with two or three girls, giggling, and chatting as they loitered along, and once more I caught the fateful word garu. Them Miss Tomlinson admonished not to be so noisy, and to hasten on or they would be too late, and thereby unwittingly relieved my oppressed spirit. But throughout the service, I regret to say, I could not get rid of the consciousness that curious eyes were fixed on me; indeed I saw them whenever I looked up, and felt that the fame of my unlucky adventure must have spread throughout the Mission.

Mac left early next morning. I saw him off and said good-bye to Nell, who was being carried by his personal boy, one Manyua. I exhorted her to behave herself, and not bite Manyua, though knowing by sad experience how much effect I was likely to produce.

On the following morning I heard a violent scratching at my bedroom door. I sprang out of bed and opened it; there was Nell, splashed with mud and scratched with thorns, but vivacious and affectionate as ever. I groaned aloud. What was I to do with such a feckless, reckless, table-overthrowing, window-breaking brute, in a spotless, well-ordered house like this, with its scrupulously scrubbed floors and snowyrobed boys, and every climbing plant on the verandah trained to its right place by a quarter-inch? I threw on an overcoat and stole out guiltily; the sun was not yet up. I took her in my arms, holding her jaws with one hand, partly to silence her, partly to defeat her strenuous efforts at licking my face. I carried her down to Mac's deserted house and fastened her up in the back verandah, carefully testing the cord. Then I fetched her some water, and, discovering an early bird of a boy who looked good-natured, bribed him to feed her with maize-porridge so soon as his wife should have some ready, and so slunk back undetected to my chamber.

Several things made me nervous that day. The doctor talked of strychnined meat to be put out at night. There had been hyenas at the hen-roost, and a leopard was suspected of having made

away with one of the goats. Not having any dog or cat of their own they had no scruples about that kind of thing. And I was fond enough of Nell, spite of all that had come and gone, not to desire such a fate for her. I revolved the possibility of sending her after Mac, but found that no caravan was likely to leave for Chingomanji that week or the next. If I particularly wanted to send, I should have to engage at least twenty men, as it was just then supposed to be a dangerous road, and two or three could not be got to travel it alone. But if I had any commissions, said good Miss Tomlinson, why had I not sent yesterday, when Mr. Maclachan went? Why, indeed?

On the top of this came the news that my steamer had arrived, and that I should have to start early next morning if I wanted to catch her. I could not take Nell, and I could not leave her. What was to be done?

Then Providence intervened, in the shape of a visitor from the American mission on the other side of the hills. He was a queer but very amiable little man, who wore huge round spectacles, flannels, and a pith-helmet, and he had one great charm for me. He was just mourning the loss of his only dog, and his abode was overrun with rats. He became almost tearful as he described how they woke him up at night by gnawing his toes.

I made my offer at once. A letter of explanation would put matters right with Mac; he had not had time to get fondly attached to Nell, and could beg, buy, or adopt a dog as good as she, and better, any day and anywhere. while I was on my way to the river, Nell left Mangasanja in tow of the American evangelist.

So

I have since received a letter from that good man, in which he gives Nell the highest character. They have changed her name to Lady,-a most amazing misnomer, I should have thought. She never steals, is a splendid ratter, and the children are devoted to her and she to them. She must have undergone some phenomenal transfor

mation, unless the American Mission's standard of conduct, honor, and delicacy in dogs is something very different from mine.

There she remains, for aught I know, to this day, and I wish them joy of her and her reformation, whether brought about by means of the Elmira system or otherwise. And for myself, I am quite resigned by this time to the notion of surviving in Mangasanja tradition (if any memory of me yet remains there), as "the man who brought that awful dog to the Manse;" and in artless and still affectionately-remembered Nziza, as "the Mwini (master) of Nyell."

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From The Contemporary Review. BRAHMS AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION. The death of a great artist should affect us with something more than the sense of personal loss. It is doubtless natural that we should feel ourselves the poorer, that we should indulge in vain and unavailing regret, that we should mourn the glory parted and the generous hand now closed to us forever. But if our first thought be of our bereavement we are soon called from inaction by the march and progress of events; we see our leader still present in the work that he has done, and hear his voice in the orders that he has issued for our guidance. "Princes are mortal, the State is everlasting;" and we shall pay most honor to the dead if, when we think of him, we are roused to remember our citizenship.

It is true that the work of Brahms is still too near us for any certain or dogmatic estimate of its value. The perspective of criticism needs distance to focus its object; familiarity with a new method can only be attained after long and patient study. Indeed, it is a commonplace that contemporary judgment has usually been astray; Haydn was called extravagant and Mozart obscure, Beethoven censured for lack of form and Schubert for lack of melody; and though many of these

verdicts were due to sheer blindness and incapacity, there are yet some which can be partially excused by the circumstances of their delivery. Men who are in the heat of contest can take no dispassionate views of either comrades or opponents; amid the clash of arms there is little hope that reason should get a hearing. Indeed, as human nature stands, toleration is commonly a mark of deficient interest, and we are often inclined to administer Solon's law and disfranchise the doubter who stands aloof from his party. But, at the same time, the principle which Brahms maintained during the last half century is of such significance to the general development of the art that in whatever terms we appraise it we can hardly misunderstand its import. He was the last great representative of the classical tradition in German music, and it is by reference to that tradition that his work can most profitably be discussed.

Art may roughly be said to fulfil two main functions: the first that of communicating some emotional idea, the second that of exhibiting a mastery over some medium or material. By the one it appeals to our sympathy, by the other to our admiration; the former influences us chiefly by choice of theme, the latter chiefly by manner of treatment. The painter no more copies nature than the dramatist copies life: each finds in certain facts the opportunity for self-expression, and sets before us not a transcript of reality, but the impress which reality makes upon the conceptive temperament. music, where the empirical element hardly exists, we may note even more clearly the immediate response of personal feeling. It may be too subtle for analysis, it may elude our clumsy devices of terminology and classification, but it remains among the truest and most vivid experiences of human nature. Melody that is conceived and born of a living soul can stir our hearts as deeply as the passion of Juliet or the courage of Hotspur; it has its own aspects of humor and pathos, of serenity and agitation, and what it lacks in

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concrete presentment it more than compensates in the directness and concentration of its touch. But to regard this as constituting the character of the art is as grave an error as it would be to criticise a picture or a poem by sole reference to the subject with which it deals. Of far more importance is the question of treatment, the relation to some standard of absolute beauty, the development of a style, the gradual victory over a stubborn or difficult medium. Here we can advance to something further than a mere personal statement of likes and dislikes, here we can follow an intelligible method and apply an intelligible test. And not only is judgment easier on this side, it is also far more vauable. One would hardly ask a painter whether Diderot or Gautier were the better critic; and if in a representative art the difference be crucial, it is surely so in that which claims to be the type and standard of formal perfection.

This, then, explains the meaning of the term classical, as distinctively employed in musical history. A classical composer is one who pays the highest regard to his medium, who aims before all things at perfection of phrase and structure, whose ideal is simple beauty, and whose passion the love of style. By some unlucky chance the name seems to have been transferred from architecture at a time when English taste was at an ebb tide, and it is for this reason often supposed to carry some connotation of formalism and artificiality. But classical writing does not mean "correct" writing in the sense which Macaulay satirized. It includes many grades of rank and many types of character; the richness of Bach, the lucidity of Mozart, the magnificent strength and dignity of Beethoven; and a pedantic insistence on authoritative rule is not a mark of its true nature, but a symptom of one of its deadliest diseases. Nothing, there fore, is implied by the title as to the particular aspect of style in which the artist happens to be interested. If the interest is paramount, the work is so far on the side of the classics.

In contradistinction to this may be set the method of which an essential characteristic is the desire to communicate at all hazards a more or less definite emotional state. No one who had any feeling for propriety of language could call Wagner a classical composer. In his drama the music is never an end in itself, but is merely a cooperating element in the general stage effect. Its office is to heighten the speech of the actor, to intensify or explain the dramatic situation, to bring the audience into accord with the requirements of the scene. And neither by temperament nor by training was Wagner fitted to combine this ideal with that of pure artistic composition. His melody is not of the first order, his harmonic devices are comparatively few, even his polyphony is often forced and unnatural. At the theatre such things are of little importance; they count for no more than the stage conventions, from which no dramatist is altogether free, or the unconvincing properties which no manager troubles to discard. The centre of Wagner's art is the dramatic illusion, and the music, accessory to this, fulfils its whole office by the emotional illustration of the text. With Berlioz, again, we are listening not so much to a musician as to a poet who speaks in musical sound. His compositions are ostensibly designed to suggest images, pictures, scenes of actual occurrence; they are voluptuous, or stern, or grotesque, according to the theme with which they deal, but they seldom give us the delight which arises from the mere contemplation of a fine thing finely accomplished. Contrast, for a moment, the "Symphonie Fantastique" with any symphony of Beethoven. The difference is not only one of degree in achievement; it implies, in addition, a wide diversity of aim.

From this conclusion two results would seem to follow. First, that in classical music the range of emotion must be somewhat circumscribed, since not all things can be told in beautiful form. Extremes of passion, extremes of terror, which form the cli

max of the one school, lie outside the limits of the other; in it everything is chastened, modified, clothed with a certain dignity and reticence that would rather forego the appeal than make it in unseemly terms. Secondly, the muIsic which is based on emotional conception is never so distinguished as that which arises from the highest appreciation of style and treatment. Schumann, with all his genius, never let us forget that he "learned his counterpoint from Jean Paul." His art is always best when he can give free rein to his fancy; it weakens before the very obstacles for surmounting which distinction of style is most needed. The pianoforte concerto, for instance, is full of suggestion, but its workmanship looks coarse and clumsy beside Mozart's; the three string quartets have abundance of poetic charm, but now and again they sink into difficulties over which a less preoccupied musician would have triumphed. In short, compared with the great Viennese masters, Schumann seems almost like a highly cultivated amateur; he has been privileged to enrich the art, but theirs is the closer intimacy.

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And it was into their family that Brahms was born. By natural temper of mind he was a pure musician, chosen lover to whom art revealed her innermost secrets. In music, as in literature, there is a peculiar tact and instinct of style which, though it be difficult to define, is for all that a true and genuine gift. Not only are its possessors incapable of writing what is vulgar or commonplace, not only do they shrink unconsciously from cheapness or sensationalism or imposture, but in their own work the power is manifested by the witness of certain visible qualities, by a special texture, a special color, a special sense of design, which it is wholly impossible for the outsider to assume or imitate. A waltz of Schubert is as unmistakable as a lyric of Heine; it may consist of a single quatrain, a fugitive thought expressed in a few simple phrases, but there is something in the attitude, or the feeling, or the form of stanza,

which proclaims its divinity. And in like manner the lightest melody of Brahms, equally with his most elaborate exhibition of science, is elect of the inner sanctuary and is touched with fire from off the altar. Not, of course, that it all reaches the same level of beauty; there are distinctions in him as there are in Bach and Beethoven, but his poorest tune, his most learned piece of counterpoint, is inspired with that special kind of vitality which we find in the great classics, and which we do not find in the music, considered from the musical standpoint alone, of Wagner and the romantic composers.

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Again he belongs to his order not only by right of birth but by right of education. There is nothing in musical history more remarkable than the difference between the training old masters and that of the generation which succeeded them. Haydn worked sixteen hours a day with Fux' Gradus and the sonatas of Emmanuel Bach; Mozart, the quickest of pupils, was taken by a careful and exacting teacher through the most rigorous course of study that the age permitted; Beethoven spent his boyhood in almost overstrained labor, and at an age when many men would look upon their education as complete, set himself again to write themes for Haydn and counterpoint exercises for Albrechtsberger. But Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, can hardly be described as educated musicians at all. No doubt the first of them was technically at the Paris Conservatoire, but of his connection with it the less said the better. Liszt, as a young man, had little inclination to exchange the triumphs of the virtuoso for the drudgery of the student. Wagner was given up as incorrigible by two masters, and by the third sent out as a finished composer after six months. And even the musicians of this period who stand nearer to the classical line-such as Schumann and Chopin-are affected in some degree by the want of balance and completeness in their musical training. In their student days they were brought up on Bach's "Well-tem