sides that one cycle is over and another has begun to describe the unfailing round which separates the ages. We do not know when (in a small way) we have received a greater shock than in reading a current work of Mr Besant's, now going on in the pages of a respectable contemporary, in which the past of literature is embodied not in Addison and Steele and their circle of wits, a thing to which we are habituated, but in—what does the reader think -Dickens and Thackeray, the familiar spirits of our youth, whose footprints are still warm among us. Mr Besant's unsuccessful poet goes to the classic regions of the Strand-the neighbourhood of the Mermaid and the Cock-to see if there are any traces of the old idols, and finds none, for their day has passed. We rub our eyes and wonder if this is so-if it can be true; and we suppose, since Mr Besant says so for who is better skilled in the history and philosophy of the literary craft than he that it must be true. Let us then with humility study the art of fiction upon its new lines, and see what is given us by the new school. We have no sooner written these words, however, than we cancel them; for Mr Stevenson can never be the founder, or even leader, of a new school. There is nothing in his art which can confer a new impulse. He may be copied, it is true; but as the chief thing in him to be copied is genius, and that is a thing incommunicable, we doubt whether his imitators will ever attain any importance. It is not that we should not all be the better of studying that fine, transparent, and marvellously lucid style which once was full of all manner of exquisite caprices and mannerisms, as is the fashion of youth, but now has settled down to its work as an incomparable medium for the telling of a terrible story, self-corrected of all the prettinesses which were becoming to lighter subjects, but would be totally out of place in such as this - but only that no mere style could commend the astonishingly painful fables in which Mr Stevenson is most strong, without that grip of power which must exist in the hand which exercises it, and which no training can confer. To make such a blood-curdling tale as that of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde the model of a common art is impossible; the Thing, which is a sort of horror far more potent than ever was that hideous Frankenstein which once so much impressed weak minded grandfathers, has been done-by sheer force of power, and perhaps an awful moral suggestion in us, that something true lies beneath the dreadful tale. But to attempt to copy it would be much like the attempt, with a turnip and a white sheet, to emulate the achievements of a real ghost-a thing calculated to bring both ghosts and men about the rash masker's ears. Mr Stevenson may teach his contemporaries an old but never worn-out lesson, that there are more things in heaven and earth than have been yet dreamt of by any philosophy, and may lead them to search over again for themselves into the endless our complications of buman relationship when stripped of all the glosses of conventional representation, and even of natural feeling; which will be partly good and partly bad, as most human impulses are. For, after all, the conventional has, or it could not continue, a certain commonplace of truth in it, and natural feeling exists in the most curious persistency even in hearts from which it seems banished; so that, on the whole, whatever divergences way he permitted to au origiual genius. the commuon bread-and-butter view is the one wost to be trusted. the more absolutely true. And unless he could transmit that grip of which we have spoken, which takes hold on us as with a hand of iron. and no more will let us go thau the Wedding Guest was let go till the marvellous tale had come to an end, it will never be in his power to form a school or to shape a new development of fiction. copy Dickens was not difficult, though it is an industry which has fallen very low; and-to copy Thackeray was possible, though the results can scarcely be said to be desirable. We hesitate-it is perhaps a weakness -to place Mr Stevenson on the line with these two nanies, But it would be less possible to copy him than either of these, and we hope that nobody will try. То There is something in the 'Master of Ballantrae' which reminds us of what has always appeared to ourselves a singularly ingenious suggestion made in one of his stray pages of criticism (which were often so admirable) by the great Christopher North, whose countenance, formed like Mars to threaten and command, looks down upon us from the place of honour in this sanctuary where once his wit sparkled and his wisdom flowed. He was "under canvass" in his old age, disporting himself less actively than his wont upon the moors, or in the shallows of the brown and golden Highland stream, when, in the evening after the labours of the day, he began to discuss Shakespeare with his companions. We are not aware whether these late chapters have ever been republished. And there. not without a flavour about, through the blue peat-smoke, and the scent of the rustling heather, of a certain steaming compound which had perhaps too much prevalence (in literature) in those days, the Professor gave forth his theory of a certain thread of meaning which he thought he had found in some of those great dramas which are our pride and boast. Probably it was no more than a notion struck out on the moment-one of those wandering lights that gleam across the mind with a sort of dancing reflection from the great light of poetry when we gaze into it, and feel the dazzle mount into our brain. It was this-that Shakespeare chose a certain relationship to forin his tale upon, contrasting it in different manifestations, the good and the bad, the feeble and the strong, so as to show that side of human nature in all its phases. No doubt, in the special example given there might be some truth in the idea—Hamlet and Laertes being, as the critic showed, placed in a position almost entirely similar, both with a father's murder to avenge; while in the case of Lear, the unnatural daughters Regan and Goneril were contrasted not only with the too gentle Cordelia, but with Edgar the slighted son, whose devotion to his father was so undeserved-so that both sides of that problem of human guilt and virtue, hesitation and promptitude, were set before the spectator. That Shakespeare's mind might have found some thread of intention such as this to form a fantastic guide through the necessary evolutions of a plot, with that love for an ingenious pretence which belongs to the poet and the child, is possible enough: although his subject became far too great for it, and no one now would think of finding any balance to Hamlet, the noblest of poetical conceptions, in the shallow cavalier with his conventional impulse of revenge, who is the protagonist according to this interpretation. But Wilson's suggestion is nevertheless a fine bit of literary perception. and very pleasing to the fanciful reader. The Master of Ballantrae' follows in some degree this theory of construction. It is a story of the relationship between two brothers, kept with great austerity of purpose wholly within the lines of its selected ground, but without any contrasting group of beings more happily inspired to relieve the reader's mind a characteristic which increases the intensity of the tale. The brothers themselves are indeed contrasted in a remarkable way, especially in the beginning of the story; but there is no Edgar to make us aware that hatred is not the rule of family life, or that relentings of the heart may still come in, however desperate may be the impulse of fraternal opposition. From beginning to end the two brothers of Durrisdeer hate each other with boundless and unchangeable animosity. There is no relenting on either side,-even less perhaps on that of the virtuous and otherwise tender-hearted brother than on that of the reprobate. We are made indeed to feel that his utter odiousness, falsehood, and selfishness have been revealed with such pitiless distinctness, that Henry bates the incarnation of every evil quality in James, whereas the other only hates his brother's person and the advantages of position which are in his eyes stolen from himself. The better hater in this way is the better man, who feels nothing but bitter disappointment when he finds that he has not as he thought killed the Master, not alloyed even with a grain of satisfaction that his has not been the hand to shed his brother's blood. We are not, indeed, even when most carried on by the stream of events and excited by the sombre occurrences and wonderful pictures of the story, allowed at any time fully to approve, much less to entertain a thorough sympathy for the virtuous brother. No one in the group, indeed, except perhaps the teller of the tale, the subdued yet distinct personality of Ephim Mackellar, the steward, secretary, and doer of the house, attracts our sympathy. The old lord is a pathetic figure, and the unfortunate lady who stands between the two brothers has traces of sense and spirit did it suit the narrator to keep her less determinedly in the background, but we can fix no affection on either. And the servants in the house, the country people, the dim society in the background, gentlemen and clowns, are all alike detestable. There is no generosity or kindness among them. one, until there comes into the house the keen-sighted spectator Mackellar, whose wits are marvellously sharpened (as always occurs in fiction) by the fact that he is bound to see through and record everything, does justice to Henry. He is always pushed aside by his own family, slandered outside, his every act misconstrued. This is perhaps one reason why the atmosphere of the book is so gloomy. There are abundance of beautiful sketches of Durrisdeer and the surrounding country. But in the story itself the sun never shines, the air is lowering and ominous, a constant consciousness of calamity; of wrong and injustice, brooding over the house. Not In the midst of this gloom, however, the two prominent figures revealed to us are masterly. The family has secured itself by an expedient not unusual, though very undignified, among the gentry of England and Scotland at the period, one sou going "out" with Prince Charles, the other keeping allegiance with the Government, so that whoever won, the race might be safe, and its lands and titles. This is how, though Henry becomes Lord Durrisdeer, his elder brother is still Master of Ballantrae. The elder brother, however, is the rebel not from any chivalrous principle nor faith in the Jacobite cause (for which neither of them would seem to have cared the least), but for vanity and restless ambition which prompted him to run the riskgreat as it was with a hope of selfaggrandisement not to be obtained in any other way. The very keynote is thus struck in a sordid tone. In other instances when this expedient was resorted to, we have always been accustomed to believe that some sort of political principle, some tradition of loyalty to the fallen race, was in the background; whereas, according to Mr Stevenson, there was here none.. The Master of Ballantrae is thus, even when he risks his life for it, with --out faith or principle, a mere interested adventurer. He is after wards a vulgar traitor betraying his friends to the Government, sucking the very life-blood of his family by a pretence of danger which no longer exists for him,-a pirate on the seas, by land a chevalier de l'industrie, living by his wits wherever he goes, betraying everybody that trusts him: he is full of taunt and intolerable mockery, a man with the gift of driving others almost mad with his tongue, as well as of putting a remorseless knife into them with the greatest coolness if they happen to come in his way. This monster is, however, the most charming and delightful of men. He is gay and polished and debonair; he has every social gift, and, in addition to everything else, a perception of character and of goodness, a sense of what is noble and generous, which is difficult to realise as existing together with so many bad qualities. Thus, when Ephraim Mackellar, in a sudden madness of impatience with the smiling devil before him, makes a wild thrust at him to push him overboard, the Master so comprehends and respects his sudden exasperation as to bear no malice, but laughs, and declares that he likes him all the better; even while Mackellar, full of miserable compunctions, cannot forgive himself for the frenzied impulse. We have had many gay prodigals before who injured and swindled all their belongings, yet never lost the power of charming and deceiving. It is indeed quite a common character in fiction. But there is something in the Master's charm which is original, as is his depravity. It deceives nobody, for he becomes odious and the most intolerable of burdens even to the father who spoilt him, and the woman who loved him; but, on the other hand, the good Mackellar, who detests him cordially, finds a variety and companionableness in the fellowtraveller whom he is forced to accompany which almost makes up to him for the horror of a wintry voyage. This paradox has in it a strange humanity which raises it infinitely above the usual haunting spectre of the wicked son. We are compelled to doubt, however, whether anything so odious as the Master could have retained in his downfall and deterioration any such reality of original brightness-and this not by an effort or for a purpose of evil: for he captivates Mackellar when it is entirely useless to do so, not with the object of making a tool of him, but in mere-to use such a word-wan tonness of good-nature and pleasure in pleasing. "You could not have been so bad a man if you had not had all the machinery of a good one," says Ephraim, not with Mr Stevenson's usual felicity of phrase; but the mixture of this curious fascination and of a strain of never quite extirpated nobleness in what is, taking it altogether, the most odious character in modern fiction, is one of the most remarkable conceptions of a ruined angel which has ever been given to the world. Henry, the good brother, is scarcely less remarkable in his way, though he is less attractive. He is, to start with, "a good solid lad," without the qualities of the elder son, the family backbone and stand-by, sacrificing everything to keep up its credit and save its honour, but so self-restrained ir his Scotch dourness, and so little apt to show his better side, that not even those who are most deeply indebted to him recognise his worth; and no one, indeed, except the clear-sighted steward, fully understands either the noble integrity and generosity of his character, or the sufferings which he bears so uncomplainingly. We think Mr Stevenson errs in making Henry so completely misunderstood. He despises the commonalty too much to give them a chance of showing how the race, sooner or later, always does recognise a good man. We cannot think it is possible that an upright and honourable person, however dour, could have completely escaped the perceptions of his neighbours, and remained through all the years of his manhood, the victim of a general misconception. Henry is, indeed, unspeakably dour. He is magnanimous in every act, but in feeling never relents, always regarding his brother with remorse less antipathy. The shock of disappointment which is his only feeling when he ascertains that he has not killed him in the wild, sudden duel which takes place between them in the dark shrubbery in the dead of night, by the light of two candles which flare on steadily over the ghastly scene, the pool of blood, the fallen body-is utterly unlike anything which we remember in fiction. It may be true to nature in such exceptional circunstances, though stubborn prejudice insists in our bosom that he should have been in some degree relieved as well as disappointed by his failure. Hatred, however, grows between the two by every meeting, along with, on the side of the innocent, a certain horror of belief in the wicked Master as in a man who walks the world protected by his infamy, -a man whom nothing can kill, in diabolical armour, sustained by all the powers of darkness. Henry's deterioration under this fixed idea, the madness produced in him by his brother's persecution, the horrible way in which his imagination and every thought are chained to the movements of his enemy, is deeply tragic, though so painful that we would fain struggle against it, and declare it to be impossible and untrue. In this respect Mr Stevenson must bear the brunt of his own singular tragical power, ---for our heart revolts at the remorseless purpose which enfolds the good man in a web of such despair. The two brothers are thus brought at the end of their protracted struggle almost to an equality in guilt as well as misery, for it is Honry who at last in his madness hires the villanous crew who drive his brother to desperation; and they die together in a supreme horror, in the intense and unyielding |