What makes a nationality? Is it race, language, creed, climate, cookery, or any other of the important factors which give character to a social organism? Few questions are more commonly debated to-day, and in considering the answer the case of America is too often left out of sight. Yet no one looking straight at the facts can deny the existence of American nationality, which is in a sense the most potent of all, for none so readily assimilates alien elements. After a few years-so at least we are told, and with authority— the foreigner becomes an American. In England or France, even the children of immigrants grow up with a difference of which both they and their associates are conscious. One generation does not suffice to merge them into the type which results from the gradual evolution of instincts and temperament. We have, perhaps, indicated the reason why America can do what other countries fail in.

America,

as a nation, rests more than any other in the world on an idea-or if on a sentiment, then on the sentiment of allegiance to an idea. A man becomes an American when the ideas for which America stands have become part and parcel of his mental fabric, and this is

1 "Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India." London: Macmillan & Co., 1882.

2 "Doctor Claudius: A True Story." London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.

3 "To Leeward." London: Chapman & Hall, 1884.

4 "Paul Patoff." London: Macmillan & Co., 1887.

easily accomplished by the very nature of those ideas. A coherent theory of life and society expressed itself in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, and America's assimilating power is largely due to the creed of universal brotherhood, the cosmopolitan principle, which lay behind those elaborate formulations. Nationality must always imply a community of historic associations; and whoever is brought into contact with Americans finds them conceiving of their commonwealth as a vast society bound together from the first by faith in a common group of ideas. Nowhere else does intellectual agreement-the agreement of admiration-count for so much in nationality, nowhere does inherited temperament go for so little. From all this there follows the negative consequence that, of all civilized men, the American is the most readily cosmopolitan. In order to understand and sympathize he has less to divest himself of, because the very essence of his nationality consists in the practical affirmation of ideas which have no special local character. We can say, if we like, that Englishmen and Frenchmen inherit a culture, whereas Americans do not; or, with about equal truth, that

9 "Katharine Lauderdale." London: Macmillan & Co., 1894. 10 "Corleone." 1897.

London: Macmillan & Co.,

11 "In the Palace of the King." London: Macmillan & Co., 1900.

12 "Marietta: A Maid of Venice." London: Macmillan & Co., 1901.

13 "The Heart of Rome." London: Macmillan & Co. 1903.

14 "Soprano: A Portrait." London: Macmillan & Co., 1905.

15 "The Novel: What it is." London: Macmillan & Co., 1893.

16 "Gleanings from Venetian History." With 225 illustrations by Joseph Pennell. London: Macmillan & Co., 1905.

American nationality consists in principles, that of European peoples in prejudices. The resultant fact is, anyhow, that whereas the cosmopolitan Englishman is apt to have lost something the cosmopolitan American has almost always gained.

Contrast, for instance, Mr. Maurice Hewlett with the late Henry Harland. Without going the whole length of the saying, we may affirm boldly that Mr. Hewlett is "Italianate." He has read so much, seen so much, fallen in love with so much, of Italy, its history and its traditional character, that he comes to us always with a little of the air of the seventeenth-century traveller: fullblooded, strangely accoutred, with a certain defiance of the stay-at-home people in his intellectual deportment. Of course, his Italians are mediaval Italians, but they are desperately mediæval and desperately Italian. Now Mr. Harland, on the other hand, an American whose whole imagination is suffused and flushed with the beauty and charm of Italy, takes Italy and Italians, so to say, for granted. His way is not to accentuate their differences from Anglo-Saxons, but to concern himself with the common human interest: he is an easy gobetween, a kind of bridge between the two great racial camps. He can (and Mr. Henry James has the same talent) write a story of French life which gives one the illusion that it might have been written by a Frenchman: but the Englishman, however well he knows and loves his Paris, must always study the Parisians, as Thackeray did, for instance, deliberately from the outside.

But the most remarkable case of this racial versatility in Americans is certainly afforded by Mr. Marion Crawford. The readiest way to realize it is to call up a comparison between his romances and those of writers so popular and distinguished as the late Mr. Seton Merriman, or Mr. A. E. Mason,

or Mr. Anthony Hope. These men tell stories of adventure in Corsica, Spain, Balkan States, Morocco and other selected regions where adventure is held to be possible to-day; and their characters without exception exhibit in the most embarrassing circumstances the psychology of excellent English gentlemen; unless and when there is reason to emphasize a foreign point of view, and then it is foreign with a vengeance. But Mr. Crawford can write books which give us the sense of being transported absolutely into a foreign society, where every gesture and action and motive is somehow subtly different from what it would be among English speakers, though we should be puzzled to define the point of distinction. And again, his English people are other than his Americans, yet the difference is never emphasized. If he were able to produce this effect in dealing with Englishmen, Americans, and Italians, it would be sufficiently remarkable, yet the less so because Italy is his native country, and an American whose home is in Italy must necessarily see a good deal of English society. But the very best of all his books introduces neither Englishman, American, nor Italian, but deals with a little colony of Russians living and working in a German town. On the whole, it seems to us best to begin our discussion of Mr. Crawford's work by a detailed review of this very beautiful and characteristic little story, which he calls "A Cigarette-Maker's Romance."

The scene opens in the shop of Christian Fischelowitz, a Russian living in Munich; and with a severely logical method Mr. Crawford begins ab extra, with a halt at the shop window. Its most notable object is a large Vienna doll, inside which is concealed a clockwork mechanism; and the doll serves as an introduction to Fischelowitz and his wife Akulina, who are within the shop. The simple-minded South Rus

sian gets all the amusement he can out of this elaborate toy, which he accepted as security for a loan of fifty marks to a poor countryman; but Akulina glares at it from behind her counter, because it is a standing reminder of the wasted money, and still more, because the loan was made to oblige the Count. To meet the Count we are conducted still further, into the recesses of a dingy backshop where the other personages of this drama are busy making cigarettes. The Count is among them-one of five workers, of whom two are girls, employed in gumming the paper covers, while the Count and Dumnoff (a stray mujik) roll the tobacco and slip it into the made covers by means of a parchment tongue. Johann Schmidt, the Cossack, has the task of shredding the leaf. Mr. Crawford has the name of being a romancer, but there is no realist who can give you more skilfully and surely the details of an unfamiliar business; and with admirable brevity he conveys the shape and color of everything in that little workroom. He has the journalist's faculty of interesting himself in life at large, and he stops by the way to comment on the special delicacy of touch which a skilled tobacco-cutter, such as Schmidt, attains to. But at the same time he never fails to remember that the figures, and not the background, are what matter; and with a very dexterously introduced conversation he leads up to the Count, who is finishing his second thousand of cigarettes. It is a dull life, "an atrociously objectless existence," as the philosopher Schmidt observes. But the

Count, while admitting this, explains that its dulness matters the less to him, since next morning he will be far removed from it, and this day's work is merely a parting gift-a mark of his goodwill to Fischelowitz. This does not surprise the listeners, though they receive the announcement with varying emotions, and Vjera, the plain-faced

girl with the long red-brown hair, glances in entreaty at Dumnoff, who jests on the idea. Nor is Fischelowitz greatly surprised when he comes in to pay the hands, and the Count insists upon returning his wage of six marks. We, however, are left without an explanation of all this odd behavior; and the mystification is carefully maintained in the next scene, which passes in the street, where the Count, meeting Vjera, insists on the courtesy of carrying her basket. We know only that the Count really believes himself to be on the eve of recovering an immense fortune, and that so believing he asks the plain little girl to be his wife-not so much because he loves her, as because he thinks that he has given her ground for anticipation. For although a spring of the Count's action is left unexplained, he is presented from the first as a kind of modern Quixote-heroically and a little grotesquely punctilious. The measure of our admiration for Mr. Crawford is largely determined by his success in this character; it is no easy thing to draw a man ridiculous and yet also a noble gentleman. The Count, whose shiny frockcoat, miraculously preserved, is so vividly brought before us, is none the less presented in such wise that we recognize from the very first the need of his nature to act always up to the highest ideal it is aware of. And it is with a very fine perception that Mr. Crawford shows him visited for a moment with an apprehensive sense of duty to the position which he expects to resume. The passage shall be quoted at length, for it exhibits at its very best the vein of generalizing comment which occupies SO large a space in this author's writings:

There are strange elements to be found in all great cities among the colonies of strangers who make their dwellings therein. Brought together by trouble, they live in tolerance

among themselves, and none asks the other the fundamental question of upper society, "Whence art thou?"-nor does any make of his neighbor the inquiry which rises first to the lips of the man of action, "Whither goest thou?" They meet as the seaweed meets on the crest of the wave, of many colors from many distant depths, to intermingle for a time in the motion of the waters, to part company under the driving of the north wind, to be drifted at last, forgetful of each other, by tides and currents which wash the opposite ends of the earth. This is the life of the emigrant, of the exile, of the wanderer among men; the incongruous elements meet, have brief acquaintance and part, not to meet again. Who shall count the faces that the exile has known, the voices that have been familiar in his ear, the hands that have pressed his? In every land and in every city, he has met and talked with a score, with scores, with hundreds of men and women, all leading the more or less mysterious and uncertain life which has become his own by necessity or by choice. If he be an honest man and poor, a dozen trades have occupied his fingers in half a dozen capitals; if he be dishonest, a hundred forms and varieties of money-bringing dishonesty are sheathed like arrows in his quiver, to be shot unawares into the crowd of well-to-do and unsuspecting citizens on the borders of whose respectable society the adventurer warily picks his path.

It is rarely that two persons meet under such circumstances, between whom the bond of a real sympathy exists, and can develop into lasting friendship between man and man, or into true love betwen man and woman.

When both feel themselves approaching such a point they are also unconsciously returning to civilization, and with the civilizing influence arises the desire to ask the fatal question, "Whence art thou"-the fear lest the other may ask it, and the anxiety to find an answer when there is none that will bear scrutiny.

Yet the very anxiety as to Vjera's fitness for the station to which he invites

her makes the Count feel more than ever pledged, and he presses the girl, who makes no secret of her love. She persists in strange enigmatic refusal, and he asseverates assurances. "Tomorrow" his friends will arrive from Russia with all the papers: "To-morrow"-Wednesday. "Ah," the girl cries, "Wednesday-if only it could be Thursday!" And so we are led towards a new step in the history of thirty-six hours. But the step which must explain the Count's conduct is not yet taken, and much animated action has to pass before we accomplish it. After leaving Vjera, he strays mechanically through the streets, and a curious impulse brings him back to the place of his daily labor; for (Mr. Crawford generalizes again) "men begin to haunt certain spots unconsciously while they are alive." Entering in mere idleness, to pass the time of day with his employer, and craving, indeed, to speak with some one of the great deliverance which he feels so near, he encounters Akulina! and the shrewish woman tells him in language of voluble insult, that his pretensions are a mere delusion, that he is no Count, and has no prospect of wealth. Thus we approach the step, but the explanation is still deferred. Fischelowitz rebukes his wife's rudeness, and then, indeed, the vials of her wrath are unsealed, and the old grievance of the Vienna doll is stated with energy. The tobacconist, listening in silence, conceives the idea of a practical retort, and, taking down the puppet, he winds it up and sets it going on the counter. Akulina, in a sudden burst of rage, sends it flying, shattered, across the room; and then, angrier than ever, since the money is now irretrievably lost, upbraids the Count with responsibility for the whole train of misfortunes-the quarrel with her husband, the breaking of the toy, and the original loan to the plausible swindler, whom in truth he had introduced to

Fischelowitz.

There is a shadow of justice in this, and the upbraided man, when at last he can get a word in, takes the fatal object, pledging his word of honor that the fifty marks shall be repaid "before to-morrow night." Thus the doll is in his hands when he enters the little eating-house where his comrades, Schmidt and Dumnoff, have their meals; and fate ordains that the doll shall be recognized by a German shop-porter, from whom it had been stolen by the defaulting depositor. The result is a brawl (described with immense spirit) in which the mujik Dumnoff upsets several policemen, and is finally lodged with the Count in the police station. It is only then that the peasant's brutal frankness gives us the whole situation. "Are you really mad?" he asks. Everybody believes it, he goes on to explain, because every week the Count has these queer fits of believing himself rich-which begin on Tuesday night and only pass off on Thursday morning. For a moment the victim of this hallucination is stunned, but soon hope triumphs, and he satisfies himself by assuming that the mujik is exceedingly drunk. And upon that understanding they settle down to pass the night quietly enough.

But outside there is perturbation. Schmidt, the Cossack, sincerely attached as he is to the Count, has escaped and gone to seek Fischelowitz; and on a disclosure of his purpose is sent off on a wild-goose chase by the malevolent Akulina. Quite late at night, abandoning the search in theatres and cafés, he comes back to wait on the tobacconist's doorstep, and as he watches there under the stars far-off days rise up before him; and Mr. Crawford, turning from the streets of well-kept, well-disciplined Munich, which he has described in a few incidental phrases, proceeds to elaborate a picture of very different surroundings, apparently no less familiar to his eye:

The Cossack thought, as he often thought when alone in the night, of his long journeys on horseback, driving great flocks of bleating sheep over endless steppes and wolds, and expanses of pasture and meadow; he remembered the reddening of the sheep's woolly coats in the evening sun, the quick change from gold to gray as the sun went down, the slow transition from twilight to night, the uncertain gait of his weary beast as the darkness closed in, the soft sound of the sheep huddling together, the bark of his dog, the sudden leaping light of the camp-fire on the distant rising ground, the voices of greeting, the bubbling of the soup kettle, the grateful rest, the song of the wandering Tchunak-the pedlar and roving newsman of the Don.

She

That is only part of the passage, introduced not to help on the story, but to give what is so necessary in a tale, limited almost to the traditional unity of time the sense of time's passing. Time passes, and Schmidt finds himself not alone in the street. The girl Vjera is there too, on the same errand. has heard the news by chance, and now in her distress she makes no secret of her feelings. The two try to waken Fischelowitz, but, failing in this, wander dejectedly away. Schmidt offers to see Vjera home, and in the curious intimacy of their solitude in the city, and their common purpose, they discuss freely the Count's hallucination. Schmidt, the philosopher, is sure of a reality behind it, sure that a man so good and honest could not have invented a story out of nothing. Vjera has not reasoned. Only she has an instinctive feeling of a crisis then imminent, which takes the form of dread that the ignominy of confinement may bring on sheer lunacy. Schmidt reassures her, but one thing she insists on. It is that he shall take her to the police station that she may see for herself-and, as the man finds, that she may go down on her knees in the street and pray. The passion of the girl's