crowd, which scattered right and left before the wild onslaught; but he saw the flash of steel, and knew that it was too late. The old man, with an oath and a gasp of pain, sank against the wall with the blood trickling through the fingers clasped against his breast. Conyngham would have reined in, but Concepcion on his heels gave the charger a cut with his heavy whip that made him bound forward, and would have unseated a short-stirruped rider. "Go on!" cried the Spaniard; "it is no business of ours. The police are behind." And Conyngham, remembering the letter in his pocket, rode on without looking back. In the day of which the present narrative treats the streets of Xeres were but ill-paved, and the dust lay on them to the depth of many inches, serving to deaden the sound of footsteps and facilitate the commission of such deeds of violence as were at this time of daily occurrence in Spain. Riding on at random Conyngham and his companion soon lost their way in the narrow streets, and were able to satisfy themselves that none had followed them. Here, in a quiet alley, Conyngham read again the address of the letter of which he earnestly desired to rid himself without more ado. travelling and an empty stomach, it kills one." "When I have delivered my letter," replied Conyngham, "we shall eat with a lighter heart." Concepcion went away in a pessimistic humor. He was one of those men who are brave enough on good wine and victuals, but lack the stamina to fight when hungry. He returned presently with the required information. The Plaza de Cadiz was, it appeared, quite close. Indeed, the town of Xeres is not large, though the intricacies of its narrow streets may well puzzle a newcomer. No. 84 was the house of the barber, and on his first floor lived Colonel Monreal, a retired veteran who had fought with the English against Napoleon's armies. During his servant's absence Conyngham had written a short note in French, conveying in terms which she would understand the news that Julia Barenna doubtless awaited with impatience— namely, that her letter had been delivered to him whose address it bore. "I have ordered your cocida and some good wine," he said to Concepcion. "Your horse also is feeding. Make good use of your time, for when I return I shall want you to take the road again at once. You must make ten It was addressed to Colonel Monreal, miles before sleep to-night, and then an at No. 84 Plaza de Cadiz. "Let his excellency stay here and drink a glass of wine at this venta," said Concepcion. "Alone, I shall be able to get information without attracting attention. And then in the name of the saints let us shake the dust of Xeres off our feet. The first thing we see is steel, and I do not like it. I have a wife in Algeciras, to whom I am much attached, and I am afraid-yes, afraid. A gentleman need never hesitate to say so." He shook his head forebodingly as he loosened his girths and called for water for the horses. "I could eat a cocida," he went on, sniffing the odors of a neighboring kitchen, "with plenty of onions and all the mutton as becomes the springtime, young and tender. Dios! this quick early start in the morning." "For where, señor?" Concepcion shrugged his shoulders. His life had been spent upon the road, his wardrobe since childhood had been contained in a saddle-bag, and Spaniards, above all people, have the curse of Ishmael. They are a homeless race, and lay them down to sleep when fatigue overtakes them under a tree or in the shade of a stone wall. It often happened that a worker in the fields will content himself with the lee side of a haystack for his resting-place. when his home is only a few hundred yards up the mountain-side. "And his excellency?" inquired Concepcion. "I shall sleep here to-night and proceed to Madrid to-morrow by way of Cordova, where I will wait for you. I have a letter here which you must deliver to the Señorita Barenna, at Ronda, without the knowledge of any one. It will be well that neither General Vincente nor any other who knows you should catch sight of you in the streets of Ronda." fully undertook to carry out his master's instructions. In little more than half an hour he was in the saddle again, and waved an airy adieu to Conyngham as he passed under the swinging oillamps that hung at the corner of the. street. It was yet early in the evening, and Concepcion nodded his head with Conyngham, having dined, set out to much philosophy. "Ah! these women," he said, turning to the steaming dish of mutton and vegetables, which is almost universal in the South, "these women, what shoe leather they cost us!" Leaving his servant thus profitably employed, Conyngham set out to find the barber's shop in the Plaza de Cadiz. This he did without difficulty, but on informing himself at the door of Colonel Monreal's apartment learnt that that gentleman was out. "But," added the servant, "the colonel is a man of regular habits. He will return within the next fifteen minutes, for he dines at five." Conyngham paused. He had no desire to make Colonel Monreal's acquaintance; indeed, preferred to remain without it, for he rightly judged that Señor Larralde was engaged in affairs best left alone. "I have a letter for the colonel," he said to the servant, a man of stupid countenance. "I will place it here upon his table, and can, no doubt, trust you to see that he gets it." "That you can, excellency," replied the man, with a palm already half extended to receive a gratuity. "If the colonel fails to receive the letter I shall certainly know it," said Conyngham, stumbling down the dark staircase and well pleased to have accomplished his mission. He returned with all speed to the inn in the quiet alley, where he had elected to pass the night, and found Concepcion still at table. "In half an hour I take the road," said the Spaniard; "the time for a cup of coffee, and I am ready to ride all night." Having eaten, Concepcion was in a better frame of mind, and now cheer explore the streets of Xeres, which were quiet enough now, as the cafés were gayer and safer than the gloomy thoroughfares. where a foe might be in every doorway. In the market place, between rows of booths and tents, a dense crowd walked backward and forward, with that steady sense of promenading which the Spaniard understands above all other men. The dealers in colored handkerchiefs from Barcelona or mantillas from Seville were driving a great trade, and the majority of them had long since shouted themselves hoarse. A few quack dentists were operating upon their victims under the friendly covert of a big drum and a bassoon. Dealers in wonderful drugs and herbs were haranguing the crowd, easily gaining the attention of the simple peasants by handling a live snake or a crocodile, which they allowed to crawl upon their shoulders. Conyngham mingled in the crowd. which was orderly enough, and amused himself by noting the credulity of the country folk, until his attention was attracted by a solemn procession passing up the market-place behind the tents. He inquired of a bystander what this might be. "It is the police carrying to his appartement the body of Colonel Monreal, who was murdered this afternoon in the Plaza Major," was the answer. Conyngham made his way between two tents to the deserted side of the market-place, and running past the procession, reached the barber's shop before it. In answer to his summons a girl came to the door of the colonel's appartement. She was weeping and moaning in great mental distress. was in disorder, and no letter lay upon action against formalism which in rethe table. "It is," sobbed the girl, “my husband, who, having heard that the good colonel had been murdered, stole all his valuables and papers, and has run away from me." From The Quarterly Review. FATHERS OF LITERARY IMPRESSIONISM IN ENGLAND. ligion was evidenced by Wesley, in painting by Romney and Gainsborough. In the present essay we shall content ourselves with the examples of Doctor Donne, of Sterne, and of Keats as the lineal fathers of our literary impressionism. We have mentioned the Renaissance, and in this regard some explanatory comments are needed, for its spirit was not, as is often hastily assumed, a pure revival of Hellenic and Latin influence. To present an action ancestral or mythical, in language heightened yet restrained, was the scope of classical epic and drama; even their lyrical poetry-that offspring of moodsproved, for the Greek and Roman, definite and unsentimental. Their music Impressionism is a word, to repeat the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, "in the air" just now. In every department of art we hear of the "Impressionist." There is impressionist music, there are impressionist pictures, there is impressionist literature, even impressionist shunned what Plato called "mixed criticism. Dilettantes and culturemongers in their hosts belaud impressionism as an æsthetic revolution; but very few seem to know what they really mean by the term. The aim, we take it, of an impressionist is to excite or recall an emotion or a set of emotions more or less familiar to his public. His appeal is to experience, his medium is the feelings, his method a style of suggestion rather than of representation. "Tones" and "values" in a painting; the leit motif in music; in literature, words grouped and chosen not so much for their graphic accuracy as for their pregnant though sometimes vague associations, are examples of this method-one, moreover, often appreciated for its nuances by its devotees, quite apart from its reasonable effects on the ordinary mind. That such a method has its peculiar fitness we should be the last to deny; but when it is claimed that the whole domain of art is a province of the emotions, it is difficult to be serious; the pretensions, moreover, of modern impressionism to novelty are absolutely unfounded. There were impressionists in the later days of Elizabeth, and, again, impressionists when George III. was king. The first were the outcome of Renaissance riot and Italian influence; the second were part of that re modes." Sadness was sadness, and joy, joy, to be appropriately expressed; and in reading them the modern feels that they are plain studies in the general grief or gladness; a certain stiffness and stateliness indeed clings to them all; the individual note is, in the main, missing; they treat the mass rather than the segment; their passions are not violent; petulance is no factor in their pathos; perplexity is absent from their musings. Catullus himself, the least classical of the classics-with his strong sense of sunny life ever veering towards the absolute gloom of the grave-never discloses undercurrents or backwaters in his transparent ripples of verse. Lesbia's sparrow is dead; Lesbia weeps; there's an end. Let Lesbia and the poet live and love together, for the night cometh when no man can live or love. Everywhere, even in his least effusions, there is finality—a distinct statement with what we should now describe as "a moral"-no attempts at hinting things "that do often lie too deep for tears;" still less any endeavors to move us incidentally or indirectly. What is understood by us as the "sentimental" is alien from the classical style. The revival, then, of paganism in the sixteenth century was not of itself likely to stimulate the personal and suos the plaintive side of literature. The classi- being loosed and the golden bowl being cal models were imitated; their license was exceeded; both conduct and opinion were in revolt against the tyranny of priests and the formulas of Schoolmen; free thought and free living were equally rampant; insurgent individuality asserted itself against derided discipline to the verge of orgy. But side by side with these tendencies was the parallel-in some respects the similarrebellion of the Reformation, which, whether, as in England, founded on a national protest against foreign interference, or, as in Germany, on a democratic impatience of papal dictation, was consistent in this, that it reasserted the claim to private judgment and restored the Bible to the people. One cannot overestimate the power of our own noble version on English literature; it is hardly too much to say that its largeness of vocabulary was Shakespeare's. The license then of the Renaissance Hellenism was leavened and tempered by the liberty of the Reformation Hebraism. Now, the Hebrew genius, from Genesis to Heine, is eminently personal and plaintive. The Scriptures teem with lyrical appeals to the inner life of feeling, of aspiration, of emotion; and their machinery is consequently one of vivid suggestion, of passionate exaltation, rather than of eloquent reasoning or harmonious presentment. To employ the jargon of the Schools, the Scriptures are "subjective;" the classics, "objective." "It" was the theme of Greece and Rome; "I," of Judæa. The Pagan contemplated man in his relation to externals; the Hebrew, in his relation to inward life. Compare, for one instant, Job's "yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward," with the παθήματα μαθήματα sentiment in Herodotus, the "Agamemnon," or the "Symposium," and this difference is manifest; or Pindar's σκιᾶς ὄναρ ανθρωπος with "All those things are passed away like a shadow and as a post that hasted by;" in the addition appears the distinction. What Greek or Roman would have imaged death by the silver cord broken when the mourners go about the streets and man goeth to his long home? These are the notes of sentimental impressionism; whereas darkness covering the eyes of Homeric heroes, the "Quisque patimur manes" of Virgil, the "Non omnis moriar" of Horace, fail to strike or stir the chords of inmost feeling. Again, contrast the voiμov véhασμα of Æschylus with Job's "When the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy." The one is the expression of plastic art, the other is akin to music; and the essence of music is its subjectivity. Both the Old and the New Testaments are pervaded by a sense of the infinite environing the individual, while the emphasis of the classical accent is, as we have said. finality objectively sublimed. In the personal and plaintive is to be found the method of what we style "Impressionism." It is just this quality, and not his acquaintance with the mythology of Lemprière, that makes Keats an impressionist; just this, and not his whimsical irregularities, that so causes us to regard Sterne; just this, and not his euphuisms and conceits, that places Donne in the same category. It follows from what we have urged that impressionist writing is a department of sentimental literature eminently adapted for lyrical poetry, or for such prose as lends itself to vivid glimpses of life or nature through the medium of awakened associations. But it is not to be restricted to lyrical poetry. "Here I and sorrow sit," for example, strikes an intenser note of desolation than pages of descriptive analysis: “I kissed thee ere I killed thee" flashes before us the speaker's whole complex nature; so does Shylock's "I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys:" so, again, does Gretchen's Doch-alles, was mich dazu trieb, None the less, however, is it unsuitable for prolonged or sustained employ born to Roman Catholicism-became an ordained priest; and eventually, after a diplomatic mission with Lord Hay to Germany, chaplain to King James, preacher at Lincoln's Inn, and eventually Dean of St. Paul's. The death of his wife in 1617 contributed to sap his spirits, and, after a long illness, he died in 1631. ment; it is only truthful, and, by con- account, till 1615 that he apparently sequence, valuable, where the incompleteness, so to speak, of its statement is counterbalanced by the completeness of its suggestion. The tests, then, of how and when it is used must be applied, and we should never allow ourselves to believe that impressionism is per se a royal road to imaginative interpretation or is to be admired as an end in itself. "Donne," says Mr. Saintsbury, in his excellent preface, "is eminently of that kind which lends itself to sham liking, to coterie worship, to a false enthusiasm." But again, "Always in him are the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment of the present, and intense feeling of the contrast of that present with the future. He has at once the transcendentalism which saves sensuality, and the passion which saves mysticism. He was of the first order of poets, but he was not of the first among the first." It is just from such a nature that we should expect impressionism; and, when we add that he was a profound pessimist, the personal, the plaintive, the restive timbre is only natural. Mr. Saintsbury himself bears out, though he has not attempted explain, what we have adduced as to the temper of the Renaissance by saying that "its peculiar pessimism was perfectly different from that of classical times, and can only be paralleled by the spirit of Ecclesiastes." to Dr. John Donne's career, like his poetry, was stormy and chequered. The son of a merchant, he quitted Cambridge, after a residence at Oxford, to study at Lincoln's Inn. He early inherited a competence, and immediately entered upon a career of pleasure, of travel, and, perhaps, of military service. In 1596 he accompanied Essex to Spain, and on his return presumed to contract a clandestine marriage with Anne Moore, Lady Egerton's niece, an audacity for which he was imprisoned. After his reunion with his wife, he joined the family and fortunes of Sir By turns erotic and devotional, always morbid and fantastic, of considerable culture and attainments, his fervid originality stands out irregular and unrestrained among the brilliant galaxies of his age. His power of suggesting ideas was extraordinary; to employ his own phrase, he was wont to "ideate,” and, although one cannot say of him, as he said of Sidney that Robert Drury, with whom he jour- For the world's beauty is decay'd or neyed on an embassy to France. It gone was not, according to Mr. Saintsbury's Beauty; that's color and proportion. |