The chairman rose and announced that the Rev. Mr. would open the proceedings with prayer. The Rev. Mr. rose to pray in a loud voice for the waifs in the body of the hall. At the same moment rose Tommy, and began to pray in a squeaky voice for the people on the platform.

.

He had many Biblical phrases, mostly picked up in Thrums Street, and what he said was distinctly heard in the stillness, the clergyman being suddenly bereft of speech. "Oh," he cried, "look down on them ones there, for, oh, they are unworthy of thy mercy, and, oh, the worst sinner is her ladyship, her sitting there so brazen in the black frock with yellow stripes, and the worse I said I were the better pleased were she. Oh, make her think shame for tempting of a poor boy, forgetting Suffer little children. Oh, why cumbereth she the ground? Oh-"

He is seized and cast forth, still praying hysterically, and even outside the doors his agitation does not leave him for a while. His author comments, "Tommy and the saying about art for art's sake were in the streets that night, looking for each other."

It is a melancholy but wonderful portrait, most skilfully heightened by contrast with Grizel, the Painted Lady's child, who, though yet a child when the story closes, is to my mind already the finest of all Mr. Barrie's achievements in feminine portraiture. I say it, forgetting neither Leeby of “A Window in Thrums," nor Babbie, beloved of "The Little Minister." Sure, indeed, was the instinct which told him to place a boy of Tommy's nature between the opposing and distracting loves of his sister Elspeth and the downright Grizel. The issue we are left (for the present) to divine; for this book, as its title proclaims, is but the

story of a boyhood, and ends with the day on which Tommy drives out to meet his manhood. But the issue, we feel, must be a sad, if not a tragic one. On the one hand, Tommy is weaker than Grizel. "The most conspicuous of his traits," we are told, "was the faculty of stepping into other people's shoes, and remaining there until he became some one else; his individuality consisted in his having none, while she could only be herself, and was without tolerance for those who were different;" and again (p. 264). “at every time of his life his pity was easily aroused for persons in distress, and he sought to comfort them by shutting their eyes to the truth as long as possible. This sometimes brought relief to them, but it was useless to Grizel, who must face her troubles." Here is his schoolmaster's testimony (p. 333): "Though sometimes his emotion masters him completely, at other times he can step aside, as it were, and take an approving look at it. That is a characteristic of him, and not the least maddening one." And Cathro repeats it on p. 335 in slightly different words: "That, I tell you, is the nature of the sacket; he has a devouring desire to try on other folks' feelings, as if they were so many suits of clothes."

But, on the other hand, we are shown not obscurely that, though Tommy may resign the captaincy of his own soul, he will grow up to be the master of women. Against this his mother, mindful of her own sorrows, entreated him to pray. And as a child he prayed, "O God, keep me from becoming a magerful man!" and thereupon opened his eyes to let God see that his prayer was ended, and added to himself, "But I think I would fell like it." Upon the same note ends the interview with Grizel (on p. 450), which was their last, we are told, until they met again as man and woman. As I read, I remember another peasant genius who describes himself in a familiar epistle as "an old hawk at the sport" of love, as he understood love. Must I brave the indignation of a perfervid race by confessing that if Mr. Barrie had no

thought of Burns in his mind as he wrote this book, he has called up the ghost of Burns more than a dozen times to the mind of one of his readers?

Damning the portraiture is, yet not altogether contemptuous. At least the artistic temperament keeps its owner constant to one point of honor; and I felt that if Mr. Barrie had forgotten or slurred that point, or made light of it, I for one should have found it hard to forgive him. Let another Scotsman explain:

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist works entirely upon honor. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavors. Merits of design, the merit of first-hand energy, the merit of a certain deep accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires these they can recognize, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects-the gross mass of the public must be forever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble. (R. L. Stevenson, "Letter to a Young Gentleman who proposes to embrace the career of Art.")

are still hesitating over the propriety of erecting a memorial to Stevenson!

But this boyish and unconscious honesty towards the half-divined ideals of art is, as far as I can discover, the one and only moral beauty which Mr. Barrie concedes to Tommy's temperament. Now, all poets and novelists, perhaps, and certainly all who touch the human heart as Mr. Barrie touches it, must possess that temperament in some degree; and, while following this tale, I could not help asking myself, "Is there not a trace of almost Puritanical bitterness in this contemptuous and unrelenting exposure of the poor, unreal, self-deluding soul?" One might almost fancy that Mr. Barrie had looked deep into his own nature, and-as we all feel most bitterly towards the weaknesses from which we have most narrowly escaped, thanks to training and the character which training gives-that he had written this book in a mood of indignant revulsion from the picture of a soul, which, but for happy circumstances, happy influences, might have been his own. I entreat you not to misunderstand this point, which I find a peculiarly delicate one to convey. But a first-rate artist has understanding both of good and of evil, and I doubt if we admirers ever recognize the extent to which, even in depicting vice and crime, he draws upon the wisdom of his own heart. It was not by amassing documents that Shakespeare saw into the springs which moved Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, nor from criminal records, alone or chiefly, that Balzac painted his "Vautrin." In Dmitri Roudine, so high of purpose, yet so futile in action, the good Tourgueneff exhibits to us a facet of his own nature. But in "Sentimental Tommy" one seems to detect an impatience accompanying the exhibition-a sort of scornful shame which constrains the author, as if in self-mortification, to avert his eyes from possibly pleasanter features of Tommy's character. I do not, therefore, find Tommy incomplete. I find him almost distressingly complete and life-like. But I warn the reader that he does not embrace the complete artis

tic temperament, and express the final word upon it; and that in real life genius and character are not necessarily antithetical, as we have only to turn to our lives of Milton, of Johnson,

or of Scott to discover.

Further, it may be fancy, but it strikes me that this impatience has not been without effect on the movement of the narrative. To be sure, the story itself is thoroughly considered; it has no loose ends; no shadowy, unrealized figures, such as Lord Rintoul in "The Little Minister;" no obvious mechanism, such as creaked and betrayed it self at least once in that work, in the chapter entitled "Various Parties Converging on the Hill;" and it has the structure which "A Window in Thrums" lacked. In short, I do not believe any competent critic will deny that technically, as well as in its combination of insight and emotion, this book stands highest among Mr. Barrie's achievements. But I do not find it a tranquil or a tranquillizing book. It flashes, page after page, with an alarming brilliance; it moves from scene to scene with an energy all but consumptive. Page after page excites wonder and admiration; but more than once or twice there followed on these a feeling of apprehension-I might almost say, of distress. Our literature-toasters would perhaps discern in this the natural shock of a masterpiece on a mind unaccustomed to masterpieces. To my thinking, the sustained and pervading pathos of the book will better account for it. For Tommy stands, so to speak, on the apex of a pyramid, the three sides of which are built of pathos, or, at least, cemented with it. Yes, and its base rests on the most sorrowful story of Aaron Latta and Jean Myles, al ready told. The story of Elspeth, if not yet acutely pathetic, will assuredly become so when the time arrives, and Mr. Barrie tells of Tommy's manhood. The story of Miss Ailie, his schoolmistress, is pathetic after a which has been lost to us since the authoress of "Cranford" died. And the story of Grizel and her mother, the Painted Lady-ah well!

fashion

that will pass with time into the company of the classics, and in time no doubt find a critic to judge it without emotion. I cannot; nor will many, I think, who make the acquaintance of that brave and adorable child. Pathos hangs like a mist about the pretty, shameful, demented little woman, with her painted face and lips, now babbling soft English words of endearment and pure joy, and anon uttering gutterstreams of foul language that Auchterlonie, the smith, felt "wae" to hear, "for she just spoke it like a bairn that had been in ill company." But the heart of the pathos resides rather in her child, who defended her mother single-handed while she lived, and nursed her single-handed when she sickened, and single-handed "straiked" her when she was dead.

It was necessary, I suppose, and part of the donnée of the tale that sorrow and suffering-other people's sorrow and suffering-should go to the making of that fine fellow Tommy Sandys, who grew up to write books so eloquent of sorrows and sufferings he had never felt at first hand. Yet I think some of the pathos of this book might have been spared; the early death, for instance, of the little girl who passes in and out of Chapter I. like the child of a dream; and perhaps—after reading it I have not the heart to speak more decidedly-the lamentable history of Miss Kitty; but not of this I am certainthe tale of Grizel. For that, and not the heroical career of Tommy, is the crown of the book. "I'm not sure what I'm laughing at," said Tommy, on one famous occasion, "but I think it's at mysel'." The author adds, "The joke grew with the years, until sometimes he laughed in his most emotional moments, suddenly seeing himself in his true light. But it had become a bitter laugh by this time." And we foretaste that bitterness as we read. The tale of Grizel, on the other hand, contains no bitterness, and its humor (let the reader turn to the chapter headed "Grizel Pays Three Visits") lies too deep for laughter.

And here, at the very end, I find I

years he used generally to talk to, or, as he was pleased to say, consult, a friend before beginning a picture, and what he would show was a small outline, two or three inches high at the utmost, enclosed in bounding lines as a frame. Whole pages of small designs such as these, in which the germs of his bestknown pictures are to be recognized, will be found. The sketch had to be considered according to the salient and retreating parts, as one might consider a relief. Raphael's pictures, which are always planned like colored bas-reliefs, were probably begun in the same way.

The first sketch being settled, he proceeded to make drawings from the model. First he drew from the nude. In many cases there are evidences of his having tried several models before satisfying himself. Then, when this was accomplished, the study from the nude was transferred in outline to another paper. The same model draped, was carefully brought into the same pose, and the draperies having been, after repeated failures, cast in a form which pleased him, were drawn in over the outlined figure. These drawings of drapery are most elaborate and beautiful, done generally in black and white chalk on blue or brown paper, to save time, as no model can sit forever.

The next stage was to square off the first small design on to the full-sized canvas, to draw in the figure from the studies in monochrome, and put the draperies on to it.

You had now an entire picture in monochrome, and the designs in this state were generally most beautiful and complete. A friend of his, himself an artist as well as an art patron, once besought him to sell him a picture, "The Idyll," in this condition. Unhappily Leighton took it as a reflection upon his powers of coloring and refused.

This businesslike method of working flowed directly from the nature of the man. His mind was extraordinarily, even disconcertingly clear. It stripped everything it approached of all fog of prepossession or mistiness of thought. He detested the indefinite either in speech or in art. A singular light

towards the understanding of his mind is that he never painted a haze in his life. Mist is the differentiating characteristic of our climate, and he delighted in English landscape, as is proved by the following incident. When George Mason first returned to England from Italy, where he had painted his first pictures, and looked at the English landscape in his own beautiful county of Derbyshire, he said there was nothing in it to paint. It was Leighton who showed him what to do. He went down to Derbyshire, and in his presence and that of Signor Costa, who was with Mason, he drew in a book, which is now in the possession of Lord Carlisle, numerous small sketches for pictures. The visit decided Mason's career. The best pictures of one of the most delightful artists England has yet brought forth would never have been painted but for Leighton's appreciation of his native scenery. Yet he himself, intensely English and aggressively patriotic as he was, never cared to paint that cardinal fact of our climate in virtue of which English landscape is the loveliest in the world. In his mind and in his eye everything is clear, defined, and as it were in three dimensions. He looks all round it. His landscape backgrounds are so modelled that you may pick your way from point to point to the extremest distance. The minds of most of us are a more or less clear space fading off into a misty region peopled with vague longings, unfinished thoughts, and indefinite shapes. Not so Leighton's. He could sympathize with others who grope to their thoughts through a poetic haze, but he never allowed his own work to be infected by it. His astonishingly active intelligence followed the thought to the horizon, and so far as that horizon extended he saw with a startling clearness. In his drawings a character so marked could not fail to assert itself.

His hand had been exercised from an early age upon all manner of subjectshorses, cows, cats, and poultry, architecture, caricature, and, above all, on the human figure. His industry was almost incredible. Already before his