What makes a nationality? Is it race, language, creed, climate, cookery, or any other of the important factors which give character to a social organism? Few questions are more commonly debated to-day, and in considering the answer the case of America is too often left out of sight. Yet no one looking straight at the facts can deny the existence of American nationality, which is in a sense the most potent of all, for none so readily assimilates alien elements. After a few years-so at least we are told, and with authoritythe foreigner becomes an American. In England or France, even the children of immigrants grow up with a difference of which both they and their associates are conscious. One generation does not suffice to merge them into the type which results from the gradual evolution of instincts and temperament. We have, perhaps, indicated the reason why America can do what other countries fail in. America, as a nation, rests more than any other in the world on an idea-or if on a sentiment, then on the sentiment of allegiance to an idea. A man becomes an American when the ideas for which America stands have become part and parcel of his mental fabric, and this is

* 1 "Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India." London: Macmillan & Co., 1882.

2 "Doctor Claudius: A True Story." London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.

3 "To Leeward." London: Chapman & Hall, 1884.

4 "Paul Patoff." London: Macmillan & Co., 1887.

5. "Saracinesca." London: Blackwood & Sons, 1887.

6 "Sant' Ilario." London: Macmillan & Co., 1889.

7 "A Oigarette-Maker's Romance." don: Macmillan & Co., 1890.

Lon

8 "Don Orsino." London: Macmillan & Co.,

1892.

easily accomplished by the very nature of those ideas. A coherent theory of life and society expressed itself in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, and America's assimilating power is largely due to the creed of universal brotherhood, the cosmopolitan principle, which lay behind those elaborate formulations. Nationality must always imply a community of historic associations; and whoever is brought into contact with Americans finds them conceiving of their commonwealth as a vast society bound together from the first by faith in a common group of ideas. Nowhere else does intellectual agreement-the agreement of admiration-count for so much in nationality, nowhere does inherited temperament go for so little. From all this there follows the negative consequence that, of all civilized men, the American is the most readily cosmopolitan. In order to understand and sympathize he has less to divest himself of, because the very essence of his nationality consists in the practical affirmation of ideas which have no special local character. We can say, if we like, that Englishmen and Frenchmen inherit a culture, whereas Americans do not; or, with about equal truth, that

9 "Katharine Lauderdale." London: Macmillan & Co., 1894. 10 "Corleone." 1897.

London: Macmillan & Co.,

11 "In the Palace of the King." London: Macmillan & Co., 1900.

12 "Marietta: A Maid of Venice." London: Macmillan & Co., 1901.

13 "The Heart of Rome." London: Macmillan & Co. 1903.

14 "Soprano: A Portrait." London: Macmillan & Co., 1905.

15 "The Novel: What it is." London: Macmillan & Co., 1893.

16 "Gleanings from Venetian History." With 225 illustrations by Joseph Pennell. London: Macmillan & Co., 1905.

ΤΙ American nationality consists in principles, that of European peoples in prejudices. The resultant fact is, anyhow, that whereas the cosmopolitan Englishman is apt to have lost something the cosmopolitan American has almost always gained.

Contrast, for instance, Mr. Maurice Hewlett with the late Henry Harland. Without going the whole length of the saying, we may affirm boldly that Mr. Hewlett is "Italianate." He has read so much, seen so much, fallen in love with so much, of Italy, its history and its traditional character, that he comes to us always with a little of the air of the seventeenth-century traveller: fullblooded, strangely accoutred, with a certain defiance of the stay-at-home people in his intellectual deportment. Of course, his Italians are medieval Italians, but they are desperately mediæval and desperately Italian. Now Mr. Harland, on the other hand, an American whose whole imagination is suffused and flushed with the beauty and charm of Italy, takes Italy and Italians, so to say, for granted. His way is not to accentuate their differences from Anglo-Saxons, but to concern himself with the common human interest: he is an easy gobetween, a kind of bridge between the two great racial camps. He can (and Mr. Henry James has the same talent) write a story of French life which gives one the illusion that it might have been written by a Frenchman: but the Englishman, however well he knows and loves his Paris, must always study the Parisians, as Thackeray did, for instance, deliberately from the outside.

But the most remarkable case of this racial versatility in Americans is certainly afforded by Mr. Marion Crawford. The readiest way to realize it is to call up a comparison between his romances and those of writers so popular and distinguished as the late Mr. Seton Merriman, or Mr. A. E. Mason,

or Mr. Anthony Hope. These men tell stories of adventure in Corsica, Spain, Balkan States, Morocco and other selected regions where adventure is held to be possible to-day; and their characters without exception exhibit in the most embarrassing circumstances the psychology of excellent English gentlemen; unless and when there is reason to emphasize a foreign point of view, and then it is foreign with a vengeance. But Mr. Crawford can write books which give us the sense of being transported absolutely into a foreign society, where every gesture and action and motive is somehow subtly different from what it would be among English speakers, though we should be puzzled to define the point of distinction. And again, his English people are other than his Americans, yet the difference is never emphasized. If he were able to produce this effect in dealing with Englishmen, Americans, and Italians, it would be sufficiently remarkable, yet the less so because Italy is his native country, and an American whose home is in Italy must necessarily see a good deal of English society. But the very best of all his books introduces neither Englishman, American, nor Italian, but deals with a little colony of Russians living and working in a German town. On the whole, it seems to us best to begin our discussion of Mr. Crawford's work by a detailed review of this very beautiful and characteristic little story, which he calls “A Cigarette-Maker's Romance."

The scene opens in the shop of Christian Fischelowitz, a Russian living in Munich; and with a severely logical method Mr. Crawford begins ab extra, with a halt at the shop window. Its most notable object is a large Vienna doll, inside which is concealed a clockwork mechanism; and, the doll serves as an introduction to Fischelowitz and his wife Akulina, who are within the shop. The simple-minded South Rus

To

sian gets all the amusement he can out of this elaborate toy, which he accepted as security for a loan of fifty marks to a poor countryman; but Akulina glares at it from behind her counter, because it is a standing reminder of the wasted money, and still more, because the loan was made to oblige the Count. meet the Count we are conducted still further, into the recesses of a dingy backshop where the other personages of this drama are busy making cigarettes. The Count is among them-one of five workers, of whom two are girls, employed in gumming the paper covers, while the Count and Dumnoff (a stray mujik) roll the tobacco and slip it into the made covers by means of a parchment tongue. Johann Schmidt, the Cossack, has the task of shredding the leaf. Mr. Crawford has the name of being a romancer, but there is no realist who can give you more skilfully and surely the details of an unfamiliar business; and with admirable brevity he conveys the shape and color of everything in that little workroom. He has the journalist's faculty of interesting himself in life at large, and he stops by the way to comment on the special delicacy of touch which a skilled tobacco-cutter, such as Schmidt, attains to. But at the same time he never fails to remember that the figures, and not the background, are what matter; and with a very dexterously introduced conversation he leads up to the Count, who is finishing his second thousand of cigarettes. It is a dull life, "an atrociously objectless existence," as the philosopher Schmidt observes. But the

Count, while admitting this, explains that its dulness matters the less to him, since next morning he will be far removed from it, and this day's work is merely a parting gift-a mark of his goodwill to Fischelowitz. This does not surprise the listeners, though they receive the announcement with varying emotions, and Vjera, the plain-faced

girl with the long red-brown hair, glances in entreaty at Dumnoff, who jests on the idea. Nor is Fischelowitz greatly surprised when he comes in to pay the hands, and the Count insists upon returning his wage of six marks. We, however, are left without an explanation of all this odd behavior; and the mystification is carefully maintained in the next scene, which passes in the street, where the Count, meeting Vjera, insists on the courtesy of carrying her basket. We know only that the Count really believes himself to be on the eve of recovering an immense fortune, and that so believing he asks the plain little girl to be his wife-not so much because he loves her, as because he thinks that he has given her ground for anticipation. For although

a spring of the Count's action is left unexplained, he is presented from the first as a kind of modern Quixote-heroically and a little grotesquely punctilious. The measure of our admiration for Mr. Crawford is largely determined by his success in this character; it is no easy thing to draw a man ridiculous and yet also a noble gentleman. The Count, whose shiny frockcoat, miraculously preserved, is so vividly brought before us, is none the less presented in such wise that we recognize from the very first the need of his nature to act always up to the highest ideal it is aware of. And it is with a very fine perception that Mr. Crawford shows him visited for a moment with an apprehensive sense of duty to the position which he expects to resume. The passage shall be quoted at length, for it exhibits at its very best the vein of generalizing comment which occupies so large a space in this author's writings:

There are strange elements to be found in all great cities among the colonies of strangers who make their dwellings therein. Brought together by trouble, they live in tolerance