hard work? Perhaps Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book of fresh out-of-doors genius if ever there were one; or perhaps Oliver Twist, or Nicholas Nickleby, or some other production of that strange genius which was always bringing the microscope of the human naturalist and the quaintly distorting lens of the humourist to bear upon the minutest fragments of city life, and then was always interpolating among the inimitable effects so produced patches of screamy melodrama or excruciating pathos. Still, it is the contact with real external fact, the unbookishness of Dickens, that gives him almost all his vast popularity.

And may we not say the same of those writers who have here and there carried the British world by storm with some masterly book of travels or some vivid ballad of human suffering? What, for instance, is the great charm of Eothen, the most delightful of all books of Eastern travel, except that it contains in it a flash of unbookish, buoyant life, as different as possible from the elaborate art of the historian of the Crimean war? Why were Kingsley's "Sands of Dee" and his fishermen's and poachers' ballads so fascinating to those who never read, except that there was the same breath of outof-doors life, of direct sympathy with unbookish woes, in all of them? Why does Tom Brown's Schooldays rivet boys as it does, except because it conveys in a book the strong impulses of a fresh, unbookish mind? Why, again, have Stevenson and Rider Haggard fascinated the modern world of boys and men alike as few authors since the days of Robinson Crusoe ever fascinated them, except that neither of these men rise to their best until they are breathing the free air of wild and daring enter

prise? I believe most profoundly that it takes a nation which is not bookish in its habits to produce the greatest and most living books. Only a descendant of the wild Borderers, with more Borderers' than authors' blood in his veins, could have achieved the great successes in making Scotland what she now is to us, which have placed Scott perhaps second in the long roll of British literature. Only the profoundly vernacular sympathies of the great Dorsetshire writers, Barnes and Hardy, could have given to these two singularly unbookish writers the power which they have certainly achieved of charming unbookish men with their books. Indeed, I believe I might say that although there will always be a field for highly cultivated genius, for instance, for a students' poet like Milton, or Herbert, or Henry Vaughan, or Wordsworth (who had, however, in him a streak of the hardy shepherd and mountaineer), or Coleridge, or Keats, or Tennyson, or Matthew Arnold,-the men who will make the great popular books of the world, the books which dominate the unbookish, will always be fed chiefly on first-hand experience of men and things, and only by accident, as it were, on literary studies.

LITERATURE AND ACTION

In a letter contributed to the Spectator Mr. Alfred Austin, who has a very large knowledge both of English literature and English politics, gives a variety of reasons why a man who is, in his own estimation and that of his friends, equally well fitted for literature and politics, should on the whole choose the former and eschew the latter. I heartily agree with him, that there are not many of those really fitted to exert a considerable influence in the higher walks of literature who are also fitted to exert a considerable influence in the higher walks of politics. There is, as a rule, in genuine literary men-though there are great exceptions to the rule -a warning instinct against the mêlée of political life, without the protection of which they could never really produce the great works they do produce. Literature in its higher forms almost always requires a certain amount of solitude, of separateness of spirit, of imaginative brooding, which is extremely uncongenial to the political life. Goethe felt this, and felt it not only to the extent of a strong repulsion to the grind and racket of political life, but to the extent of an almost equally strong repulsion to the exacting ties of domestic life, by which he probably suffered

was

morally more than he gained intellectually. Sir Walter Scott felt it, and never intervened in politics without something of injury to his imaginative nature, for which there was no adequate compensation of any kind. Even the great French poets have all felt this, and though their sociable French nature has often decoyed them into politics, as the flame of the candle draws the moth into it, we have seen in the lives of Chateaubriand, of Lamartine, and of Victor Hugo, that their interference with politics was never very durable, and hardly of a kind to reflect lustre on themselves. At the same time, it is certain that there are, here and there, men of very considerable literary power who seem to be destined for politics, and who find in politics the exact sphere of their literary genius. Canning was one such. Probably Burke another, though his peculiar sphere was rather what we may call the sheath or membrane of the political life, the work of the political reviewer and pamphleteer, than the most vital processes of the State. Macaulay was a third whose influence on politics was still less direct than Burke's; while Mr. Disraeli, on the contrary, never really found his highest literary gifts-and even as a politician almost all his successors were literary-till he found them in the actual thrust and parry of Parliamentary debate. Thus, it can certainly not be said that a true gift for literature necessarily wards off the minds of men from politics. In its higher imaginative forms it is very apt to do so. The Muses are jealous mistresses, and will not lend their higher gifts of song to any one who plunges very deep into the mêlée of the world. Even the greater imaginative politicians, like Burke, cannot

help crying to the eager crowd of active partisans, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!" And the true poets feel this shadowiness of practical aims so deeply, that if by chance they get drawn into the eddy, they are only too thankful when at last they find themselves once more stranded on the terra firma of ideal life. But still, there are kinds of literary power, not precisely poetic, but involving a good deal of the detachment of imaginative insight, which seem to find their natural expression in political life, though they might also find a very adequate expression in the field of pure literature; and can we say of such kinds of literary power as this that they are the worse for that "baptism of fire" which they receive in the fierce struggles of the political world?

Mr. Austin says they are, on the ground, first, that literary men with anything of the true imaginative power in them can find a higher joy and a more glorifying radiance in the world of their own thoughts, than any they can obtain in that curious mixture of admiration and contempt which besets the politician's stormy life; and next, that in literature, at all events, the man with any gift for it can, if he pleases, be pretty sure to do no harm, while the politician, whether he eats his heart out in the fray or not, can never be quite sure that he has not done more harm than good. I cannot accept either plea. Of course, I heartily concede that a literary man who is warned by his own instincts, as he often is, that he loses his true self, instead of finding it, in the field of politics, is justified, nay, enjoined, by that instinct of selfpreservation to keep out of an angry world in which he is unable to be his truest self. But it is not of