MR. G. W. STEEVENS'S "THINGS SEEN." *

QUITE apart from the tragic circumstances of Mr. Steevens's death, the energy and versatility displayed in the aureum guinquennium which succeeded an exceptionally brilliant academic career, and the charm of his personality, the publication of these stray papers, edited by two intimate friends, is entirely justified by their intrinsic merits. Of G. W. Steevens it might truly be said, in the words of Schubert's epitaph, that he left behind " a rich treasure, but still fairer hopes," yet his accomplished work, even when designed to fulfil an ephemeral purpose, seldom lacked the qualities of expression and insight which give the reader pause, which.compel him to think and force him to remember. Mr. Steevens's academic achievements fairly entitled him to he considered a prodigy,—the list of his honours and medals, scholarships and classes, is enough to take one's breath away.. Yet once he had committed himself to the paths of journalism, he was never guilty of making the smallest parade of his scholarship. His powers of intel- lectual digestion were not less remarkable than those of assimilation. If he ever had any tendency towards priggishness, his early and complete plunge into the world of action purged him wholly of that taint, and those who knew him best in his later. years found him as modest as he was learned, and as fearless as he was sincere. His case, in fact, was very far from being that of an "unhappy doc- trinaire immersed in the intricacy of practice." But though his wide and accurate reading was never obtruded on his audience, it was often observable as an illuminative influence to those who cared to read between the lines ; to take only one example, his masterly analysis of the psycho- logy of lying as practised by the Greeks and Turks in his Blackwood article on " What Happened in Thessaly " is manifestly the work of one who had not merely " got up" his ethics for the schools, but tested Aristotle's deductions in the heat and.stress of an international collision. This, no doubt, is one reason why his journalistic work appealed to the few as well as the many. " He wrote," says Mr. Henley, "for a round. million, at least, of readers, and whatever he did for these was so well done that, when the million had found it

• Things Seen: Impressions of Men, Cities, and Books. By G. W. Steeren% Collected and Edited by G. S. Street, with a Memoir by W. E. Henley. London : W. Blackwood and Sons. fr.'s.)

good, he could appeal to the five thousand, or the five hundred, behind the million—even the five thousand or the five hundred who know—and count ou their plaudits also."

The special interest attaching to this collection of papers is that, with some few exceptions, they were, by the circum-

stances of their publication, originally addressed to the five thousand rather than the million, and have in them more of the finished literary quality and less of the impressionism than are to be found in most of his books. As an example of his method in the domain of belles lettres nothing could be better than the brilliant tour de force entitled "From the New Gibbon," in which he adapts the sonorous style of the historian of the Decline and Fall to a pessimistic survey

of the closing decade of the nineteenth century. We may quote a passage chosen at random :-

" The example of France, her secular enemy, emphasised the just complacency with which British seemed to regard her con- dition. The republic groaned under an alternation of license and tyranny ; the monarchy breathed freely in the reasonable acceptance of laws, enacted honestly for the general good and applied indifferently by judges of grave sacrosanctity. In her foreign relations France alternately intrigued and precipitately withdrew from the consequences of her duplicity ; Britain pursued her designs with unyielding tenacity, but in uninjurious silence. Unvexed by the conscription which weighed upon their neigh- bours, and secure in the protection of their invincible navy, the people affected the arts of peace, and received the accustomed reward of a single devotion."

As the writer borrows the mask and voice of another, it would be dangerous to go too far in assuming that be seriously entertained all the views which he has clothed in the sounding periods of Gibbon. But it is hard to avoid the con- viction that his denunciation of the vulgarity and corruption

of smart society and of mercenary athletics was seriously intended, and this conviction is confirmed by the tone of the paper on "The New Humanitarianism" which precedes it.

We have already spoken of the review of the Greco-Turkish War, in which the personal and moral equation of the con- tending races is solved with a sincerity which commands attention if it does not altogether carry conviction. Of the description of the "Monotype " we can only say that it is written with a perception of the semi-human aspect of modern machinery which reminds us by turns of Mr. Wells and Mr. Kipling. In the department of literary criticism we have three notable wets in a brief but caustic depreciation of Tennyson's " In Memoriam," in which the

canons that should govern the writing of elegiac or threnodic verse are formulated on lines which would con- demn Lycides—though here, again, the artificial standpoint

adopted may relieve the writer from the imputation that he means all he says—a eulogy, tempered with some adverse

criticism, of Zola, and a paper, to which much the same description can be applied, on Ibsen's Little Eyolf. Mr. Steevens's remarkable "visual grip," to quote Mr. Henley's apt phrase, is exhibited in a series of admirable papers on the Jubilee, of 1897, while the impact of Wagner's genius on a

sensitive though not strictly musical mind is vividly described in the account of a visit to Bayreuth in July, 1897. As a really wonderful specimen of the way in which Mr. Steevens

could revise the verdict of his eyes, we would specially single out the two papers on the Dreyfus case reprinted from Helper's and .Alaclure's, which should be read as a corrective to the largely impressionist letters contributed to the Daily Mail and subsequently published in book form. We have not space to deal in detail with any more of the papers in a deeply

interesting and suggestive volume. Very few pages in it could we wish away—unless it be the curiously savage in- dictment of "the futile Don "—but none fail to bring home the loss sustained by journalism and letters by the untimely taking-off of this alert and intrepid observer.

It may be noted that the volume, which forms the first of a " Memorial Edition" of the author's works, has for frontis- piece an admirable photogravure reproduction of Mr. John Collier's portrait of Mr. Steevens, and is dedicated by his widow to Mr. W. E. Henley, who contributes a short memoir,

to which is prefixed his fine in memoriam quatrain :— " We cheered you forth—brilliant and kind and brave. Under your country's triumphing flag you fell. It floats, true heart, over no dearer grave.

Brave and brilliant and kind, hail and farewell ! "