jects for ceraceous art than are any humbler folk. The high remoteness of their life tends to clear them of obvious vivacity, and these wax-works are apt travesties of faces whose Olympian calm is unmingled with Olympian contemplativeness. But even this crowd of models is a failure. See how each figure stands solitary! It is only those imperceptible nerve-currents, passing from one being to another, that create a homogeneous scene. Though these wax-works are made in so close an imitation of life, they have, indeed, less verisimilitude than the outcome of any fine art. They are most nearly akin with statuary, I suppose, in that they are themselves a form of plastic art. But statuary, as Pater pointed out, in a pregnant (if rather uncouth) sentence, moves us to emotion, "not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it." I think that waxworks fail, because they are not made within any of those "exquisite limitations" of color, texture, proportion, to which all visual arts must be subjected. Life, save only through conventions, is inimitable. The more closely it be aped, the more futile and unreal its copy. Well! And herein, perhaps, lies the secret of that enervation, which waxworks do produce in many of their beholders. Good painting and good sculpture inspire us with some illusion, thus compensating us for what were otherwise the fatigue of gazing at them. But the best wax-works can only be regarded as specimens of ingenuity, mysterious and elaborate, always abortive. One marvels not that Æneas wept when he saw Troy's fall frescoed on the walls of Carthage. But could Louis Napoleon, coming up from Chislehurst and visiting Madame Tussaud's, have turned away, from the presentment of his lost pomp, with so terrible a heartery as "Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris"? I can hardly suppose that any one who ever saw his own wax-work did not feel mortified and sickened. I can imagine a man being haunted, for the rest of his life, by the knowledge that a ghastly double of him self is standing, all day long, over a number, to be gazed at and “looked out” in the catalogue—is standing there, all night long, in the dark. Is the condemned murderer, I wonder, ever appalled by the thought of his sure survival under Madame's roof? Does he ever think that, soon after he, poor wretch, has been slung down to eternity, another figure will be propped up in the Chamber of Horrors? Such were the speculations that filled my brain, as I roamed morbidly around the exhibition. Though with every moment my vitality seemed to be ebbing lower and lower, though I cursed myself bitterly for being there, I could not tear myself from that gaunt hierarchy of tongueless orators, patriots without blood, and kings whose insignia are colored glass. The unreality of everything oppressed me, in brain and body, with an indescribable lassitude. I felt dimly that the place was terrible, everything in it terrible. Life was a sacred thing-why had it been profaned here, for so many years? Whence came this hateful craft? With what tools, in what workshop, who, for whose pleasure, fashioned these awful images? Images? Yes, of course, they were images. . . . But why should Garibaldi and those others all stare at me so gravely? Had they some devil's power of their own, some mesmerism? It flashed upon me that, as I watched them, they were stealing my life from me, making me one of their own kind. My brain seemed to be shrinking, all the blood ceasing in my body. I would not watch them. I dropped my eyelids. My hands looked smooth, waxen, without nerves. I knew now that I should never speak nor hear again, never move. I took a dull pride, even, in the thought that this was the very frock-coat in which I had been assassinated. . . . With an effort, I pulled myself together. Looking neither to the right nor to the left, I passed, through that morgue of upstanding corpses, to the entrance, down the marble staircase, out into the street. . . . Ah! It was good to be in the street! MAX BEERBOHM. Snow hymned by Siel has vanished from I came among them, did not arise from the land, any notion that they were real men and While freshly Pai's young willow-buds women, bewitched into an awful calm. From The Saturday Review. To plume oneself on a negative virtue is surely the cheapest form of selfrighteousness, and I am not puffed up when I declare that I never was "one of those miserable males" who are ever seeking "sensations" and "experiences." Indeed, I have often suspected that these seekers are but the figment of certain philosophic brains. We all, naturally, have moments of boredom and the desire for diversion. In such a moment, yesterday, I myself did stray beyond the portal of a scarlet edifice in the Marylebone Road and did wander among wax-works. My visit may have been a "sensation" or an "experience," or both, but it was not at all nice. In future I shall stick to ennui. What is it that pervades that congress of barren effigies? Why is the atmosphere so sinister, so subtly exhaustive? They say that, for all creatures, life ebbs lowest and death's meridian is in those chill, still intervals before the sun's relapse or resurrection, and I can well imagine that, likewise, no invalid, laid among those effigies, could survive for many minutes. They frightened; me, I remember, when I was a little child and was taken to see them, as a treat. In a sense, they frightened me again, yesterday. But my fear, when I could not have cried to be taken home. I could not tear myself from their company. Powerless of escape, as in a dream, I must needs wander on, pausing before each one of those cadaverous and ignoble dolls, hating the tallowy faces and glass eyes that stared back at me, the rusty clothes, the smooth, nailless, little hands. I wished to Heaven I had never come into the place, yet must I needs stay there. The orchestra, playing lively tunes, did but intensify the gloom and horror of the exhibition. One would prefer no music in a sarcophagus. Why were they ranged here, these dolls? What fascination had they? They were not lifelike. They gave me no illusion. I remembered how Ouida, in one of her earlier books, had told us of one who came to the dim hall of some Florentine villa, and, gazing round at the pagan statues that were there, had fancied himself in the presence of the immortal gods, and had abased himself before them. Could any man, I wondered, entering Madame Tussaud's initial chamber, fancy that the old kings and queens of England had come to life? Mrs. Markham being his sole authority for most of their faces, he would not be hampered by any positive conceptions. For aught one knows, Richard Cœur de Lion may have had some such face as yonder person on the daïs, and King Stephen's image may be the image of King Stephen. But oh, what stiff and inadequate absurdities! That fatuous puppet, called Mr. Gladstone, in the next room, is scarcely less convincing. And even when the familiar features of some man or woman have been moulded correctly, how little one cares, how futile it all seems! The figures are animated with no spark of life's semblance. Made in man's image, they are as man to God. Even from that elaborately set scene, representing a drawing room at the court of St. James's, one can draw no possible illusion. It is true that the royal personages, of whose models it is composed, are better sub jects for ceraceous art than are any humbler folk. The high remoteness of their life tends to clear them of obvious vivacity, and these wax-works are apt travesties of faces whose Olympian calm is unmingled with Olympian contemplativeness. But even this crowd of models is a failure. See how each figure stands solitary! It is only those imperceptible nerve-currents, passing from one being to another, that create a homogeneous scene. Though these wax-works are made in so close an imitation of life, they have, indeed, less verisimilitude than the outcome of any fine art. They are most nearly akin with statuary, I suppose, in that they are themselves a form of plastic art. But statuary, as Pater pointed out, in a pregnant (if rather uncouth) sentence, moves us to emotion, "not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it." I think that waxworks fail, because they are not made within any of those "exquisite limitations" of color, texture, proportion, to which all visual arts must be subjected. Life, save only through conventions, is inimitable. The more closely it be aped, the more futile and unreal its copy. Well! And herein, perhaps, lies the secret of that enervation, which waxworks do produce in many of their beholders. Good painting and good sculpture inspire us with some illusion, thus compensating us for what were otherwise the fatigue of gazing at them, But the best wax-works can only be regarded as specimens of ingenuity, mysterious and elaborate, always abortive. One marvels not that Æneas wept when he saw Troy's fall frescoed on the walls of Carthage. But could Louis Napoleon, coming up from Chislehurst and visiting Madame Tussaud's, have turned away, from the presentment of his lost pomp, with so terrible a heartcry as "Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris"? I can hardly suppose that any one who ever saw his own wax-work did not feel mortified and sickened. I can imagine a man being haunted, for the rest of his life, by the knowledge that a ghastly double of him self is standing, all day long, over a number, to be gazed at and “looked out” in the catalogue-is standing there, all night long, in the dark. Is the condemned murderer, I wonder, ever appalled by the thought of his sure survival under Madame's roof? Does he ever think that, soon after he, poor wretch, has been slung down to eternity, another figure will be propped up in the Chamber of Horrors? Such were the speculations that filled my brain, as I roamed morbidly around the exhibition. Though with every moment my vitality seemed to be ebbing lower and lower, though I cursed myself bitterly for being there, I could not tear myself from that gaunt hierarchy of tongueless orators, patriots without blood, and kings whose insignia are colored glass. The unreality of everything oppressed me, in brain and body, with an indescribable lassitude. I felt dimly that the place was terrible, everything in it terrible. Life was a sacred thing-why had it been profaned here, for so many years? Whence came this hateful craft? With what tools, in what workshop, who, for whose pleasure, fashioned these awful images? Images? Yes, of course, they were images. . . . But why should Garibaldi and those others all stare at me so gravely? Had they some devil's power of their own, some mesmerism? It flashed upon me that, as I watched them, they were stealing my life from me, making me one of their own kind. My brain seemed to be shrinking, all the blood ceasing in my body. I would not watch them. I dropped my eyelids. My hands looked smooth, waxen, without nerves. I knew now that I should never speak nor hear again, never move. I took a dull pride, even, in the thought that this was the very frock-coat in which I had been assassinated. . . . With an effort, I pulled myself together. Looking neither to the right nor to the left, I passed, through that morgue of upstanding corpses, to the entrance, down the marble staircase, out into the street. . . . Ah! It was good to be in the street! MAX BEERBOHM. From The Speaker. FETICH. We have just destroyed another stronghold of Fetichism in West Africa, perhaps the foulest of all; but more than enough still remain for the study of those inquirers who seek the meaning and the explanation of the system. We used to think that explanation was not needed. The word "superstition" sufficed to account for any practice of human beings, just as "instinct" did in the case of animals. Each blocked the path of the investigator, who contentedly set himself to gather facts and illustrations, not trying to push further towards the hidden sources of things. But of late it has been discovered that Fetichism is a stage in the evolution of religious sentiment which perhaps every race of mortals has traversed. It succeeds the state of blank unconsciousness to things supernatural, and it is followed by Nature-Worship-that is, Fetichism represents the earliest faint adumbration of a deity. True negroes have never got beyond that stage unaided. The theory is reasonable enough-it can be argued without inconsistency; though if Nature-Worship were put first and Fetichism behind nothing would be lost apparently. But the word must be taken in a limited sense, excluding much that persons practically familiar with it understand thereby. The learned refer to that form of Fetichism which may be called domestic, where an individual chooses some paltry object, as a pebble or a bit of wood, and makes it his "god" until another object of the same sort catches his fancy. They do not take account of the developments which produce a theocracy like that of Dahomey or Benin, nor of the strange and potent influence which Fetichism enjoys in our Christian colonies. But there lies the interest of the system to ordinary men. Well do I remember a conversation with Mr. Marshall, chief justice of the Gold Coast, in 1872. He told me that "the Fetich drove him to despair." He felt himself encompassed by it as soon as he entered his court. If any case of such impor tance that one party could obtain the help of the Fetich men, such circumstantial evidence was forthcoming that he had found himself obliged to deliver judgment against his own strong conviction. But it was not false swearing exactly-that never calls for remark in negro-land. Mr. Marshall was satisfied that the witnesses who described a scene or a document, when he had reason to think they were committing perjury, did, in fact, believe every word they said. And he concluded upon the whole that the Fetich men impressed these ideas upon them by acting the scene in their presence when under the influence of a drug. Thus they had an answer always ready when questioned upon any detail, and they were unanimous. Dr. Charcot had not published his observations then or Mr. Marshall would have explained the mystery, no doubt by hypnotic suggestion. But his perplexity and distress were greatest when the matter at issue concerned one of the chiefs. He had the worst opinion of these men; but I say no more on that point, since I have no personal knowledge. He declared, however, that when a chief came before his court he felt perfectly helpless. The Fetich men took the case out of his hands, producing witnesses of the highest respectability-as respectability goes out there to depose whatever might be desirable. Not seldom, when the case touched on matters outside the ordinary experience of natives, they swore to a flat impossibility. But that demonstration puzzled without confounding them. Tant pis pour les faits would express their frame of mind. I myself had a little experience of the Fetich-that is, the incident passed under my observation. Mr. Selby, the merchant who hospitably entertained me at Cape Coast Castle, was robbed of his cash-box. He had such strong ground to suspect his head clerk that I was surprised to see the man at his desk next day. But Selby, who was curiously reticent on this occasion, told me he had not informed the police. There was a considerable sum in the box. "The man will abscond with it," I said. “Oh, no,” replied Selby; "I have spoken to Chief Something"-a longlegged veteran who dwelt in a tumbledown barrack across the road. And the man did not run away. After this I met negroes of rather curious aspect always hanging about the yard in which he had his office. From time to time they held a brief interview with him. Every day I asked, "What news?" There was none, and Selby began to get irritated. At length the head clerk vanished, but I heard that he had not run away. Some weeks afterwards, on my return from a trip, Selby showed me the cash-box; the man had confessed, but he would not give up the money. After another pause, he brought half of it and Selby took him back into his service. Then I heard the story, kept from me hitherto lest I should chatter. Old traders do not ask assistance from the law in such a case. They go to a friendly chief and invoke his Fetich. That paralyzes the thief to begin with-he cannot escape. Then the Fetich urges him somehow to confess. If he remain obstinate, he is taken away, unable to resist, and treated. Selby told me I might have seen his clerk in the chief's house all the time, free apparently to walk out at his pleasure. But whatever the process, I should say that man never outlived the effects. It was a sleek, sly, smiling negro who committed the crime; the wretch who returned from the dominion of the Fetich was wrinkled and terror-stricken. He seemed to be always listening. But Selby assured me that the torture was altogether moral, and Mr. Marshall inclined to the same belief. Both ascribed an extraordinary knowledge of poisons to the Fetich men, which is at anybody's service for a trifle. It appears, then, that Fetichism in this aspect is identical with the Obi and Voodoo of the West Indies. In another aspect it represents to the negro a superstitious feeling common enough among ourselves. A good many of us recognize, for example, that it is "unlucky" to put on the left shoe before the right, though we all mock the notion; a black man who wore shoes would say that it was against his Fetich. Indeed, many of our old-world beliefs relating to witchcraft may be paralleled in West Africa. There was a sort of bowl behind the door of the "palace" at Quisa, shaped of mud, attached to the wallour servants taught us to call it the "Fetich hole." It had been emptied before my arrival, in search of gold, and the rubbish taken out lay on the floor. Amongst it was a string of egg-shells, with a feather tied on betwixt each pair. I think the famous "Witches' ladder" had not been discovered then, in the thatch of a Scottish farmhouse; when I came to hear the description, I recognized that object from the Fetich hole at Quisa without the egg-shells. To apply the word Fetichism to the religious organization of the great negro monarchies appears to me misleading. It prevails there, of course. Kings and priests and subjects all have their Fetich, but the gods are above that. In the case of Dahomey, indeed, snakes are worshipped. The use of the term "Fetich" causes confusion. It is Portuguese, but the natives have adopted it widely, and they apply it to all matters connected with their superstitions, for which, of course, they have a distinct word. Before the philosophers can master the principle of Fetichism they must learn the different notions and practices all lumped together under that title. From Public Opinion. THE DACOITS OF BURMAH. Burmah is one of the cuntries that are changing very fast, and one of the tuings that has changed in Burmah is the dacoit. The sportive gentlemen described by Rudyard Kipling and others, who crucified villagers wholesale were flourishing in full vigor less than ten years ago, but they already belong as completely to the past as Dick Turpin and his colleagues in England. No doubt a fresh war, or any event se |