'and it shall come out.' A like decision was mentally registered by the author of the 'Barchester' novels, when his earliest ventures fell practically still-born from the press. Notwithstanding a manner rather blustering, and a congenital impatience or irritability at delay, Trollope always possessed the capacity of waiting as well as of working. Whatever his peculiarities of manner or vehemence of conversational expression, he never really mistook fussiness for energy, or mere restlessness for zeal. He was conscious of having carried away from two public schools little of real knowledge, classical or modern, and less of intellectual discipline; he devoted quite as much effort to continuing his school studies by himself, and acquiring habits of correct observation in early life, as he did to the business of earning his daily bread in inferior post-office situations. More than this, when the post-office authorities discouraged his best attempts with the remark that they could make nothing of him, and the publishers predicted that nothing he wrote would ever find readers, Trollope went on with the official drudgery till he had mastered every detail of the department, and continued to accumulate, by study of life, the materials for those future novels which the trade experts had assured him might, for any good they might do him, as well remain unwritten. His perse

verance in the task to which he had laid his hand was a quality as traditionally English as is the spirit animating all his best books.

Yet, delightful as is the legacy he has left us, it may be doubted whether English literature can altogether congratulate itself on some of the personal consequences of his example. Trollope, it is well known, resembling in this respect the late Sir Walter Besant, held that, given the necessary minimum of ability, of intellectual training, of faculty of concentrated and continuous thought, any one might make himself an author; granted, too, a fair allowance of imagination, and a power of correctly observing life and character, there was no reason, he held, why almost any one should not develope himself into a tolerably successful novelist. These notions of his, originally, perhaps, propounded as paradoxes or for mere love of opposition, have become not less widely known than the fact of Trollope's literary

fecundity having been due to early rising. As a consequence, many persons of both sexes, of different classes, and of varying degrees of inaptitude for using the pen as a staff of life, have taken to literature; and the world groans under the burden of novels which no one reads, and which never ought to have been written. Trollope had genius of a kind; he had also the faculty for taking infinite pains; but the two things are not the same. Nor, supposing him to have spoken as if they were, did he fail to that extent to mislead and entice scores among the rising generation who have literary ambition without literary capacity.

The real debt of English letters and English history to Trollope is not, however, diminished by considerations like these. Lord Beaconsfield, in his latest work, 'Endymion,' is the one nineteenth-century novelist in the first rank who reflected the social phenomena summed up in the word 'smartness,' and generally regarded as specially characterising the closing years of the Victorian age. Anthony Trollope had allowed himself to make something of the same attempt in his two least-known, perhaps, as well as decidedly least agreeable stories, The Way We Live Now,' and 'He Knew He was Right.' The chief charm and value of his writings, however, will always arise from the fact that, continuing, though with less of creative power, the realism of Thackeray, he places his characters amid scenery, in social and personal environments, graphically representative of the country or town life best known to the immense majority of his readers, as that existence was lived and regulated, at a time when society journalism had not developed beyond its germ in the 'London Letter of Our Own Correspondent'; and the 'smart set,' if ever the words were used, remained a piece of Yankee slang, not only unintelligible and repulsive to ears polite, but as yet not understanded of the English public.

T. H. S. ESCOTT.

Art. 12.-THE REFORMING TURK.

EUROPE seems constitutionally incapable of grasping the subtler phases of Asiatic thought, or of appreciating the higher aims of Asiatic striving. The West has never fully understood the 'psyche' of the East. Hence the many confusing and dangerous errors committed, even of late years, by the people of the one continent in attempting to judge the men and things of the other. No one among us, for example, appears to have foreseen the vast change that recently came over Turkey. The melancholy plight of Macedonia was absorbing our attention just then; and we fancied that Turkey, too, was thinking of little else. When, therefore, the Reformers, whom we had been taught to look upon as idle daydreamers, made a clean sweep of the régime and closed a memorable epoch, we hesitated to yield credence to evidence, and continued for a time to take a historic event for a passing episode. Then, impressed by the sudden death of absolutism and the almost bloodless establishment of a constitutional régime, many of us rushed to the opposite extreme and assumed that the Near-Eastern problem was virtually solved. This view is turning out to be as ill-grounded as the other.

In order the better to grasp the significance and gauge the trend of the Turkish revolution, it behoves us to space out its history into a period of at least a generation. For, during the past forty or fifty years, the various forces were imperceptibly at work which at last rendered a thorough change in the political and social fabric the only alternative to utter ruin. Hence a survey confined to the proximate and obvious causes that brought about that last phase of the grand transformation scene would give but a partial and therefore distorted picture of the reform movement. Doubtless, whatever landmark we may select as our starting-point must by its nature be arbitrary, because the vital process of nations is marked by unbroken continuity, and a political upheaval is itself but an episode in the broader sequence of events known as national evolution.

The sudden abolition of one-man rule in Turkey is generally set down as the necessary outcome of unbear

able oppression, and therefore less the fruit of abstract ideas than most of the radical changes known to political history. Viewed as a brief summary of the facts that accompanied the final phase of the revolution, this account may pass unchallenged. But no rounded sketch of the revolutionary process would be even tolerably correct that left out of consideration certain exotic politico-religious doctrines that began to be spread among Mohammedan peoples some fifty years ago. These Western notions came as a new revelation to strengthen or destroy the old ones enshrined in the Book. No similar influence had been felt before. For centuries the minds of the faithful had been sedulously preserved from the troubling influence of Christian speculation. Even the eternal problems that have never ceased to exercise the ingenuity and fire the imagination of mankind, inspiring alike the poem of Job, the pessimism of Koheleth, and the noble despair of Omar Khayyam, were authoritatively withdrawn from the ken of the orthodox Moslem. At last, however, continuous contact and not unfriendly intercourse with the West, which had itself largely outgrown its traditions and its creeds, produced the inevitable effect. The stream of modernism gradually formed an alluvial stratum, from which sprang the creative ideas that are now awaiting embodiment in the new birth of the Ottoman Empire.

The foreign influences, however, taking a firm hold of men's minds, stimulated them in different ways, according to their dominant instincts, thoughts, and feelings. Speculative and ascetic natures-nourished mainly by religious fact and fancy-it nerved to sacred daring, filling them with the hope of bringing back the halcyon days when the brilliant feats of Islam thrilled the world. On the more robust and evenly-balanced spirits, who have no expectation of reaping where they have not sown, and who put their faith in good sense, organisation, and an intelligent use of the law of causality, its action was fruitful. It gradually accustomed them to contemplate without dismay those ideals and strivings, principles and institutions, which, recognised as factors in the political communities of the West, were still anathema to the followers of the Koran and the Sunna. The religious idealists favoured a grandiose reaction against the

aggressiveness of Christian Empire. They also advocated a scheme to utilise the vast spiritual forces still latent in Islam, in order to weld together in one world-empire all the peoples whose spiritual lives are still regulated by the Koran. The centre of this movement was, ex officio, the Caliph, the spiritual head of Islam, the Sultan of Turkey. His lieutenants were the Ulemas,* and others who, to a limited extent, correspond to our clergy. The name given to the ideal was Pan-Islamism.

It was

The other tendency was narrower in its scope, less ambitious in its immediate aims, more practical in its avowed methods. It reckoned carefully with modern ideas, and built upon latter-day conditions. willing to let Islam stoop to conquer, and ready to make a compromise with the spirit of the world. It shrank from tackling too vast a problem. Leaving Mohammedanism as a whole, therefore, to take care of itself, it was solicitous only for organised groups of Moslems, those of Turkey, Egypt, Persia, India, Morocco; and it sought to awaken within these a keener consciousness of their collective unity, and a faith in their consequent force. It would fain furnish the Moslem communities with the means of winning back, each one for itself, such a share of political power and economic well-being as is still possible. Consequently the champions of this movement are at bottom nationalists. They would deal only with the problems that are ripe for solution, knowing that what is now impracticable may soon become feasible. They respect the religious fanaticism of their brethren, and utilise it as a potent means. With European public opinion they deal deftly; they begin by respecting it and end by winning it over as an ally to their cause. They sow the seed of nationalism in the fertile soil of Mohammedanism, and allow the fiery advocates of Pan-Islamism to assume that the ways of Young Turkey lead as directly to the farther as to the nearer goal. They allow it to be thought that, if national individuality once becomes conscious of its power, it may create conditions which will be favourable to the ideas of Pan-Islamism. To sobering experience, which will in time reveal the black

The Ulemas, or 'knowers,' are the men who, having made a study of the Koran and the Sunna (orthodox tradition), know exactly what is prescribed and what is forbidden by religion.