tain all kinds of shocks and buffets, including those of his own conscience. The Protestant religion (New England version) did not make Mr. Rockefeller a successful man, it did not make him, in any true sense of the word, a good man; but it seems to have given him that peace which the world cannot bring, and fortified him, not merely against the obloquy of his fellow-men, but also against dissatisfaction with himself. He is calm, contented, The Nation. kindly, tranquil in mind and soul, at ease in his relation towards the Universe and the general scheme of things. But his success as a man of action does not spring from this source. It is due to his expertness in a difficult art-the art of financial adventure-in which he would probably have failed if he had not kept it sternly apart from his religious ideas and ideals. Sidney Low. MEETING AGAIN. To meet again with our friends after an interval of years may well be the greatest of all joys, but to meet again with our friendly acquaintance from whom we have been long divided by circumstances is by no means always a great pleasure. The thought of the reunion is fraught, no doubt, with a certain sensation of excitement. We cannot bring ourselves to refuse the opportunity, yet how seldom we entirely enjoy it. There are, of course, a few men and women in whose personality time makes no change. They alter in nothing but appearance. They have from youth to age the same manners, the same interests, the same sympathies, the same friends. Their environment may change to any extent. They may go from Piccadilly to the desert, or from Clapham to the backwoods; they come back "just the same." They may begin behind a shop and end in the front of the world. They may marry, they may grow rich, they may prosper or fail. The first thing to be said of them by every fellow-creature who sits in judgment upon them is that they are "just the same." They are as they were born, and they take it for granted that every one else is also. They are strong people never carried away by their experience, and they have a strange power of annihilating time for others, and bringing them back, as we say, "to their old selves." They may or may not have very quick sympathies; they have always very strong affections. Nevertheless it is sometimes a qualified pleasure to see them again. Some of us do not want to be reminded of our old selves, and come away with an uncomfortable feeling that we have renewed acquaintance with one person more than we bargained for. But such people are exceptional, and belong to a strongly marked type. The majority change with the years inwardly as well as outwardly, perhaps inwardly even more than outwardly. We may have no difficulty in recognizing them at first sight, and yet after a quarter of an hour's talk we may feel quite unable to realize their identity. They may even give us a strange sensation, as if we could doubt our own. They have developed in an opposite direction to that which we expected; or is it we who have changed? The years between youth and middle age are the most eventful years of life, and those in which long separations most commonly occur. During the time that elapses between a parting and a meeting again we very often follow, as it were subconsciously, the career of our acquaintance. Every time we are reminded of them we instinctively form a mental picture of what they have become, a picture by no means always corrected by what we hear casually of the actual facts. John Smith was a conceited fellow, we say to ourselves. Though we liked him, he has probably made a good many enemies by now; his self-confidence must have stood in his way. He was ambitious too; probably he has become rather embittered. Then chance throws us once more across his path. He is a grave man, self-confident, successful, and with troops of friends. No doubt the boy we knew is still there somewhere, but we cannot find him, and we feel confused. Then perhaps there was a man we lost sight of for a time on whom we looked down a little. He also was one whom we liked; we had a pleasing little feeling that he looked up to us. It was natural, we felt; our chances were better than his. No doubt he envied them. We perhaps often thought of him during the interval, always with Possibly feelings of kindness. heard vaguely that he had "got on" but the news made no permanent difference to the development of our mental picture. We still looked downwards to see him with our mind's eye. At last chance throws us across his path again. We did not understand that he had passed us on the world's stairs, and we are inwardly astonished to find him a man of far more account than ourselves, and we realize with a smile that is not altogether without bitterness that he must remember our old relations with something of amusement. Was it really we to whom he used to defer? We cannot take up the old rôle. Yet we cannot take up any other. On the whole, we wish we had never seen him again. Or the positions are reversed. We realize our success with a sudden sharp thrill of pleasure which we comes unbidden and comes of contrast, followed most likely by a horrid sense of remorse. What brutes we are, we say to ourselves, and how vulgarminded! We wish we had not met and indulged in such an unworthy sensation. It will bring us ill-luck; we feel sure it will. Between women the sudden resumption of intimacy with a person who has been long away is even more embarrassing than among men. A familiarity which has ceased to be habitual is irksome, and the gradations of intimacy are more marked. Also a woman's career is or she always thinks it is-more a matter of chance than that of a man, and she is still more the creature of environment. She must be a very good woman if she never rebels against fate when she suddenly sees again some one who has realized so many more than she has done of the hopes once common to both, and she must be very just minded if she never vents a disappointment, which should rightly be an abstract feeling, upon some particular person. On the other hand, if the prosperous person is not sorry for her less prosperous friend, she is far more hard-hearted than the average woman; but feelings of pity and of envy, however soon dismissed, are bad omens for the renewal of frindship. But suppose all these petty factors to be out of the question, and that two people meet again who are by nature really good and generous, or who still stand about equal so far as luck and the world are concerned, who have run the race apart, no doubt, but abreast. It is still very difficult to knit up a For one friendship severed by time. thing, the first meeting, which should relay the foundation, often leaves a gloomy impression upon the minds of the people concerned. There is no disguising the fact that it is sad to look back. We are apt to come away from such a meeting possessed by the recol- science, to take a fairly accurate view lection of The eyes that shone now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken. Even merry memories sometimes assume a false air of pathos. Again, we have to consider the fact that in no perception do people differ more completely than in the perception of time. Long and short sight forms but a poor analogy for long and short memory. The sense of proportion where the past is concerned seems sometimes not to be the same in any given pair of people. One man may be hardly able to recall an incident which seems to his past friend to be the key to his character. Some men and women live to be old, as it were, in possession of a perfect picture of their whole lives. For many others nothing but the foreground is clear, and out of the haze stand certain events in wholly undue prominence. These persons who cannot see behind them seldom know their own defects. They talk of what is there with misplaced confidence, and confuse the interlocutor who sees a different scene. In real truth they have have no past in common, and that though they spent it together. Again, there are a few naturally uncandid persons who are not otherwise bad. They have been forced by circumstances, or even by conThe Spectator. of what goes on around them. They control their sentimentality, or their melancholy, or their excessive egoism and sense of their own importance while it is called to-day. But once take them into the region of memory and they give full rein to their inclinations. The past becomes a fancy world known to none but themselves. Of course we do not mean any of the above reflections to apply to love. Love in all its many forms is not subject to destruction by time. Indian parents and children after years of separation not seldom renew the tenderest relations. The tie of blood is independent of common recollections, and the spirit of criticism engendered by absence may make for as well as against a good understanding. A long engagement generally turns out better if the pair are parted; but here again love has nothing to do with a common past. As to those few and true friendships upon which absence has no effect, they depend for the most part upon common interests, interests which are impersonal, and very often abstract. But it may be said: You are limiting true friendship to persons of intellectual interests. To say that would be, no doubt, to make too sweeping a statement. Absence-proof friendships do exist which are founded on nothing but an indefinable affinity of soul, but they are rare. BOOKS AND AUTHORS. Henry Eighth in his youth is scarcely more agreeable than in that doubtfully married era of his life most familiar to the reader of history made to sell, and Mr. Joseph Hocking bestows no added gifts and graces upon him in his latest novel, "The Sword of the Lord." Henry, from a mixture of motives all having root in his overruling selfishness, desires that a certain English heiress shall be brought from Germany to England, and sends the hero to escort her thither, leaving the means to his discretion, giving him no credentials, and forbidding him to mention the royal name. Having little to lose, the hero accepts the conditions, and having a long score to settle with English monks and priests, he naturally gravitates towards Luther when he finds himself in his neighborhood, and thenceforward the story is Luther's plus some fighting with English rivals and German Catholic noblemen, and glimpses of Ulrich von Hutten. Dr. Martin befriends Lady Elfrida in every way possible to one who carries no sword; and the hero and heroine leave him safe at Wartburg and go to England to find Henry much better than his word, and so the tale ends well. It is a good love tale and its historical part is well-managed and uncommonly free from the bitterness to be expected in a story of the Reformer. E. P. Dutton & Co. Miss Eva Lathbury's "The Long Gallery," superficially, is the English family romance in which mother and daughter pursue the possible wealthy husband, not altogether willingly, not quite shamelessly, but in obedience to the instinct of self-preservation, the daughter almost invariably atoning for her sin against love by falling into utter misery, the mother often discovering that she has overreached herself and made herself the permanent prey of remorse. In reality the book is a subtle study of varied selfishness, as seen in the lives of four married pairs, and one unmated baleful figure, abandond to unchecked self-worship. One girl desperately separates the man whose fortune she desires and the girl to whom he is beginning to turn, and flings her to a richer husband, from whom she is easily won by a man who also deceives the schemer, and almost succeeds in making a chaos of her life and her husband's. This villain is no simple Don Juan, but the perfect flower of that spurious æstheticism, that parasite of the wholesome Ruskin-Morris movement, which for a time bade fair to strangle it, but was itself blighted and withered by the frost of Gilbert's jest and Du Maurier's art. Less obvious, and far more artistic than the portrait sketch of Wilde introduced by Mr. Hichens in "The Green Carnation," he presents the natural development of Wilde's philosophy, cruel, repellant and disgusting, but always intent upon elegance. With such a group of personages and such incidents, the book would be unbearably painful, were it not that both girls have been educated by good teachers who have so trained their minds and hearts that they are able to break the meshes entangling them, and to save their souls alive. It must be owned that they discourse at enormous length and that their husbands are unnaturally tolerant of their eloquence, but the fault is easily tolerated inasmuch as they have something to say. "The Long Gallery" is equally remarkable in its English and in its personages. Henry Holt & Co. The world belongs to him who will convince it of his perfect stupidity, but although everybody knows it, nobody remembers it until the gross of green spectacles are in his pocket, until he has invested his last penny in the dearly bought whistle: until the swamp-lots of Eden are his to settle at will, and the professed stupid person is o'er the border and awa'. The hero of Mr. Edward A. Balmer's "Waylaid by Wireless" was no wiser than the rest of the world, but possibly he was more excusable because in his case the stupidity exhibited for his undoing was of that English variety in which the reader of American comic newspapers and international novels devoutly believes as generic. Therefore did this young American allow himself to be played with every grace of the gentle art of angling, reckoning each new cast and fly as a national trait, and obligingly doing the angler's will, esteeming himself an acute reader of character all the while, yet he was by no means a dull fellow. On the contrary, both he and the heroine are acute in their reasoning, discreet and able, and guilty of nothing more foolish than excessive trust in accepted generalities, and upon the whole they are as interesting a pair of modern lovers as American fiction has furnished for many a day. The author's management of wireless, the machinery of his story, is excellent, and, although actual occurrences have verified some of his theories as to its possibilities, very slight acquaintance with the exigencies of writing, making and publishing a book will show that he owes nothing to the recent notorious cases of its employment, but was himself the architect of his hero's varied fortunes. The story should be in the library of all passenger steamships plying between English and American ports, that passengers may be warned of the dangers besetting him who ventures into the lair of the British police, and it is good enough to console the home keeping youth for the homeliness of wit arising from persistent or enforced sojourn in his native land. Small, Maynard & Co. This being a world in which prejudices and baseless traditions outlive enduring brass, it is not strange that one is surprised to find "The Bancrofts" the most charitable volume of reminiscences published by any one belonging to the same generation as Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft. One expects a volume of theatrical memoirs to abound, if not in actual scandal, at least in passages in which the author's contemporaries will appear at some disadvantage, while the authors themselves, perfect in make up, the limelight becomingly disposed, the supernumeraries and minor personages in the dim background, smile with unearthly sweetness from the centre of the stage. The Baucrofts do not fulfil this anticipation. They tell their story, now one and now the other speaking, frankly, gently and sweetly relating their experience. They may have heard of hearts unkind, but they make no sign of having met them. Possibly this description may suggest insipidity not only to the disciples of Wilde and Mr. Shaw and their like, but also to those who still practice the habit of sneering at the players, but in truth, there is nothing so free from insipidity as charity. The charm of its strangeness never fails, and to those readers to whom Marie Wilton has hitherto been only a lovely name encountered in the literary and dramatic memoirs of her time she will henceforth be as a friend to be sought again and again in her pleasant pages. There is scarcely any contemporary English person of any prominence whom either one or the other of the two authors did not encounter while in active life, and in the later chapters they include many kind letters sent to them on various occasions; but the story of their picturesque youth and energetic prime is naturally more interesting, as it is practically the history of the best English comedy of their day. They never stooped to conquer, but, no matter what prosperity might attend evil or evil suggestion at other theatres kept their own free from any and all stains, and, as it ought not to be necessary to say, do not boast of their abstinence, but mention it in the simplest fashion as a matter of history. The forty illustrations, chiefly portraits of actors and drama tists, include a few interiors, and are carefully chosen photogravures and good duogravures and the index seems very good, but this last point can be really tested only by those repeated readings which the volume will certainly have from all its possessors. E. P. Dutton & Co. |