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tion here of making a figure; often she has nothing to say, she writes purely to give her extravagance an outlet. We have her here as though we had been present at one of those sparkling conversations which, in old days, used to send Grimm sleepless to his rooms, but of which nothing remained memorable, which in truth charmed by their vivacity rather than by wit-by that verve which so often supplies the place of brilliancy. This familiar note will appear in her letters to the Emperor Joseph; as unlike those addressed to Herod as the letters to Grimm are unlike those to Mme. Geoffrin or Voltaire. He was also des nôtres. She, who judged men in general poorly enough, though she used them incomparably well, not only recognized (unlike most of his contemporaries) but was fascinated by the element of greatness in that extraordinary man. She used him it is true, as she used Orlof and Patiomkin; her good fortune helped her as it did before, and will again; their great alliance against the Ottoman brought her everything, and him nothing. Still, no foreigner ever dazzled her as he, who could so little impose himself on his age. "He will live unrivalled," she wrote in her enthusiasm, "his star is in the ascendant, he will leave all Europe behind!" A wandering star, alas! He will go before her to the grave, the great failure of his generation, in the bitterness of death dictating that saddest of epitaphs, "Here lies one who never fulfilled an aim." Impar congressus! like Michelet's Charles the Bold, “il avait trop voulu, des choses infinies."

She was notable in her day for that vitality and "character" by which she absorbed to herself men so diverse as the histrionic, gigantesque Patiomkin, and the cold and calculating Grimm. They were her great endowments. Her buoyant enthusiasm, her huge self-confidence, her audacity and impetus seemed sometimes to enable men and carry them off their feet. Her gaiety was constitutional; but had it not been so, she would have been happy on principle. "Madame, il faut être gaie. Il

n'y a que cela qui fait qu'on surmonte tout." Her animal spirits were unfailing, though her sense of humor was incomplete. Her secretary brings her a dispatch; she doubles him up with it in the manner of the historic company at Angel's, and invites him by way of reparation to join her at blind-man'sbuff with her grand-children. SainteBeuve has praised her intellect, yet its chief characteristic was a superb common sense. She had read widely enough, but she had not the true passion for literature. Nuance, the delicate play of wit or imagination, were lost upon her. Her authors are Corneille first of all, and Plutarch, who just then was greatly in the mode at Paris, especially among women. But her sense sometimes carried her farther than others were carried by genius. "Que je plains, ces pauvres savans! ils n'osent jamais prononcer ces quatre mots, je ne sais pas, qui sont si commodes pour nous autres ignorans." The "let us dare to be ignorant," does not take us farther than that! All the world knows her speech about torture to the Moscow assembly-an excellent way of ending a sickly innocent, and of letting a stout rogue go free. Listen to her again: "Euler (whom she had settled at St. Petersburg) nous prédit la fin du monde pour le mois de juillet de l'année qui vient. Il fait venir tout exprès pour cela deux comètes, qui feront je ne sais quoi à Saturne, qui à son tour viendra nous détruire. Or, la grande-duchesse m'a dit de n'en rien croire, parce que les prophéties de l'Evangile et de l'Apocalypse ne sont pas encore remplies, et notamment l'Antéchrist n'est point venu, ni toutes les croyances réunies. Moi, à tout cela je réponds comme le barbier de Séville. Je dis à l'un: 'Dieu vous bénisse,' et à l'autre: 'Va te coucher!' et je vais mon train."

The arts were indifferent to her, and she was insensible to the simplicity of true greatness. She idolized a Zubof, but Kosciusko was immured at St. Petersburg till the day of her death, and she never even learnt his precise name, Yet she brought to society and politics

much of that protean activity which was the distinction of her teacher Voltaire in the field of letters. She did much for education, and something for Russian literature. She herself wrote, or collaborated in plays, whose performances the Holy Synod had to attend-and applaud-in a body. She also published translations, pamphlets, books for her grandchildren, a history of Russia to the fourteenth century, and even helped to edit a newspaper. Unlike Frederick, she did not despise the language of her country. She put her court to school, and at the "Hermitage" so many lines of Russian were learnt every day. But Radistchev said: "Fear and silence reign round Tsarkoë-Sielo. The silence of death is there, for there despotism has its abode." He received the knout and Siberia, because his words were true. She lived, as he said, remote from her people. Beggars were forbidden to enter Moscow, lest she should see them; but a rumor ran after her return from the South that Alexis Orlof led her into a barn where were laid out the bodies of all who had died of hunger on the day of her triumphal entry. Like Peter the Great, she even in some ways intensified serfdom. hundred and fifty thousand "peasants of the Crown" were handed over by her as serfs to her lovers. Their proprietors could send them with hard labor to Siberia; they could give them fifteen thousand blows for a trifling offence; a Saltykof tortured seventy-five to death. Sed ignoti perierunt mortibus illi! their day will come, but not yet.

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This is not the place to describe the campaigns of Rumiantsof, Patiomkin, and the rest, against Sweden and the Ottomans. Her own ideas in the field of foreign policy we have already seen. After the Revolution another policy, that of spurring on Gustavus and the Western powers to a crusade against France, takes the first place. It gave them something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she "wanted elbow-room." The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious for "elbow-room." Schemes of the kind were common enough in the

eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by every one else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times of trouble and sickness. And John Sobieski had foretold the doom of Poland a hundred years before. But it remains a blot upon her name. For her final fate overtook Poland not, as is commonly said, because of her internal anarchy (sedulously fostered by the foreign powers), but because that anarchy seemed about to disappear. The spirit of reform had penetrated to Warsaw, and after the Constitution of May 3rd Catharine was afraid of a revival of the national forces similar to that which had followed the reforms of 1772 in her neighbor Sweden. She was aided by traitors from within, a'quali era più cara la servitù che la liberta della loro patria; and on the field of Maciejovitsy they were able to cry, "Finis Poloniæ!" No question has been more obscured. The fashion of liberal thought has changed, the history, like that of town and gown, has been written by the victorious aggressors, and Poland is become the rendezvous of the political sophistries, as it has been the cockpit of the political ruffianism, of all Europe. But Catharine could boast that she had pushed the frontiers of Russia farther than any sovereign since Ivan the Terrible. "I came to Russia a poor girl. Russia has dowered me richly, but I have paid her back with Azof, the Crimea, and the Ukraine."

There remains the side of her which attracted Byron, and which no one has failed to seize. The beginnings of her moral descent are there before us in the memoirs; ennui and solitude weighed upon her; and as she gained greater liberty she sought distractions which, at first, were harmless. The third stage was the infamous command of the empress, the grand duke and she have no children; the succession must be secured. If Soltykof, as Catharine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanofs only in name.1 From this point till her death

1 But there is a distinct resemblance between

in 1796, she entirely ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the family. In the succession of her "lovers" only Patiomkin, and for a moment Gregory Orlof, acquired a position of the first political importance; and Patiomkin's was maintained long after his first relation had come to an end. It has been ascribed to her as a merit that she pensioned these worthies handsomely, instead of dealing with them after the manner of Christina of Sweden; and that she was able to make passion, which has lost others, coincident with her calculated selfinterest. Certainly she entered, a child, into a society "rotten before it was ripe." She was surrounded with a court long demoralized by a succession of drunken and dissolute czarinas, which aped the corruption of Versailles more consummately than its refinement. The age was that of Louis XV., of Lord Sandwich, of Augustus the Strong; in it even a Burke had persuaded himself that "vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." The reader of Bayle and Brantôme had been introduced to a bizarre sort of morality; her "spiritual father," Voltaire, was the author of "La Pucelle," and "Jacques le Fataliste" proceeded from the same pen as the "University for Russia." Diderot, indeed, whose moral obscenity was not the whole of the man, but was. nevertheless, sincere and from the centre, was able to compliment her on her freedom from "the decencies and virtues, the worn-out rags of her sex." She had no fund of theoretical cynicism on such matters, nor, on the other hand, the slightest moral pretence. The revolutionary Moniteur branded her as Messalina. "Cela ne regarde que moi," she said haughtily, and the sheet circulated throughout the empire. Such is the summary of the gallons of printers' ink that have soiled paper on this account. It is the aspect of her allowed to escape no one, and therefore

the portraits of Peter III. and Paul I.; a resemblance stronger still in Paul's eccentric policy, temperment, and miserable end.

we say no more of it here. How easy it is to "hint and chuckle and grin" with the "chroniques scandaleuses!" easier still to be incontinent of one's moral indignation. The truth is that this backstair gossip misses, on the whole, that just proportion necessary if you would not only see but also perceive. Catharine, whom her generation called "the Great," had one absorbing passion; it was the greatness of Russia, and of herself as ruler of Russia-"mon petit ménage," as she would call it, with her touch of lightness-and she desired to be the first amateur of "la grande politique" in Europe.

"Elle brillait surtout par le caractère," says Waliszewski, whose volumes, collecting most of what is known about Catharine, I have freely consulted. It is only natural that her biographer should regard her as a strikingly complex and exceptional being. "Nous sommes tous des exceptions." Yet she is not essentially different from the "woman of character" you may meet in every street. Given her splendid physical constitution there is nothing prodigious about her except her good fortune in every crisis and important action of her career. In one of his Napoleonic fits of incoherence, Patiomkin said vividly enough that the empress and himself were "the spoilt children of God." For herself, she says in that introductory page, which SainteBeuve has well compared with Machiavelli, that what commonly passes for good fortune is in reality the result of natural qualities and conduct. If that satisfies, it is so much to her credit. Certainly, "the stars connived" with her from the day in 1762 when she galloped in her cuirassier's uniform through the streets of St. Petersburg. "Toute la politique," she said, "est fondée sur trois mots, circonstances, conjectures et conjonctures;" and like many leaders of action she was in her moments a fatalist, for then she saw how little, after all, the greatest, as Bismarck says, can control events.

W. KNOX JOHNSON.

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From The Contemporary Review. MR. BARRIE'S "SENTIMENTAL TOMMY."

A CAUSERIE.

Matrimony by advertisement is popularly supposed to lack glamour; and I feel a reasonable shyness in confessing that my introduction to the most romantic of all literary loves was brought about by a press cutting agency. Sometime in the winter of 1887-88 I received a parcel of cuttings, which included one from the St. James's Gazette, entitled "Meade Primus to his Proud Parent." The reader will find something very much like it by turning to chap. xx. of his copy of "My Lady Nicotine," by J. M. Barrie. At this time, however, and for a year or two after, I did not know the author's name; I only knew that this man's humor differed in a subtle way from other men's humor, and hoped that when next he set forth to write about boys I might be there to read.

A year or two after it became a fairly common experience of mine to find myself waiting for a few minutes in a certain publisher's room. In the bookcase stood a copy of "When a Man's Single," published in the autumn of 1888. By this time Mr. Barrie's name was beginning to be noised abroad, and I took down the volume with curiosity. The copy belonged, or had belonged, to an eminent novelist, who had passed it on to the publisher, no doubt with the kindly purpose of calling his attention to the work of this young man. I wonder how often I began to read that book. "One still Saturday afternoon, some years ago, a child pulled herself through a small window into a kitchen in the Kirk Wynd of Thrums.

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It grew to a point of honor to begin at the very beginning, and always the interruption came before I reached the end of chap. ii. Months passed, and I read the "Auld Licht Idylls" and "A Window in Thrums" and underwent their spell, but still without guessing that this master of our hearts, the creator of Jess and Leeby and the wonderful world of Thrums, was also the writer who had tickled my lungs with the economics of Meade Primus. The

first glimmer of enlightenment came at length with a determined perusal of the book which had baffled me so often, and was confirmed in April, 1890, by "My Lady Nicotine."

Now concerning "Sentimental Tommy," Mr. Barrie's latest book, and (as many will hold) his masterpiece, three very obvious remarks may be made at the outset. The first is, that Mr. Barrie now for the first time turns to serious purpose that queer knowledge of the humors of childhood which he formerly in the case of Meade Primus, for exThe secample-wasted upon trifles. ond is, that he concurrently raises what one may call the Thrums note to the n'th power. I cannot offer to define that note exactly, but love of home will be found in it, and of the hearth, and of the worn faces of kinsfolk, and of all things homely; and a sense of tears and of the heroism of obscure lives; and an exile's regret, lingering upon trifles; and the smile of one who knows better, and the sigh of one who knows better still. Let it suffice that you all recognize what so many have imitated of late. And let it be hoped that after reading "Sentimental Tommy" you will all recognize the imitations for what they are. For even the pathos of the last chapter of "A Window in Thrums" did not reach the emotional intensity of Jean Myles's last message to Aaron Latta, or of her last Hogmanay, or of Aaron's last look up at his old love, or of Grizel's "straiking" of her mother the Painted Lady. You may contend that this pathos is almost intolerably poignant and altogether too frequent, and that by reason of it the masterpiece now and then comes dangerously near to resembling a tour de force. But you cannot deny that in this book, for good or ill, Mr. Barrie has allowed his genius the fullest expression of its own individual quality, and has drawn notes unapproachable and inimitable from the very strings which his imitators selected for their experiments in "thrumming."

And in the third place (though this observation is really implied in the foregoing one), "Sentimental Tommy"

must be recognized as a book of genius before the critic falls to work upon it with line and measure, and that recognition must qualify your acceptance of the critic's measurements and conclusions. It seems a hard thing to say: but it is the postulate, nevertheless. The critic cannot undertake to explain genius or say in what it consists. But it exists so evidently in "Sentimental Tommy" as almost to encourage a hope that time and popularity may waft it into the ken even of those who make speeches about Literature at public feasts when her health is toasted immediately after that of the Reserve Forces. In theory nothing could be better than our custom of entrusting this toast to a gentleman whose good will towards Literature stands above suspicion of personal interest, and associating it with the name of another gentleman who has a capital memory for funerals. But in practice these orators too constantly invest their theme with a pathological interest unsuited to the occasion; they come to bury Literature, not to praise her; they tell us not of her health, but of her last hours. "Answer me," demands A, "what has happened to literature of late? Where are the giants?" And B responds, "Literature is moribund; and of giants I am sorry to report a total dearth. I myself have had the privilege of escorting as pall-bearer, the last five or six to their resting-place." We cannot hope that the genius which so evidently lends its own distinction to page after page of Mr. Barrie's novel will persuade these sad augurs to mock their own presage, or even to look at each other with an awed surmise, silent; but it may induce a shadow of distrust upon their too hasty assumption that the Sacred Choir began to droop at the exact moment when A embraced a professional career; and died, and were buried, one by one, in the coffins of B's distinguished friends. Speaking merely as a hack whose business constrains him to take the elementary trouble of reading the literature on which he discourses, I must timidly confess to having detected, or believed

myself to detect, signs of genius in as many as three writers among our younger living novelists-in Miss Schreiner, Mr. Kipling, and Mr. Barrie. I would add the name of Mr. John Davidson, who has genius and writes novels now and then; but his novels are not novels of genius, and he seems to have followed prose fiction, as Saul followed asses, on his way to find a kingdom.

To come to the book-"Sentimental Tommy" is, first of all, a study of what we call the "artistic temperament;" and the owner of this temperament is exhibited to us a boy, by parentage a lowland Scot, and but little, if at all, above the peasant class. The reader's lips at once hesitate over an august name. Is it can it be-that Mr. Barrie's mind dwelt on Robert Burns as he drew the portrait? To be frank, I do not know. Let us first examine this Tommy, and remember meanwhile that Thrums is not in Ayrshire. Tommy is the son of one Jean Myles, who abandoned her disgraced lover, Aaron Latta, to marry a fascinating rascal named Magerful (Masterful) Tom; and she married, not because she loved, but because he fascinated and mastered her. The scandal of the circumstances drove her from her native Thrums to London, where her two children, Tommy and Elspeth, were born, the latter after Magerful Tom's death had brought release from his brutalities. The story opens with Elspeth's birth, and we find the mother in a London attic, working hard for daily bread, wearying for the northern home that has cast her forth, hiding from the Thrums folk who are her fellow-exiles in London, but writing home magnificent accounts of a wholly fictitious prosperity, even while to her children she paints Thrums in all the colors of fairyland, colors which are intensified and made more fairylike by Tommy's imaginative young brain. But the shadow of death already lies on the mother; and before dying she must speak, if only to secure provision for her young children. She sends a mes sage to be delivered to her old sweet

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