sity of Louvain has ordered not deprive the prose-writer to be expunged from the new library at Louvain, an inscription ordered by Cardinal Mercier, which reminded Belgium and the world that the old library was destroyed by la fureur teutonique. Naturally the outraged citizens of Louvain, who saw their treasures destroyed not as an act of war but as an act of savage wantonness, are indignant. And what do the Germans do in return for this clemency, which no doubt they accept as a proof of weakness? They distribute, through their FichteBund, libels upon the nation whose priests, women, and old men they massacred, and whose library they burned to the ground. Nor must they be reproved for their misdeeds. When next they go to war they will proclaim aloud their right to savagery. They will declare that what they did before was quickly excused, and they will claim to repeat where they will the brutal slaughter of Louvain, in which Belgium and England, by a purposed forgetfulness, make themselves accomplices. 66 who expresses a new thought or who invents a new style of the praise which belongs to creation," and reserve that word to those who devise plots or relate anecdotes. What would Sir Frank say if we retorted that the only pictures which " engaged the power to create were those which told a story? Perhaps that is his opinion. If it be, he is in disagreement with all the masters of his art. At any rate, there is no vital difference between the craft of painting and the craft of prose. Neither the one nor the other must be judged by what it says, or by the story which it "creates." The supreme test of excellence is the skill with which material of the art is handled the paint in pictorial art, words in the art of prose. And Sir Frank Dicksee is not content with his one rash statement. He would carry his dogmatism a step farther. "Apart from poetry," says he, "it seems to me that the rest of literature is but the raw material for the profoundly great novelist.” That is to say, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, Swift, Addison, Steele, Dr Johnson, Gibbon, Landor, and a hundred others are but "the raw material " for the profoundly great novelist." We are not told by the President of the Royal Academy where are the great novelists who made a proper use of this raw material. But we would point out one difficulty in Sir Frank's argu ment. Before Richardson and Fielding, it may be said that in England, at any rate, there was no "profoundly great novelist "at all, which means that for some centuries the distinguished writers of prose produced their "raw material " to no purpose whatever. There were they, finished masters of their day, with no anecdotes ready to their hand, and therefore, in Sir Frank's opinion, without the power to create, wasting their lives in the making of raw material, which there was none to use. A like sad fate overtook the inventors of Greek prose. Of what service were Herodotus and Thucydides and Plato-great artists all of them -to the literature of their land! We have piped to you, they might have complained, and you have not danced. We have given you plenty of "raw material," and you have not produced among you a single detective story. Perhaps this is not precisely what Sir Frank Dicksee means, but it is this which he seems to say, and in saying this he gravely misunderstands the purpose of prose. The truth is that it is in fiction last of all that the amateur of prose would look for the masterpieces of the art. Sir Frank might as wisely invite us to seek for the masterpieces of his own art solely among the pictures of the year. If your quest is for painted anecdotes, it is to the Royal 66 Academy you must go. You may gaily exercise your curiosity, and wonder what the finely dressed ladies and gentlemen are up to. It doesn't matter much, and would no doubt confuse the purpose of the painter. But we believe that even the President himself, who is a partisan of the anecdotic style, would resent were his own definition of "creativeness" applied to the pictures of his own exhibition. There is a story of Rodin which is pertinent to this question. As we, freshly returned from a visit to the Exhibition," writes M. Ojetti, "whispered the titles -Despair, the Race to the Abyss, Genius, the Wave, the Voice-Rodin burst out laughing, raising his hands to the sky and then striking them on his knees, said, 'but this is literature. Those are the invention of Mirbeau, of Geoffroy, of my literary friends, for the exhibition. I model human bodies as well as I can. The rest does not concern me.'” Would Sir Frank Dicksee deny Rodin in this other art of sculpture the power to create ? But if Sir Frank wishes to understand how English prose grew into the material of an art, let him consult Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's anthology, The Oxford Book of English Prose,' and he will see how little fiction has had to do with the development of the art of prose, and 1 'As They Seemed to Me,' by Ugo Ojetti, p. 47. London: Methuen & Co. how vastly superior is what He was happiest when he was "the Sir Frank calls raw material to what appears to him the sole "created" thing. Nor is it for one other reason wise to put fiction too high in this competition of excellence. Fiction, in these modern days, is not always an art. It is far more often a moneymaking concern. There are best sellers and vast circulations. Novels are no longer designed to be possessions for all time. They are the pets of the circulating library, and their authors are content if they have a brisk and vigorous life for a month or two. There is no place in which Walter Biggar Blaikie better deserves to be recalled than in these pages. For, though he was a citizen of the Empire, he belonged most intimately to Scotland and to Edinburgh. Few men have combined more happily a local with an imperial patriotism. He took a pride in what Scotsmen achieved all the world over, and the study of Scottish history was the passion of his life. Yet his death removes from England also a craftsman and a writer who will not easily be forgotten. He was a printer-an artist printer Henley called himwho liked to remember that the revival of the craft in Great Britain owed not a little to his taste and skill. And it may be said that he never approached that which he proudly looked upon as an art in a merely commercial spirit. VOL. CCXXIII.-NO. MCCCLII. devising pages and titles for the books of his friends. He remembered with the greatest pleasure Henley's Book of Verses,' for instance, and the noble series of Tudor translations, for they celebrated not only his own sense of design in the printed page, but an unbroken friendship which lasted many years with W. E. Henley. For The Scots Observer,' after The National Observer,' he had a peculiar affection. He it was who persuaded the original proprietors to invite Henley to Edinburgh as editor. There are still a few who remember his sudden descent upon London, and the proposal, swiftly made and accepted, that Henley should return to Edinburgh, where he was already a familiar figure, and revive or strengthen an old tradition-for it has never died out-of outspoken criticism and gallant experiment. And the years in which the 'Observer' was edited and printed in Edinburgh, printed with an elegance which we shall find in no other review of its kind, were always remembered by Walter Blaikie as years of happiness, of a happiness which is still treasured by the few survivors who worked with Henley and with Blaikie in Thistle Street. When the adventure was continued in London, Walter Blaikie felt himself deprived not so much of a business as of a friendship, and with a sentiment wholly char 2 H . acteristic of him, preserved in a window of his office a wire blind carrying the legend The Scots Observer.' Into all that he achieved into his craft and into the literary enterprises which he encouraged Walter Blaikie carried much of himself and all his own thoughts and enthusiasms. We like most to picture him sitting in his little room in Thistle Street, where he wore the aspect of a smiling wizard. The ceiling was covered by a pictured firmament in which he could study the stars; for to astronomy, in the hope as he said in his whimsical fashion of arriving at astrology, he was devoted. And all the space which was not taken up by books was filled with astronomical instruments. Had you seen a stuffed crocodile hanging from the roof you would not have been surprised. With all bis interests, artistic, scientific, and scholarly, he was a man of affairs also, and for many years grudged neither time nor money if only he might do a service to Edinburgh. Yet perhaps it is as a historian that he will be best remembered. He was a supreme authority upon Prince Charles Edward and his misfortunes, and his Origin of the Forty-five' and other works are not likely to be superseded. He once told a friend that he could follow the movements of Prince Charles through every hour that he spent in Scotland, and he added with an ironic smile that the more he knew about him the less he esteemed him. And now that his well-filled life has come to an end, his friends will treasure his memory, we believe, rather for what he was than for what he did: they will think of him as one staunch in friendship, quick in humour, as a man who had the rare gift of smiling at misfortune, and who did not take his most serious pursuits too seriously. CADI: HUR OUTLAWS, 383. HIGHBROWS AND LOWBROWS, 1. COMMANDANT'S GOAT, THE, 315. DEATH'S HOLIDAY: A BALLAD OF LIFE, DEBT OF HONOUR, A, 452. 'Defence of the West,' by Henri Massis, DEVI DEEN, MUTINEER: I., 443- Dicksee, Sir Frank, and creative litera- DREWET, JESSE CARR: TIN IN THE DRUG ON THE MARKET, A, 145. EL GRANDE OSUNA, 639. 449. EXPEDITION, A DESERT, 519. FAME AND MONS. RENÉ, 749. FIRE AND FEATHERS, 709. "FORTHWITH," 176. FROM THE OUTPOSTS- A CHRISTMAS EVE IN YORUBA LAND, FIRE AND FEATHERS, 709. G. O. M.: FLYING, AND THE ENGLISH "GAID SAKIT": COTTON CULTIVATION, GORDON, VIVIAN THROUGH THE UN- HANNAY, DAVID:- ARCHBISHOP AND ADMIRAL, 109. HEARSE HOUSE: Prologue. The Ship of Hearst, Dr W. R., and world peace, 132 -on the power and importance of the HIGHBROWS AND LOWBROWS, 1. |