of study which he has pinned on the bedroom wall of his humble lodging.

Chance-wise he meets Ethel Hen

derson, and the pretty fools steal walks and talks and plight their love and Mr. Lewisham is dismissed the school with his character (in the Proprietary School sense) considerably damaged. In London he toils at the Kensington Normal Science School; toils manfully, little embarrassed by memories of Ethel, who has vanished into Clapham. The Career flourishes. It enlists a supporter, too, in a fellow-student, Miss Heydinger, a girl of the period, who encourages him to wear the red ties of Socialism. Laboratory work, examinations, and glowing talks in the Gallery of Old Iron at the Museum with his Egeria. But Ethel is to come again into his life, and she does it, so to speak, with a vengeance. More naturally than it sounds, he meets her in a darkened room, at a spiritualistic séance, whither he has gone in laughing scepticism with some fellow-students; meets her, too, as the docile accomplice of her step-father, Mr. Chaffery, in a despicable imposture. Her helplessness and her beauty and the old Whortley days are too much for his common sense and strength of will. And when he finds that Ethel is innocent at heart, though not quite in conscience, it is enough; he loves her, will save her. There are wonderful walks to Clapham, dwindling honors at school, tears and dismays in Miss Heydinger's bosom, and remorses (about the Career) which cannot be uttered. At times he sees all things with deadly clearness:

He suddenly perceived with absolute conviction that after the séance he should have gone home and forgotten her. Why had he felt that irresistible impulse to seek her out? Why had his imagination spun such a strange web of impossibilities about her? He was involved now, foolishly involved. All his future was a sacrifice to this transitory ghost of love making in the streets.

Transitory ghost it should have been, but it was not. Marry the step-daughter of a Chaffery, a quack, a blasphemer of science! Marry on a legacy of one hundred pounds! A pretty pitiful marriage, full of its own mad sweetness. For she was sweet, was Ethel, and for a time her wifehood could hold its own against the Career. It was the bills and the price of coal that brought complete revelation; these, and the reproaches of Miss Heydinger, and the blankness of his scholastic prospects. The revulsion, the rebellion, the final solution-need we speak of them? Lewisham is submissive to Love, and passes with resolute resignation into the obscurity of a small home, parentage, and Clapham. The child is coming, and this-yes this-is life; the other was just vanity; at any rate, it is over, quite over. The schema that had long lined a trunk is torn up without a single pang — in thought.

the stillness of

That is the theme, and it is worked out with a searching analysis that would be merciless if it were not, in fact, so very merciful. We have need of such themes. Modern fiction will be regenerated by these faithful seizures of neglected types. It has great work to do in floating little men (who are not little) and narrow lives (which yet globe all life) into our ken. Dickens did it by caricature, by an emphasis necessary in his day. But it has yet to be done in the noble manner; and it is much that for Mr. Horatio Sparkins we have now Mr. Hoopdriver. Let Mr. Wells travel this road. These two novels may be masterpieces or not (we should be the last to deny it); but we are certain that their production tends to create the atmosphere in which masterpieces are born. Our own faith in bis future is immovable, and we know not how we can pay him a less formal compliment than by saying that when we closed "Love and Mr. Lewisham."

full of gratitude and stimulations, we involuntarily groped for a definition of good novel writing which might celebrate our mood. And groping, we found one which, with all its defects and bizarrerie, seems to sweep into its net every writer in whom is greatness, The Academy.

or the seed of greatness; a definition adapted from Coleridge:

He writeth best who loveth best All things both great and small, For the great God who loveth us He made and loveth all.

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT. I. CENTRAL.

The constitution of the Chinese Government can, perhaps, best be understood by a short reference to its origin. Two hundred and sixty years ago the Manchu dynasty came to the Throne at the head of a conquering army composed mainly of Manchu troops, but including also certain corps of Chinese and Mongolian origin. The victorious army, divided into eight Banners, was permanently quartered in and around Peking and converted into an hereditary force for the support of the Throne, minor detachments being settled at Canton, Nanking and other large cities as permanent garrisons to overawe the native population. The chiefs of the army were created princes, dukes and so on, and their commands were made hereditary in their respective families.

The machinery of government left by the outgoing Ming dynasty was, speaking generally, taken over en bloc. The six boards between which the administrative business of the nation was divided were retained. but the higher offices, such as president and vice-president, were duplicated by the addition of a Manchu colleague to each Chinese official, and so it has continued to this day. The principal change was in the constitution of the advisory council of the sovereign. Under the Mings this

had been purely a civilian body termed the Grand Secretariat. The latter was not formally abolished, but all business was transferred to a much smaller body termed the Chun Chi Chu, or military council. This body, which was originally, as its name implies, the war council of the Manchu army, is still the Grand Council of the Emperor, and though no longer exclusively military it keeps in touch with the Manchu force and can set the troops in motion. The Manchu soldier is not what he was 250 years ago, nevertheless an armed force of 75,000 men, the estimated number of the Manchu troops, counts for something, and is a ready weapon in the hands of the council.

As are all Eastern monarchies, the Chinese Government is essentially despotic. In theory everything hinges on the personality of the Emperor. His will is absolute, not merely in affairs of State, but in the smallest details of private life. The highest form of legislation is an imperial decree whether promulgated in general terms, or conveying orders on a particular point, in all matters judicial, administrative or executive. The persons and property of all his subjects are at his disposal, and he can behead, imprison, or confiscate without form of trial or reason assigned. In ordinary circumstances

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