But most serious of all was the attempt made on Prince Galitzin. As he was driving through the streets of Tiflis, he was attacked by three Armenians, who made desperate efforts to murder him. His assailants were killed on the spot, but the Governor-General escaped with slight wounds. He is regarded with deadly hatred by the Armenians, as the author of this series of measures to oppress them. The Armenians have robbed several Russian churches in Tiflis, and one of them who made no effort to escape answered at his trial: "I only did at night what some officers are doing by daylight." As a means of securing the apparent consent of the people to the transfer of the properties, every member of a guild, shopkeeper or merchant who renewed his license at the New Year was presented with the alternative of signing his consent or having his business closed. To restrict agitation an order was given in June, 1904, that no Armenians from Persia or Turkey should be allowed to enter the Caucasus. Their passports were refused visé. The Government is said to be preparing a new Polojenya or Constitution for the Armenian Church. It has not yet been published. Rumor says that the office of Catholicos will be abolished, that in lieu of one, the Czar will appoint a Metropolitan who shall reside in St. Petersburg, to which place the Synod of the Armenian Church shall be transferred, and the ancient seat of St. Gregory will remain a common monastery; that the Meron or sacred oil will hereafter be made on the banks of the Neva, not at Etchmiadzin; that the Armenian Church will be brought into a condition of complete subordination, that no ordination of deacon, priest or bishop will be allowed except by authorization of the Czar, which will be withheld until the Church makes submission. The Catholicos and the institutions at Etchmiadzin have begun to be pressed for funds since the revenues have been cut off and the endowments seized. Hence the Czar has sent a donation of 70,000 rubles to the Catholicos. The latter, fearing Greeks even when bearing gifts, has declined to receive it, and replied that his own people are able and willing to support him. S. G. WILSON. HENRY JAMES: AN APPRECIATION. BY JOSEPH CONRAD. THE critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of Mr. Henry James's work. His books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. But not all his books. There is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been provided with; no neat row of volumes in buckram or half-calf putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these victories have been won. Nothing of the sort has been done for Mr. Henry James's victories in England. In a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case of other men whose writing counts (for good or evil)-had it not been, I say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident of-I suppose-publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. Because, emphatically, in the body of Mr. Henry James's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of mere probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that field where he is master. Happily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom such a confession naturally would be meant. It is impossible to think of Mr. Henry James becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality of our common fate whose finality is meaningless-in the sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone. I do not know into what brand of ink Mr. Henry James dips his pen; indeed, I heard that of late he has been dictating; but I know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. The thing—a privilege—a miracle —what you will-is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. To those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. After some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with Mr. Henry James's work, it grows into absolute conviction, which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. If gratitude, as some one defined it, is a lively sense of favors to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of "The Ambassadors "—to name the latest of his works. The favors are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will never dry up. The stream of inspiration runs brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. It is, in fact, a magic spring. With this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running water, as applied to Mr. Henry James's inspiration, may be dropped. In its volume and force the body of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality. Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue-work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values-the permanence of memory. And the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "Take me out of myself "! meaning, really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness. But everything is relative, and the light of conscious ness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our industrious hands. When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last air-ship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass shall have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in his resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. The artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression, and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. I do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious tale. It would be too much to expect -from humanity. I doubt the heroism of the hearers. As to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. There would be on his part no heroism. The artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. He is so much of a voice that for him silence is like death; and the postulate was that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrowwhether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess? - For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some to us now utterly inconceivable hope. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. It will sleep on the battle-field among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And, perhaps, it is right in that quality. The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. Mr. Henry James seems to hold that belief. Nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honor about the drooping form of a victor in a barren strife. And the honor is always well won; for the struggles Mr. Henry James chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets. Those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved. And Mr. Henry James records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest, and the feelings of the combatants. The fiercest excitements of a romance de cape et d'épée," the romance of yard-arm and boarding-pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to Mr. Henry James's men's and women's sense of truth, of necessity-before all, of conduct. His mankind is delightful. It is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the battle-field. These warlike images come by themselves under the pen; since, from the duality of man's nature and the competition of individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. In virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this relation, in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations. That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. It is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal, on which rest the labors of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. Like a natural force which is obscured as much as illustrated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, |