book destined to be as undying as Don Quixote. The child-world is now a living organism. The formalities of the Fairchild Family have vanished; "Parents" no longer need "Assistants:" and an interaction between the fiction addressed to the grown-up and that designed especially for children is most noticeable. In the old-world novel children played a very small and a very vague part. In the modern novel they play one distinct and convincing. The young lesson the old. The old have ceased to patronize the young, while the child, after a fashion undreamed of in ancient Greece, has become father of the man.

The vibration, so to speak, of manifold modern influence quivers along the electric wires of modern Fiction. And yet with all the flashes of widened and heightened interests, with all the multitudes of their messages, with all our myriads of novels, we are still awaiting the great novelist of the future; one who will coordinate the chaos of these movements by spontaneous and creative genius; one who will make them palpable and audible, idealizing the real, and realizing the ideals towards which they strain; one who, like Nature herself, will "throw out altogether and at once the whole system of every being and the rudiments of all the parts." This it is to embody a period.

After all, an ordinary story is the form of the novel. That ordinary story may be heard any day in the streets. Each passer-by is always telling such a story, with the "He says to me, he says," and the "Well, you see it was like this," which any of us may hear any day. It is the shape given to the The Fortnightly Review.

substance which makes it interpretative and lasting. The giant competition of our day, while it affords varieties of comedy and of tragedy unknown to our forefathers, has so far hindered any single masterful presentment. Of making many books there is no end. There are two antidotes which may in the near future remedy the relaxation of fibre that has attended the body fictional. The one is a revived sense of national unity and of national purpose. The other, an improved standard of criticism. Of late there has been a sort of indifference which has produced the indifferent. And there have been too many cliques of mutual admiration; too much "log-rolling" in the commerce of unabashed advertisement. National compactness, critical insight and sympathy, may applaud honest effort, and reject the spangles of gaudy trash or the postured affectations of profundity. Nor will it prove the least service of a new criticism if it can also eliminate the flood of bad English that defiles the fountain. The voice that calls to us should be pure and true. This at least was once the case. With an audience far less instructed than our own, the styles of Fielding and of Smollett, of Sterne, and even of the prolix Richardson, were such as to make their readers realize what a wonderful medium is the English language; how flexible in its solidity, how majestic in its directness. Voltaire has observed that the Englishman says all that he wants, the Frenchman all that he can. In modern literature we need somewhat more of the Frenchman's imposed limit; some outward barrier of repression against the redundant gush that promotes quantity and impairs quality.

Walter Sichel.

To act the part of officer in attendance upon Malayan royalties is a task with which circumstances have familiarized me. As I review the past it seems to me that I have been engaged in that thankless office on and off any time these last nineteen years; and my memory calls up a series of recollections, commonplace enough in themselves, but alien to the experience of the majority of my fellows, and as such perhaps worth recording.

I was first detailed for duty of this description when I was myself in leading-strings-that is to say, at a time when I was a newly joined cadet, and barely more than half-way through my teens. I knew very little of natives in those days, and even less of the vernacular; but I was chosen for the post, for which I was manifestly ill-fitted, by no less a person than the very raja over whose welfare I was required to watch. The reasons that actuated his choice were not far to seek: he had no desire to be controlled by any one, and he rightly judged that I should be absolutely powerless to control him. He was a typical son of the old régime, a barbarous person of unspeakable manners and morals. When, some years later, his time came to die, and when, in accordance with the custom of the land, his people conferred a posthumous title upon him, they called him "Al-Merhum Rahmat Allah," which, being interpreted, "The late king, God be merciful to him!" They felt that no conventional phrase of laudation or glorification would fit him, and that, in view of his manifold iniquities, the best that his most sanguine friends could hope was that Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate, might grant him the forgiveness which he had not earned, but needed sorely. In the company of this potentate I

is,

spent three lurid weeks while he disported himself in the neighboring colony of Penang. I was technically responsible for all his lapses from prudence and mannerliness, yet I knew myself for what I was-the merest fly upon the wheel! His doings and omissions covered me with shame as with a garment. When we appeared in public I was conscious, with the acuteness of agony only known to the very young, that we presented a grotesque and ridiculous figure. When some more than usually humiliating incident occurred, it was in vain that I pleaded my impotence to prevent or guide him. It was my business to do both, and the excuse of sheer impossibility was rejected with scorn whenever I urged it. That time comes back to me now with all the haunting misery of a bad dream. Most of the tales which I might tell concerning it are of the kind that must be told in camera, and cannot therefore be printed here; but one or two of a more publishable character will suffice to indicate the many and grievous things which I suffered at his hands.

One of my chief troubles lay in the inability of my king to appreciate the advantages of punctuality. In common with all Malays he held time to be valueless, and regarded an hour or two either way as a thing of no account. I remember my distress when all my efforts failed to drag him from his sleeping-mat in due time for a parade of a European regiment which, to the extreme discontent of a peppery old commanding officer, had been ordered in his honor. British troops in Asia are very precious things, and the unpardonable sin is to keep them standing in the sun-glare. When, therefore, I at last sneaked on to the ground in the wake of my king, I

On that

longed, if ever man did, that the earth would gape and swallow me. The raja was a fine billow of a man, and he waddled with the rolling gait of a sailor. His figure was portly, and he had a strong predilection for gorgeous colors and barbaric raiment. particular morning he was chastely clad in a bright yellow cap with a black scroll from the Kurân embroidered upon it, in a pink cloth coat, a pair of green silk Chinese trousers reaching to the middle of his shins, and in a number of red, blue, and purple shawls huddled about his waist. Lengths of brown hairy legs protruded from the bottoms of his trousers, and his bare splay feet were thrust into canvas tennis-shoes without strings. He leaned heavily on a long patriarchal staff, and scowled furiously at all the world, as was his wont. I noted miserably the effect which this apparition was having upon the parade collectively, and my discomfiture was completed by the impressive things which the commanding officer said to me in a voice of concentrated fury as he rode up to us with his face "set like the day of judgment." Of course I was not to blame, and equally of course the whole blame was laid at my door; nor did the consciousness of injury and innocence solace me greatly.

On another never-to-be-forgotten occasion I escorted the king to the waterfall at Penang, which is one of the sights of that little stew-pan of a place. The fall tumbles down the face of a hill out of the heart of a great bank of greenery, into the concrete reservoir whence the good people of Penang draw their drinking-water, and this spot is reached from the road below by a stiff climb up a steep and winding footpath. I have said that my king was of a full habit of body, wherefore he arrived at the top of the ascent hot, dusty, perspiring, and in a more villainous temper than was usual even

with him. He sat himself down heavily by the roadside, puffing and blowing, mopping his face with a cloth, and cursing his panic-stricken followers, who fanned and shampooed him assiduously. Then, having somewhat recovered his breath, he suddenly announced his unshakable resolve to cool his burning body by bathing in the reservoir. Now the criminality of this act cannot easily be exaggerated, and an alert municipality keeps a little Tamil policeman always on the spot for the sole purpose of prosecuting the delinquents who sin against public decency by attempting to swim in the drinking-water of its citizens. These things I explained to my king, and the little Tamil aforesaid, torn in twain by his respect for royalty and his dread of his employers, added his tears to my persuasions. The king, however, was a man of strong character, not easily to be moved from any purpose upon which his will was set. For all the effect that our words and entreaties had upon him, the Tamil and I might as well have addressed ourselves to a stone wall. Sitting on a culvert by the roadside, without even looking at us or vouchsafing us a reply more articulate than a grunt, he continued to divest himself of his garments, piece by piece, after the manner of the circus-rider so dear to a provincial audience. To put the crowning horror on the situation, a European picnic-party arrived at the foot of the hill and began to make the ascent just as the king was getting down, so to speak, to the bed-rock; and with writhings of agony I presently recognized the voices of several ladies with whom I had every desire to stand well. Forming a kind of guard of dishonor, my companions and I grouped ourselves about the king, trying to screen from sight as much of his ample person as possible; but our efforts were in vain, for just as the new arrivals came up

to us my monarch lurched on to his feet, and pushed his way through our ranks. He glared murderously at my ill-favored old friends, who eyed the brown man in his airy costume with extreme disapproval. Then he waddled forward, shouldered his way between two ladies, and crawled down the bank of the reservoir, whence, with only his nose, eyes, and mouth above the level of the water, he looked up at us with all the malevolence of a bull buffalo. I tried, not very successfully I fear, to look as though I had no earthly connection with this shameless violator of the law; but I came in for an unmerciful amount of chaff from the men of the party, while the ladies, I think, decided then and there that I was a lover of low company, a disreputable person with whom it was safest to have only the very barest acquaintance. In addition to this I had to eat as much dirt, to make as many apologies, and to accept as much reproof, as though I had myself defiled the drinking-water of the community.

In the years that followed it frequently fell to my lot to attend this same raja during his visits to the colony; but by that time I had acquired a sound working knowledge of the vernacular, and had learned enough of the intricacies of the Malayan character to be able to deal with some degree of confidence and success with even this abnormal development of the race. Moreover, I had made the discovery that avarice was the keynote of my king's character; and by playing upon this weakness skilfully, and, I fear, unscrupulously, I was able to induce him to do and leave undone according as I conceived it to be desirable. I had a weapon in my hand now which would easily have deterred His Highness from swimming in the Penang reservoir, for it would have been easy to frighten him with the bogey of phantom damages, and there

we

fore my task was greatly lightened. The king meanwhile had also learned something of my own prejudices and and whenever predilections, chanced to have a difference of opinion he promptly retaliated by publicly humiliating me. Thus, when invited to five o'clock tea by some lady of high standing in the community, he would take complete charge of the tea-table, shouting to his ragamuffin followers to join in the plunder, and distributing all the available comestibles among them All this he before I could intervene. would do with a wicked eye cocked in my direction to note how I bore up under the ordeal; or else with the same iniquitous leer he would ostentatiously remove the soaking quid of tobacco, red with beteljuice, from between his lip and gums, and would cast it upon the carpet in our midst with a soft, splashy flop that made the stoutest shudder. Also he would buy useless things in the most reckless fashion, and would shamelessly repudiate the purchases when the time arrived for payment. On such occasions he would storm and rave and whine, would call Allah and His Prophet to witness that he had never intended to buy anything, and would ask pathetically whether, in the name of common-sense, it was possible to conceive him riding a high bicycle, working a sewing-machine, or playing on the double-bass. Why, in the first instance, he ever pretended to deal in such things is difficult to understand; but I fancy that the explanation lay in the fact that the temporary possession of articles for which no payment had been made gave him an added sense of wealth, and that this was the last emotion that the thieving years had left him. It was often weary work enough trying to keep him out of the reach of the civil and criminal law; but in the end I used to get him back to his own country-everlastingly disgraced, it is true.

but more or less unharmed. Yet it is curious how understanding and sympathy bind a man to even the least attractive personality, for I grew to have more than a sneaking affection for my wicked old king. I learned from him much concerning the management of his people which has since stood me in good stead; I was often forced to admire the hard-bit, strong-willed, shameless, but fearless old curmudgeon; and when at length he died in the odor of iniquity, I joined heartily, and more than a little sadly, in his people's prayer, "God be merciful to him!"

Memories recur to me of many another Malayan râja to whom from time to time I have acted as pilot through the reefs and shallows which, for a native, beset the difficult waters of European life. The duty has frequently been interesting, and on the whole pleasant; for I have been fortunate in the men with whom circumstances have placed me in this relationship, and never again have I been called upon to attend a chief whose character even remotely resembled that of the late lamented "God be merciful to him." The râja to whom I have most frequently acted the part of guide, philosopher, and friend is, to my thinking, one of the most picturesque figures in Asia. In his youth he was a mighty warrior; he is still a keen sportsman; and during the best years of his life he has been a stern and ruthless ruler of men. After a decade of devastating warfare, two-thirds of which period were packed with defeats, disasters, and misfortunes that must have broken the spirit of a weaker man than he, the throne upon which he afterwards sat so squarely was wrested by him from his kinsman, the rightful owner of the kingship which he coveted. Thereafter for more than a quarter of a century he ruled a turbulent people in such wise VOL. XVII. 886

LIVING AGE.

for

that no man in all that lawless State dared think above a whisper without his leave. He so impressed his will upon his subjects that for them his lightest word, his merest whim, his hinted desire, were law; and though, since his were the limitations of the brown man, he governed selfishly, using his "high place as perch for low ambition and a vantage-ground pleasure," his was a personality, a force, that kindled the imagination and claimed the tribute of a reluctant admiration. During two blood-curdling years I lived in his country under his rule, watching his methods with a fascination of horror, and with the agony that comes to one who is the impotent witness of much evil; yet, when at last Great Britain was prodded out of its impassivity and patience, and was forced to take upon itself the tranquilization of the troubled land, it was with a curious blending of intense relief and profound sympathy for the man himself that I saw the downfall of his power. It was an instinctive consciousness that I cherished the latter sentiment that led him, perhaps, to admit me to his intimate friendship; for, as I have said, sympathy and understanding are the only keys wherewith to unlock the brown man's heart, and if they be lacking familiar intercourse between Asiatic and European are for ever vain.

These things need not presuppose any measure of approval of the man himself, or of the questionable methods for which he stands. They only imply sufficient of imagination to enable the European to occupy in spirit the position which is natural to the Asiatic, to adopt for the nonce his impossible point of view, to follow the tortuous twistings of his mind as it works crookedly, but as he deems logically, through obscure byways from right to left.