sitting down at her feet, 'what you want to know they never tell.'"*

It is this inner life that is described, and the gradual awakening of the conscious being its agonies and disappointments, and its final compromise, when "this thing we call existence" is realised to be no longer "a chance jumble," but "a living thing, a one.”

"And so it comes to pass in time that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the hall of the universe, our soul looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable-all is meaning-full; nothing is small-all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life which throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, not too small.

"And so it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us, and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again." +

The second part is occupied with the tragedies of their lives, mainly that of Lyndall. Into these I have not time to enter now; yet neither as children, nor afterwards, are they characters that are likely to be forgotten. There is Waldo, with his "silky black curls" and uncouth movements, with his infinite yearnings after the unseen, and his infinite anguish in the material world. And Em and Greg-well, they are Em and Greg. These homely diminutives sufficiently indicate the comparative commonplaceness of their respective characters and fortunes. And Lyndall, how could we forget Lyndall, with her frailty of person and strength of will, with her worldly philosophy and unworldly action? Lyndall is the favourite child of the author. She is endowed with a personal charm that nothing can dispel-not even the equivocal position in † P. 52.

* P. 18.

which she has at last placed herself. We are never told in so many words in what her beauty consists, but we know that her face had that highest form of beauty, beauty of expression, "the harmony between that which speaks from within, and the form through which it speaks." I have spoken of the incompleteness, of the strange gaps, which characterise the work. This deficient construction, the absence of any subordination of the parts to the whole, or of the lesser characters to any central action, is nowhere more conspicuous than in the treatment of Lyndall's "stranger."

On this point the author has explained herself in the preface to the second edition.

"Human life," she says, "may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that, each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that at the right crisis each one will reappear, and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this, and of completeness. But there is another method-the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls, no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. . . Life may be painted according to either method; but the methods are different. The canons of criticism that bear upon the one cut cruelly upon the other.”

When the

Well, the author ought to know how her book was written, but, apart from this, the book tells its own story. She has written it so because it actually happened so. Constructively it is not, it was never intended to be, a work of art it is a bit of real life, a record of experience, a

human document. Lyndall's stranger is indicated in this shadowy form because it was only in this shadowy form that he existed in the author's mind. The Boer woman, Em, Greg, Waldo, the coloured people-all these she has actually seen, and she has drawn them as she saw them the stranger she has imagined, and his picture. contains just so much as could assume substance in her mind.

There is another branch of South African literature upon which I must say a word.

It is somewhat remarkable that, while colonial fiction and colonial poetry is read in England, no account is taken of the skill exhibited in political essay-writing. And yet the success achieved by colonial writers is more general, and relatively higher, in this than in any other branch of letters. It would be strange if this were otherwise, for as Amiel, the Genevan, has pointed out, democracy tends to develop the individual upon political lines. "On things," he says, "its effect is unfavourable, but on the other hand, men profit by it, for it develops the individual by obliging everyone to take an interest in a multitude of questions.' Among works of this class in South Africa we have Cloete's "Five Lectures on the Emigration of the Dutch Farmers," and the late Judge Watermeyer's "Three Lectures on the Cape of Cood Hope under the government of the Dutch East India Company." The difficult circumstances under which the colonisation of South Africa by the Europeans has been effected present a wide field to the historian, and, apart from the monumental work of Mr Theal, we find a group of colonial writers who have devoted themselves to the useful task of recording the work of past generations of colonists for the benefit and instruction of the present.

In this connection it is necessary to make some mention of the Cape University. The University of the Cape of Good Hope was incorporated in 1873, and obtained its

charter in 1877. It is the crown of a remarkably complete and effective system of national education; and although its teaching staff is distributed among the various colleges, there is a sufficient amount of academic work to be transacted at its head-quarters at Capetown to render the University circle a distinct stimulus to the literary enterprize of the colony.

But the work of Olive Schreiner stands out conspicuous, if not unique, not only in South Africa, not only throughout the British Colonies, but throughout the Englishspeaking world. If we ask to what special element this pre-eminence is due, we can find the answer in that remarkable chapter which contains the Allegory of the Search for Truth.*

"The attribute of all art, the highest and the lowest, is this that it says more than it says and takes you away from itself. It is a little door that opens into an infinite hall where you may find what you please. Men, thinking to detract, say, 'People read more in this or that work of genius than was ever written in it,' not perceiving that they pay the highest compliment."

It is this attribute of art that is conspicuous in "The Story of an African Farm." Its literary merit is due, not to its realism, not to its discussion of a social problem, but to its suggestiveness; in short, to its possession of this highest quality of art, to speak directly to the mind, not by reason but through the imagination.

* Part II. ch. 2.

CHAPTER XII.

THE CHARTERED COMPANY AND MR CECIL RHODES.

FOLLOWING the precedent established by Napoleon,

now a hundred years ago Péron, the naturalist, was sent to report upon the Antipodean settlement of Botany Bay, the French Government have lately despatched Monsieur Lionel Décle on a scientific mission to Africa. With the general results of the observations made by the explorer during his journey from Capetown to Uganda we are not specially concerned: he has however, with the aptitude of the French mind for rapid generalisation, provided us with a happy phrase to characterise the field of the Chartered Company's operations-"The pick of Central Africa on both sides of the Zambesi." But we are dealing with a country which is not only physically but historically attractive. Apart from the interest which attaches to the scene of a great colonising effort, the territories now opened up by the Company possess two strong claims upon our attention, the great River Zambesi and the ruins of Zimbabwe.

*

The special objective of the Company's operations is the high plateau which stretches for 300 miles, at an

*The Company's "field of operations" extends from the Molopo River to the Congo State, over an area of 750,000 square miles. Matabeleland and Mashonaland have been provided with an administrative system similar to that of a Crown Colony; and the Company assume the administration of the country north of the Zambesi (except Nyasaland) under the Agreement of November 4th, 1894. The Bechuanaland Protectorate is still entrusted to the B. B. Police, an Imperial force, but under the Charter the Company have the sole right to obtain concessions of land and minerals in the Protectorate.