fitness for any profession; how he consumed his youthful leisure in learning strange languages and associating with strange people. He admits to sadly misspending his time, and to have always misspent it, "but could I, taking all circumstances into consideration, have done better than I had?" It is seldom that Lavengro interrupts his stepping westward to look back. When he leaves London; when he starts at the reflection of his face in the water because it is squalid and miserable; when he goes to church where he had last been as an innocent child, and now he had become a moody man: these are some of his departures from neutrality. Had Lavengro been a drama, the scene of its prologue would have been laid in heaven, and the actions of its characters predetermined once and for ever.

It is a passionless atmosphere that recalls the Limbo pictured by Dante where the heathen poets dwell without joy or sorrow. There is some justification for an earlier critic's remark that Lavengro is a portfolio of sketches. The characters do not revolve round the central figure, and possess varying degrees of attraction for each other. They move in solitary orbits with their attendant moons, and on not all of them is there life.

When Borrow does depart from his necessitarian method and meditates on cause and effect, it is a sign of disease. He was a born wanderer, and his mental and bodily health depended on change of scene and untainted air. The period of authorship in London shook his constitution to its foundations, and aimless questionings such as this would escape him :-"Will a time come when all will be forgotten that now is beneath the sun? If so, of what profit is life?" It is the cry of a mind the edge of which has been worn down by work for which it is unfitted. He must have felt that most painful of all reactions from brain exercise the same weariness and lassitude on sitting down to begin his task as if he had toiled at it for hours. He left London and took to the roads because his mind was sick and he feared consumption. He could not, in the words of Musset,

vivre entre deux murs et quatre faces mornes,

Le front sous un moellon, les pieds sur un tombeau."

And no sooner does the roar of the great city grow faint than Lavengro comes to his own and his powers of observation revive. Were it not for the apple woman and the Armenian merchant and his dumb clerk, there is little in the London scenes to haunt the memory.

When Borrow treats of the publisher, of Francis Ardry, or of other town-dwellers, he is ill at ease, and his mind, to use a phrase of his own, is dry and unproductive. But place him in

the grassy lane or by the gypsy encampment, and all this is changed. The thoughts arrive in their throngs, and he effaces himself as he listens to others. He has no righteous horror of thieves or cheats, because he feels that had his circumstances been similar he might have become as one of them. His mind is merely the medium through which the story flows upon his page; it emerges as it left the lips of the teller, without colour from his personal idiosyncrasy: as the immortal discourse with Jasper Petulengro about the wind on the heath. Lavengro narrates the story of Peter Williams for its intrinsic worth, not for any enriching effect it has upon his own moral nature. His mind goes out to his characters, to those possessed by one idea which has made them wanderers on the face of the earth. And his treatment of nature is identical with that of man; he does not seek nature, he is nature. Had he lived in the eighteenth century, as well he might, with what vigour would he have refuted Dr. Johnson's claim for the superiority of Fleet Street over the fairest sylvan scene. The modern dweller in towns is smitten with something of religious awe at meadows golden with buttercups or fruit-trees in blossom. With Borrow they are man's rightful heritage, to be enjoyed, not worshipped. When Milton decks with flowers the bier of Lycidas, he reveals as much of his own mind as of their beauty; but when Shakespeare's Perdita speaks of "daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take the winds of March with beauty," it intoxicates us with the immortal hope of spring. Borrow wanders in nature's garden like one of its lawful possessors. The leafy canopy that shelters him from the sun, the cool stream to refresh his limbs, the tinkle of falling water, the light on grass all these are not far removed like some Promised Land, but ever present, and for lack of which man shall not grow old in health.

The episode of Isopel Berners is said to be no exception to the almost unnatural calm that broods upon Borrow's pages. It is accepted as veracious, since Borrow never invented a character, and Professor Saintsbury, after remarking that there was an absence of passion in all his characters and that he was never in love, adds that he would not have made himself cut so poor a figure without cause. Mr. Seccombe affirms that Borrow's normal temper was a cold one, that he was a despiser and distruster of young women, and that he dallied with the project and insulted Isopel with his irony. Both these statements are too sweeping, though it may be conceded that Borrow spent the time with Isopel in the dingle somewhat strangely in teaching her Armenian. But to a man of his temperament, companionship and affectionate sympathy sufficed, as was proved

by the happiness of his marriage to a woman older than himself who shared all his thoughts and copied his manuscripts for the printer. Actual love-making was alien to his nature, and his gladness in Isopel's propinquity was of an unconscious kind. The Armenian lessons merely filled a gap in their conversations, as the sense in a certain kind of poetry is subordinate to the emotions expressed indirectly by the sound. Yet it may be doubted whether, since the serpent entered Eden, greater happiness has been vouchsafed to man than in this instance to Borrow.

Perhaps the strongest case for his detractors is the slightness of his regret for Isopel's departure, when every succeeding time the temptation to follow her grew more faint; but we must remember that in him the man of action is always contending with the poet, and it is the nature of the man of action to live in the present and ever to seek new adventures. His books are composed of the imaginative aura that action gives off; they are sagas in which he sings his own deeds. Although literal records, they are touched with a retrospective enchantment, as by one who has toiled all the morning, slept at midday, and woken at sunset to find the prospect unchanged yet transfigured. In the preface to Lavengro he describes it as "a dream,' and there is a passage in the Bible in Spain telling of his joy in contemplating a beautiful landscape, which throws an unconscious light on the working of his genius :-"An hour elapsed, and I still maintained my seat on the wall; the past scenes of my life flitting before my eyes in airy and fantastic array, through which every now and then peeped trees and hills and other patches of the real landscape which I was confronting" Before the conclusion of Romany Rye the glow had faded entirely from the heavens, the real encroached more and more upon the ideal. And the whole of Wild Wales was composed in the light of common day.

Save for the single instance of the stage coachmen and the coming of the railway, there is no reference to contemporary life in Borrow's volumes of autobiography. The stream waters the fields of childhood, enters the green valley of youth chequered by the shadows of domestic sorrow; and passes through the dark gorge of London life. Then the hills fall back, the river spreads into a lake on which the sunlight dances; only our charmed boat has no landmark by which to steer. The Bible in Spain was held together by the state of the country, the distribution of Testaments, the relations of Borrow to the Spanish Government; but for want of such stiffening ideas the fabric of Lavengro is liable to collapse upon the reader's mind.

Yet this unfettered simplicity is not all loss. We may prove

it by turning, after a study of Borrow, to the works of any other writer of imaginative prose. At once we are made aware of contracted horizons, of having exchanged the boundless heath for the walks of men, freedom for social tyranny. We visit other writers at well-ordered times, and a guide escorts us along gravel walks, and points out objects of interest. But the visitor to Borrow's domain must always find the lodge closed and the keeper gone. He is fortunate if, roaming round the immense circuit, he espies a little door unlatched; but when he enters, what a wilderness meets his view! And if one of the hilly and overgrown paths does lead him to the house-front, he discerns a long and rambling structure, in no single architectural style, but with the traces of every age upon its surface.

No discussion of Borrow's merits should omit some reference to his style. It is flexible but not emphatic; it neither disturbs nor excites; its epithets do not lance the reader's mind. It has a colloquial tinge, and does not disdain the set phrase; we do not feel, as with some writers, of whom Milton is the grand exemplar, that every word has been re-dipped in the creative spring. But its rhythm is flawless, and pursues the reader as the long-drawn ebb of the sea pursues the traveller who turns his steps inland. It often wears a thin robe of irony, but when this is discarded, it less resembles thinking aloud than confession by letter or spoken word to an understanding friend. Take this from Lavengro :-"When many years had rolled on, long after I had attained manhood, and had seen and suffered much, and when our first interview had long since been effaced from the mind of the man of peace, I visited him in his venerable hall, and partook of the hospitality of his hearth." Or this from the Bible in Spain :-"In the streets of Aranjuez, and beneath the mighty cedars and gigantic elms and plantains which compose its noble woods, I have frequently seen groups assembled listening to individuals who, with the New Testament in their hands, were reading aloud the comfortable words of salvation." There is one book on which many writers have attempted to model their style, and of whose grand music we find some echoes in Borrow :“Oh, how dare I mention the dark feeling of mysterious dread which comes over the mind, and which the lamp of reason, though burning bright the while, is unable to dispel! . . . In the brightest days of prosperity-in the midst of health and wealth-how sentient is the poor human creature of thy neighbourhood! How instinctively aware that the flood-gates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for ever and ever! "

AUGUSTUS RALLI.

A GERMAN FOG IN WASHINGTON.

To uphold the honour and dignity of the United States, and yet keep the country out of war, is the difficult problem now before President Wilson. This is the task set for him by a majority of the American people, judging from the expression of public sentiment which finds voice in the Press and in speeches made on various and sundry occasions throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is in the attempt to express this sentiment in American foreign policies that President Wilson finds himself at the moment in a most difficult and trying position, from which it will take enormous political agility to escape with dignity and credit to himself or to the nation for which he speaks.

"Give a calf enough rope and it will hang itself," is an old saying which seems to furnish a key of sorts to the President's policy in dealing with Germany and Austria. In other words, he seems inclined to let things go on until they become so bad that he has a unanimous public sentiment behind him in any action he may take. To prosecute British officials for violation of neutrality in enlisting men in the United States for service in the British Army, to demand the recall of the Austrian Ambassador caught red-handed in a plot to hamper American industry, and to pursue relentlessly all unimportant violators of American neutrality law, regardless of which side of the European controversy these violations favour, are all matters against which no protest will be made by the American people; in fact, such actions will meet with their approval, because they cater to the neutrality idea without seriously threatening America with an armed conflict.

It is, however, when the American authorities enter the controversial field of international law and custom that the touch becomes less sure and American policy vague and confused. In the matter of protests since the sinking of the Lusitania, as shown by the diplomatic record, there is no flaw. A position was assumed, reiterated, and the threat distinctly made, that further violation of the American contentions would be regarded in a most serious light, necessitating action on the part of the American Government. The sinking of the Arabic was as gross a violation of the American contention as was the sinking of the Lusitania. The German Ambassador to Washington made a statement full of apologies for the incident, and said that the