of the misery of those days when their forebears were helpless as driven cattle before râja and chief.

But of late years there has been yet another influence at work, that which is now making itself manifest in Egypt and throughout northern Africa, and presently, it is probable, will be felt in every land where the Muhammadan is ruled by the infidel,-the influence of the As-Senusi Brotherhood. About the time of the Crimean War a certain Saiyid, a descendant, that is, of the Prophet Muhammad,-who ruled over a little oasis in the Sahara, initiated a movement for the reform of the Faith upon purer lines, and preached as a first tenet that an insult is offered to the true religion by the subjugation by the infidel of the followers of Muhammad. In the fulness of time he died, but his son trod and treads to-day in his footsteps, and the organization which he originated has flourished exceedingly. Mecca, the annual resort of thousands upon thousands from every quarter of the Muhammadan world, was made the centre of propagation, and during the past fifty years millions of pilgrims have been initiated into the great As-Senusi Brotherhood, and, returning to their homes, have spread the tenets of its founder broadcast through their native lands. This reformer, and the brotherhood which he and his father have been instrumental in bringing into being, have escaped the observation of Europeans to an unaccountable degree. Greater than any Mahdi who in the past has convulsed the Muhammadan world, he has shown that he understands, not only how to organize, but also how to bide his time. To-day Islâm is honeycombed root and branch by the As-Senusi Brotherhood, and nowhere, save in northern Africa, has it taken a firmer hold upon the popular imagination than among the Muhammadans of the Malayan Archipelago. From

time to time there have been, in the majority of cases almost unnoticed, little spurts and outbreaks of what white men call "fanaticism" among Muhammadan peoples who chance to be ruled by men of an alien faith. Look closely, and you will find the great As-Senusi Brotherhood at the back of one and all of them; but they have not been ordered by its Head. Signs are not lacking to-day, however, which seem to indicate that at last he deems his hour to be near at hand; and when that hour strikes, if all that has been planned befalls, the most universal organization which has ever permeated Islâm since the time of Muhammad will strike too -like one man!

Saleh had early learned that Râja Haji Abdullah was of the Brotherhood, having been initiated by the Sheikh of the As-Senusi at Mecca, that Râja Pahlawan Indut and practically every malcontent in Pelesu (which included most of the young men who had grown up under British rule) had been enrolled, and before he had been two years in the country Saleh was himself a newly enlisted recruit. His growing resentment against the white men, and his indignation at what he regarded as their shameless usurpations, were fanned by his zeal as a Muhammadan and intensified by his sympathy with the tenets of the As-Senusi Brotherhood. The two sets of sentiments reacted upon and stimulated each other. To dream of beginning the Sabil Allah, the Holy War, which should drive the Infidel screaming from the land and should give Saleh back his own, was but a step.

Raja Haji Abdullah and Râja Pahlawan Indut were for ever at his elbow to feed such dreams, to quicken his energies and his resentment, to rowel his fanaticism, and to hound him on to action. They were both men of a certain age, and for them time was slipping by at a desperate pace. Malay

like, they, having dreamed dreams, could see no step between a magnificent conception and its immediate attainment. In a word, they lacked the prime quality of the Head of the AsSenusi Brotherhood, the quality which has made his organization what it is and that makes the man himself so dangerous, the restraint which knows how to wait. Moreover, they and Saleh were convinced that all the youth of Pelesu was at their backs.

XXII.

The crisis came, as such things are apt to come, very suddenly.

It

Saleh was at that time in charge of a district consisting of a big river which falls into the Pelesu on its right bank at a distance of about a hundred and twenty miles from its mouth. formed an appanage to a much larger district ruled by an Englishman named Wilson, to whom Saleh was directly responsible. Wilson himself bore the reputation of "a glutton for work," and one of his preoccupations for many months past had been an attempt to get a measure of steady toil out of Saleh. He had not been uniformly successful, and there was little love lost between the two men.

Saleh was never quite clear how it was that the mistake in his accounts originated. Persistent carelessness upon his own part, aided possibly by dishonesty on that of one or more of his Malay clerks, was probably responsible; but upon a certain day he made the discovery that he was some five hundred dollars short in his cash.

He had just concluded the annual collection of land rents in his district, and there were nearly six thousand dollars in the safe. He had already anticipated the greater portion of his next month's allowance-in itself a serious irregularity, and he had no means of making good the deficiency.

The visit of an audit-clerk was to be expected at any moment.

Once

At first Saleh was in despair. more he had failed, and had failed hideously. The thought of the open shame to which the incident would expose him made him wince and tingle. The prospect of the sort of interviews which awaited him with Wilson and with the Resident made him squirm and fume in anticipation. And then anger, the fierce, unreasoning anger of the Malay, and the old hatred of a manifest injustice, the keenness of which was due to his English upbringing, came to his aid. After all, was not this missing money the property of the rightful rulers of Pelesu? Was it not his, his, to have and to hold, to do with as he chose? What claim, had the white men to it, the white men who would presently call him to account because of its loss? In imagination he saw himself publicly disgraced by those same white men, spoken to, in the presence of his people, it might be, in language which hot, royal blood could ill brook, relegated thereafter to contemptible obscurity as a tool which had been tried and found worthless. Once before, in a Richmond ballroom, when the conversation of a pair of lovers, overheard by chance, had seemed to knock the bottom out of his world, Saleh had had his soul whipped into that turmoil of excitement which, among men of his race, produces the amok-runner: once again this inherited madness gripped him, but this time there was no Jack Norris at hand to exorcise the demon by the force of his strong, calm presence. Instead, at his very elbow, was Raja Pahlawan Indut, a warrior whom experience had made expert in the morbid psychology of his kind, to play upon his emotions and his passions, upon the angry, tortured soul of the lad, as a skilled musician plays upon his chosen instrument. The two sat

communing together far into the night. Wild words were spoken, wild counsel was given and taken, wild schemes were framed, wild plans were laid. Then, a little before the dawn was due, Raja Pahlawan arose and presently melted away into the district.

Thereafter Saleh spent a miserable ten days. He watched the bend in the bank down river, expecting every moment to see a boat bearing either Wilson or the dreaded audit-clerk loom into view. He was torn by agonizing vacillation. At one moment he was for surrender, for making a clean breast of everything to Wilson, and for accepting the consequences of what had occurred, let them be never so unpalatable. At others he was goaded to fury by the thought of the unmerited injustice of which he was the victim; and then again he would recall the fact that Raja Pahlawan had gone forth upon a mission which had for its object the raising of the Green Flag of the Prophet in the land of Pelesu, and that he, Saleh, could not now withdraw without betraying his friend. His brain, his whole being, was in a turmoil: he could neither eat nor sleep. His moods varied hourly, now plunging him into depths of despair, now elating him with a wild, savage joy at the prospect of battle to be done for the rights of which the white men had robbed him, now reducing him to a sullen torpor, again goading him to the manifestation of a half-delirious hilar

ity.

Upon the tenth night, as he lay wideeyed upon his sleeping-mat, he was startled by the sound of a sudden. fierce outbreak of rifle-fire. Tingling from head to foot, and anticipating he knew not what, he leapt to his feet, seized a native broadsword in his hand, and, followed by half a dozen of his people, plunged out into the darkness. Loud cries and an occasional shot Blackwood's Magazine.

sounded from the direction of the police-station; in the Chinese shops of the long street bordering the river-bank he could see lights passing to and fro, could hear the noise made by the inmates as they hastily fortified the doors, and the keening of frightened women: as he ran, he saw a great, crimson tongue of flame leap upward into the night, licking hungrily at the darkness.

The police-station was distant half a mile from the bungalow, and by the time Saleh arrived upon the scene the building was a roaring bonfire, round which danced a host of armed Malays waving their weapons aloft, yelling their battle-cry, their faces seen in the red fire-glare strained and savage with excitement, their figures eloquent of the mad lust of fighting whereby they were possessed.

Raja Pahlawan Indut, who entertained certain doubts as to whether, at the last moment, Saleh would nerve himself to break finally with the old life, had taken it upon himself to go a step beyond the plan prearranged between them. He had delivered a successful night attack upon the policestation, whose occupants, grown careless through long immunity, had not the faintest notion that any danger threatened them; had butchered the garrison of five-and-twenty Sikhs, before they could wake from their sleep or reach for their weapons; had removed all arms and ammunition which the place contained; and then had set the building in a blaze. All had been done in the name of Raja Muhammad Saleh, the leader of Young Pelesu, the Champion of Islam, the Scourge of the Infidel, the Pretender to the throne of his Forebears! Râja Pahlawan, as he knew full well, had not only burned the police-station, for Saleh's boats had gone up to the angry heavens also on that tongue of flame!

In that excellent book of his, "The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages," Mr. Taylor points out that "the Greeks reached their ethical conceptions in part through philosophical speculation as to the universe and man and God, matter and mind, and in part through their sense and understanding of the beautiful; that is," as he proceeds to explain, "through the æsthetic and artistic side of their nature, which sought everywhere harmony, fitness and proportion." The first statement presents no difficulties. Philosophical speculation is just as much a way to knowledge now as it was in the days of the Greeks. But the second is much harder to understand. How are ethical conceptions, how are ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct, to be derived from the æsthetic sense and the understanding of the beautiful? The very thought of an ethical significance in the word beauty has almost died out. It lasted far on into Christian times. Early Christian philosophy, especially that which emanated from Alexandria and was nourished on Greek ideas, habitually deals with beauty as synonymous with truth. But that meaning of the word has evaporated. No one now would think of describing a search after truth as a search after the beautiful.

It is pretty safe to say, unless the reader has derived it from Greek art, that the notion of the æsthetic sense originating and being a source of ethical conceptions will scarcely have occurred to him. Other races have em.ployed art as a vehicle to express ideas and convictions previously arrived at, and it has been in proportion as these preconceived ideas have been strongly and decidedly held that the art embodying them has assumed a definite

and significant character. But to express ideas, however vigorously, is not to initiate them.

The distinction between an art which initiates and an art which expresses ideas is perfectly exemplified in the difference between Greek and Gothic architecture. A Gothic cathedral is the finest and most complete presentment remaining to us of the life and thought of the mediæval age. It is full of the spiritual exaltation which was the master sentiment of the epoch of the Crusades, and it is full of the extraordinary democratic energy of a time when all classes of the people, banded in their crafts and guilds, were animated by a virile pride in their labor and a consciousness of the value of it. It is the keynote of mediæval life that the whole of it, down to the commonest industries and poorest acts of toil, was inspired by a vigorous spirit of dignity and independence; and all this was poured into mediæval art. To us, of the same race and blood as its builders, this art still appeals as it did to them. It expresses us as it expressed them. If it is not strictly artistic in the academic sense, if it is not laid out and proportioned by abstract rule, it is none the worse for that. We are not going to art for a justification of what stirs our hearts so deeply. The Gothic cathedrals, Mr. Lethaby declares, "are more than art." He means that their appeal as an interpretation of life, their eloquent appeal to the racial sentiments and emotions we still share in, is of itself their justification, and is a better justification than adherence to æsthetic laws, which, he admits, were ignored by their originators.

Perhaps he is right. But, while we extol Gothic for what it gives us, let us also note the one small, and in our

eyes insignificant, thing which it fails to give. Gothic art has in it no power to initiate ideas, nor was it ever used or regarded as if it possessed any such power. It was used to record ideas. For this its contemporaries loved and valued it, because it uttered their lives for them; and for this we, being of the same national stock and sympathies, love and value it still. But this was not the Greek notion of the function of art at all. So little so that there is not a single merit in Gothic which, in Greek eyes, would not have been a demerit. There is not an end striven for which, in Greek eyes, it would not have been degradation to attain. Between the two there is no question of degree of excellence, or greater and less perfection. The question is one of the whole end and aim of art and its intended use to mankind. A Greek, reared in his own race's ideals in matters of art, would, if he were brought into the presence of Gothic, assuredly tell us, not that this style was in certain respects different and, in his own estimation, probably inferior to his own, but that it was not art at all; that it was not the creation of the artistic faculty, and did not serve the purposes which art was intended to serve. And if we were to press into his meaning he would explain that this art was worthless for the very reason that we love it so, because it is a record of life. Yes, he would insist, an art which reflects the life of its time, with all its fugitive daily interests, which is swayed by human impulses and caprices, and takes its color from passing fashions or the likes and dislikes of an individual, is an art which has become life's slave. It offers no independent testimony of its own, for it does not act according to its own volition. does not obey its own laws, for it does not even know that it has laws of its own to obey. It does what life

It

tells it to do, and says what life tells it to say. We can imagine our visitor's growing perplexity and concern in this world of Gothic, and how at last he would break out almost incredulously: "Do you really believe, then, that the aesthetic sense was given us merely to record our own petty whims and impulses? If so, you ignore the nature of the faculty and the part it should play in human life. What is that part? It is to illumine life, not to record it; to be a guide, not an echo; to be a witness to ethical truths, not indeed by explaining the truth, but by demonstrating their beauty."

This would be the Greek criticism, and for two reasons we should give it a hearing. In the first place, the most cursory acquaintance with the Doric style reveals in the Greek view a remarkable consistency. That which first strikes a Northern eye in regard to Doric is its lack of all interest and significance derived from life. It is true the subjects of its sculptured groups, when such existed, were mostly taken from Greek history or myth. But these representations were at the most racial, never local. Such vague legends as the wars of Centaurs or Amazons are not impressions of life in the Gothic sense. Their interest is ideal and remote, not actual and immediate. Moreover, these sculptures are independent of the structure, which is perfect without them; their appearance was optional, and in more cases than not they were dispensed with altogether. Nothing in the Gothic sense personal, nothing of local or temporary interest, finds a place in the Doric temple. It is detached. For centuries the type does not vary. Cities rise and fall, generations come and go, but this characteristic achievement of the Greek genius scarcely changes by the inflection of a line. Aloof from human life, the accidents and passions of man's lot do not touch