was a balmy feeling in the air, a blue sky above, and not a particle of ice or land to be seen from the masthead. Had he possessed steam power, there can be no doubt that he would have succeeded in reaching a much higher latitude, probably the highest on record before or since. This was on February 18, 1823. But the wind was against him, a thousand miles of most dangerous ice-infested sea lay between him and safety; and besides all this, the interests of his gallant crew, co-partners with him in the venture, had to be considered. So the two tiny little ships were headed northward again, reaching their fishing grounds in safety, and making such good use of their time that in spite of the big gap in their season, made by their attempt upon the Pole, the voyage was entirely remunerative.

Upon Weddell's return he published an account of his voyage, after much friendly pressure had been brought to bear upon him, that for modesty and self-effacement is totally admirable. It made considerable stir in this country; but it was not until eight years later that Captain John Biscoe in the brig Tula, 148 tons, accompanied by the cutter Lively, left London on a South Sea whaling voyage, but with special instructions from his public-spirited owners, Messrs. Enderby Brothers, to devote a great part of his time to Antarctic exploration. Faithfully and bravely did he endeavor to carry out his orders, but the weather being persistently of the usual Antarctic type, the sufferings of the gallant little band were very great, and he could get no farther south than 65 deg. 57 min., where, in longitude 47 deg. 20 min. E., he discovered land, but whether an island or part of a continent has never been determined. He was almost immediately driven back, reaching Tasmania with most of his crew sick and two dead. But, like most of his com

peers, he was hard to beat, and the next summer (1832) he, again pressed south. He got only a few miles farther than before, but on another meridian, and was rewarded by the discovery of several islands. Crowning feat of all, he succeeded in landing on what he believed to be the Antarctic continent, the first arrival. Again he was driven northward, this time so furiously that his brig was hurled upon the savage South Shetlands, and only by superhuman labor on the part of the weather-worn crew was she got afloat again, with a jury, rudder-rigged, to steer her to the Falklands. His midget consort, the Lively, was lost upon arrival there, but all hands escaped. Reaching home, his discoveries were received with great enthusiasm and suitably rewarded. And his employers sent him out again on a similar errand, undeterred by their previous heavy loss through a barren voyage commercially. But this time the mysterious sea refused to admit him at all. Upon his first contact with the ice both the vessels were so badly damaged that they were barely able to get back to the Falklands again.

Another eight years of silence ensued, during which there is no doubt that many a wandering whale-ship, both from England and America, hovered about the edge of the Antarctic Circle, courting destruction in their eager quest for whales, but, as was their manner, quite silent about the marvels they daily met with. It makes one ache with desire, to read the bald entries made in those greasy old logbooks, for the ability to read between the lines of what they really saw, did and suffered. But I well remember, to quote only one instance, when, with a huge sperm whale alongside, in 54 deg. S., we were driven log-like for three furious days, in a blinding smother of salt spray, past ghost-like icebergs and low-lying dangerous hummocks, only

visible by the angry break of an intercepted wave, until the great carcass, swollen to treble its normal size, burst with earthquake shock and a dense fog of stifling stench. At utmost risk of being poisoned by that foul effluvium, we hacked the corrupt mass free, and began, painfully, to creep north again to a less dangerous parallel of latitude. Then the mate entered in his tattered journal: "Wind as yesterday. Whaleburst. Cut him adrift, and wore to N.N.E. So ends this twenty-four hours." And in stress of whaling work I have known a whole week to elapse without a single entry being made.

After the last long spell of eight years' silence there suddenly sprang up quite a gale of exploring ardor concerning the Antarctic. Another of Messrs. Enderby's ships, the Eliza Scott, Captain Balleny, in pursuance of the standing permission given by that most public-spirited firm, worked her way down south as far as 66 deg. 44 min. S., making many minor discoveries of real or supposed islands. For, so difficult is it in those regions to distinguish between land, icebergs and various kinds of mirage, that even the most experienced mariners are liable to be deceived. At about the same time a French expedition under the gallant Dumont D'Urville, composed of two ships, L'Astrolabe and Zélée, made its appearance in the Antarctic; but the discoveries made by our neighbors were only discoveries to them. Every one had been seen and charted before. The United States also had an expedition in the field, under Commander Wilkes, consisting of the Vincennes, Peacock and Porpoise, with two small schooners; but of their proceedings nothing more need be said than that they were so disastrous that even the commander was courtmartialled upon his return home.

Latest of all came the Erebus and

well

Terror, under Sir James Clarke Ross and Captain Crozier, an expedition well planned and thoroughly equipped for its duty, according to the best authorities of the day.

Abundantly did the results of that memorable voyage justify the anticipations of its promoters. The records, kept with unwearied care, of observations, taken every hour throughout the voyage, have been a veritable mine, wherein savants have been delving ever since. A higher latitude was reached than ever before-76 deg. S. Not only so, but a landing was effected in 75 deg. 48 min. S. upon a volcanic island, to which was given the name of the brave gentleman who died in the icy loneliness of the far North, Sir John Franklin. And who could adequately voice the awe and wonder with which those daring wanderers beheld the next morning, January 28, 1841, Mount Erebus rearing its awful bulk thirteen thousand feet above the sea, and belch. ing forth into the freezing atinosphere vast columns of sulphurous smoke begirt with tongues of lurid flame! This portent was flanked by a consort, ten thousand feet high, Mount Terror, whose fires were extinct; and the two seemed fitting commencement of the great ice-barrier seen by Cook in the previous century, but on the other side of the Pole. Painfully hampered by lack of steam-power at this important juncture, the ships slowly skirted those grim cliffs, every eye strained for sight of an inlet whereby they might gain admission to the mysterious circle beyond. Closer and closer crept the icepack in towards its source from the open sea; although early in February, the Antarctic autumn, the normal temperature was 20 deg. below freezing point. Regretfully, most reluctantly, they headed northward, fighting with desperate energy every mile of the return journey as far as 65 deg. S. What dangers they encountered by the

way, until the time that the two vessels, in the height of a howling tempest, only escaped being dashed to pieces against a rolling mountain of ice, to fall upon one another and rend themselves apart in a bewildering entanglement of wreckage, has never been told, nor ever will be, in its entirety. Language has its limitations. But the best proof of the effect those heroic deeds had upon their authors is found in the fact that, after a season of rest in Hobart Town, they returned to the battlefield again.

Worse weather than on the previous attempt awaited them, nor could they, by any means, get beyond about 68 deg. S. In fact, the season's toil was utterly fruitless. So they returned to the Falkland Islands to recruit their energies, and in the ensuing summer tried yet again to win their way southward, this time upon the track followed by Weddell with such success nineteen

The Leisure Hour.

years before. But they could not fight against the invincible severity of the weather and ice, although many hitherto undiscovered points of land were seen and accurately charted as far south as 71 deg. 30 min. S., on the opposite side of the Pole to their first season's track. At the close of the season they returned to Cape Town and closed their memorable visit to the far South.

Since that time absolutely nothing has been done worth mention in that lonely sea, although several abortive and ill-considered attempts have been made. But it is to be earnestly hoped that the present strenuous efforts that are being made, aided as they are by steam-power, and the accumulated experience of all that have gone before, will be successful in wresting most, if not all, its secrets from the lonely Antarctic.

F. T. Bullen.

The historical novel is not at present flourishing in this country. It enjoyed a renewal some few years ago, when "A Gentleman of France" flashed sword in every face; but the brief force of that movement seems already to be expended. There can be little doubt, indeed, that the art of historical fiction is dead in England, and that he who would succeed in raising it must first create for it a new form, a governing convention more in accord with naturalistic tendencies than that which has miraculously survived all the artistic upheavals of ninety years. Matters are otherwise in America and France, the two countries nearest to us in art as in life. France is wit

nessing, or about to witness, a real renascence of the historical novel-a renascence which M. Emile Faguet, employing a theory more creditable to his ingenuity than to his sagacity, explains on the singular assumption that realism has exhausted the material offered by modern existence. In America the historical novel overtops every other sort: it is making authors rich and turning publishers into millionaires; the circulation of it counts not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands, and the man or woman who, having omitted to peruse it, cannot discuss it with fluency, is thereby rendered an outcast. The two most notorious and amazing examples of its suc

cess (at the moment of writing), Mr. Winston Churchill's "Richard Carvel" and Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's "Janice Meredith," although neither is a year old, have between them already reached a sale of nearly three-quarters of a million copies in the United States.

These two long novels-they total over a thousand pages-both deal with the period of the American Revolution; they both include the figure of George Washington; and in other respects of tone, color, sentiment, and incident they are remarkably alike. The chief thing to be noted of them is their perfect lack of originality; they are not the fruit of any inspiration, but a dish meticulously concocted upon a recipe; and the recipe is by no means a new one. Conceive a musical composer who at this date should capture the ear of the populace by an exact, but lifeless, imitation of Mendelssohn. It is such a feat in literature that these authors have performed. To read their amiable stories is to wonder whether the art of fiction has not stood still for fifty years, whether the discoveries and the struggles of a dozen writers in France, England, and America since 1850 are after all in vain. "Esmond" is a great book, but no man of a later period could possibly produce a great, or even a fine, book that resembled it; for time breaks every mould. "Richard Carvel" is by far the better of the two American novels which I have mentioned; and what one feels about "Richard Carvel" is that it is the work of a man who kept a bust of Thackeray over a bookcase crowded with eighteenth-century literature, and wrote with one eye on this and the other (perhaps unconsciously) on that airy, fairy creature known in the States as "the matinée girl," forgetting that he, even he, ought to have a personality. Mr. Churchill has learned everything about his craft, except the two things which cannot

be taught the art of seeing and the art of being one's self. He looks only at pictures, and then, piecing this with that and that with another, confects an enormous canvas without once leaving the gallery. He is not himself-artistically he has no selfbut rather the impersonal automatic result of a century of gradual decadence from one supreme exemplar. In "Richard Carvel" every primary tint is lost, every sharp relief smoothed down. The conventions, which formerly had a significance and an aim properly related to the stage of art which evolved them, have been narrowed instead of widened, until they are become meaningless, arbitrary, and tiresome. The heroine with her peerless beauty, her royal tantrums, her feminine absolutism, her secret, her hidden devotion, her ultimate surrender; the hero of six-footthree, with his physical supremacy, his impetuosities, his careful impromptus of wit, his amazing combinations of Machiavellian skill with asinine fatuity, his habit of looking foolish in the presence of the proud fair, and his sickening false modesty in relating his own wondrous exploits; the secondary heroine, pretty, too, but with a lowlier charm, meek, steadfast, with a mission to "fatten household sinners;" the transparent villain who could not deceive a sheep, but who deceives all save the hero; the "first old gentleman;" the faithful friend; the boon companions; the body servant: all these types, dressed with archæological accuracy, perform at Mr. Churchill's prompting all the usual manœuvres with all the usual phrases and gestures. Who does not know that speech of the heroine's ending: "And so, sir, you are very tiresome," to which the hero must perforce reply "ruefully;" or that critical moment, half-way through the narrative, when a few words which if spoken would end the story on the

next page, are interrupted in the nick

of time "Alas, for the exits and entrances of life! Here comes the footman;" or that astronomical phenomenon-"The light had gone out of the sky;" or that solitary wild outburst of my lady-"Her breath came fast, and mine, as she laid a hand upon my arm, 'Richard, I do not care whether you are poor. What am I saying?' she cried wildly. 'Am I false to my own father?'"

Let it not be thought, however, that there is no merit in "Richard Carvel," or in the more saucy "Janice Meredith." What these authors, neither of them apparently with any strictly literary culture, could do that they have done. In the case of Mr. Churchill, particularly, one cannot fail to perceive laborious care, a certain moral elevation, and an admirable sense of dignity. He has been satisfied with nothing less than his best. His style may be a beach pebble among gems, but it is polished. He may not be a student of character, but he knows his eighteenth century; he is a giant of documentation, and the mere factual basis of his descriptions of eighteenth-century life in America and England is almost incredibly elaborate, and decidedly effective; whether he is giving you the interior of Brooks's or a naval battle with Paul Jones in it, he reconstructs the scene to the last limit of research. His historical portraits, including those of Fox, Walpole, Garrick and Washington, are as brilliant and hard and exact as the exercises of a court painter. He can plan out a work, arranging the disposition of its parts, and handling vast masses of detail with the manipulative skill of a transport officer. He knows when dialogue should be used, and when narration; how to give substance to a chapter, and theatrical ornament to an episode; when the reader will best appreciate a diversion from the main

theme, and when the device of monotony will build up a pleasing tension. He is the type of artist who takes the Prix de Rome by dint of sheer mathematical calculation. And withal, there is no breath of imaginative life in him. He could no more avoid being tedious, profoundly and entirely tedious, than he could add a cubit to his stature.

America is a land of sentimentalism. It is this deep-seated quality which, perhaps, accounts for the vogue of history in American fiction. The themes of the historical novel are so remote, ideas about them exist so nebulously in the mind, that a writer may safely use the most bare-faced distortions to pamper the fancy without offending that natural and racial shrewdness which would bestir itself if a means of verification were at hand. The extraordinary notion still obtains that human nature was different "in those days;" that the good old times were, somehow, "pretty," and governed by fates poetically just. Inquiry would, of course, dissipate this notion, but no one wants to dissipate it; so long as it remains, there is at any rate some excuse for those excesses of prettiness, that luxuriant sentimentality, that persistent statement of life in terms of the Christmas number, which are the fundamental secret of the success of novels like "Richard Carvel" and "Janice Meredith." There are, of course, other factors special to America which have their share in the dazzling result. One is the pride of the nation in its brief traditions. Shall not he who ministers to this pride be rewarded? It would be strange, indeed, if he were not. When a man hears that his name is in the newspaper he buys a newspaper, and a long time will elapse before he loses the habit. So it is with America. We, with a thousand thrilling years behind us, can scarcely understand the pre-occupation of America with her Revolution and her Civil War.