the universe by reducing it to the terms of their lofty intelligence, expressed in terms of their all but perfect language. The Romans stood for governing the world by reducing it to one august state with one Imperial religion." Of course they stood for nothing of the kind. There were philosophers in Greece; there were statesmen in Rome. But there were also men in Athens, as in Rome, of like sympathies and passions with ourselves, men who were not fashioned of marble or bronze, but men who took delight in the sights and sounds of nature, in the song of birds, in all the manifold imaginings of romance, who listened with rapture to the surge and thunder of the Odyssey," and who heard in the theatre the full-throated nightingales of Aristophanes. In truth, until we abolish from our mind this chill superstition of Greek and Roman inhumanity, we shall never be able to understand their literature or

our own.

Having dismissed the Classics from his survey, Mr Wyndham asks, "When and where does Romance arrive in European literature?" Not before the second half of the eleventh century, he answers, and probably in Great Britain. He finds that "the first piece of obvious Romance in literature that remains is 'The Song of Roland.'' And, furthermore, he connects the birth of Romance with the marriage of King Henry II. and Queen Eleanor. "The lives of Eleanor and Henry," he says, "were

potent factors in the renewal of the influences that preceded the advent of Romance." Even if we did not believe that Romance was many centuries older than "The Song of Roland," we should still be unable to accept Mr Wyndham's argument. Henry and Eleanor could affect the progress of poetry only by writing poems themselves, or by giving birth to a poetic son. Speculations of this kind, so dear to the literary historian, leave out of account the man of letters. They suppose that literature can exist, as a sort of fluid, apart from those who produce it, and that its best chance of prosperity is that it should be discreetly subject to favourable influences. But there is nothing in the world so wayward, so sternly individual, as literature. It cannot be called into being, like the false happiness of the political dreamer, by a community of socialists. Influences and dates have never composed a single work. Eleanor might have been married a dozen times, and not a memorable line have been written. Literature, whatever shape it assumes, mirrors one mind, and one mind only, either a mind of gold, which desires to express itself, or a mind of dross, which is content to give the world what it wants. Dross for the most part were the minds of the Romancers of the twelfth century. They were, says Professor Ker, "the sophists of medieval literature." Most of their romance is "already hot and dusty and fatigued. It

goes wherever the golden thread of his fancy leads him. In the gathering of manycoloured flowers he forgets the long and dusty road which he must traverse. His frank delight in the bypaths of his art distracts him ever from the purpose of his journey. Or, to resume our architectural image, he cares less for the security of his literary edifice than for its decorative effect. Its stones may not all be well and truly laid; there is not one of them that is not carved and fretted into some strange fantastic shape.

In other words, the Classic makes the rules, the Romantic breaks them. Both may be right. For a rule, excellent in itself, if it be attenuated to formality, may deserve scant reverence. But though style and structure most clearly distinguish Classicism and Romance, even here dogmatism is out of place. Until we are far enough removed from the clash of schools and the combat of ideas it is easy to detect the seeds of revolution in the shyest change. That which to a contemporary may appear a vital principle well worth the shedding of blood, seems often to a later generation no more than a modest development. And thus the Romantic of to-day, if he be great enough, becomes instinctively the Classic of to-morrow. That which is new in his work is seen by the impartial eye to be but a reverent treatment of the inviolable tradition, and not an outrage

which are the essence of all the arts. The one great English poet who wrote in what Mr Wyndham calls the period of Romance (1100-1550) was Geoffrey Chaucer, and he has worn the myrtle crown of Classicism for many a century. As for the ingenious scribes who composed the Romances of Thebes and Troy, they are sunk deep in the slough of Romanticism, from which no curiosity will ever help them to emerge.

In modern times there has been one definite movement of Romance, the movement 1830, whose progress we may follow without doubt or difficulty.

Like most other selfconscious movements, it took place in France. It was the work not of shadowy influences or of courtly patronage, but of one or two men. Nowhere else, save in the inauspicious revolt of the Romantic Euripides against the unattainable splendour of the classic Sophocles, can we 80 clearly discern the "movement" at work. The leaders were not, of course, without examples. Even if they had not read Scott and Byron and Goethe, they had heard of them. There are certain lessons which are transmitted by the atmosphere, and it is thus that they must have reached Hugo, if they reached him at all, for that eminent man can hardly be suspected of reading much else than his own poetry. It was, indeed, rather the vapidity of the Abbé Delille and suchlike poets which deter

mined the policy of Hugo and his friends than the active achievements of England and Germany. They saw that it was within the reach of the merest mediocrity to produce pale copies of Racine, and they were resolute to separate themselves as far as possible from their immediate predecessors. Their art of literature should be new in material, new in purpose, new in style. Deliberately and aforethought they turned their eyes from their own age and their own country. In their passion for novelty they cultivated Gothic names and exotic faiths. They dressed like brigands; they drank their wine from skulls; and they assumed the manners and bearing of another and more savage age. Though they wrote French-the best of them -with a fine distinction, they sought their inspiration at the outset in Spain, in the East, in any country that was remote and strange to their experience. Their doctrines and symbols were plain for all to see. The preface to 'Cromwell' was their gospel; the first performance of "Hernani" marked their birth as a separate school; the red waistcoat of Théophile Gautier was their oriflamme. And yet as we look back on this movement, one clear fact emerges: it was a battle of style rather than of subject. Spain and the mysterious East sank to insignificance beside the revolution in the making of verse, which seems small enough to day. Two lines of "Hernani were enough to rouse the audi

The word dérobé, left over to the second line, this bold enjambement, was enough of itself to make a revolution, and it plainly showed the path which the movement would take. In other words, it was a revolt of style. The strange words, the loud colours, the exoticism of thought and speech, which the party of Young France affected were soon forgotten. Racine and Corneille, if they were ever exiled, returned to their kingdom mightier than ever. Hugo soon became a Classic, and Gautier, the fervent champion of foreign inspiration, sat himself down to preach a kind of realism. Then came Balzac, the greatest Romantic of them all, who, like a Napoleon of literature, recreated France, showed that the topmost pinnacle of adventure was a bonne fortune, and that, as Gautier wrote in his celebrated apologue, "Celle-ci et Celle-là,” Romance shines not only beneath the blue sky of the Orient, but folds her golden wings to sit in a musty garret by the pallet-bed of any one who has the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

The conclusion of the argument, then, is that we shall best understand Romance and Classicism if we do not docket them with dates and put them away captive into pigeon holes. Eager communities and aggressive influences have little to do with the making of literature. Behind every work of art there is one individual man who defies the trammels that ingenious critics would put upon him. "Il n'y a pas de classiques et romantiques, said Jean Moréas, the last great poet of France, a few days before his death; "c'est des bêtises!" That is one way of putting the case. There is another equally sound. "Romance and Classicism have lived side by side since the beginning of time. They were born, both of them, in the Garden of Eden, and the serpent was the first Romantic."

We are not likely to arrive at an agreement as to what is Romance in literature. The romantic in life provokes far less controversy. The unknown road, which we all must travel, the unexpected triumph, the sharp difference between the modest beginning of a career and its glorious conclusion, all these are the elements of Romance as it is lived, not written, and nowhere shall we find a finer example of such Romance than in the career of Cecil Rhodes. Sir Lewis Michell's official biography of the great venturer

1

and statesman is less a work of art than what used to be called mémoires pour servir, but it collects between two covers many valuable documents, and it gives us all the material we need for an estimate of a great man. That Cecil Rhodes was a great man is to-day an accepted commonplace. All the marks of grandeur were upon him. His achievements were the achievements of a great man. He was great also in his mistakes. No mere politician could have so vastly underrated the strength and purpose of the Boers as he underrated them, but then a man who never made a mis

take never made anything. There was in him the brave spirit of the Elizabethans, who sought their fortune in Eldorado and gladly risked their lives in pursuit of the Golden Trade. His life from its beginning to its close was like a fairy tale,-a fairy tale turned to the practical ends of wealth and empiry.

Fortunate in many things, Rhodes was fortunate above all in the possession of two gifts rarely lavished upon one man

the gift of thought and the gift of action. His hand had the strength to carry out the grandiose promptings of his imagination. To the eye of shallow detraction he appeared a mere speculator, with little else than a sordid ambition to make money. He meant always to make money, and he succeeded as few of living

London: Arnold.