which was incarnate in the Cavaliers and clans, and the enthusiasm of religion which filled the Covenanters. These were social forces and supported a lifelong character in men. They gave ideal elevation to the tragic and cruel events which belong to Scotch history, and made an atmosphere about the actors which glowed with life. Scott shared to the full the national capacity for enthusiasm, and was in his own imaginary world as much a Jacobite as he was a border-raider; and he put into his representation a fervor hardly less than contemporary. He was master, too, on the scale of private as opposed to public feeling, of all the moods of sorrow, and especially of that dark and brooding spirit, frequent in the Scotch character, which he has repeatedly drawn. Such emotion, in the people or in individuals, is the crucible of romance. He used its fires to the full. Whether the scene be battle-broad or dungeon-narrow, whether the passion involves the fortune of a crown or burns in the single breast of Ravenswood, he finds in those deep-flowing and overmastering human feelings the ideal substance which makes his romances so charged with power over the heart, with the essential meaning of human life, in its course in character, and at its moments of personal crisis. The homogeneity of this power of passion with the events of Scotch history and with the character of the people is complete, the unity of the whole is reinforced by the romantic quality of the landscape, which is its appropriate setting. The state of society, its stage in civilization, is also in keeping. It is, in fact, a kind of Homeric world, without any fancifulness; or if, when the parallel is stated, the difference is more felt than the likeness, it is a world of free action, bold character, primitive customs, as well as of high feeling and enterprise, such as has fallen to the lot of no other author since Homer to depict with the same breadth and elevation. It was good fortune for Scott, too, that he could follow Shakespeare's example in relieving the serious scene with humor. It is humor of the first quality, which lies in character itself, and not in farcical action or the buffoonery of words. It centres in and proceeds from eccentricity, in which the Scottish character is also rich; nor in general is the eccentricity

overstrained or monotonously insisted on. Scott is very tender of his fools, whose defectiveness in nature is never made a reproach or cruel burden to themselves; and the humorous side of his serious characters only completes their humanity. All parts of life thus enter into his general material, but harmoniously. His share of artistic power was instinctive; he was never very conscious of it; but it was most remarkable in the perfect blend he made of the elements he used. The Pirate is an admirable example. It is a sea story, and takes its whole atmosphere from the coasts where its action lies. The struggle with the elements in Mordaunt's opening journey is like an overture; the rescue of the sailor-castaway, the cliff-setting of Mertoun's house, the old Norse of the patriarch's home, and the life of the beach there with its fishing fleet, the superstitious character of Norna, the weird familiar of the winds, the bardic lays of Claude Halcro, the sentimental pirate-father, and the son with his crew, the secret of the past which unlocks the plot,

all these make a combination of land, character, and story, each raised in power by imaginative treatment to a romantic height, and echoing the same note of the sea one to the other in a blend as naturally one as sky, cliff, and weather. As a sea piece, given by character and event as well as by description, it is an unrivalled work, and this is due to its artistic keeping. This power of blend was an essential element in Scott's genius; by it his romance becomes integral in plot, character, and setting; and this felicity of composition achieves in its own way the same end in artistic effect that is sought in another way by construction in the strict sense. Scott never fails in unity of feeling; it was a part of his emotional gift.

The third commanding trait of the Waverley Novels is creative power. It is this that places Scott among the greatest imaginative prose writers of the world, and makes him the first of romancers as Shakespeare is the first of dramatists. He had that highest faculty of genius which works with the simplicity of nature herself and has something magical in its immediacy, in the way in which it escapes observation and in its total success; he speaks the word, and there is a world of men, moving,

acting, suffering in the wholeness of life. These masters of imagination, too, have as many moulds as nature; whoever appears on the scene of Homer or Shakespeare, no one is surprised; and Scott was as fertile as any of his kind. He is a master of behavior, for both gentleman and peasant, and of the phrases that seem the very speech of a man's mouth. The world of gentlemen is represented in its motives and interests, its sacrifices and ideas for both age and youth, with a sympathetic comprehension that makes it seem the most just tribute ever given to the essential nobility of that kind of life, aristocratic in ideal, warring, terrible in what it did and what it suffered, but habitually moving in a high plane of conduct and having for its life-breath that passion of loyalty, which, however unreasoning or mistaken, is one of the glorious virtues of men. The world of humble life, likewise, is rendered with vivid truth in its pursuits, trials, and submissions, the virtues welling from the blood itself in peril, sorrow, natural affection, for man and woman, for every time of life and in every station of the poor. It is in the language of these characters that the life lies with most efficacy; only nature makes men and women who can speak thus; and the solidity of their speech is part of the simplicity of their lives. Cuddie's mother in Old Mortality, the old fisherman, Mucklebackit, in The Antiquary, Jennie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, are examples; but Scott's truth of touch in such dealing with the poor is unfailing. If the behavior of his gentlemen appeals to the sense of chivalry in every generous breast, the words of his humble persons go straight to the heart of all humanity. In both classes there is a vitality that is distinguishable from life itself only by its higher power. He creates from within; he shows character in action so fused that the being and the doing are one; he achieves expression in its highest form the expression of a soul using its human powers in earthly life. This is the creative act; not the scientific exhibit of the development of character, not the analytic examination of psychology and motivation, for which inferior talent suffices, but the revealing flash of genius which shows the fair soul in the fair act, be it in the highest or the lowest of

men, in good fortune or bad, triumphant or tragic, or on the level of all men's days. It belonged to Scott's conception of life that character and act should be in perfect equipoise; to find them so is the supreme moment of art. It was the moment of Shakespeare and Homer, in drama and epic; and it is the moment of Scott in the novel. The living power of his men and women by virtue of which once in the mind they never die out of it, but remain with the other enduring figures of imagination, "forms more real than living man," proceeds from this union of passion, truth, and creative power with the form and pressure of life itself. The material is always noble, and the form into which Scott throws it is manly. The impression of all he creates is of nobility; not the nobility that requires high cultivation or special consecration to supreme self-sacrifice, but such nobility as is within the reach of most men, to be honest and brave, tender and strong, simple, true, and gallant, fair to a foe and faithful to our own.

MARK TWAIN 1

STUART PRATT SHERMAN

Nor by his subtlety, nor his depth, nor his elevation, but by his understanding and his unflinching assertion of the ordinary self of the ordinary American, did Mark Twain become our "foremost man of letters."

He was geographically an American; he knew his land and its idioms at first hand - Missouri, the Mississippi River and its banks, Nevada, California, New England, New York, the great cities. It is insufficiently recognized that to love one's country intelligently one must know its body, as well as its mind. He had the good fortune to be born in the West; so that, of course, he had to go East — otherwise he might, instead of becoming an American, have remained a mere Bostonian or New Yorker all his life, and never have learned to love Chicago

1 From the (New York) Nation, May 12, 1910. (Vol. XC, pp. 478-480.) Reprinted by permission of the author.

and San Francisco at all. At various times and places he was pilot, printer, editor, reporter, minister, lecturer, author, and publisher. But during the first half of his life, he went most freely with "powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families." The books in which he embodies his early experiences - Tom Sawyer, Roughing It, Huckleberry Finn-are almost entirely delightful. They breathe the spirit of eternal boyhood, they are richly provincial, they spring out of the fresh earth. There is a touch of melodrama in the first and more than a touch of farce in the last, but in the main they are as native as a bluff to the Mississippi or a pine .tree to a red spur of the Rockies.

It is when an American carries his virtues abroad that the lines of his character become salient. Mark Twain was a selfmade man, of small Latin and less Greek, indifferent to abstractions, deficient in historical sympathy and imagination, insensitive to delicate social differences, content and at home in modern workaday realities. I confess with great apprehension that I do not much care for his books of foreign travel. Like the story told on Whittier's birthday, they are "smart and saturated with humor"; but for some almost indefinable reason my emotions fail to enter into the spirit of the occasion. An uneasy doubt about the point of view binds my mirth as with a "black frost." I find myself concerned for my fellow-citizen, the author behind the books; beneath the surface gayety the whole affair seems to be of appalling seriousness for us both. Ostensibly light-hearted burlesques of the poetical and sentimental volumes of travel, these books are in reality an amazingly faithful record of the way Europe and the Orient strike the "divine average" the typical American — the man for whom the world was created in 1776. Wandering through exhumed Pompeii, he peoples its solemn ruins with the American proletariat, and fancies that he sees upon the walls of its theatre the placard, “Positively No Free List, Except Members of the Press." He digresses from an account of the ascent of Vesuvius to compare the prices of gloves, linen shirts, and dress suits in Paris and in Italy. At length arrived at the summit of the

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