observing only the surface of things, remaining throughout superbly ignorant of their real deeper significance, is delighted, and in his delight is not backward in extolling the institution and conditions of life of a country, the press and people of which have shown so extravagant an interest in and appreciation of himself and his kind. Indeed, it is becoming customary of late for foreign royalties, on quitting England's hospitable shores, to return formal thanks to the press for favors received. Thus does English journalism play a not unimportant part in contributing its share to the Social Hegemony of England.

V.

An Ambassadorship in London which was once looked upon more or less as a penance by distinguished diplomatists, if only on account of the English climate, is now the great prize of the diplomatic service. And if it brings in its train a fair share of invitations to the Royal dinner-parties and Ducal country houses, then, indeed, the goal of earthly ambition, social success in England, is won. Has not a foreign monarch recently declared that he was in uncertainty whether he would not rather be an English country gentleman than a monarch in his own country?

Minor diplomatic stars are charmed by the reception Social England accords to them as such. Once acclimatized to English life and in course of time placed on the Retired List-they find that they can no longer be happy without the social incense to which they have become accustomed in England. They thus often make London their lasting home, and in their retirement live upon the connections which they have acquired during their residence there as full-blown "Ministers Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary," whereas, in their own country, once ousted from official life, they are nobodies. In the world of aristocratic sport, yachting and racing, similar phenomena are to be observed. A Russian Prince has only to run horses for our great races in order to leap into popularity at a bound. He reads with delight the news conveyed by the press that he possesses all the best characteristics of an Englishman; whereas, in sober truth, the only touch he may ever get with the people of England during a residence of years is the mud which his carriage, in driving through the streets, splashes upon the unwashed crowd.

Under such conditions, the foreigner gets to like England

and to bow down to the social code prevailing among us, sometimes with queer results. If of flabby fibre, the temptations of English high life, pleasure-hunting and reckless extravagance are apt to prove too much for him, as witness a few notorious cases in which "distinguished" foreigners have cut undignified figures of late in the English Law Courts. The Don Juan who in his own country seduces the wife of his brother officer and, by means of the queer code of honor prevailing there, is allowed to add to his record of villainy by becoming the licensed assassin of the wronged husband, finds that no such thing is tolerated or indeed possible in England, unless he cares to face the felon's doom as a common murderer. The Bobadil who breathes fire and slaughter in his own country, and to whom foul slander and intrigue are as the breath of his nostrils, is very soon made to feel the taming effect of English Social Conventions, and "coos" as gently as any sucking dove on admission to an English drawing-room. These worthies fear the cold terrors of social ostracism from English society more than sword or pistol, and are thus generally on their good behavior, at all events as far as outward appearances go whilst within our shores.

Here at least the Social Hegemony of England has had a beneficial effect by enforcing a certain discipline and self-repression all round; whereas unbridled self-indulgence on the lines. indicated has for some time past been one of the festering sores of society on the Continent of Europe. In this it may be confidently asserted that England by her code of manners and her rigid enforcement thereof has added to the decency and decorum of nations.

VI.

England is apparently Americanizing her methods, if not her institutions, one after the other: American managers run our "shows" and American slang has entered into our daily vocabulary to an extent scarcely realized; but the wealth and fashion of the United States still render homage to English royalty and the social life of English aristocracy. Quite a colony of American millionaires have taken up their abode permanently among us. The parents of lovely American women who have chosen titled Englishmen for their husbands have been known unable to withstand the attractions of English fashionable life, and have come over bag and baggage after their married daughters to

make England their home. One of America's most distinguished diplomatists a man noted for his strong partiality for Continental life-confessed to me some years ago that, since he and his family had passed a season in London, he was unable to get his wife to see anything except through English spectacles. Our powers of assimilation are, indeed, for the moment stupendous; and it is perhaps not surprising if our self-esteem sometimes is more marked than our discretion.

King Leopold in writing to his niece, Queen Victoria, told her that the French and English are the two nations which possess the most exaggerated sense of their own importance. If this be so, then in view of the homage paid to us from every side in the form of imitation-that sincerest and thus most dangerous form of flattery-we might well plead extenuating circumstances in our favor. Surely, there is some excuse for the weaker-headed anong us who occasionally betray an affinity with Marshal von Schomberg's Major - Domo already referred to, and proudly resent the imputation of belonging to any other nation. But England's Social Hegemony might also suggest more serious reflections. Does it, as in the parallel cases of Rome, Italy and Spain, herald the sunset of a nation's greatness? Or does it only point to a superficiality of interests, a softening of the fibre, among an aristocracy in the term's broadest, best meaning, which, in the course of a pre-eminence of centuries, has given to the world the British conception of loyalty, veracity and personal freedom, a class which has evolved as its best product the English gentleman and his complement the English lady, as she still speaks to us in the female characters of Shakespeare, and gazes down upon us in her peerless beauty from the frames of Sir Joshua Reynolds's pictures?

To this momentous question only the future can supply an answer. In the mean time it might be as well we should realize that, though the foreigner may admire our extravagances and ape the cut of our clothes, it is only by a maintenance of those sterling qualities to which in the first instance we owe our national greatness and its latest adumbration, our Social Hegemony, that England can hope to maintain her dominant position in the world.

SIDNEY WHITMAN.

THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY.

BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS, LAMPSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT YALE.

THE father of Thomas Hardy wished his son to enter the church, and this object was the remote goal of his early education. At just what period in the boy's mental development Christianity took on the form of a meaningless fable we shall perhaps never know; but after a time he ceased to have even the faith of a grain of mustard seed. This absence of religious belief has proved no obstacle to many another candidate for the Christian ministry, as every habitual churchgoer knows; or as any son of Belial may discover for himself by merely reading the prospectus of summer schools of theology. There has, however, always been a certain cold, mathematical precision in Mr. Hardy's way of thought that would have made him as uncomfortable in the pulpit as he would have been in an editor's chair, writing for salary persuasive articles containing the exact opposite of his individual convictions. But, although the beauty of holiness failed to impress his mind, the beauty of the sanctuary was sufficiently obvious to his sense of art. He became an ecclesiastical architect, and for some years his delight was in the courts of the Lord. Instead of composing sermons in ink, he made sermons in stones, restoring to many a decaying edifice the outlines that the original builder had seen in his vision centuries ago. For no one has ever regarded ancient churches with more sympathy and reverence than Mr. Hardy. No man to-day has less respect for God and more devotion to His house.

Mr. Hardy's professional career as an architect extended over a period of about thirteen years, from the day when the seventeenyear-old boy became articled, to about 1870, when he forsook the pencil for the pen. His strict training as an architect has been

of enormous service to him in the construction of his novels, for skill in constructive drawing has repeatedly proved its value in literature. Rossetti achieved positive greatness as an artist and as a poet. Stevenson's studies in engineering were not lost time, and Mr. De Morgan affords another good illustration of the same fact. Thackeray was unconsciously learning the art of the novelist while he was making caricatures, and the lesser Thackeray of a later day-George du Maurier-found the transition from one art to the other a natural progression. Hopkinson Smith and Frederick Remington, on a lower but dignified plane, bear witness to the same truth. Indeed, when one studies carefully the beginnings of the work of imaginative writers, one is surprised at the great number who have handled an artist's or a draughtsman's pencil. A prominent and successful playwright of to-day has said that if he were not writing plays he should not dream of writing books; he would be building bridges.

Mr. Hardy's work as an ecclesiastical architect laid the real foundations of his success as a novelist; for it gave him an intimate familiarity with the old monuments and rural life of Wessex, and at the same time that eye for precision of form that is so noticeable in all his books. He has really never ceased to be an architect. Architecture has contributed largely to the inatter and to the style of his stories. Two architects appear in his first novel. In "A Pair of Blue Eyes" Stephen Smith is a professional architect, and in coming to restore the old Western Church he was simply repeating the experience of his creator. No one of Mr. Hardy's novels contains more of the facts of his own life than "A Laodicean," which by the way was composed on what the author then believed to be his death-bed; it was mainly dictated, which I think partly accounts for its difference in style from the other tales. The hero, Somerset, is an architect whose first meeting with his future wife occurs through his professional curiosity concerning the castle; and a considerable portion of the early chapters is taken up with architectural detail, and of his enforced rivalry with a competitor in the scheme for restoration. Not only does Mr. Hardy's scientific profession speak through the mouths of his characters, but old and beautiful buildings adorn his pages as they do the landscape he loves. In "Two on a Tower" the ancient structure appears here and there in the story as naturally and incidentally as it would to a pedestri