the harmony of our environment and our relation to it-this affords him continual concern. Who else has given us such portraits of places, of homes, of rooms, of gardens, of streets and churches and little inns, of dress even, of all that has passed under the hand of man to be beautified? In the earlier books, where all emotions are more insistently held, this emotion for beauty has its active part to play on the comparatively empty stage, and one grows at times almost tired of its inevitable appearance. Later it takes its place as a pervasive, comforting influence which, like the fragrance of flowers, ameliorates all harsh conditions and deepens the sense of well-being. In "A London Life," miserable story as it is of sordid quarrels and debased relations, the description of the dower-house at Plash is like a cool and soothing touch in fever. In the novel that has least to commend it to the admirers of Mr. James, "The Sacred Fount," we find ourselves bewitched by Newmarch, the country-seat at which take place the extravagant and pitiful events of the fable. Wherever we turn in this strange story, driven by our puzzled and half-rebellious curiosity, we are hushed and calmed by glimpses of utter loveliness. They are scattered in single sentences and fragmentary allusions, occasionally expanding into descriptions of consummate felicity, fixing some moment of passing effect:

"There was a general shade in all the lower reaches a fine clear dusk in garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last calls of the birds sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed serious splashes in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in the grounds of some castle of enchantment. My few steps brought me to a spot where another perspective crossed our own, so that they made together a verdurous circle with an evening sky above and great lengthening, arching recesses in which the twilight thickened. Oh, it was quite sufficiently a castle of enchantment, and when I noticed four old stone seats, massive and mossy and symmetrically placed, I recognized not only the VOL. XXXVI.—46

influence, in my adventure, of the grand style, but the familiar identity of this consecrated nook, which was so much the type of all the bemused and remembered. We were in a beautiful old picture, we were in a beautiful old tale, and it wouldn't be the fault of Newmarch if some other green carrefour, not far off, didn't balance with this one and offer the alternative of niches in the greenness, occupied by weatherstained statues on florid pedestals."

These are the scenes with which Mr. James has gained familiarity and which he reproduces as they are reproduced in the art of Corot, with such an adjustment of values and accents that the whole trembles mysteriously into color without a brilliant note or patch of deadness. And it is in such descriptions that one feels now his older vision, they are so perfectly the evolution of what his younger eyes beheld when Europe still was foreign land; they realize so fully the dream that grew out of early reading and imagining. Compare the bland serenity of Newmarch with this picture of Hampton Court, dating more than a quarter of a century earlier, and throbbing with impressionable youth and eagerness:

"Over against us, amid the deep-hued bloom of its ordered gardens, the dark red palace, with its formal copings and its vacant windows, seemed to tell of a proud and splendid past; the little village nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common with its tavern of gentility, its ivy-towered church, its parsonage, retained to my modernized fancy the lurking semblance of a feudal hamlet. It was in this dark, composite light that I had read all English prose; it was this mild moisture that had blown from the verses of English poets; beneath these broad acres of raindeepened greenness a thousand honored dead lay buried."

It is the same vision, it is the same craving, the same delight in humanized landscape and sophisticated nature, the same zest for turning the pages of a book written in the tongues of ancient peoples and illustrated by the great masters of form and color. The development has been certain, sustained, and complete. Following a habit he has in common with many other intensely personal writers, Mr. James has devoted to this trait of his mental

physiognomy an entire book. In "The Old Things," later called "The Spoils of Poynton," he gathers up as if in some slender vase of intricate workmanship, the aroma diffused by the multitudinous flower of civilization. In this work (and in this alone) the human interest is subordinated to the pressure of æsthetic preoccupations. At the end Fleda Vetch and Owen Gereth are dim and fantastic to the reader's imagination, and it is the fresh old tapestry and deep old damasks, the rare French furniture, the old golds and brasses, the Spanish altar cloth and the ivory' crucifix that flicker and glow with vitality. Saving himself by the adjective "maniacal" applied to Mrs. Gereth's passionate regard for her properties; saving himself still more by Fleda's refusal to see in those wonderful properties the price of her affections, Mr. James nevertheless emphasizes, once and for all, the reader feels, the compulsion of such a passion as that of Mrs. Gereth for her "Old Things." He points a warning hand in the direction of its ultimate effect upon human character. We may see for ourselves, he seems to say, how far it may carry one. In "The Portrait of a Lady,' which antedates "The Old Things" by some fifteen years, he has also shown that the dilettante attitude, the excessive preoccupation with matters of taste, presents to him as to less susceptible observers its ugly and contemptible side. In the person of Gilbert Osmond he has concentrated all its hardening and lowering possibilities, and he has provided an illuminating contrast to this peculiarly detestable connoisseur in Ralph Touchett, in whom taste, the unfortunate Isabel feels, is "a kind of humorous excrescence" that does not interfere with his inalienably human qualities.

In the world which Mr. James has chosen to depict, reality prevails. There is a vast amount of art, but there is little artificiality. There is almost nothing of what critics are fond of calling primal sentiment, but there is an abundance of the ordered, restrained, compressed sentiment that reaches its highest development in the soil of civilization. Unlike Mr. Meredith, he fails to show us any wild flowers of womanhood springing, beautiful and alluring, from the crags of unconventionality. None of his heroines could be compared to great sky

birds, or to forest trees, or to the showercloud of the mountains. But to say that his characters clothe their emotions with the garments of the cultivated world to which they belong is not to deny their sincerity or even their intensity. Purely primitive passion does not interest him, but strong feeling-feeling of which-one may die, for that matter-assailed by the problems of life in a complex environment— this awakens him to searching analysis and to poetic interpretation. The wonderful story, "The Beast in the Jungle," furnishes a striking definition of the tragedy which he finds in passionless living. No more terrible vision of blank and empty reaches in the soul can be conceived than that evoked by the anguish with which Marcher covets the ravages of grief beheld upon the face of a mourner. And, as usually in the life of the modern world, feeling is obliged to parade itself or else to seek concealment before a cloud of witnesses. In all the later stories people are coming and going with constant intrusion, doors are swinging, we obtain glimpses here and there of significant corners out of the way of the crowd; but it is a rare chance that we can feel ourselves alone for an instant with anyone. All that we gather in the way of confidences must be culled from halfframed sentences, from allusions, tacit understandings, instantaneous intuitions. We must keep ourselves alert, guarded, intelligent, or we miss the secret. If Mr. James is the opposite of idle with his observing and recording, we too are industrious. He calls upon his readers to work with him and in his own spirit of untiring curiosity. And everywhere he produces what a recent critic has called "the emotion of multitude.” He moves among his characters, numerous as they are, with great serenity and with an air of perfect ease. Again unlike Mr. Meredith, who continually enters one's thoughts in his company, he assumes no mask of comedy or tragedy, he requires no isolation of place. In evening dress, in great assemblies, he astutely interrogates the human soul and receives its confessions. I recall but one instance of his rebellion against the social order, the shackles of which he seems so consentingly to embrace. Once, at Newmarch, he complains that to that fine and formal company the summer stars called in vain. "We had ignored

them in our crystal cage, among our tinkling lamps, no more free really to alight than if we had been dashing in a locked railwaytrain across a lovely land." But for the most part the immense society of the civilized world offers him his tremendous opportunity and he is not disdainful of it. For this reason he has been placed in a group of writers fundamentally unlike himself, and the tag of "realist" has been cheerfully attached to him. It is hardly worth while to dispute the applicability of that or any other tag when its applicability can be so easily defended. But the realism of Mr. James is merely the solid and tangible envelope of his inherent mysticism. He is too thoroughly an artist to leave his characters in the air in a disembodied state. It is the business of an artist to give form to his thought, to provide illusions that shall convince; and this to the most extraordinary degree Mr. James accomplishes. His least characters walk the solid earth and think and act with integral individuality. They are born into life as real persons, not as dreams or ideas; but this world of our mortality is not the only world of which they are conscious. The domain of terrestrial experience is narrow compared to the wide world of psychological conjecture. From the natural phenomena absorbing the attention of most of us, some of us are continually summoned by a vision of miracle, by a ghostly sense of the supernatural coldly breathing upon our lusty materialism. It was not for nothing that Mr. James had for his father and the guide of his early studies, that genial theologian of Swedenborgian tendencies, who pursued Emerson even to his bedchamber to "bring him to book on the topic of man's regeneration," and who found the idol of Concord "absolutely destitute of reflective power. In the early work of Mr. James, in that of his middle period, and markedly in the work of his later years, we feel that visions and dreams have been his frequent companions. Occasionally he has written ghost-stories of undiluted mystery. "The Turn of the Screw" is a tale of which the elusive horror cannot be exaggerated. In all its elements, in the choice of the little child as the victim of inexplicable evil, in the veil shrouding in darkness the manifestations of the evil, in the sense of irresistible forces sweeping against and overturning divine innocence of

heart, in the downfall of the physical under the fierce assault of the spirit, sheer ghastly, shattering horror is present. In other stories involving excursions into the region of good and evil spirits, a lighter medium is used. The ghosts of "The Real Right Thing," "The Third Person," "Owen Wingrave," "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes"-these ghosts enlist the imagination without appalling it. In the story called "Maud-Evelyn" the eccentric spirit of whimsy is riotous. Maud-Evelyn is a child who died at some early age and who lives in the memory of her parents with such intensity-but it is folly to translate or curtail the wonderful web into which MaudEvelyn's adventures are woven! Reading of them one is far away from the author of "The Papers" and "What Maisie Knew."

But it is from this amazing composition of equal sensitiveness to the visible and the invisible that the moral worth of these various works has grown. The spiritual difference between good and evil is kept continually in mind, and out of a maze of incident, weary with intellectual exercise, one emerges at the important goal to find the beauty and dignity of virtue still preeminent. Out of the corruption of a society which Mr. James depicts with unsparing detail and without satire or didactic comment, rises the flame of purity. Some one among his characters is sure to stand for invincible goodness. There is never for a moment the pretense that wickedness and vulgarity are happy estates for the soul. There is always the assumption that to be sanely and positively good is to shape for one's self the only satisfying destiny, and the assumption is the more potent that none of the felicities of life escape the notice of him by whom it is made. The resources of the opulent material universe, the complications of the intricate social relation, the deep delights of multifarious personal experience to hold these in the hand and weigh against them the secret value of goodness is to count so far as one can for morality.

Mr. James may be said to count for morality on its sturdiest side, on the side assailed by all the insidious temptations of refined and sophisticated tastes. "I like your talking, my dear man, of what you don't perceive. I've yet to find out what that remarkable quantity is." One of his

own characters tosses him this appreciation, and he himself admits that "a man habitually ridden by the twin demons of imagination and observation is never enough for his own peace out of anything."

But such a man speaks with authority to the initiated and those who have tasted satiety. The freshness and sweetness of his message has none of the crude tang of immaturity, and if he is listened to he is believed.

Unfortunately it becomes increasingly difficult to listen understandingly. Many years ago the years of "The Passionate Pilgrim" and "The Europeans"-there was but one fault to find with that clear enunciation in which words had so delectable a sound. It was not entirely flexible. Mr. James, like many another writer whose ideal of the English tongue is a high one, wrote at first cautiously, and erred on the side of elaboration. He explained; at times he even a little exhorted. He moved not quite freely among his sentences. In the correction of that fault

he arrived at the style of "Princess Cassamassima" and of "The Portrait of a Lady," a style beautifully sincere, personal and significant. Then, to use the expressive characterization of one of his fellow novelists, he "bent backward." Apparently he is increasingly anxious to be on terms of careless intimacy with his readers, to address them in the colloquial speech of inner circles, in an argot like that of the studio or the newspaper or the stage. Such an expression as "things are not, also, gouged out to your tune" is an example of the liberties he now takes with his easily handled instrument. The result is an immense pliability; a wonderful sense of being in and of the group; a pleasant goodfellowship between the reader and the book, but as one reads, a fear settles upon the mind-is not this broken and distorted style the most fragile of vessels in which to preserve the precious substance? Will it not be practically unintelligible for future generations? A greater mishap in literature could hardly be imagined.

MANCHURIA

HE beginning of the rainy season may be said to mark the completion of the first stage of the war. The difficulty of conducting extensive operations during the rains, coupled with the comparative exhaustion of both armies after a prolonged campaign attended by unusual hardships, will probably cause a temporary cessation of hostilities on large scale in central and southern Manchuria. From six weeks to two months will elapse before the ground becomes again sufficiently firm to bear the weight of heavy transport, and in the interim, while keeping a close watch on each other, the antagonists will do what they may to repair the wastage of the campaign now ending, preparatory to taking the field in the fall.

The time, then, seems opportune for an account of some of the operations of the army under the command of General Kuropatkin as they have come to my knowledge during four months spent with the Russians in the sphere of hostilities.

That Russia was not prepared to undertake a war in this part of the world must now be generally understood, but the extent of her disadvantage is probably not yet fully appreciated. When the war began, various estimates of Russia's strength in the far East were published. These differed widely, but it is not putting it too strongly to say that even the lowest was greatly in excess of the reality. So well do the Russians preserve their military secrets that it was not until I had been for some time on the scene that I began to grasp the facts. Many details conspire to confuse one. For instance, the organization of the Siberian troops and railway guards is different from the European army, and estimates of numbers based upon battalions, regiments, or divisions are apt to be entirely

at fault.

In attempting to estimate the number of men Russia actually had in the theatre of war at the beginning of hostilities, the Vladivostok garrison should be at once eliminated, since they were required for the defence of that fortress and could not be used for any other purpose. Not only was it impossible to withdraw troops from Port Arthur for use in the field, but it was necessary to reënforce the garrison. When the war began, there were probably about 20,ooo men in and about Port Arthur, and as many more in the Vladivostok district. This left free for active operations only the Manchurian railway guards and such of the Siberian troops as happened to be east of Lake Baikal at the time. While I do not pretend to possess positive information on this matter, I have good reason to regard the following estimate as reasonably accurate. Of railway guards, who are armed and equipped as infantry, there were approximately some 24,000, fully one-fourth of which were required to guard and operate the railway east of Baikal. Moreover, when the war commenced, these were not concentrated, but were widely distributed. In addition to the railway guards there were two brigades of East Siberian rifles, of four regiments each, and having a theoretical strength of 16,000 men. there were some thirty or forty sotnias of Siberian Cossacks at the outside some 4,000 men-distributed throughout the Yalu country and along the Korean frontier. So, assuming that these regiments were full strength-which certainly was not the case-the Russians had not more than 40,000 men free to take the field when war was declared. Compared to estimates varying from 150,000 to 300,000, conceded to the Russians by military experts at that time, this seems a ridiculously low figure, but I believe it is not far from correct.

Then

Although something had been accomplished in the way of concentration, this