And thus we end where we began, with the perception that of all the displays of art the essay is the most indefinable, the most subtle, because it has no scheme, no programme. It does not set out to narrate or to prove; it has no dramatic purpose, no imaginative theme; its essence is a sympathetic self-revelation, just as in talk a man may speak frankly of his own experiences and feelings, and yet avoid any suspicion of egotism, if his confidences are designed to illustrate the thoughts of others rather than to provide a contrast and a self-glorification. The essayist gives rather than claims; he compares rather than parades. He is led by his interest in others to be interested in himself, and it is as a man rather than as an individual that he takes the stage. He must be surprised at the discoveries he makes about himself, rather than complacent; he must condone his own discrepancies rather than exult in them. 'One knocked,' says the old fable, 'at the Beloved's door, and cried "Open!" "Nay," said the Beloved, "I dare not open save to Love and God." But the voice said "Open then without fear, for I am both; I am thyself.”

LESLIE STEPHEN, EDITOR.

THE late Professor Maitland, whose 'Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen' must have been a source of pleasure and interest to numberless readers besides those who find in them the admirable and adequate presentment of a lost friend, says that Stephen 'did not think himself interesting,' and concludes that he would not have been in all respects a good autobiographer.' It is not, in truth, easy to imagine him writing his own memoirs; while it is easy enough to believe that a man so essentially reserved, sensitive, ironical and humorous would decline to make himself interesting to the world after the only fashion really open to autobiographers who aim at success. Probably, moreover, he was quite sincere in thinking that the men and women with whom he was brought into contact did not care to know much more about him than he, on his side, cared to reveal to them. As a fact, his very reticence, his frequent spells of absent-minded taciturnity, his mild air of intimating that trespassers would be prosecuted, were bound to stimulate, and did stimulate, the curiosity of the many contributors and others whom his avocation compelled him to meet. No one could help feeling that there must be a good deal behind the protecting screen of that grave, slightly distant manner. There was a great deal behind it, and nothing of it all that was not noble, kindly, and honest. 'I now,' says he, writing of his relinquishment of revealed religion, 'believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality, &c. I mean to live and die like a gentleman, if possible.' One likes to think that he carried out that very simple code of ethics to the letter.

Even if Leslie Stephen had been-as he certainly was notan ordinary man, he could not have been deemed so by one humble contributor to the CORNHILL MAGAZINE of his day. Who thinks of his former head-master as an ordinary man? I have been assured that Dr. Goodford and Dr. Balston at Eton were quite ordinary men, but nothing will ever make me believe it; nor would it be possible for me to lower my first editor from the pedestal upon which, in that character, I must needs contemplate him. A great many years ago it came into my head to write a short story which,

when completed, I despatched to the CORNHILL, confidently expecting the return of my venture within a short space of time. Instead, I received a letter, written in a tiny, cramped hand, which stated, to my great surprise and joy, that the editor thought well of the thing and would be glad to take it, subject to certain specified alterations. The alterations were, of course, made; I saw myself (not without tremors and a wholesome sense of ineptitude) in print; a second story was asked for; then a third. But it was not, I think, until more than a year later that there came a rather long letter, suggesting that I should try my hand at more ambitious work, and hinting at the possibility of room being found for a novel by me in the pages of the magazine for which I had already begun to conceive a quasi-filial affection. This, being signed in full 'L. Stephen,' revealed to me for the first time the identity of my editorial patron. That I was then very young must be my excuse for the effect that the disclosure produced upon me. Having been in my earlier years an enthusiastic, if wholly undistinguished, mountain-climber, the victor of the Schreckhorn and the Eiger Joch was to me, naturally, something of a hero-more of a hero, I daresay, than the author of Hours in a Library' or An Agnostic's Apology.' So I felt very proud. I well recollected to have had one brief glimpse of him in my boyhood—a gaunt, lanky figure, of whom, as he stalked out of the low-ceiled salle à manger of I forget what Alpine inn, somebody said 'That's Leslie Stephen.' Whereupon somebody else observed 'He's a parson, you know, though he don't look much like it.' With this little episode in mind, what must I needs do but sit down and indite a grateful acknowledgment to The Rev. L. Stephen'! It was scarcely felicitous, and when, after a day or two, the post brought me a rejoinder, addressed to 'The Rev. W. E. Norris,' I perceived, coldly shuddering, that I had committed a blunder. Inquiry enlightened me as to its nature; but I did not make matters worse by apologising; nor, beyond that gentle rebuke, did I hear any more of it from him.

When my first meeting with him took place, he had accepted a novel of mine which had duly made its appearance in the CORNHILL, and upon this and other subjects we had corresponded at some length; so, in complying with a request from him that I should call in Hyde Park Gate, I hardly felt that I was about to be confronted with a stranger. And indeed the tall, lean, stooping man, with ragged reddish beard, overhanging brows, and curiously luminous eyes, who held out his hand became - I despair of

explaining why or how-intimately known to me almost on the moment. I have often heard Stephen described as awe-inspiring, forbidding, repellent; I can only say that he never struck me as being anything of that sort. Shy myself, I recognised at once that he was more so; that he was, and could not help being, in some degree inarticulate; yet that he perfectly understood all that there was any need for him to understand. His quick comprehension and unexpressed sympathy never failed. I speak with a knowledge and grateful remembrance of both which are only so far relevant to the present attempt at an appreciation that I cannot think of him in any capacity as divested of either. With Stephen one could say or leave unsaid anything; he was always sure to understand. I saw him often afterwards, both in London and at the little house on the north coast of Cornwall where he made his summer home, and to look back upon such intercourse as I was permitted to have with him is to realise how solid and enduring a possession are happy retrospects to the elderly.

For the rest, as an editor, he was not indulgent. He himself was at infinite trouble over the discharge of his duties, and he did not mind calling upon his contributors to be equally painstaking. More than once he made me re-write whole chapters, and often I was required a little against the grain I must confess to strike out passages or incidents which he thought likely to jar upon the susceptibilities of his readers. One's tidy manuscripts used to come back scrawled all over with alterations and emendations in his diminutive script, which was not always over-legible. His own manuscripts were, I believe, the despair of the printers, who, after the manner of their kind, were wont to make sense of undecipherable words-sometimes with the oddest results. He once showed me a comic example of this in the proofs of a volume on Swift upon which he was then engaged. Swift had said that something or other was like beef without mustard,' and Stephen had added on the margin, by way of reference, in a letter to Arbuthnot.' The printer's reader who improved this footnote into or wine without nuts' deserved some credit for ingenuity.

Stephen's habit of scribbling marginal notes, whether in books or on papers, had, I think, taken such hold upon him that it was difficult for him to keep his hands off anybody's manuscript. Moreover, he had to consider those squeamish readers of his, even though he might not have formed a very high estimate of their average intelligence. The fear of Mrs. Grundy was ever before his eyes,

and this rendered him inexorable. I am sorry,' he wrote once, 'that you don't agree as to the excisions. Very likely you are right and I am wrong; but I must use my own judgment, such as it is.'

That his judgment in literary matters was a very fine and accurate one does not need to be said. Whether he was absolutely the right man in the right place as editor of a magazine may be open to question; he himself seemed to think that he was not. I never heard him actually say that the task of editorship bored him; his complaint was rather that he was conscious of inability to discern the shifting currents of public taste. But it is hard to doubt that he must have been more than a little bored at times by the close study which he thought it incumbent upon him to give to page after page of contemporary fiction. For my own part, I often felt ashamed that so much of his time and attention should be devoted to the loves of my Edwins and Angelinas. I have never been able to take these fictitious personages very seriously myself; but he did. In one sense, perhaps, everything in the world was serious to him; that is, he strongly held that, if a thing is to be done at all, it should be done as well as possible. It may be that he was less exacting with authors of greater eminence; but I am very sure that he published no line of their writings without careful perusal beforehand, for he never scamped or shirked his labours.

What will not, in any case, be denied is that the CORNHILL under Leslie Stephen's rule attained and kept an extremely high level of literary excellence. In what fine company the neophyte of those good old days discovered himself! George Meredith, Matthew Arnold, R. L. Stevenson, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy-to take, almost at random, half a dozen names from the list these were amongst his companions; some of them perchance, through benign fortune, to become numbered amongst his valued friends. The memory of having belonged, in no matter how unpretending a part, to that brilliant phalanx is a very solacing one in these changed times.

For the times, of course, have submitted to the universal, inevitable law of change, and the existing generation has developed predilections in literature which differ more or less widely from the predilections of a quarter of a century ago. Whether the taste of readers to-day shows improvement or deterioration, as compared with that of their predecessors, we need not discuss; what is certain

VOL. XXVIII.-NO. 163, N.S.

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