Positivists or Comtists-G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, and a few others occupied substantially the same ground. Mill himself felt the loneliness of his position. In a note to Taine, he says rather sadly, though resignedly: "When I wrote my book [evidently meaning his "Logic," published in 1843] I stood almost alone in my opinions; and though they have met with a degree of sympathy which I by no means expected, we may still count in England twenty a priori and

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spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience." In Alexander Bain he recognized a strong champion of the leading ideas of the sensational school, yet with some important differences. Herbert Spencer, whose career began in the fifties, had much in common with them, but his original contributions to philosophy in the Victorian era make him a representative of the new epoch of Evolution. EUGENE PARSONS.

HAT does the last dictum set forth as the specific principle which differentiates veritable creation of life in fiction from mere photography or painting? By what power does one author vitalize, while another, or possibly the same in different mood or atmosphere, only reproduces life in panoramic display?

That quality which enables a writer to create, to make men and women who breathe, talk, and move, hate and love, are glad or sorrowful, can be only sympathy-sympathy in its completest meaning, of feeling with another.

When God fashioned his first man and woman, he used mere clay for the outward forms, but these he shaped "in his own image," vitalized by his own breath, and in them set the same life beating. In other words, he breathed into them, felt with them. He who would be a creator in the universe of letters must do the same. All who are named immortally as makers in that sphere have been great through such power.

George Eliot was in perfect sympathy with Maggie Tulliver; their pulses beat in unison every moment, from the stormy days when child Maggie furiously hammered nails into the wooden pate of her doll, or the sunny ones when she and Tom sported and dreamed beside the merry Floss, on through the woman's tempestuous love and mad but sublime renunciation, down to the solemn yet dear time when brother and sister, after a bitter estrangement, met death in a mutual embrace, "living through again in one supreme moment the days when they clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together."

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It is this alone that has made Maggie Tulliver the most intensely vital of George Eliot's creations. The author intended that Romola and Fedalma should also touch our hearts as fair, real women who suffer: they are exquisite and faultless portraitures, but she forgot to breathe into them.

In "Adam Bede," Dinah, Hetty, and Adam are real; and Mrs. Poyser is as live a housewife as ever kept herself and everybody else stirring from 4 o'clock. Monday morning until the shades of Saturday evening. But Seth Bede and Arthur Donnithorne are mechanisms.

We miss the vitalizing touch in "Silas Marner" and "Felix Holt." The latter barely fails of being great. Had its maker sympathized with Esther for one day even, as she did with Maggie every minute, or with the sturdy and more than half-lovable young Radical as she did with Carpenter Adam, this feeling of the work's the work's incompleteness would not be so universal. Mary Garth is genuine flesh and blood, and redeems from lifelessness the earlier pages of Middlemarch"; so is Rosamond, sometimes. We are not sure of either Mrs. Casaubon or Dr. Lydgate at first, and feel a little as do children who visit a waxwork show: we should like to pinch the figures or pull their hair to see if they would stir. This continues until, in the one case, Dorothea comes upon veritable love, and, in the other, Lydgate is tempted, as he watches alone at midnight beside the dying man whose unspoken secret signifies so deeply in the young physician's life. At the crucial moment of both existences, George Eliot was drawn into vivid sympathy with each;

and this sympathy proved, as always, the life-giving touch. From that hour they walk before us a real man and woman.

But George Eliot never felt with Deronda's Mirah; from first to last she simply made a pretty, painted doll of her, and told us that the little thing suffered, and loved, and at last found happiness; and we take her seriously, for we are used to hearing the puppet's mistress say that her plaything has some melodious name, that she is dear and good, that her wee heart beats with warm love, and that she had a hard time yesterday, but is happy to-day. We do not seem to mind it much until Mirah is set above Gwendolen, who is truly human and alive, from the palpitant pulse in her long, graceful throat to the impatient movement of her slender foot; from her abhorrence of Alice's ugly shoulder-lifting to her loathing of Grandcourt's sin when she gets over-close to it; from her cowardice in facing poverty, because refined surroundings can not go with it, to her passionate and world-forgetting worship of the noblest nature she has found; in short, from her utter selfishness to her self-renunciation. Deronda himself sometimes rings wooden, and we are in terror lest, after all Gwendolen's adoration, he should prove still but an automatically moving piece of the stagesetting. But Henleigh Grandcourt and the abominable Lush have in some way subtly caught a real breath from their maker.

Walter Scott is an immortal painter; and as long as the romantic canvas, with its chivalrous love, valor, and villainy fascinates, as long as rich coloring enchants and heroic legends weave their resistless spells, so long shall his cult endure. To-day we cannot see beyond the time when he is all-powerful in that sphere; we do not care to hear that an end will come to such a time. But did he create? Never! The reason is plain; he loved his stories far better than his men and women. He made his stories, instead of making his men and women, and letting them live the stories after life's immutable fiats.

The same has been true of the romantic school from first to last, from the portrayal in unfadingly beautiful tints of demigods and noble-statured men in the Ilian age down to the new art-birth in "The Prisoner of Zenda" and "The White Company." One and all, the romanticists have

followed their stories with so intense an absorption and love that they have forgotten to consider whether their actors were breathing creatures or mere dummies. If Shakespeare himself had but pursued his romances, and failed to feel with Othello or Cordelia, the one would not have been all vibrant pulse and flaming breath, nor the other an incarnate devotion quivering with a girl's heart-beats.

There were fibres in Fielding's nature that stirred in sympathy with every sin of Tom Jones and made a very genuine rascal of his creation. But Richardson was the moralist from his first page to his last; and while his preaching is often warm enough and human enough to enlist our willing hearing, yet poor Clarissa, pretty, weeping Pamela, and Sir Charles are never more than rather stiff and underdrawn illustrations in his homiletics. Defoe was a child in tale-telling; but a child's tale may be more eloquent and ardent than his world-weary elder's. And while Defoe had but sparse elements in his tale, yet they were bona fide; his island was genuine soil and rocks, surrounded by wet water, and his solitary was a man who ate, and missed human companionship, and made veritable tracks. The earliest English novelist was, beyond a doubt, entirely en rapport with his hero, and they lived in unbroken accord.

Although Bulwer wrote stories that English letters would not spare, yet this master of felicitous diction and dramatic action barely occasionally remembered — or was able to breathe into the nostrils of his creations. Pelham's young impetuosity and warm feeling are very human, as is Eugene Aram's remorse. Now and again, looking in on other scenes of his, one is impelled to declare that a heart-throb proceeds from no mechanism, but is caught from the creator's vivifying sympathy.

Dickens was a master artist. Ah, how he drew! sometimes as the world's greatest cartoonist, sometimes in the immortal line of beauty; again, with the perfect. curve of love, and now with the deep and fatal stroke of tragedy. He loved his pictures as such, and countless generations will repeat that love in ardent degree. Yet it was not often that he took down one of his masterpieces from the wall, laid his breath upon the lips, and said, "Live as human!" Copperfield, we are certain about, as much SO as of some old school friend. We have watched

the blood come and go in his boyish cheeks, have been close enough to him in his young manhood to see the gray pallor of pain rise to his face when he finds Steerforth dead on the beach; and later, we have heard the very tremor of his voice when he spoke to Agnes of love. What is it that makes David a friend who walks and talks with us, while Nicholas Nickleby remains simply a faultless drawing? Only the keen and perpetual sympathy of Dickens himself with the former. So entirely did his creator feel with Copperfield that one hears it constantly iterated that in this book Dickens gave the world his own life, and in this hero he lived again.

Thackeray is unlike his great brother. In Dickens, art and life stand distinct and apart, and discrimination is easy. But with the maker of Becky Sharp it is different; so fine is his art, and so artistic the life he creates, that much confusion and some unseemly disputation have arisen as to what of his work each may claim. Laura and Amelia, little Mrs. Pendennis, Lady Castlewood, Jos. Sedley, poor, pretty Fanny, dear, adorable old Dobbin, the incomparable Mrs. Major O'Dowd, Esmond himself, grand but shadowy, are they all merely paint and canvas? we ask, holding our breath to catch the answer. But sometimes does not the great master move among them in affection? and can we not then see these men and women of his step down from their glittering frames and walk with the true gait of throbbing life? Do we not hear genuine sobs springing from too real a heartache in poor Amelia's breast when the handsome rascal she has chosen before true Dobbin goes dancing attendance on Mrs. Rawdon Crawley? And do we not note the ashen wanness that creeps up to the very lips of Esmond when he and the young viscount break their swords in the face of the prince whose perfidy can no longer command them? We wish, oh, how we wish! that we knew this to be life, and not merely a cunning manipulating of wires and chiaroscuro by a magician who smilingly mocks us with his puppets.

It is pleasant to feel sure of some of Thackeray's figures. Pendennis, for example, is sometimes a cad, sometimes a fainéant, rarely a fool, and not infrequently a fine fellow. But he undoubtedly lives, in all these phases, and he moves with a

stride that is undeniably British. It was almost in unconsciousness that the author vitalized him so intensely. He himself scarcely knew how he loved Pen above his other creatures. "Man and brother" he called him, and he made him such indeed. Blanche Amory and fair Lady Beatrix of Castlewood, too, are more than simply pictures of spoiled beauties; we have talked to them, laughed at their caprices, murmured love-words into their pretty

ears.

We have sighed sentimentally when Blanche sang O mes Larmes; we have caught her hiding Foker's ring when Arthur came, have felt for her a goodnatured contempt that yet did not kill within us a certain sort of admiration. We have danced with Beatrix, and longed to go down on our knees and kiss the buckles on her high-heeled little slippers or the silver clocks on her scarlet stockings, as her cousin Harry did. What a radiant, breathing maidenhood she is when she steps statelily down the stairs at Walcote to meet Esmond, holding the candle high to show well the heart-roses in her cheeks and the youth-light dancing in her eyes! You remember that "She was a brown beauty; that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes were dark; her hair curling with rich undulation and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine, except her cheeks, which were bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full; and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace. Agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen, now melting, now imperious, now sarcastic, there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful." She is radiance and light gloriously incarnate, is she not? And we are all lovers with Esmond. But no one forgets another tense moment when we come near enough to feel her breath come pantingly, and to hear the low words halfhissed between set teeth: "Farewell, mother; I think I never can forgive you; something hath broke between us that no tears or years can repair."

But it was not in these even that Thackeray reached the acme of his creative power: after Pendennis it was Becky Sharp whom he cared most for and has endowed with most perennial life. The maker of this marvellous woman might be more amazed than amused if he could step for a moment into our closing era and hear callow youths assail his injustice to Becky, his motives in scattering such insinuations regarding her character; could hear them declare her "a far better woman than Mr. Thackeray, would have you believe; in fact, not a bad woman in any way, only one who had to shift for herself from first to last, and who schemed because she could not get things she needed without scheming." To those dogmatic critics who are constantly asserting that all is art in Thackeray, and nothing life, this must be a difficult argument to go around, this chivalrous defence of Becky which one perpetually hears from young enthusiasm and softness of heart. Call her a portrait when she is as genuine a siren as ever charmed youthful men or drew maidens to her side by enchantments of lifted or veiled eyes, tearful lashes, heaving breast, soft syllables over softer lips, accents of sympathy, and acts of subtlest calculation? No: it is life we look on, and are drawn to and repelled by. Young enthusiasm is more than half right, with that fierce, unintended tribute to the power of him who created this wonderful woman and set her where she may still ensnare judgment and lead it whither she chooses.

Among the Titans of fiction's Olympus, Nathaniel Hawthorne will never be denied a place. Strangely enough, a critic rarely thinks of him as a painter, yet more rarely as a creator. His art is rather sculpturesque, let us say; and none will gainsay the Phidian touch when looking on the wondrously beautiful figures that illustrate his art sermon in allegory, "The Marble Faun." But once the calm blood of the New England artist stirred warmly, and he played Pygmalion: his lovely frozen work thrilled with life,- such life as has made "The Scarlet Letter" the sublimest piece of fiction ever produced in America.

In Gallic letters Victor Hugo surely stands forth as the greatest maker. It is not merely his larger genius that places him above Balzac and Dumas in this ability to vivify; it is his larger soul,

his keener sympathy again. Jean Valjean will move among us and help us by his very shortcomings to be better brothers to one another, when the bloodiess Seraphita and even gay and debonair d'Artagnan are forgotten. Daudet is not devoid of the life-giving force: Tartarin is a human fact, as is his British fellow, Mr. Pickwick; extravagant, undeniably, are both, almost unto caricature; but so are many fat, middle-aged cockneys and Gauls who entertain their club comrades and boardinghouse mates to-day. Pickwick and the Tarasconian are but two among many.

There are creations in our later literature: it is not wholly photography or portrait-painting with fine writing.

Mr. William Dean Howells's "realistic » men and women are rarely real; but Penelope, in "The Rise of Silas Lapham,” is entirely genuine. Richard Harding Davis is not in the main a sympathetic man, but he has moulded with the true maker's touch of feeling once at least; for Van Bibber is a creation. How often one hears visitors to New York exclaim, "Ah, look, that must be Van Bibber!" For they cannot think but that they will meet him some fine day, on the avenue or in the park.

Tess is flesh and blood - quite too much so to justify Mr. Thomas Hardy's appellation of her. We are beginning to think that if Mr. Hardy were merely to give us canvases for awhile it might be more wholesome for the general public.

Hall Caine has often created. Look merely at "The Bondman"; Red Jason moves with volition, and joys in the wild, free heart-beats of a strong man. Sunlocks is a beautiful, mild-eyed viking in his first appearance; yet this is only a handsome dummy that Caine mistakenly - though but momentarily - asks us to accept for the living hero. The hero is not long in stepping on the stage in propria persona; and, despite the floating yellow locks and limpid sea-blue eyes which seem to stamp him as of the mystical, mythical Norse age, one is not slow to perceive that his pulses leap from no machinery, but from the propulsion of bounding human blood.

ful, but perfectly lifeless work, and “Marcella," less scholarly but far more vivid and human.

What shall I say of Trilby, whose apotheosis might well make an honest critic quake before speaking? A year or two back, perhaps, I should not have dared say anything-very loud; but today I am not afraid, simply because I do believe that there are many others besides myself who have opened their eyes and peeped, and will support my brave heresy in declaring that there never was or will be any Trilby except the one whom Mr. Du Maurier put on canvas, with the gown of Sappho and the face of heaven's whitest angel. And we all looked and loved until we knew every beautiful line and tint; and then we shut our eyes and listened to the painter's eloquent voice while he persuaded us that this Trilby-angel breathed humanly, like ourselves, and walked on common earth, and sinned uncommon sins, but kept her seraph voice, and all the while still ex

haled seraph purity. The sweet cheating was made easier because he brought Taffy and the Laird to us; and they are veritable human beings. Ah, Mr. Du Maurier, but your art is so masterly! Why may we not go back to honesty and call it just art?

The self-exalted "realistic school" of this era claim to give us life always. Their stage-settings are very excellent, beyond a doubt; the best we have in the way of reproduction. But a fearless and frank looker-on must admit to himself that their actors are only dummies moved by dynamos and cunning springs. A cheap contrivance, this, for the stage of the novelist, and one that we hope to see go out of fashion with the waning century which gave it birth.

The subject has only remote limits: and out of it arises the kindred question of how far the subtle yet gaugeless difference between portraiture and creation must affect the quality of permanence in literature.

LEONORA BECK ELLIS.

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HE mighty Ottoman Empire, which at one time threatened the civilized world, sprung from a band of four hundred wandering Turkish families which, in the fourteenth century, journeyed westward from the upper streams of the Euphrates river through Asia Minor. The armed force of this band, whose leader was Ertoghrul, numbered four hundred and forty-four horsemen. This valiant band it was that succored Ala-ed-Din, the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, and his followers near Angora, where they were engaged with a Mongol army which was rapidly gaining the mastery. This small body of then unknown horsemen took the chivalrous resolve, charged desperately upon the conquering forces, and reversed the fortunes of the day. For this gallant service a principality in Asia Minor was bestowed upon Ertoghrul. Neschri, the Oriental historian, gives this as the first recorded achievement of that ramification of the Turkish race, which from Othman (Ertoghrul's son) has been known as the nation of the Ottoman Turks.

Ertoghrul served as a vassal and lieutenant under Ala-ed-Din, and it was not until after the death of both Ertoghrul

and Ala-ed-Din that Othman waged war as an independent monarch. He was a skilled leader and rapidly accumulated dominions and increased the strength of his armies; and, before his death, had conquered strongholds and fortresses as far as the Black Sea. Although he is considered the first Sultan of his race, he never assumed a more pretentious title than Emir.

It was during the reign of Othman's successor, Orchan, that an institution was inaugurated which did more than anything to establish the Ottoman power. Orchan's brother, Ala-ed-Din, in order to insure future successes, organized a corps of paid infantry, called Yaya or Piade, whose pay was high and whose pride and arrogance soon made Orchan apprehensive lest they would turn and smite down the hand that ruled them. In order to devise a check for these soldiers, Orchan took council with Ala-ed-Din and Kara Khalil Tschendereli, the latter being connected with the royal house by marriage. Kara Khalil, or Black Khalil (the epithet "Kara," meaning "black," is considered by the Turks to imply the highest degree of manly beauty when applied to a person),