of the Lamas, is an American, who, during four years' sojourn at Pekin as secretary of our legation, acquired a knowledge of the Chinese and Tibetan languages. He is, we believe, the only American who has ever visited Tibet, and, as he himself states, parts of the country which he traversed had been visited only by Prjevalsky and the Pundit Kishen Sing, a British emissary, whose interesting journey is well known to readers of geographical periodicals. Mr. Rockhill dressed and lived like a Chinese, and was incumbered by none of the usual impedimenta of travelers. He decided to enter Tibet from the north, as Fathers Huc and Gabet had done in 1845, and, leaving Pekin with one servant, started upon his journey through northern China to Tibet. His route map is, unfortunately, executed upon much too small a scale, being apparently a reduction of a larger map. The names are in extremely fine print, and the whole route is, consequently, very difficult to follow. The sketch map of the Chinese Empire is better, but not good. A cart journey of 1350 miles from Pekin brought our author to Lanchou, a city of from 70,000 to 80,000 inhabitants, chiefly Mohammedans, and the chief town of the province of Kan-su. The Mohammedans here are far from conversant with the tenets of their faith, having but slight acquaintance with Arabic, and quoting the Koran in Chinese. The total number of Mohammedans in western China, according to the best authorities, is now about 30,000,000. They have several times risen against the Chinese, and it is easy to see that sooner or later they will undertake to propagate their faith by the sword. Mr. Rockhill, like other travelers, notices the fact that the Salar Mohammedans differ physically from the Chinese, having aquiline noses, long oval faces, and

1 The Land of the Lamas. By WILLIAM WOODVILLE ROCKHILL. New York: The Century Co. 1892.

large eyes, indicating a strain of Turkish blood. Further on, at Hsi-ning, our traveler dressed himself in a Mongol gown and fur cap, and with a cleanshaved head and face reached Lusar. Here the mixture of races, Chinese, Mongols, Tibetans, and tribes of mixed Turkish descent, was remarkable. The author gives a detailed account of the manners and customs of the Tibetans at this place and its neighborhood, for which we must, however, refer the reader to his work. The route then led to Lake Koko-nor, the azure lake. This lake is some 230 miles in circumference, and about 10,900 feet above sea level. The water is salty, and apparently not very deep. In this district boots are the unit of value, and goods are paid for in boots. Mr. Rockhill warmly defends the accuracy and integrity of Father Huc, who has been severely attacked. Huc appears to have written his work from memory some years after the events he describes. Our author says that this work cannot be too highly praised, and that if it had been properly edited and accompanied by notes Prjevalsky's accusation would never have been accepted.

Leaving the Koko-nor, Mr. Rockhill went through the province of Ts'aidam. The Mongols here are devoted Buddhists, and are continually mumbling prayers, twirling prayer-wheels, or doing both. The number of Lamas in Tibet is simply astounding. In a distance of 600 miles the author found forty Lamaseries, in the smallest of which there were 100 monks, while in five there were from 2000 to 4000. The Lamas are everywhere de facto the masters of the country. "Nearly all the wealth acquired by trading, donations, money-lending, and bequests is in their hands. Their landed property is frequently enormous; their serfs and bondsmen swarm." Our traveler compares the Lamas to the Templars. Every Lama is well armed and well mounted,

and always ready to resist the local chiefs or the Chinese, or to attack a rival Lamasery. The account of Tibet is very full. Mr. Rockhill thinks that the total population will not exceed 3,800,000, of which about 2,000,000 inhabit the kingdom of Lhasa. The author arrived safely at Shanghae, descending the Yangtsu - Chiang. His courage and pluck command our hearty admiration, and his book is a really valuable contribution both to geography and ethnology. A number of very interesting supplementary notes. and tables conclude the work.

Mr. Norman has given us a work1 which is at once instructive and agreeable. In the author's own language, his essays constitute an attempt to place be fore the reader an account of some of the chief aspects and institutions of Japanese life as it really is to-day. He had uncommon facilities for his work. Every opportunity for the study of the various departments of government was offered him. A Japanese gentleman from the civil service was placed at his disposal as translator and interpreter, and he spent months of special investigation at the capital. The first essay, At Home in Japan, gives a lively and amusing description of a Japanese house, and of the mode of life in it. The summary of the dinner is eminently suggestive: "Delicate in form and substance, characterized by infinite kindliness and merriment, subject to strict and immemorial rules, a Japanese dinner is typical of the Japanese people. Most foreigners are delighted with it as a novel experience, and hasten to supplement it with a beefsteak or a dish of poached eggs." The geisha, or girl musicians who appear at such entertainments, made a great impression upon our traveler, and he devotes a number of photographs and much pleasant description to them and their attractive ways. The account of Japanese journal

1 The Real Japan. Studies of Contemporary Japanese Manners, Morals, Administration, and

ism is both amusing and suggestive. We find nearly all the "institutions" with which we are familiar, the interviewer, the reporter, the newspaper boy, perfectly well defined. We have personal sketches of various editors, remarks on the difficulties of using both the Chinese ideographic and the Japanese syllabic modes of writing, and a broad view of the whole subject of the Japanese press. Then follows a chapter on Japanese justice, which seems to be indeed justice tempered with mercy. The details of the modes of punishment are curious, and one may well ponder the forms of systematic labor to which convicts are subjected. We have next the subject of education. "It is intended," said an official address to the people of Japan, issued in 1872 by special order of the Emperor, "that henceforth education shall be so diffused that there may not be a village with an ignorant family, nor a family with an ignorant member." This ideal has been sought under great difficulties. Mr. Norman sums up the result in a few words: "Education is compulsory and secular. It is not gratuitous. It consists of five parts, kindergartens, elementary schools, middle schools, special schools, and universities." Our limits will permit us only to refer to Mr. Norman's very interesting chapter. It will be sufficient to quote the words "I found that in five years' time there will hardly be a position involving high practical scientific knowledge filled by a foreigner in Japan. The architects, the naval architects, the engineers, the chemical and agricultural experts, the physicians and surgeons, the assayers and masters of the mint, will all be graduates of Japanese universities."

The fact that Japan has become a military power of no small magnitude has hitherto, perhaps, excited little attention. Yet Mr. Norman states that Politics. By HENRY NORMAN. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1892.

the dockyard at Yokosuka is not behind Woolwich and Portsmouth in much except size. The Armstrong cruisers are among the finest vessels of their class afloat. The war department has at least 40,000 men under arms, and could put 100,000 well-armed men in the field. The men are solidly built and "stocky," and the army is a true European force, whose march and company drill are first-rate.

Very well written chapters on the arts and crafts of Japan follow, but the ground has been gone over so often that we may well refer the reader to the book itself. Two chapters full of painful suggestions conclude the work. One relates to the necessity for the abolition of the treaties with foreign nations by which Japan is ranked with semi-barbarous states, of the opening of Japan to the enterprise of the world's capitalists, and of her admission to the modern comity of nations. The other discusses the future of Japan. The various political questions and points in political history in these final chapters are carefully and thought fully considered. As critics, it is our duty to find at least some fault with Mr. Norman's work, but, with the best intentions, we have found nothing at which to cavil.

Mr. Norman saw Japan with the eyes of a cultivated man, full of taste and feeling. Sir Edwin Arnold saw Japan with the eyes of a poet. There is perhaps not much that is new in his work,1 but the "mode of putting it" is at least very charming. Except for certain delicious periods of the year, one cannot honestly praise the climate of Japan; but it has all the while "divine caprices," and when the sunshine does unexpectedly come during the moist and chilly months, the light is very splendid and of a peculiar silvery tone, while the summer days are golden. While on the whole a healthy climate and excellent

1 Japonica. By Sir EDWIN ARNOLD. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1892.

for children, it must not be too greatly extolled. Autumn and spring are the best seasons. From November to March the cold is extremely bitter, and the winds are often savagely bleak. We pass over the pleasant descriptions of home construction, upon which many travelers have dwelt at length, as well as the account of Japanese religion, and come at once to the delightful and instructive chapter on the Japanese treatment of flowers from the æsthetic point of view. The Japanese have systematized their love of flowers, including all beautiful and ornamental leaves, stems, branches, and even stumps and roots, the blossom being rather a detail than the central point. The seven princely flowers are the chrysanthemum, narcissus, maple, cherry, peony, rhodea, and wistaria. The iris is also princely, but must not be employed at weddings because of its purple color. The arrangement of flowers is raised to a branch of art. The vessels which are to hold flowers are also subjects of study. Probably a Japanese would commit hara-kiri, if presented with one of the hideous colored glass vases into which the barbarous American delights to put flowers. The details which Sir Edwin gives of flower arrangement as a fine art are also well worth studying. In all that concerns flowers we have still much to learn from our Asiatic brethren. The florist's stiff bouquet must go, the sooner the better, and something at least approaching to artistic feeling govern the adjustment of even a bunch of mignon

ette.

Sir Edwin never tires of extolling the charming manners of the Japanese, even of the poorest, their exquisite personal cleanliness, and the sweet courtesy with which they acknowledge the smallest obligation. His admiration of the Japanese women has been so much quoted that we may assume that it is familiar to our readers. He embodies it in a charming poem called the Musmee. Yet

one great fault of the Japanese character is the contempt with which women are regarded by men. The position of a woman is little if at all better than that of a slave, and she may be divorced at her husband's pleasure. We have touched very lightly upon Sir Edwin Ar

nold's charming work, and have sometimes used his own language to do him the more justice. The book contains no politics, no philosophical musings or views, but is what most readers will cordially welcome, a delightful picture of something worthy to be painted.

FICTION, for many persons, is the one form of art which they are permitted to enjoy to the full; it sets them free from imprisoning circumstance, and makes them for a while masters of themselves because admitted to the freedom of another world. It is a great gain, therefore, when a novel, besides carrying one away, as the phrase is, by its storytelling power, borrows elements from other forms of art, and enriches the reader by appeals such as architecture, sculpture, music, painting, or poetry makes to the sensitive mind. If, for example, one has never seen a great architectural structure, massive in its complex form, rich in its multitudinous detail, but has read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, he has received from that work, beyond a notion of other human lives, an impress which is a faint simulacrum of that of fered by a great building into which art has wrought a charm independent of the uses of the building. The rustic reader who has never stood before the still-breathing marble, but has brooded over the figures in Hawthorne's romance, Hilda, Donatello, Miriam, knows something of the charm which springs from companying with the figures of human sculpture when the sculptor has breathed into them the breath of life, yet left them remote, wrapped in the solitude of their own inscrutable being. Again, there is a lyrical beauty about the Vicar of Wakefield which affects one as Haydn's

music may. But no doubt the art which lends most to the novel, and is most conspicuously present in it, is the art of design. That is to say, while the novelist and the draughtsman both desire to set vividly before the imagination scenes whether of landscape with figures or of figures with a background, and each uses his own means, one words and the other lines, the novelist suggests the draughtsman oftener than the draughtsman suggests the novelist. It is true that a picture is said to tell a story, and this is sometimes considered a condemnation of its value as a work of art, but more often a story is praised heartily for its pictorial effect. Yet there is a further, a heightened value now and then in a novel, which we can state to ourselves in no terms so exact as when we say not merely that the novelist is a designer, a term which may be made to cover pattern-making, but that the novelist is a painter, and this name we should give preeminently to Miss Murfree as represented in her latest book.1

Whoever has read In the "Stranger People's" Country attentively and the book demands close attention — has seen a succession of masterly paintings, and is almost as much impressed by color, by light and shade, as if his very organs of sight had rested upon canvas 1 In the "Stranger People's" Country. By CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1891.

and pigments. So intent is the author upon these successive effects that she relies upon them for carrying the story, and leaves the reader to construct one somewhat necessary link in the chain of events which constitutes the plot out of scattered hints and inferences. If one chooses so to regard it, the whole story turns upon the highway robbery and Steve Yates's connection with it; but one is not present at this scene, and is left to conjecture what circumstances compelled Yates to be a reluctant member of the gang. There is a fine art in this, but we suspect it was less premeditated than due to an instinctive subordination of the mere narrative to the dramatic conception, and the drama is developed rather by successive tableaux vivants than by action. The scene in the robber's hiding-place when Guthrie surprises the gang is a masterly piece of drawing. In the hands of a lesser artist the violence would have been the prominent element; in Miss Murfree's handling the attention is concentrated upon the lights and shadows, upon the figures in their changing relations, and all the violence is dispatched in a moment of lightning-like rapidity.

The vividness with which the scenes are presented is due to the meaning with which they are charged, and to the imaginative skill with which the details are perfected. Miss Murfree has completed her analysis of her characters before she draws them. Only now and then does she permit herself, as in the changing relations of Shattuck and Rhodes, to dwell at length upon the movement of mind before action. As a rule, all is translated into the terms of speech and behavior, and given so clear a tone, so sharp an accent, that the meaning cannot be mistaken. Her characters, for this reason, never seem to be getting ready to do something; they are in their places when the reader sees them, and, however slowly they may move, each step, each word, counts. For this reason, as we intimated, the reader finds

himself closely attentive to the author's words, not that he fears he may miss some hidden disclosure on which events turn, but that the perfection of the whole rests upon the exquisite joining of the parts. There is no mere accumulation of details in the attempt to give elaborate fullness to a scene, nor are details elaborated while the reader waits impatiently for the story to move on; but they are lifted into significance by the author's imaginative power, which so selects and disposes as to disclose their meaning, not to invest them with some adventitious force. For example, there is a striking scene in which Shattuck, the representative of ultramontane civilization, a character almost always introduced by Miss Murfree into her stories as a contrasting figure to the rude mountain folk, — thinks himself fired at by Yates's wife, who has threatened to shoot him if he attempts to explore certain pigmy graves which he looks upon with scientific curiosity, she with superstitious reverence; and so thinking, he rides fast to the cottage, and confronts Mrs. Yates, Letitia Pettingill, Baker Anderson, and little Mose, his companions following behind. The picture of the house and its inmates, the disposition of the group of men, the disclosure of character in the sharp conversation, the purposed confusion of the reader as to the actual fact involved, there is not a word too much, there is no word lacking. Here, for example, is the scene which presented itself to Rhodes, one of Shattuck's companions, as he flung himself from his horse at the threshold of the house:

"No friendly greeting had it been, to judge from the dismayed, deprecatory faces grouped about the fire. Adelaide had risen with a slow look of doubt, a sort of stunned surprise. Letitia, who had been out milking the cows, stood in the back doorway, the brimming piggin on her head, one hand lifted to stay it, the wind rustling the straight skirt of