all events, it is necessary that they should prove that their motives in connecting themselves with the district are good and sound. If they follow their business (hunting or shooting being, of course, indulgently recognized as a serious enough business for the ordinary purposes of life) in a proper manner, going their own way and letting other people go theirs, then they will be accepted in the district eventually as worthy inhabitants, who at least mean no harm; but if not, they will be scarcely tolerated. It should be understood that the newcomers are on probation-a probation imposed from below by persons who seldom undergo it themselves. It is a wholesome and stimulating condition this, that esteem, or even tolerance is not a purchasable commodity. The property may be bought at Tokenhouse Yard but the "goodwill" of the people does not go with it, and must be created afresh by each proprietor. The new proprietor may suppose that the respect of the people should be his at once, and that if it be withheld it is only a proof of boorishness; but his assumption-nay, presumption-is in vain. He may buy everything else, but he must earn that.

For the poor people of the country are undoubtedly suspicious. Before one begins to understand them one must recognize that this suspicion is not a want of manners so much as a natural protection. It is the open signal, for one thing, that the intimacy which is not easily bestowed is worth having. In theory a Fellow of a College is not verus socius till his year of probation is over, though readers of Sir Frederick Pollock's verses may remember that the new Fellow was held to have satisfied the necessary tests because the College cat displayed very

friendly feeings towards him. He had found a short cut and became "a verus socius, known to all," because "accepted by the cat." Country people in requiring a like probation before a newcomer can be regarded as verus socius no doubt have at the back of their minds a sense that they belong to a close corporation of a similar kind. We have heard of a lady who came to live in the "great house" in a certain district and was shocked at the manners of the people. The women did not curtesy-which was perhaps explicable, for the fashion dies out even where squires are thickest-but the men did not even touch their hats. She called their unreadiness to pay their respects sullenness and wilful rudeness. Never had she seen such manners! Her strictures, freely expressed, were passed from mouth to mouth, and it became impossible for her to create a "goodwill" in that district. A more sagacious invader would have understood that the process must be gradual. It is almost like the disagreeable process of entering a full railway carriage; you are looked upon with positive hostility till you have insisted on forcing your way into a seat, when after a few moments you understand that, by some tacit agreement, you have become part of the garrison which you are loyally and acceptably helping to keep out further intruders. Bacon has said that "suspicions are defects not in the heart but in the brain." If this truth were grasped there would be less resentment against the backwardness of poor people to meet generous advances. "There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little." Villagers are suspicious in more complicated as well as crasser ways than townspeople are; in towns the more romantic forms of suspicion, as they might be called, are dulled by exper1ence; they are worn away by attrition,

-in the process of rubbing shoulders with the multitude. There is more mystery in the thin populations of the country, perhaps, because there is more time for contemplation, for following clues to their conclusions without being disturbed. The lowing of a cow or the crowing of a cock is less distracting to an inefficient intellectual apparatus than the flashing sights of the streets or the roar of the motor'buses. The whole point, then, is that the newcomers must be known and understood before suspicion can be lulled. They may be bountiful and friendly from the beginning, but unless they are plainly understood they will be treated as the five little children and the "Quangle-wangle" who went round the world were treated by their relations when they returnedwith "affection mingled with contempt."

A counterpart of suspicion is secretiveness. If the villager or cottager had the easy habit of telling you all about himself, he would have already handed you the keys of his citadel. He knows better. He makes a mystery of which way he will vote at the election, not because he is more scrupulous than yourself in observing the theory of the ballot, but because to appear to keep his judgment in suspense is to acquire a sense of power. It is his secret, not yours, and it is a secret of some moment. Similarly, his wife opens a mere crack of the door when some one knocks, and holds the door so till she has examined the person, not because she is constitutionally inhospitable, but because the penetralia of her home are not for all eyes. The interior is her secret. Again, secretiveness prevents the countryman from revealing the exact degree of his pleasure or gratitude. If you offer him a job which it has long been his ambition to have, he says: "I don't mind obliging"; or if you invite him to eat or drink, he says: "I

don't mind if I do." No doubt all this merges in the just habit of remaining independent. Cobbett said that to be poor and independent is very nearly impossible. We think he was wrong. Anger, as some one has said, makes a man poor, yet it is obvious that anger is frequently indulged in on that condition. A laborer "throws up his job”— only too often-because he is offended or cannot refrain from the satisfaction of "having a go" at his employer. Another proof of independence among poor countrymen is that they are so far from expecting bounty from the rich that they are not easily persuaded that it is given free of all stipulations or motives. They suspect some kind of a deal. "Narthen for narthen," as they say in Essex, is a regular, almost a proverbial, principle of their life. Yet the poor may completely and unexpectedly surrender their hearts to the author of an act which is agreeable to some complicated and delicate section of their ethics. Mr. Kipling has perceived this, and makes use of the discovery in his new book in the deeply moving episode of the American lady who wins the admiration of the village by her vigil by the dead body of the old caretaker.

Just as Mr. Kipling fancies there is a law of the jungle, so there is a "law of the land,"-the "land," we mean, in the special sense of landed property. It is only natural that those who have long lived on the land, whether as employers or laborers, should understand that law, while the newcomers, who have not inherited the same experience, are completely baffled by it. It is an unexpressed, implicit law, and if you asked those who abide under it what it is, they would probably be unable to say; but its existence is proved because any of them would know by instinct when it had been transgressed. Townspeople who are never on the land, except to visit a hired "shoot." or

to spend Saturday to Monday in the houses of others, can hardly hope to get to the bottom of it. The phrase the country gentleman uses about "our people" may have a sound of undue proprietorship, but more often than not it embodies a triumphant fact,the existence of a complete polity in which there is mutual understanding and respect. After all, do not the country people say "our squire," "our parson," or even, maybe, "our Duke"? The intimacy and confidence, the absence of all suspicion and suspicious restraint, between the villagers and their employers in such a polity is one of the most valuable of the mutual social influences in English life. What a strange reflection that in these progressively democratic days so many of the rich newcomers to the land should be less democratic than the older owners! We have heard lately of the resentment of an old fell-side farmer in Cumberland at his treatment by some of the rich invaders, who were evidently very far from creating the "goodwill" which no doubt they desired. There was not a house in the The Spectator.

old days where he was not welcome to enjoy the universal license of a hunting morning, and have his breakfast by the side of the best in the county. To-day he has to wait till the more important friends of his nouveaux riches hosts have been regaled in the sanctity of their own society. In the same way, the old-fashioned landowner protably dislikes poaching every bit as much as the rich man who has bought the big place next door, but his concep tion of it is tempered by his knowledge of the "law of the land." To him it is, at all events, a very intelligible crime. On the whole, we fancy that the poor people of the country have more art in their life than their brothers in the towns. To feel what that art is, rather than to have its rules by rote, is the task before the rich invader. If be fails in the long run, he has himself missed the art of living in the country. He may play at the country life, like Marie Antoinette and her friends in their spick-and-span hamlet in the garden of the Petit Trianon, but this per formance will be the shadow and not the substance.

Novalis says in one of his writings that "character is fate." But if we trust the testimony of our own consciousness the reverse is the truer view, for we are unconscious of being dominated, in the myriad acts which sum up our destiny, by any power except that of our own essential being. The conviction is present to everyone that what he does and has done he must have done only because he is what he is. In this way character is a universal attribute, for no two men are alike; but in ordinary speech the term is applied only to certain individuals who stand further apart from the

"average" man, i.e. to men who resemble their fellows less than the great majority of men. So far the face value of the word character holds good; but in effect we use the term in a subtler fashion. In general we say men have character when they manifest inconsis tency in their actions, when they cannot easily be estimated, when they refuse to be reduced to exact and precise definition; and the common practice on examination proves to be based more deeply than at first sight apears. For character really means life-the fulness of life. Not the mere murmur of the brook on its way to the sea, calm

and peaceful, stirring no rocky bed with the roar of its strength, stirred by no troubled winds, gleaning nothing in its uneventful course. It is rather the impetuous mountain stream, waking echoes among the hills as it wends its impetuous way, bearing the flotsam and jetsam of many places.

It is not regular, orderly, and generic. Life only wins these attributes by the sacrifice of all its vigor. The subtle charm of character, the suggestion of unplumbed depths, comes from being fully awake to the multiplied in fluences around, receptive under all the varied experience which flows in and over and through our daily life. While life exists there can be no pause. Fresh experience is continually flowing in through the avenues of the mind, and the process of unifying and assimilating is, consequently, never complete. It is always several steps behind. The more fully alive a man is, the less is he able to keep pace with his experience. Obviously the perfect thing would be to be thus awake and receptive and able to cope with lights and sidelights and shadows as they come. to be able to assess them rightly and fit them into a broader synthesis. But from the nature of things this can never be. Α brave, unified, and coherent front may be preserved by shutting our eyes to many things, by a refusal to see the antinomian sides of life. Under the

play of these incompatibles a violent effort is necessary to complete assimilation, and it is thus that revolutions must have their place in the history of a man's, as of a nation's mental growth. Revolutions of this sort are akin to the crises in a fever, which mark not destruction but the casting forth or the dominating of destructive influences. They cast forth the noxious and venal elements, but gather to gether, in the throes of settlement, all that past healthful life has gleaned of strength or vigor. They are efforts to

assimilate and to be assimilated to the new truths while the old ones and those of yesterday are but in the anteroom of the mind. In time the sharp corners of the stones of the seashore are worn off by the wearing of one against another, and so the incompatibles of experience, crushed one against another, are at last woven into the texture of life.

Symmetry and uniformity are not the marks of any true life. Every living thing changes its shape continually. and this, in spiritual growth, is not the same as the growth of a youth to manhood. Physically men are of one spe

cies.

To a certain extent, we can predict what sort of man physically a given boy will develop into; but we cannot predict what he will do and think. Each man is mentally suae speciei-a species apart. Every second of conscious life brings food to his mind, which while he attempts to assimilate tends to develop him in one direction or another. Not that disorder is a note of Nature. Nature is obedient to law and order. But where order must be handmaid of experience. the unfailing flow of the latter renders it impossible that the work should be ever complete. Order, or rather the attempt to reduce to order, is one of the functions of mental life, but so also is docility to experience. And hence regularity and symmetry of development are generally the symptoms of the lifeless, of starvation or stuntedness, not by force of any inherent necessity, but because man is not an ideal but a real living and not perfect being.

Leonardo da Vinci describes the human soul as a "vague shadowing forth of infinite depths, a calmness suggesting unutterable passion, a being with certain surroundings, dwarfing everything around by perpetually recalling the superiority of the self-summed human soul." All this is more truly said of character, since it is the full

possession and expression of the soul! It is a "vague shadowing forth" since the images of all its surroundings are continually thrown upon it-one confused with another too rapidly succeeding. The depths are infinite. Each time we attempt to sum up and classify him who possesses this elusive quality we find that there is a certain residuum which is suggestive of further depths that remain unfathomed. We

feel that, at the last, we do not know him. These are deeps indeed, and infinite ones! Calmness and passion-incompatibles coming from the centre whose function it is to labor under the play of them-a token facing in opposite directions which, by this very fact, bears upon it the stamp of Nature's workshop, where trim classes exist not, where truths overlap and merge into. and seem to deny other truths, and all things can bear the opposite explanation. Calmness and passion! The calmness of unity and strength, and the passion of division and variety. The suggestion of passion without giving vent to it, self-possession and reserve force. It is magnificent to be capable of great passion, more magnificent to hold a power sufficient for its restraint. A being with certain surroundings, yet dwarfing all by recalling its superiority. Here we have returned to the sentiment with which we began, and fate becomes character.

Leonardo himself fully exemplifies his own description of the human soul, or that strenuous life of it which we have called character, for a dwarfed soul is commoner than a dwarfed body. Maker of songs and music and models from his earliest youth, setting captive birds free, delighting in curious draperies and fine horses, Leonardo would seem to fall into line as one of Nature's artists. Yet we find him, after winning fame in this pursuit, instructing a patron in the art of war, and, called to Milan to model a statue, travelling

as a harpist on an instrument weirdly fashioned in silver by his own hands. Two beacon stars lured him, the desire of knowledge and the desire of beauty; and, hence, he is now surrounded by his vials and furnaces, drinking in the curious lore of his day, now alchemist of color, contriving effects of wondrous beauty and grace. Anon we find him in the useful guise of chief engineer to Cæsar Borgia, and later, artificer of toys that seem alive, made from war and quicksilver. There seems no unity in his life, no stability; it runs through his fingers like the money he could never keep and the homestrings he could never hold. A strange bird of passage, full of the light and mystery of life, drinking at many and distant fountains, resting in many places, but rarely for long. Stray threads of his life he left in all he wrought, and his fascination with all he met; for men ultimately conquer and charm by character, and not by any gifts of intellect, however high, though commonly they go together, as in Leonardo.

Another example, in some respects better, of strongly marked character may be found in S. Augustine, whose Confessions are for all time a human document of priceless value, full of strange contradictions, such as his eager and unquestioning pursuits of things evil and his curiously overwrought remorse over the robbery of an orchard. He is unusually strongwilled, and yet he lives with a set whose actions he "ever did abhor.” The inconsistencies over the greater part of his life were the outward expression of warring and contradictory Impressions gleaned in his full and strenuous youth, and these he caught up into a broader synthesis towards the end; but the simplicity and trimness of his life was only obtained by schooling his senses to repression, by closing up the avenues of the soul to the thronging scents and sounds of the world's