Who can be surprised that amid this seething turmoil of colours,
instincts, creeds, and languages, art should have fastened upon the
race-problems as her great theme for the moment? And she has fastened
upon them everywhere. France herself has not been able to avoid the
contagion. Pierre Loti is the most typical French representative of this
vagabond spirit; and the question of the peoples naturally envisages
itself to his mind in true Gallic fashion in the "Mariage de Loti" and
in "Madame Chrysanthème." He sees it through a halo of vague sexual
sentimentalism. In England, it was Rider Haggard from the Cape who first
set the mode visibly; and nothing is more noteworthy in all his work
than the fact that the interest mainly centres in the picturesque
juxtaposition and contrast of civilisation and savagery. Once the cue
was given, what more natural than that young Rudyard Kipling, fresh home
from India, brimming over with genius and with knowledge of two
concurrent streams of life that flow on side by side yet never mingle,
should take up his parable in due course, and storm us all by assault
with his light field artillery? Then Robert Louis Stevenson, born a
wandering Scot, with roving Scandinavian and fiery Celtic blood in his
veins, must needs settle down, like a Viking that he is, in far Samoa,
there to charm and thrill us by turns with the romance of Polynesia. The
example was catching. Almost without knowing it, other writers have
turned for subjects to similar fields. "Dr. Isaacs," "Paul Patoff," "By
Proxy," were upon us. Even Hall Caine himself, in some ways a most
insular type of genius, was forced in "The Scapegoat" to carry us off
from Cumberland and Man to Morocco. Sir Edwin Arnold inflicts upon us
the tragedies of Japan. I have been watching this tendency long myself
with the interested eye of a dealer engaged in the trade, and therefore
anxious to keep pace with every changing breath of popular favour: and I
notice a constant increase from year to year in the number of short