that Chile and Peru and Mexico may not

. . discover that they, too, have a moral sense which is capable of being outraged by oppression and injustice."*

As the weeks went by, American preparation took on the aspect of completeness. The naval militia was mobilised. Swift ocean steamers were chartered and equipped with modern guns.t Two protected cruisers, a gunboat_and two torpedo boats were bought in England. Of the regular naval force, a strong fleet had now assembled at Key West under Captain Sampson; a flying squadron under Commodore Schley lay at anchor in Hampton Roads; while a patrol squadron under Commodore Howell cruised in the vicinity of the northern sea-coast cities. In Asiatic waters, Commodore George Dewey collected at Hong Kong the ships under his command; and to him were despatched large quantities of ammunition on the cruiser Baltimore. More than fifteen hundred torpedoes and mines. placed in the principal harbours of American sea-coast cities. The Spanish War Office also displayed activity. A Spanish squadron was ordered to St. Vincent, and rumour said that another naval force was assembled at the Cape Verde Islands. The moment for decisive action had arrived. On April 11th, the President sent to Congress a special message in which, after a recapitulation of recent events, he asked that he be empowered

were

"The issue is now with the Congress. It is a solemn responsibility. I have exhausted every effort to relieve the intolerable condition of affairs which is at our doors. Prepared to execute every obligation imposed upon me by the Constitution and the law, I await your action."

To this message, Congress responded on the 19th,* by adopting a joint resolution declaring that the people of Cuba were, and of right ought to be, free and independent; authorising the President to demand that Spain relinquish her sovereignty over Cuba and withdraw her forces from that island; directing him to employ the army and navy to enforce this demand; and finally asserting, on the part of the United States, a determination to leave the government and control of Cuba to its people.

Pursuant to this mandate, the President caused to be cabled to General Woodford, American Minister to Spain, the text of an ultimatum. But already the Spanish Minister in Washington had demanded and received his passports, and had departed for Canada. Before General Woodford in Madrid could communicate with the Foreign Office, he received a note from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, informing him that diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain had already terminated. General Woodford thereupon left Madrid. Under very trying circumstances, he had borne himself with great dignity and circumspection. For a long while, he and his family had been subjected in Madrid to something like a social ostracism; yet he had made no sign, and had compelled the personal respect, both of the diplomatic corps and even of the Spanish officers of

state.

Events marched fast. The Queen Regent of Spain, attended by her son, the King-then a boy of twelve years-addressed the assembled Cortes in a speech animated by a noble yet pathetic courage;† and the people of her capital greeted her with frenzied cheers as she made eloquent

*The delay was due to a difference of opinion between the Senate and the House as to the wording of the joint resolution.

†Translation in Wilcox, A Short History of the War with Spain, pp. 87, 88. (New York, 1898.)

appeal to their loyalty. On the following day, Captain Sampson, now raised to the rank of acting Rear Admiral, was directed to blockade the coast of Cuba. The President, almost simultaneously, called by proclamation for 125,000 volunteers. Already detachments of regular troops were moving southward. Erelong they began to pitch their tents in Key West. On April 25th, Congress, by a unanimous. vote of both Houses, made a formal declaration of war.

It was with a feeling of relief that Americans received the tidings of this momentous step. At last the long expected hour had come. The nation entered upon the struggle à cœur léger. Curiously enough, there was expressed

hatred of the Spanish people. The war appeared to the multitude in the light of a romantic episode, a picturesque adventure. In the cities, at the theatres and restaurants, orchestras played patriotic airs, intermingling "The Star Spangled Banner" with the strains of "Dixie." Men and women leaped to their feet and sang the words. An air of buoyant gaiety pervaded every gathering. Once more the nation was truly and inseparably one, and patriotism was not only universal,-it was the fashion.

Far more remarkable was the manner in which the news was greeted in Great Britain. Within six hours after the cable had told the story, all gigantic London burst out into rainbow hues of the American national colours. Thousands of American flags floated from shops, hotels and private houses; while streamers of red, white and blue effected a brilliant contrast with the smoky hues of the metropolis. A great multitude of people assembled before the American Embassy, cheering heartily for the United States. No such demonstration in behalf of another country had ever been witnessed in the British capital. It banished forever from the hearts of all Americans who witnessed it the memory of other days, when the ties of blood and language had been almost sundered.

But history was already making. From Washington, on the preceding day, a brief despatch had flashed around the world to Commodore Dewey at Hong Kong:

"War has commenced between the United States and Spain. Proceed at once to the Philippine Islands. Commence operations at once, particularly against Spanish fleet. You must capture vessels or destroy. Use utmost endeavours."

UDYARD KIPLING, who has a special gift for packing away the substance of an essay within a single headline or title, has perhaps nowhere condensed a keener bit of literary criticism into three small words than when he named his volume of nonsense tales for very young children the Just So Stories. No one who has mastered the pleasant but difficult art of telling a bed-time story to the satisfaction of critical childhood, needs to have the meaning of that title explained-because no one could make a success of the bed-time story who did not know instinctively how to tell the tale "just so," with unvarying accuracy in the sequence of events, with scrupulous care in laying the stress at the crucial point, on the expected word or syllable. There is an obvious corollary to the thought in Mr. Kipling's title; namely, that the average story written for adult readers is not a Just So Story, because the average adult reader makes no such critical exactions. In nine cases out of ten, he will tell you that he does not care about style or method or literary creed, so long as a story is clearly told and holds his interest. The average reader, lacking the guidance of a child's instinct or a critic's training, does not realise how much the clearness and the interest of every story depend upon its verbal form and colour, the influence of certain sequences of syllables and sound tones on the brain.

In other words, every story of first magnitude, every story that is to justify its right to live, is in a certain broad, symbolic sense a Just So Story. There are a hundred ways of telling the simplest little episode; there should be just one way of telling it that would bring out all the possibilities it contains, accentuating every tremulous wave of light and shade. The hero is about to speak; he is at the author's mercy; he can be made to utter any words in the whole range of the language. There is just one

combination of words which a real man, in real life, would use under given conditions; and if the author succeeds in finding that combination and putting it into his hero's mouth, then he makes that hero live and play a man's part in the world; if he fails to find the combination, then he is simply making polite conversation for his stock company of puppets. It is only conversation that is written "just so" that makes you forget you are reading fiction and not reality.

Every now and again, we are told of some novelist who makes it his boast that he writes without corrections or erasures, whose manuscript is a model of neatness, whose first draft stands as the finished product. It may be possible, at rare intervals, that a page, a chapter, a book, struck off in the white heat of inspiration, proves to be a masterpiece. But this is not the method by which the great painters, the great sculptors, the great musicians, have produced works that live; and among the world's great books, it is the general rule that those live the longest which have been most faithfully worked over, and cut and polished. Who knows how many generations of Greek minstrels it needed, constantly revising and embellishing, to raise traditional folk songs to the dignity and symmetry of an Iliad?

But in insisting that a work of fiction is something to be toiled over and polished with the patience and lingering care that a sculptor bestows upon a block of marble, one means something more than the mere surface finish of smooth prose, an extra lustre to its contours of word and sentence. A story, to be written just so, depends upon something more vital than a question of vocabulary. Neither is the question altogether one of style, although that comes somewhat nearer. An author's style, like an actor's mannerisms, may in some instances be an actual handicap; it may be a highly cultured, impeccable style, from the academic point of view, and yet, for the very reason that it is so impeccable, ren

der him unable to achieve a certain rugged simplicity, without which a particular type of story never could give the effect of being unquestionably "just so." And yet style comes as near as any one word can come to defining that subtle something upon which the quality of a work of fiction depends, as a musical composition depends upon the key in which it is written.

It is probably not too much to say that more otherwise well-written stories have been marred by being pitched, so to speak, in the wrong key than from any other one cause. Many a simple, pathetic little tale, showing real insight into life and character, has been robbed of its effect by too much verbal embroidery, like a young girl robbed of her simplicity by an overweight of velvet and jewels. The inimitable quality of Verga's Sicilian sketches, Cavelleria Rusticana and the rest, is due to the rare self-restraint with which the author kept himself absolutely in the background, telling these fierce, primitive, elemental tragedies in the simple, picturesque speech of the peasantry themselves. The cadenced rhythm of a d'Annunzio, the cumulative force of a Zola, might have expanded these short sketches into volumes, but they would have lost something of that primitive tensity that entitles Verga's tales to be numbered among the Just So Stories of the world.

Yet Verga's method, wrongly applied, may easily spoil an otherwise well-constructed story. Imagine, for instance, a novel of aboriginal life, among the Indians, the Australians, the Congo negroes, by an author who knows their manner of life intimately-a novel built on epic lines, with a central drama of native romance, based on savage customs of love and marriage; and back of this, a big, vital, national problem, in the awakening of the race to a consciousness of their need of union against the encroachment of the white man, a dim perception that even now such union would come too late. Such a theme, if rightly handled, would make a strong, virile, unique story; but to attempt to tell such a story with a studied simplicity of diction, a style borrowed from the native folk-lore, and revealing the primitive

thoughts and limited vocabulary of an inferior race, would be not only to sacrifice the epic strength of such a theme, but to alienate our sympathies by emphasising the intellectual gulf that separates them from us.

It would be an interesting and not unprofitable experiment for every reader to run over in his mind the stories and novels to which he would personally feel inclined to apply the term Just So Story -stories with which he is so intimately acquainted and so well satisfied, just as they are, that he would not, if he could, make any change in their construction or wording. There would be some queer lists drawn up, on such a principle, no doubt, and an extensive weeding-out of many so-called classics. But the tonic effect of making such a list would be valuable, because it would result in a new mental attitude towards certain books, a redistribution of values. For once each reader would find himself judging fiction, not from any dogmatic belief that realism is better than romanticism, or a detective novel better than a ghost story, but on the simple, common-sense ground that, so far as we are individually concerned, the best story is the story to which we most frequently go back, to read over piecemeal or in its entirety, quite satisfied with it just as it is, and not caring in the least whether it is what dogmatic criticism has pronounced literature or not.

"The Mountain of Fears."

It is interesting in such a frame of mind to approach a book of the type of The Mountain of Fears, by Henry C. Rowland. One does not need to have served an apprenticeship in literary criticism to know that here is a volume of short stories of very uncommon quality, gruesome, no doubt, even repellent some of them, but of a sort that not half a dozen authors writing to-day in the English language could duplicate. They are full of the glamour of strange lands and peoples, a suggestion of sunshine and palm trees and tinkly temple bells that awakens the spirit of unrest latent in most men and some women. To some readers, no doubt, the substance of the stories themselves, dealing as they do with unwholesome, degenerate types of

men and women, will prove unpalatable. But the reader with a stronger mental digestion, who does not mind having his reading served up with high condiments, an oriental lavishness of seasoning, will find it unnecessary to weigh and analyse these eight stories critically, or to discover what is eminently true, that they have close kinship with Kipling, with Conrad, with Dawson's African Nights. He will be content to recognise that in this particular volume Mr. Rowland has revealed himself as one of the few writers who can tell a tale "just so" when he wants to do so. Yet it must be added that he has either acquired the art recently, or else he has wantonly. chosen not to do so in the past; for his earlier books have contained pages and chapters that made one wish some benevolent friend, with influence over him, had intervened and begged him not to do it. The stories all purport to be the adventures and and experiences of a certain Dr. Leyden, collector, traveller, hardheaded man of science, with a special fondness for psychological problems. The opening tale, which gives the book its title, is the most fantastic of the collection, and aside from the well-sustained note of creepiness, is the least interesting of them all. It describes the panic of fear which overcomes a party of three white men and a native girl in a mysterious valley in Papua, where they have gone in quest of gold. The cause may be narcotics in the strange vegetable growths that they eat; it may be evil spirits; it may be pure imagination; but the native girl dies, and the white men escape by the narrowest margin. It is when one turns to "Oil and Water," or "Two Savages," or "The Bamboula," that one finds Mr. Rowland at his best. The first of these is a study of the mulatto temperament. "Did you ever notice," asks Dr. Leyden, "how African blood is curdled by being mixed with Anglo-Saxon?" and he goes on to tell a story to illustrate how the black and white will no more mix than oil and water-how, in this specific case, the fate of an expedition was sealed by the cowardice of a mulatto, who one moment had the stolid courage of the German officer who begot him, and the next was

a shivering, grovelling, black human animal. "Two Savages" is too unsavoury a story to epitomise. It deals with queer racial admixtures and primitive passions. Its excuse is the masterly art with which the thing is told-an excuse which a condensed repetition would not have. But it is the story out of the whole book to which one should turn first. And next to this comes "The Bamboula," the burden of which is the rhythmic "tom, tom, tom," the beat of the primitive drum in the voodoo worship among the negroes of Haiti. The point of the story is how the call of that drum awakened an atavistic instinct in a strain of black blood diluted almost to whiteness; how a woman, to all intents and purposes pure French, forgot her breeding, her station, her dainty ways, and went out into the night, in dainty satin and lace, to a heathen orgy, in obedience to the call of the drum.

"Sons o' Men."

Another collection of curious, faraway, exotic tales with a touch of real distinction both in theme and treatment is Sons o Men, by G. B. Lancaster, whose chosen field is New Zealand and the neighbouring islands. Measured either academically or by the "just so" standard, they belong to a lower plane than Mr. Rowland's volume. One cannot unhesitatingly say that they are best just as they are, that they would not be improved by a little judicious pruning. But there are some strong stories among them, and especially "The Story of Wi," which fits in well with the problems of racial admixture and primitive psychology in which Mr. Rowland delights. Wi, when we first meet him, is “a piece of six-year-old Maori flesh, with the carriage of a conqueror, and the tongue. of a dissolute gutter-snipe, and the brown of the earth that bore him in his supple skin." The taming of Wi is like the taming of any passionate, primitive jungle beast; but Lane, the Englishman who adopts him, finally succeeds beyond his hopes, and Wi develops into a splendid young Hercules, with a veneer of AngloSaxon culture and Christian religion. Lane would have this educated young Maori, this domesticated human animal,