through hither India, about the gates of cities and on the corners of streets, and supposed that Rembrandt's secret was to be looked for in similar conditions.

"Formerly less was said about the light in Rembrandt's work and more about the marvelous chiaroscuro, that is to say, a darkness which is not black, but in which the light combines with the dark. Much was written about this and many artists attempted to discover the particular pigments they imagined he must have used for this. These investigations led to much imitation of his manner both in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century. But those who attempted to imitate the master's shades and light most literally were farthest removed from fathoming his secret. And even though one should succeed in guessing by what pigments

Rembrandt's lights and shades were produced, one would still be as far removed from him and his power as ever, because the secret was not shut up in any recipe or formula."

Madame Marius concludes her account of this distinguishing trait of the "Conjuror with Paint" thus:

"It is not to be wondered at that so much has been said about this light of Rembrandt's. Wherever his art works are seen, in whatever museums of his own or of foreign lands, among works of equally great, in some respects perhaps greater, masters everywhere Rembrandt impresses one with this light which is so exclusively his own, in which no one else has ever fully equaled him.”

Mark Twain pays a graceful tribute to William Dean Howells in an essay in Harper's (July) which, it is prophesied, will acquire accumulated value with time and from which future literary critics will be apt to quote. "Is it true," he asks at the outset, "that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Dr. Osler is charged with saying so. But I can point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr. Howells." Mr. Clemens continues:

"I read his 'Venetian Days' about forty years ago. I compare it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of Harper, and I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities -clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. Sustained. I intrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as does he, but only by intervalled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights."

In the matter of verbal exactness, Mark Twain also votes Mr. Howells the first place. "He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the right word. Others have to put up with approximations." The more or less acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations may be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word

would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better. "It doesn't rain when Howells is at work," says Mark Twain:

"And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its cadenced and and undulating rhythm? its architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his English of to-dayhis perfect English, I wish to say-can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid."

Turning to the element of humor in Mr. Howells's works-and here he may claim to speak with authority-Mark Twain says:

"As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try if I had the words that might approximately reach up to his high place. I do not think anyone else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. they are unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and well conducted. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page, pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the blood."

For

Finally, Mr. Howells's stage directions" compel Mark Twain's whole-hearted admiration. "Some authors," he remarks, "overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us

how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn't said it at all. But Mr. Howells's stage directions are done with a competent and discriminating art." To illustrate:

"Sometimes they convey a scene and its conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if some one would read merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance, a scene like this, from 'The Undiscovered Country':

and she laid her arms with a beseech

ing gesture on her father's shoulder.'

she answered, following his gesture

with a glance.'

466

she said, laughing nervously.'
she asked, turning swiftly upon him

that strange, searching glance.'

she answered, vaguely.'

she reluctantly admitted.'

but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his face with puzzled entreaty.""

In contrast to Mr. Howells's "stage directions," Mark Twain presents the "worn and commonplace and juiceless forms of the third-rates," which make their novels "such a weariness and vexation":

"We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of

"And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over."

The spirit of Mr. Howells's work is as beautiful as the make of it, says Mark Twain. He adds: "I have held him in admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count."

the

The reason that Robert Louis Stevenson has been selected out of the whole of suffering humanity as the type of modern martyrdom, remarks G. K. Chesterton, London journalist and essayist, is a very simple one. It is "not that he merely contrived, like any other man of reasonable manliness, to support pain and limitation without whimpering, or committing suicide, or taking to drink." In that sense we are all stricken men and stoics. "The grounds of Stevenson's particular fascination in this matter," avers Mr. Chesterton, "was that he was the exponent, and the successful exponent, not merely of negative manliness, but of a positive and lyric gaiety." Mr. Chesterton embodies this conclusion in a new booklet* on Stevenson, from which we quote further:

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Two Essays by G. K. Chesterton and W. Robertson Nicoll. James Pott & Co.

"This wounded soldier did not merely refrain from groans, he gave forth instead a war song, so juvenile and inspiriting that thousands of men without a scratch went back into the battle.. This cripple did not merely bear his own burdens, but those of thousands of contemporary men. No one can feel anything but the most inexpressible kind of reverence for the patience of the asthmatic charwoman or the consumptive tailor's assistant. Still the charwoman does not write 'Aes Triplex,' nor the tailor 'The Child's Garden of Verses.' Their stoicism is magnificent, but it is stoicism. But Stevenson did not face his troubles as a stoic, he faced them as an Epicurean. He practised with an austere triumph that terrible asceticism of frivolity which is so much more difficult than the asceticism of gloom. His resignation can only be called an active and uproarious resignation. It was not merely self-sufficing, it was infectious. His triumph was, not that he went through his misfortunes without becoming a cynic or a poltroon, but that he went through his misfortunes and emerged quite exceptionally cheerful and reasonable and courteous, quite exceptionally light-hearted and liberal-minded.”

Stevenson's triumph over his physical

"Apart from any moral qualities, Stevenson was characterised by a certain airy wisdom, a certain light and cool rationality, which is very rare and very difficult indeed to those who are greatly thwarted or tormented in life. It is possible to find an invalid capable of the work of a strong man, but it is very rare to find an invalid capable of the idleness of a strong man. It is possible to find an invalid who has the faith which removes mountains, but not easy to find an invalid who has the faith that puts up with pessimists. It may not be impossible or even unusual for a man to lie on his back on a sick

bed in a dark room and be an optimist. But it is very unusual indeed for a man to lie on his back on a sick bed in a dark room and be a reasonable optimist: and that is what Stevenson, almost alone of modern optimists, succeeded in being."

The faith of Stevenson, adds Mr. Chesterton, was founded on a paradox-the paradox that existence was splendid, because it was, to all outward appearance, desperate. And this paradox, we are reminded, is deeply rooted in human life. Man's spirit is constantly depressed by the things which, logically speaking, should encourage it, and encouraged by the things which, logically speaking, should depress it. Christianity is founded on the idea that the best man suffers most. "We can accept the agony of heroes, but we revolt against the agony of culprits. We can all endure to regard pain when it is mysterious; our deepest nature

protests against it the moment that it is rational." To quote, in conclusion:

"Stevenson's great ethical and philosophical value lies in the fact that he realised this great paradox that life becomes more fascinating the darker it grows, that life is worth living only so far as it is difficult to live. The more steadfastly and gloomily men clung to their sinister visions of duty, the more, in his eyes, they swelled the chorus of the praise of things. He was an optimist because to him everything was heroic,

and nothing more heroic than the pessimist. To Stevenson, the optimist, belong the most frightful epigrams of pessimism. It was he who said that this planet on which we live was more drenched with blood, animal and vegetable, than a pirate ship. It was he who said that man was a disease of the agglutinated dust. And his supreme position and his supreme difference from all common optimists is merely this, that all common optimists say that life is glorious in spite of these things, but he said that all life was glorious because of them,"

Flaubert, the French novelist, held that though there may be many ways of expressing a thought, there is only one perfect way and that it is the supreme task of the artist to discover it. The sentiment is quoted approvingly in Walter Pater's essay on "Style," and undoubtedly reflects the inspiring motive of this famous Englishman of letters. His life, observes James Huneker (in the New York Times Saturday Review), was a long patience. "As Newman sought patiently for the evidences of faith, so Pater sought for beauty, that beauty of thought and expression of which his work is a supreme exemplar in modern English literature. Flaubert, a man of genius with whom he was in sympathy, toiled no harder for the perfect utterance of his ideas than did this retiring Oxford man of letters in his tower of ivory. And, like his happy account of Raphael's growth, Pater was himself a 'genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius.'"'

Walter Pater's achievement, so we are told by A. C. Benson in a new biographical study,* was to discern and then to display a new capacity in English prose. His masterpiece, 'Marius the Epicurean," represents something absolutely distinctive, something that had never been done before. The essential difference existing between Pater's work and that of his forerunners and contemporaries is indicated as follows:

"The tendency of the best prose-writers of the century had been, as a rule, to employ prose in a prosaic manner. Landor had aimed at a Greek austerity of style. Macaulay had brought to perfection a bright hard-balanced method of statement, like the blowing of sharp trumpets. This was indeed the prose that had recommended itself to the taste of the early Victorians; it was full of a certain sound and splendor; it *WALTER PATER. By A. C. Benson. The Macmillan Company.

rolled along in a kind of impassioned magnificence; but the object of it was to emphasise superficial points in an oratorical manner, to produce a glittering panorama rich in detail; it made no appeal to the heart or the spirit, awaking at best a kind of patriotic optimism, a serene selfglorification.

"Carlyle had written from the precisely opposite point of view; he was overburdened with passionate metaphysics which he involved in a texture of rugged Euphuism, intensely mannerised. But he had no catholicity of grasp, and his picturesqueness had little subtlety or delicacy, because his intense admiration for certain qualities and types blinded him to finer shades of character. There was no restraint about his style, and thus his enthusiasm turned to rant, his statement of preferences degenerated into a species of frantic bombast.

"With these Pater had nothing in common; the writers with whom he is more nearly connected are Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Newman, and Ruskin. He was akin to Charles Lamb in the delicacy of touch, the subtle flavor of language; and still more in virtue of his tender observation, his love of interior domestic life. has a certain nearness to De Quincey in the impassioned autobiographical tendency, the fondness for retrospect, which Pater considered the characteristic of the poetical temperament.

He

He

is akin to Newman in respect of the restraint, the economy of effect, the perfect suavity of his work, but none of these probably exerted any very direct influence upon him. Ruskin perhaps alone of the later prose-writers had a permanent effect on the style of Pater. He learnt from Ruskin to realise intensely the suggestiveness of art, to pursue the subjective effect upon the mind of the recipient; but though the rich and glowing style of Ruskin enlarged the vocabulary of Pater, yet we can trace the time when he parted company with him, and turned aside in the direction of repression rather than volubility, of severity rather than prodigality."

The essence of Pater's attempt, writes Mr. Benson, was "to produce prose that had never before been contemplated in English, full of color and melody, serious, exquisite, ornate." More specifically:

"His object was that every sentence should be