THE LONDON
MERCURY

Edited by J. C. Squire

Volume I

1919 November to April 1920

London The Field Press Ltd

PRINTED AT
THE FIELD PRESS
WINDSOR HOUSE
BREAM'S BUILDINGS
LONDON E·C4

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1

Vol. I No. 1 November 1919

WITH these notes we introduce the first number of the London Mercury. It might, beyond denial, appear in more tranquil and comfortable days. We have just been through a crisis which has brought us within sight of the basic realities of life—food, clothing, housing, security against violence. As soon as the paper was projected we were forced to visualise the likelihood of a time in which paper would be almost unprocurable, printing impossible (save in an amateur way at home), and the distribution of literature a matter of passing sheets from hand to hand. We have had a glimpse into the abyss of disorganisation, and, for the time being at all events, we have managed to keep on the solid ground. But, having conceived this journal, its conductors would have been reluctant to abandon their plans whatever confusion might have supervened. They may fairly claim to have formulated a scheme which, when it is perfectly executed, will meet all the demands of the public which reads old or new books, and of that other and smaller public which is chiefly concerned with the production of new works of the imagination. The more intense the troubles of society, the more uncertain and dark the future, the more obvious is the necessity for periodicals which hand on the torch of culture and creative activity. Literature is of the spirit; and by the spirit man lives. Our traditions are never more jealously to be cherished than when they are threatened; and our literature is the repository of all our traditions.

We think that, with our list of contents before us, we may reasonably say that there has never been in this country a paper with the scope of the London Mercury. We have had periodicals which have exercised a great critical influence, such as the Edinburgh Review of Jeffrey's and Macaulay's day. We have had periodicals which have published an unusual amount of fine "creative work," such as Thackeray's Cornhill. We have at this day the Times Literary Supplement, which reviews, with the utmost possible approximation to completeness, the literary "output" of the time; we have weekly papers which review the principal books and publish original verse2 and prose, and monthly papers which diversify their tables of contents with articles on Molière or Chateaubriand, Byron or Mr. Alfred Noyes. But we have had no paper which has combined as the London Mercury will do all those various kinds of matter which are required by the lover of books and the practising writer. In our pages will be found original verse and prose in a volume not possible to the weekly paper; full-length literary essays such as have been found only in the politico-literary monthlies; a critical survey of books of all kinds recently published; and other "features," analogues to some of which may be found, one by one, here and there, but which have never before been brought together within a single cover. The London Mercury—save in so far as it will publish reasoned criticisms of political (as of other) books—will avoid politics. It will concern itself with none of those issues which are the field of political controversy, save only such—the teaching of English, the fostering of the arts, the preservation of ancient monuments are examples—as impinge directly upon the main sphere of its interests. But within the field that it has chosen it will endeavour to be as exhaustive as is humanly possible. The present number is an earnest of its intentions; in early future numbers other sections will be added which will steadily bring it nearer to the ideal that it has set out to reach.

That ideal comprehends the satisfaction of the current needs of all those who are intelligently interested in literature, in the drama, in the arts, and in music. We shall attempt to make known the best that is being done and, so far as literature is concerned, to assist the process by the publication of original work. But thus far we have mentioned no more than the London Mercury's functions as what may be called a "news" paper, an organ for the recording and dissemination of things that have already happened or been done. Its functions, as its conductors conceive them, will include—and this will be the chief of them—the examination of those conditions which in the past have favoured, and in the future are likely to favour, the production of artistic work of the first order, and the formulation and application of sound critical standards.

It is not a matter of attempting to make universal the shibboleths of some coterie or school, or of carrying some technical "stunt" through the country as though it were a fiery cross. We do not propose to maintain (to give concrete examples) that literature should be didactic or that it should be a-moral. We are not interested in urging that the couplet is exhausted, that the sonnet should be revived, that plays should have four or three acts, that rhyme is essential or that it is outworn, that lines should or should not be of regular lengths. We are tied to no system of harmony; we have no dogmas as to the dominance of representation in painting; we3 would make no hard-and-fast rule about the desirability of drawing a vertical wall as sloping at 45 degrees or of painting a man's face magenta and sage-green. As convenient descriptions we do not object (save sometimes on grounds of euphony) to the terms Futurist, Vorticist, Expressionist, post-Impressionist, Cubist, Unanimist, Imagist: but we suspect them as banners and battle-cries, for where they are used as such it is probable that fundamentals are being forgotten. Our aim will be, as critics, to state and to reiterate what are the motives, and what must be the dominant elements, of all good art, whatever the medium and whatever the idiosyncrasies of the artist, even if he find it convenient to draw on papier-mâché with a red-hot poker, and even if his natural genius impels him to write in lines of one syllable. The profoundest truths about art, whether literary or pictorial, are crystallised in maxims which may have been more often reiterated than understood, but which have undeniably been so often repeated that people now find them tiresome. Of such are "fundamental brainwork," "emotion recollected in tranquillity," "the rhythmical creation of beauty," and "the eye on the object." Each of these embodies truths, and there is indisputable truth also in the statements that a poet should have an ear and that a painter should paint what he sees. These things are platitudes; but a thing does not cease to be true merely because it is trite, and it is disastrous to throw over the obvious merely because it was obvious to one's grandfather. Yet men—and even women—do such things. We have had in the last few years art, so called, which sprang from every sort of impulse but the right one, and was governed by every sort of conceptions but the right ones. We have had "styles" which were mere protests and revulsions against other styles; "styles" which were no more than flamboyant attempts at advertisement akin to the shifting lights of the electric night signs; authors who have forgotten their true selves in the desperate search for remarkable selves; artists who have refused to keep their eyes upon the object because it has been seen before; musicians who have made, for novelty's sake, noises, and painters who have made, for effect's sake, spectacles, which invited the attention of those who make it their business to suppress public nuisances. We have had also theories in vogue the effects of which on mind and heart were such, and were foredoomed to be such, as to wither many talents in the bud. A single positive trend in English literature we do not ask and it is not necessarily desirable. We have heard the complaint from critics of the Gallic school that even in the days of the marvellously fertile English "Romantic generation" there was no one "movement," no Ten Commandments, and everybody was at sixes and sevens. That is the national way, and it probably accounts for our possession of the greatest and most varied imaginative literature that exists. Nevertheless, anarchy is not desirable, nor that worthy frame of mind which extends toleration not merely to the good of all kinds, but to the good and the bad, the intelligent and the foolish indifferently. And surely this toleration has been too commonly in evidence in this country in our time.

4 Is the contention disputed? Is the fact other than self-evident? Is it necessary to explain and to accentuate the confusion which for the last ten years has been evident in the creative and in the critical literature of this country? There have been, as there always are, writers who have cheerfully continued writing as their predecessors have written, serious parodists of Milton, of Tennyson, and of George Eliot. These least of all can be said to be in the tradition of English letters; for that tradition has been a tradition of constant experiment and renovation. There has been a central body of writers—from Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bridges, and Mr. Conrad to the best of the younger poets—who have gone steadily along the sound path, traditional yet experimental, personal yet sane. But there has been also a large number of young writers who have strayed and lost themselves amongst experiments, many of them foredoomed to sterility. Young men, ignoring the fundamental truth expressed in the maxim, "Look in thy heart and write," have attempted to make up poems (and pictures) "out of their heads." Others, defying the obvious postulate that all good writing will carry at least a superficial meaning to the intelligent reader, have invited us to admire strings of disconnected words and images, meaningless and even verbless. Others, turning their backs on those natural affections and primary interests the repudiation of which means, and must always mean, the death of the highest forms of literature, have concentrated upon the subversion of every belief by which man lives. They have sapped at the bases of every loyalty, and sneered at every code, oblivious to both social welfare and social experience. They have been, such of them as profess the moralistic preoccupation, very contemptuous of "clean living and no thinking," but the dirty living and muddled thinking that they have offered as a substitute have been no great improvement. They have been, such of them as have the preoccupation of the artist, so anxious to look at the abnormal and the recondite that they have forgotten what are and must be the main elements of man's life and what the most conspicuous features in man's landscape. We have had an orgy of undirected abnormality. The old object of art was "what oft was said but ne'er so well expressed"; the object of many of the new artists has been what was never said before and could not possibly be expressed worse. The tricks of abnormality have been learnt. Young simpletons who, twenty years ago, would have been writing vapid magazine verses about moonrise and roses have discovered that they have only to become incoherent, incomprehensible, and unmetrical to be taken seriously. Bad writers will, without intellectual or æsthetic impulse, pretend to burrow into psychological (or physical) obscurities which are no more beyond the artist's purview than anything else, provided he responds to them, but which have the advantage for an insincere writer that they enable him to talk nonsense that honest unsophisticated readers are unable to diagnose as nonsense. Year after year we have new fungoid growths of feeble pretentious impostors who, after a while, are superseded by their younger kindred; and year by year5 we see writers who actually have some intelligence and capacity for observation and exact statement led astray into the stony and barren fields of technical anarchism or the pitiful madhouse of moral antinomianism. At bottom vanity and pretence are the worst of vices in a young writer, but they may be encouraged or discouraged, even these; and we have seen times and places in which black was called white.

Amid this luxuriant confusion the voices of critics at once sane and informed have been few. For the most part our older critics have tended to treat the younger generation as a howling menagerie of insensate young beasts, and have failed to keep sufficiently closely in touch with production to discriminate between the traditional and the anarchistic, the sincere and the pretentious, the intelligent and the stupid, the healthy and the vicious, the promising and the sterile. We have ourselves been frequently amused and irritated at finding elderly men of letters alarmed at the "revolutionism of the young," as manifested in Mr. A. or Mr. B., or asking, bewildered, "why the young take Miss C. so seriously," when as a fact A. and B. are merely rowdies of whose foolish books even the young buy only fifty or sixty copies, and the fair C. is a person taken seriously by no serious person of her own generation. Those critics, again, who are constantly in touch with the fruits of the printing press have for the most part got into a state of puzzlement in which they are not merely afraid to make mistakes (lest what looks like a frog may turn out to be an angel), but in which they have almost lost the habit of using their senses for the purpose for which they were meant to be used. Everything is treated with respect. Platitudinous rubbish—so welcome perhaps because it is so easily understood—is treated as though Wordsworth had written it; hectic gibberish of the silliest kind is honoured, at worst, with the sort of deferential reprimand that is applicable to great genius when great genius shows a slight tendency to kick over the traces. Even those of our reviews which do not ignore the best contemporary work more often than not allocate just as much space to the humbug and the faux bon. "The public, though dull, has not quite such a skull," as Swinburne's limerick put it. Many bad authors are much talked about but very little read, and critics who never write a line are frequently sound when most of the professionals have gone clean off the rails. Moreover, it is arguable—though we should not, without long consideration, accept the argument—that no amount of misleading criticism or bad example will ruin a man of strong natural genius, which implies perceptions which will not be denied, and a well-defined positive character. Nevertheless, even if we do not exaggerate the ill effects of haphazard and timid or haphazard and reckless criticism, it is surely obvious that both artists and their publics must gain if some of the rubbish can be cleared away. The ship moves in spite of all the barnacles, and it does not lose direction, but its progress might be less troublesome. We have often met6 persons who have distrusted all reviews because they have bought books on the strength of extravagant reviews and been once bit. We have often met people, too, who have procured what somebody (undeniably "intellectual") has told them to be the latest and most vigorous and representative work of imaginative literature, and, finding it distasteful, have come to the conclusion that the "poets of the day" or the "novelists of to-morrow" are not for them: turning back, then, to their Dickens or Browning or Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the mood of that ghastly pessimist who said that whenever a new book came out he read an old one. These readers are typical of many, and the result of their existence is that the dissemination of the best contemporary literature is (1) less wide than it might be and (2) less rapid than it might be. There is, as a rule—in the economists' term—far too great a "time-lag" in the making of the best reputations. A man often writes for years before he is heard of by the mass of the cultivated readers who are naturally predisposed to like his work, and do like it when at last they meet it. In a nation so large, and with so immense a volume of literary production, such numerous and diverse news-sheets, and such congested and ill-arranged bookshops, this phenomenon is bound to exist in some degree. But it may be minimised, and although we of the London Mercury cannot hope, and do not desire, to be judged by our aspirations rather than by our performances, we may at least be permitted to say that we shall do our utmost to contribute towards that end.

Even to disclaim an ambition for an infallible pontificate of letters must savour of impertinence. We can only say that what our journal can do in the way of affirming and applying principles of criticism, and giving a conspectus of the best contemporary work, we shall attempt to do. Our other functions we have already outlined, and a beginning is made in this number. We have made no endeavour to arrange a dazzling shop-window of names or "features" for our first number; whatever may be our readers' views concerning this number we can at least assure them that the contributors to subsequent numbers will be not less representative than those here found, and that only a beginning has yet been made towards the complete scheme that we have in view.

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16

By ROBERT NICHOLS

LONG, long ago there dwelt in the pleasant City-of-Towers a young princess of immense riches and of such exceeding beauty that none other could be compared to her. So famous, indeed, became the riches of her beauty and her possessions, that were only less than her beauty, that she was sought in marriage by every kind of personage. In three moons the train of her suitors, or mounted upon gold-stencilled elephants, tassel-fringed camels, palfries of Arabia, ponies of Astrakhan, mules of Nubia, or faring but upon the Sandals-of-Nature along the Road-of-Advantage, became so huge that the citizens of the City-of-Towers being eaten (albeit at no small price) out of hearth and home, petitioned the princely father of the damsel to mitigate, in whatever sort he should think fit, the good fortune of their city, which, possessing such a treasure as the princess Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity, admitted to finding its pleasure rather in reflecting upon the value of their jewel than in entertaining those who came to steal it. The ever-benevolent Prince accordingly issued a decree that no suitor was to approach the Princess save on the understanding that if he failed to win her affections his head should pay the forfeit. Forthwith ensued so remarkable a diminution in the number of her suitors that, in a short while, only those whom the Light-of-Love's-Eyes had guided or those whom the Three-thonged-Scourge-of-Need had driven remained mounted or standing before the palace gates. Nor did these linger overlong, for the heart of the Princess was less easily softened than that of the Executioner, who with one sweep of the scimitar relieved the Lover of the Burden-of-Love or severed the Needy from the Vessel-of-Need. Then the beautiful Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity, not unfatigued by such a succession of maidenly preoccupations, determined that for a little she would forget the Bonds-of-Necessity and atone somewhat to the citizens of the City-of-Towers for the inconveniences she had brought them. To this end she caused a special litter of cedar wood to be constructed, and, mounting therein, sallied forth to bestow upon the citizens of the City-of-Towers the hitherto-unseen and almost-unendurable beauty of her face.

Now it happened that in this city there was then dwelling a young scribe by name Es-siddeeh, that is the Very Veracious. This youth, the height of whose beauty was almost as remarkable as the depth of his wisdom, had spent the greater number of his days in study; so much so, in fact, that he had never cast his eyes upon a woman to love her, and this in spite of the possession of an enchanting smile, Nature's gift to him, of the power of which he was hardly conscious. Surrounded by parchments, having hung about his neck many little scrolls, with his tablet laid across his knees,17 daily he sat in his window and, while the traffic flowed by and the crowd shrilled more loudly than a flock of parokeets, raised not his eyes from his papyrus nor regarded any sound but the squeaking of his stylus-reed.

Thus, then, was he sitting when the troating of horns and the bombilation of gongs proclaimed the nearing of the Princess in her progress. But Es-siddeeh paid this din no attention and, though the fantastic shadows of many majestically-apparelled persons fell across his page, lifted not the Gatherers-of-Knowledge from the Leaves-of-Enlightenment. Meanwhile Sa-adeh, lying in her litter, enjoyed a certain satisfaction in the pleasurable recognition the gracious bestowal of the sight of her countenance procured the citizens. This satisfaction she told herself, as the procession advanced, was increased rather than diminished by the spectacle of certain bleared scribes, who, with ears already attached by cobwebs to the lintels of their doors, never lifted eyes as she passed. "For," she reflected, "such insensibility affords me a scale by which to gauge the pleasure I bestow elsewhere."

At this moment she arrived opposite Es-siddeeh's window.

Then the young scribe, feeling the gaze of another fixed upon him, looked up. And the eyes of Es-siddeeh exchanged thoughts with the eyes of Sa-adeh. When he bent to the tablet again, behold the words were to him but foolishness. All the afternoon he sat there wondering why he had spent his youth upon such things as now appeared to him the very vanity of vanities, colourless and the occupation of the myopic. At evenfall, driven abroad by a terrible restlessness, he wandered outside the walls of the city, but the murmuring of the breeze through the groves did but increase his distraction. Toward midnight he returned and, after spending the remainder of the night without sleep, informed his parents of his intention to turn suitor. Greatly perturbed, they besought him to relinquish so hopeless a project. In vain! at the third hour he proceeded to the palace. The gates were shut. When they did at last open he found himself face to face with the Executioner. Involuntarily he recoiled.

"No alms will be given to-day," said the Reliever-of-Headaches.

"I have not come for alms. I wish to see the porter."

"I am the porter."

"I thought you were——"

"So I was. But now that job is at an end. The capacity to love as our forefathers loved is passing away. Even a spirit of commercial enterprise is lacking. The world goes from bad to worse. Yesterday I cut off the heads of princes; to-day I open the door to mendicants. On no one is Fortune harder than I."

"I find that last reflection," returned the scribe, "so general that I grow convinced it must be true. But be of good cheer. Strange as it may seem, I am the bearer of good tidings. There is every likelihood of your shortly resuming your distinguished office—I have come as a suitor to the Princess."

"Have you, indeed? Ha, ha, ha! The coin is as good as earned.... However ... excuse my entertainment. I should not laugh; for18 understand my heart goes out to you in your public-spirited endeavour not to permit my office to lapse. Ah, if there were only more men of your kidney, and yet ... I regret to have to add that you will not profit me much. For make no mistake, I am a Republican; I believe that handsome is as handsome does. It is therefore my custom to request a little honorarium, in ratio to the means of my customer, in return for the service I render him. For this is a service which is unique, in that he probably has no servant in his suite trained to perform this duty for him, and it is besides a service for which the requirement of one small fee cannot be described as extortionate since the duty is one which being once satisfactorily performed does not require to be repeated."

"But I have not yet incurred the penalty."

"You will. Be reassured and, having no troublesome misgivings on this count, hand me that which in a few hours it will be too late for me to ask."

Es-siddeeh smiled. "Are you not paid by the Court?" he asked.

"I am," replied the other, softening, "and a beggarly wage it is, too, which compels me to make these requisitions. However, since you seem, for all your queer dress, a pleasant fellow, I will reduce my charge."

"Good. I feared I should never be able to pay—my means are so scanty."

"I should inform you that it is as well to pay because, if you do not, my arm, unstrengthened by the sinews of charity, may not perform its office with quite that address which is at once a delight to the spectators and a matter of self-gratification to my customer."

"Your magnanimity," replied the scribe, giving the man a coin, "does indeed bear witness to the superiority of your mind to its present situation and deserves a reward. I hope you will see that I am not disappointed of an interview."

Thereupon the Executioner conducted him into the palace and, leaving him in an inner apartment, acquainted one of the attendant damsels with the object of the scribe's visit.

For some time the maid regarded his dress dubiously.

"I should be grateful if you would inform the Princess of my arrival, for I cannot say that I find the sound of the Executioner in the courtyard below sharpening his scimitar on a wheel affords me as much pleasure as by his expression it affords him."

She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears:

"A young man calling himself the Very Veracious has arrived and sues for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners."

"I cannot see him." The maid returned.

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose in a garden of lilies."

"The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "is a new one and is graceful. Nevertheless dismiss him."

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the19 rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of the dove."

"It is very remarkable," he heard the Princess remark, "that he should so accurately describe my characteristics. He must be a diviner; since, as far as I know, he has never seen me nor spoken to me. Nevertheless dismiss him."

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh—but he could not think of anything to tell her and was sadly cast down. For his love, continuing to pain him, tortured him as a sweet fire in his bosom. At length, bethinking himself of his wisdom, he said in as brusque a tone as he could summon, "Tell her that I know the answer to all secrets and that she will regret it if she dismiss me."

"How now?" cried the Princess, "is he so clever, and has such courage? He will indeed be the Very Veracious if, possessing these answers, he depart immediately, for then my womanish regret will indeed be sharp; since of all humours, he has had the wit to see, this humour of curiosity is the one most deeply implanted in us. Of what complexion is he?"

"He is of spare build; his hair is black and glossy as that of a black panther; in his eyes there is a dark fire. His clothes are by no means new, his fingers are stained with ink, and about his neck there is a necklace of little scrolls."

"A necklace of little scrolls, did you say? Send him in."

Then Es-siddeeh stepped into her presence, and it was to him as if he were a little planet drawn for the first time into the orbit of the sun.

She commanded him to be seated and plied him with various questions concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous horses, music as Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature.

All these questions he answered not only discreetly, but with wit.

For some time she rested her eyes upon his face in a musing fashion. Then, with a strange inflection, she asked, "What is love?"

"I have but just beheld the cause," he returned; "give me a little space and I infer its properties as a consequence. At present I am troubled to know whether the same vessel can contain both cause and consequence."

Not without haste, she assured him that she would consider her question answered, and enquired, "Does it become thee to risk so wise a head at the bidding of so foolish a heart?"

"It lay not, and does not lie, with me to make it becoming."

This answer did not appear to please her, for, moving her head, she proceeded with an instant change of tone, "One thing I have ever desired to know. What is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?"

He was taken aback.

"What? Canst thou not answer, thou who didst assert that thou hadst in thy bosom the answer to all secrets, O Very Veracious one?"

Seeing her smiling, he replied, "I have not seen the Sphinx unless I see her now."

20 "I perceive that thou canst not answer. Yet because of thy youth and thy beauty I will spare thee."

"Spare me not, since before thou hast not spared me."

"Upon one condition:—that shouldst thou wish again to see me thou shalt bring with thee the secret of the Sphinx's smile. And now, before thou leavest me, because thou wert not as insensible as most scribes are wont to be, but wast willing to assay to gain some knowledge of perfection from life as well as from thy scrolls, I will give thee a token to take with thee."

At these words, as if some beneficent and invisible djinn had escaped from his bottle, a spirit of strange sweetness seemed to fill the room. Strength forsook the body of Es-siddeeh.

"Come hither," she murmured.

So Es-siddeeh went to her and bowed down with his face to the floor.

Then the Princess took him very gently in her arms and, raising his head, placed one hand beneath his locks and the other over his eyes, and so kissed him.

Now when Es-siddeeh felt the touch of her hands, cool as water lilies upon him; smelled the delicate smell of her bosom, more mysterious than any perfume of the mages; tasted her mouth's nectar, more precious than the combed honey of the blessed in Paradise, then indeed he knew there to be such a seal coldly pressed upon his heart that the stamp of it would not be erased all the days of his life.

"Ah, merciless," said he, "thou hast indeed not spared me. Now must I inevitably return."

"It was for that reason I gave it thee," she said.

He hurried home. He sold all his belongings.

His father, seeing him about to depart, cried, "Thou wilt break thy mother's heart."

He could not reply.

His mother, watching him set out upon his mule with a slender bag of coin in his hands, cursed him and the Princess.

He did not look back.

After a journey of three moons he arrived before the Sphinx.

His first impression was that her countenance contained no such difficult riddle as he had been led to suppose. The body of the Sphinx was huge, her paws stretched in front formidable, her shoulders heavy. Her bandeletted head sustained a wedge-fronted tiara. All this he took in at a glance. Then he turned to the face. He had not expected it to be so close to the ground and so open to inspection. The forehead he could see was ample. The eyebrows, albeit contracted in a slight frown, were high, arched, and wide, which lent the upper part of the face a frank21 expression; but the reverie of the eyes, fixed on space, seemed somewhat dimmed—as if an impalpable hand had interposed itself between the gazing orbs and the sun. The smoothness and delicate moulding of the cheeks and chin were remarkable. The nose astonished by the firm subtlety of its outline, which gave to the face a simultaneous expression of suavity and undeviating determination. If the nose had provoked wonder the mouth was yet more amazing. The lips, which might have been gracious and full when parted, were so closely compressed in their smile as to modify the whole effect of the other features.

"I must go nearer," said Es-siddeeh.

He established himself almost between the paws of the monster, for monster she had become to him who now beheld her mien more clearly—a mien disfigured, yet seeming uncaring for its own disfigurement, and—greatest horror of all—a mien in which the eyes possessed irises but seemingly no pupils. For a little he considered returning. Then he said to himself, "No; to see her afar off gives a false impression. One should see her as she is, and earnestly scanning the visage wrestle in thought till one discovers the secret of the smile." In this he instinctively knew himself to be right.

But he was not long in finding that the more and the closer he stared the more difficult the problem became. To begin with the blemishes distracted him overmuch. The main cast of the face appeared, though subtle, simple and grand enough, but the fissures between the blocks that composed it, the discolorations, and the crevices that ran from side to side confused his eye. "If it were only perfect, all would be much easier to discover," he murmured. Then, too, the expression of the Sphinx and the import of the smile seemed to vary with the changes of the weather. On fresh-blowing sunny days the image beamed on him with a shadow-dappled, bleached cheerfulness of resignation. But when the sun raged the face, too, raged as with an inward fury; its lineaments shook in the heat-eddies that arose from the sand, and every grain glowed like a particle of fire. Nor did its rage abate during the succeeding night. The rising of the tropic moon gave to its complexion, streaked with violet shadows, an ashen hue: the pallidity of an unappeasable and frustrated anger. On lowering days it blackly scowled, and the swollen nostrils and imperious mouth assumed the similitude of being endowed only with the bitterest irony, a constancy of cruelty and an unquestionable scorn. Then he hated it....

At last, perceiving that the secret was not to be gained in a few days or even in a few moons, he resolved to settle in the desert opposite the Sphinx.

Three years passed.

Day by day and night by night Es-siddeeh watched the Sphinx. Daily the sun, shining upon the surface of the mask, seemed to make it more impenetrable, and nightly the moon, deepening the shadows in the crevices, increased its mystery. Round about the knoll, which the pilgrim had selected for his station, the sand gave off a glare more deadly than the bed of a furnace or, rising in whirlwind-spouts whose tops spattered ashes upon him, circled22 his island like monstrous and infuriate djinns. Toward sunset the clouds, gathered in an awful and silent grandeur, discharged, with stunning clap and reverberations as of mountains overthrown, their lightnings, a shower of blue arrows, to all quarters of the fluttering horizon. Once indeed Es-siddeeh awoke to behold a body of dense vapour launch itself wrathfully downward against the head of the brooding Sphinx and wreath it with a crown of crackling fire. The scribe leaped up, and, despite the pressure of the blast, succeeded in gaining, not without considerable risk to himself, a position before the base of the monster. His courage was unrewarded. Upon that obstinate mien, livid in the tawny light, the rain glistened as if there had indeed started from the stony pores a ghastly dew; but the thin lips were as tightly compressed as ever. "Hideous Sphinx!" exclaimed the youth, "thou cruelty incarnate, cannot even the ire of the gods subdue thee? Shall I never, from some motion of thy visage, learn what secret thou hidest?"

As the winter approached the wilderness, utterly denuded of weed or moss, grew vaster and more bleak. The nights turned frosty. Overhead the constellations increased in splendour and number until every quarter of the empyrean shone encrusted with stars. Against these brilliant galaxies and the diffused, pervasive effulgence of countless further bodies the forehead of the Sphinx outlined itself in desolate and stubborn majesty.

Then was it that, alone amid the desert, under the gaze of those myriad and so distant lights, facing the figure of the Sphinx, now blacker and more impenetrable than ever, Es-siddeeh reached the climacteric which is despair. Baffled, without any sensation but an exasperation that gnawed his very reins and made giddy his temples, he spent his days and nights in complete dejection. At length, wishing, to terminate his sufferings once and for all he approached the Sphinx and, vehemently hammering its breast with his fists, cried in a terrible voice, "What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?"

But the Sphinx did not answer.

At dawn, impotent before the titan, he perceived upon the surface of her bosom bloodmarks hitherto unobserved. Other hands beside his own, then, had knocked upon that stony breast. He returned to his hovel and stretched himself down in a sleep that was like a stupor. On waking he determined to climb the bandelettes of the Sphinx and to cast himself from its forehead. He had scarcely taken a step when, exhausted by privation and prolonged anguish of mind, he fell, and lying helpless found himself fronting a face mirrored in a pool, the product of a shower which had fallen while he slept. The face was the face of one whose visage was slowly approximating to that of the Sphinx, but it lacked the smile, and in its eyes there was the light of imminent insanity. For a space he gazed without realising the apparition to be but his own reflection. Then—stiffening his arms that he might raise his head and shoulders, extended, as he was, upon the desert like a Syrian puma whose bowels are transfixed by an arrow and23 who is about to die—he rallied his strength for a last effort. Before him, a quivering tigress in the meridian sunshine, crouched the colossal Sphinx. The frustrated eyes of the scribe, nigh starting from their sockets, bent upon it such a glare as sought to penetrate its very soul. Yet at the last, heaving himself forward, with nostrils wrinkled and teeth bared as if in the very coughing frenzy of a fighting death, he could but ejaculate "Sphinx, now had I entreated thine aid!—hadst thou not rendered me too proud, who have discovered thee to be but stone."

Then the Sphinx answered in a voice of thunder:

"O man, aid thyself!"

A company of Bedawi, journeying across the desert, discovered him lying senseless. Him they succoured as a madman, and therefore sacred to the gods.

For a while he rested in a pleasant city, enjoying the support of a good man, who did not understand the cause of his afflictions, but at once realised their intensity and the deep importance to Es-siddeeh of the search on which he was engaged. His health mended at length and undeterred by the solicitations of his host, troubled to see him in such haste, he resumed his investigations. This time he did not attempt to wrestle the secret from the Sphinx herself, but determined to prosecute his enquiries among the learned.

With this end in view he interrogated the chief scholars of that district, but, coming to the conclusion that they were too provincial, he made his way to Jerusalem. Here no answer at all was given him—save that by the study of the particular law made for a particular tribe and containing, as he himself was obliged to admit, the most admirable rules for the preservation of an individual or a clan, he would attain to a knowledge of all things.

He determined to go to Greece, the fountain-head of knowledge. But in Athens he fared not much better. The majority of the inhabitants, the fascination of whose minds he had nevertheless to admit, seemed given up to the fervour of local politics, money-making, the quarrels of the law-courts, the consideration of athletics, the technique of the chase, and the refinement of trivial or voluptuous delights: pursuits which he told himself could scarcely further true knowledge. There were, however, a number of persons, given to the study of natural law as revealed in nature, who enquired whether he had weighed the Sphinx or examined her molecules beneath the magnifying crystal. He was compelled to reply that he had done neither of these things. Whereat they retorted that it was therefore impossible for them to build a theory as to the constituents of her smile and verify it in experiment. "Moreover," they continued, "even the data you have given us appear not only insufficient but contradictory, since you state that the smile is at once sweet and sour. Direct opposites cannot be reconciled in science. We think it therefore best to direct you to the school of metaphysics opposite, where, if we are to judge from the uproar which occasionally24 disturbs our precincts, we believe this feat to be daily accomplished." ... Es-siddeeh accordingly lost no time in entering the school opposite. After a lengthy session, the clamour of which somewhat bewildered him, a young man with a high complexion and a shrill voice approached him and said, "As far as can be ascertained (for there are the usual number of qualifications and reservations of opinion amongst us) we are of a mind that the secret of the Sphinx is that she has no secret—at least no secrets from us."

Es-siddeeh did not stop to enquire further, for it appeared to him that he could not gain by it and, moreover, he was much fatigued. So, taking boat, he sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and, turning north, descried, after an arduous voyage, the extreme Western Isles enshrouded in a perpetual prismatic fog. On these coasts he landed and, penetrating inland, in a short while discovered a university situated on the chief river of the main island. Having struck up an acquaintance with the courteous master of the chief college, he poured out his tale. The Disseminator-of-Truth, after prolonged thought, replied, "Without wishing in any way to influence your conduct, I should, since you seem to be enamoured of the lady, inform her that the secret is anything you happen to have in your head at the moment (as well it may be), provided the matter be of such obscurity that that instinct which is peculiar to females, and which on the best authority (namely, their own) I am given to understand is infallible, will instantly assure her that she understands it even better than you do."

"But you would not have me deceive her?"

"Indeed, no. For recollect—what she believes to be true will per contra be true to her."

"It seems to me, then, that you are asking her to deceive herself."

"Not at all," answered the Sage somewhat impatiently; "all is, you must know, relative, and any conclusion is as relative to enquiry as any other."

"But not to truth!" returned Es-siddeeh with heat.

The great man smiled. "An irritating preoccupation this, when the search itself is so intriguing."

Es-siddeeh, the Very Veracious, experienced a curious sensation in which pleasure certainly played a part. "That is perfectly true," he remarked; "I am finding more interest in the search than I expected. Nevertheless I wish to return to Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity" (and at her name he was conscious of an inexplicable spasm of contrition), "and to present her with my conclusion—the Truth."

"Here I think we part," said the other suddenly. "Farewell."

Then, as he turned away, the elder flung over his shoulder, "For myself, old-fashioned being that I am, I am inclined to think the truth is that the secret of the smile of the Sphinx is not one that should be repeated to a lady."

It was some time before Es-siddeeh recovered from the shock of this interview. When he had done so, he hastened to leave the country and to betake himself to the Furthest East. The voyage lasted three years. But,25 when he posed his question to the head of a Manchu university, what was his surprise to be countered with just such a suggestion as had been put to him in the extreme Isles of the Western Hemisphere!

"But you forget my name," he exclaimed.

"No; for indeed so eager have you been to enquire of me the secret of the Sphinx and to narrate to me the story of your quest that you have forgotten to acquaint me with your name."

"I am named Es-siddeeh, which, being translated, is the Very Veracious."

"Then, my middle-aged young man of redoubtable veracity, I advise you to abandon your quest and to despair at once. It is much quicker. In such a mood you will discover yourself becoming most pleasantly the prey of one of the unmarried maidens who abound hereabout and who, I assure you, are not less beautiful and certainly less exacting than your friend. For women, according to the sage's experience, are much the same the whole world over—a morsel of honey in which the bee has left his sting: without the sting no honey, and no honey no sting."

"Sir," replied the scribe, "I am much indebted to you, but you know neither Sa-adeh nor the secret of the Sphinx."

"I do not indeed, but I venture to think that to propose to oneself a question that cannot immediately be answered is not the conduct of a wise man and may very well give offence to Powers of which we are becomingly ignorant."

Utterly wearied by the enquiries he had prosecuted among the learned, Es-siddeeh turned over in his mind the many types he had encountered in his wanderings and, recollecting the lively intelligence of those Athenians who were not of the learned professions, he determined to live after their manner that perchance he might hap upon the secret. Several years were spent in acquiring sufficient money. The subsequent spending taught him that his mind was apt to wander from the problem in the mere enjoyment of the moment. Before, however, he could make finally sure whether he was any nearer gaining a solution he found himself ruined. Turned soldier, he took part in many notable engagements and distinguished himself not a little. The itch of the excitement of the search was for the time being eclipsed by the perils and responsibilities of war. There were, too, other distractions, nor were these invariably the bodiless preoccupations of the mind.... It was the somewhat unpleasant termination of one of these episodes which plunged him into reverie upon the past. At midnight, silently rising from his rose-strewn couch, he determined there and then to bring to the contemplation of the Sphinx that store of varied knowledge which he had gathered in the course of his wanderings. Arrayed, then, in a dress similar to that which he had worn as a youth and encircling his neck with a necklace of scrolls he set out alone for the desert.

Since the way was long and he no longer young, a year passed ere he approached his goal.

Then once again Es-siddeeh stood before the Sphinx.

26

In the moonlight it seemed to him that during his thirty years of absence the image had grown larger. That his eyes, accustomed to watch for unexpected perils, played him no tricks he was certain, yet he now observed the brow of the Sphinx to be wreathed in a faint vapour as if its crest had attained the altitude of no inconsiderable hill. The fissures between the stones seemed slightly to have filled, but the crevices across the face were both more numerous and more deeply scored. The pits of the eyes, too, had become immensely more cavernous. And—could he be mistaken?—was not the smile less ambiguous? Surely he did not remember the visage as so noble, or had it grown nobler in his absence? How was it that, though the aspect remained as unflinching as ever, the expression now seemed less hard and more magnanimously stern? The cheeks had undoubtedly sunk further, but did not the muscles appear tightened less in impatience than in endurance of suffering? The nostrils no longer breathed scorn; they laboured with the indrawing of breath that, like fire, was at once painful and inspiriting. To the brow there had been added, he thought, a faint line, and its coming had softened the contraction of the brows so that the creature appeared even more majestic and wiser than of yore. And lastly—he took long to discover this—in the shadow under the brows the orbs seemed to stir with a mysterious and darkling life. "O mighty Sphinx," he murmured, leaning his head upon her bosom, "what has come to thee? How art thou changed! Much I fear thou hast passed beyond so small, feeble, and ignoble an intelligence as I and that now I shall never learn the secret that, behind thy lips, lies locked in thy heart. O Sphinx, if I speak wilt thou answer? Time was when I came to thee and, impatiently stamping my foot upon the mound of thy illimitable desert, beating with my fists thine unanswering flesh, conjured thee in a voice of thunder to yield up thy secret. But to-night, nestling against thy bosom, how shall I speak to thee?—I, of less account among men than one of the myriad morsels of dust out of which thou art compounded; I, whose voice is to thine ears hardly louder than the scratch of the beetles that crawl about thy base; I, lost in the shadowy cleft between thy breasts? O Sphinx, I will not cry out to thine unregarding face, lost in such a reverie as transcends the thought of such as myself, but leaning here my fevered forehead against thy cool stones, as in a dream and scarcely expecting an answer, let me whisper to thy heart, 'What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?'"

Then from within the Sphinx arose a deep murmuring as of a multitude of nigh-forgotten voices; a handful of vapour parted from the lips to wither in the glacial moonshine.

"Scarcely am I changed," said the Sphinx. "'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret."

So low had been the sound, so immense was the night, so lonely the desert, that Es-siddeeh doubted whether it was not his own heart that had27 spoken. Then, placing both hands against the breast of the colossus, he cried in a despairing voice, "Is that thy all, O Sphinx?"

But there was no answer.

With spirit heavy as death, Es-siddeeh wrapped him in his cloak and laid him down to sleep between the paws.

"Alas," said he to himself, "how brief, how obscure, and how profitless seem all the answers given to man!" Yet, when the morning came, it occurred to him that, if the Sphinx had indeed spoken, he would do well to ponder the words.

So for three moons he sat pondering: "Scarcely am I changed. 'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret."

Those who crossed the desert marked him, sunk in the deepest travail of thought.

"Why do you not look at the Sphinx?" they asked.

"I begin to know something about it: that is why," he replied. "If I gazed at it always in the present and never in memory I should learn nothing."

One day a young scribe of great beauty approached the Sphinx and in a low tone enquired: "What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?"

"Speak louder. She will not hear you," called his companion.

Es-siddeeh leaped to his feet.

"Who sent thee hither?" he cried.

"Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity," answered the youth; and turning to his comrade, "If you wish to know why I do not shout, know that it is because I have read the early work of a certain scribe Es-siddeeh. It is very evident that, as with many persons of original mind, he scarcely recognised the full import of what he was at the time writing. Had he been acquainted with more scholars and had more experience of life he would have spoken with greater certainty. He would have also realised, too, I do not doubt, that his work was not so vain as it then appeared to him. But he disappeared and none knows whither, since his parents never spoke of him again. I, taking up his work, have already carried it further, I think, than he had when he abandoned it. Nevertheless I, too, have ceased to labour at it and am come hither for the purpose thou knowest."

"Sa-adeh," echoed Es-siddeeh, waking as if from a dream; "I seem to remember that name. Tell me now, how did you——"

But the stranger, receiving no reply from the Sphinx, had departed.

Es-siddeeh sat him down again in dejection.

That night he did not sleep. The memory of Sa-adeh overcame him with tears. All his life passed in review. Never had his reverie seemed so bitter, his questioning so futile as on that midnight, yet toward dawn he suddenly stood up with a shout. An immeasurable serenity flooded his being.

"I have it," he cried; "I have solved the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx!"

28 At that moment the tropic sun arose, and in its rays he beheld the face of the tormentor shine with an equable and golden splendour. The eyes, no longer lacking pupils, possessed sight, and from the smile had vanished all that he detested.

A new porter, a garrulous and slipshod wastrel, had taken the place of the old. It appeared that nowadays the Princess had but few visitors despite the fact that she was acknowledged almost as beautiful as ever, albeit in a different style. Her temperament, he learned, was difficult, her wealth greater than ever.

After but short delay he found himself in the antechamber. He acquainted the damsel with his mission. She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears:

"An old man, calling himself the Very Veracious, has arrived and sues for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners."

"I cannot see him." The maid returned.

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose in a garden of lilies."

"The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "though graceful, is not new; in fact so old that I scarcely distinctly recollect when I made a fashion for it. Dismiss him."

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of the dove."

"The Very Veracious," he heard the Princess remark, "is there very much in the wrong. If I have learned nothing else in my life I have at least learned that my wisdom has no such enviable characteristics. Dismiss him."

"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, suddenly overcome with a novel misgiving, "that I know the answer to all secrets, including the secret of the smile of the Sphinx."

"How original!" cried the Princess. "Does he really know the secret of the Sphinx's smile? Send him in."

Es-siddeeh went in and bowed down.

"Though changed," he said, "O Sa-adeh, you are as beautiful as ever."

"Your beard has grown so long and so white," she answered, "that—surely thou art the (what is the name?) the Es-siddeeh I once knew, are you not?"

"I am."

"And you know all secrets?"

"I do."

Then she plied him with various questions concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous horses, of music as an Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature.

29 All these questions he answered with such a considerable wealth of detail that Sa-adeh appeared confused. Both fell silent.

After her eyes had rested for some time upon his face in a musing fashion, she asked with a strange inflection, "What is love?"

He was dumbfounded.

"I believe you have forgotten," she said, and in the intonation of her voice there was a hint of the equivocal.

His eyes filled with tears. "I have not forgotten," he said; "perhaps I am only just beginning to learn."

She gave him a curious look; then, moving her head, proceeded with an instant change of tone, "Well, what is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?"

A wave of emotion swept over him. He smiled and arose.

"With the details of my enquiry I will not trouble you. Suffice it to say that for nearly forty years I have been searching."

"So long as that?"

"Many hard early days I spent in the desert and endured great privations."

"Indeed? I am sorry. Forget them."

"I would not if I could—they were the price of knowledge. At one time I came near losing my wits."

"So? I am sorry."

"Then I spent some years interrogating the wisest of earth."

"Oh?"

"But met with no answer."

"Ah."

"Then I spent further years in acquiring money—years of misery they were and years of degradation—that I might discover the secret. I was ruined. I repeat, I was ruined."

"Pardon me. Yes, you were ruined. I am sorry."

"I served as a soldier. I received wounds. I was captive. I was beaten. I escaped. I rose to power. I exploited all modes of living and fulfilling myself, but my experiments brought me no nearer the secret."

"No nearer...."

"Then I set forth on a dreary journey to renew my memory of the Sphinx's face. I sat down beside her. For a long time I learned nothing—the smile seemed hardly less mysterious than it had ever been. Then—but you are not listening...."

"My friend, I am indeed; you were on a dreary journey and——"

"At length one day a youth—but I will not burden you with that, though it was strange...."

"Why do you look so at me? I am listening."

"That night I learned the secret of the Sphinx."

"At last!"

"I learned it indeed."

"Yes. Well, what is it?"

30 "A difficult matter. You must listen most carefully, so subtle is its sense; yet in its comprehension lies hid the whole secret of man's possible happiness."

"I am listening."

There was a great stillness in the chamber. Es-siddeeh closed his eyes to concentrate his thought. Then, opening them, he began:

"I learned the secret—that smile is the secret."

"So I supposed."

"Hush, or I shall begin to think that you do not know how to value this gift of my whole life, which I am making you. It is very difficult, but if all men would listen to me their lives would be easier."

"I thought the secret was for me—yet no matter. Proceed. You see how serious I am."

"I learned its secret."

His lips trembled. He could hardly speak; at last with a great effort he said, "Now it comes—upon maintaining that smile, which is the sign of the power of her existence, all her energy is bent. She did not tell me, but I found it written in my heart. For what is she? In the Sphinx, with her ravaged countenance and mutilated smile, I behold Life itself—Life in mysterious might, ignorant of its own origin, conscious only of its own beauty, couchant amid the wilderness of space and eternity."

"Is the smile of the Sphinx all that indeed? I somehow thought it was something more intimate. But how serious you look! Do not frown—I would not offend you for the world."

"Should I not smile?" he said bitterly.

"Yes, like the Sphinx."

"Quick! How, did you know that?"

"Don't frighten me. I was but speaking idly."

"Idly?"

"Seriously then, if you like—since you attach such importance to it. Women always work by miracles and never know when they have performed one.... Excellent, you are smiling, though your smile is ambiguous."

"I do but obey her."

"Not me?"

"That smile which we behold on her face is the smile we see everywhere about us; only in her it has become more august—first by reason of her greater consciousness of isolation in the Desert and beneath the Stars, and, secondly, by consciousness of her strength."

"Will you hand me my fan? Thank you."

"For what are not the properties of the smile—the sovereign beauty, the witness of power—in Nature? Wise indeed the man who knows the bounds of what it is capable. When we are born the first thing we behold is a smile: the Nurse smiles at us, and in that smile we should read—were we then capable—the self-satisfaction of Nature, proud of her reproductive powers, who dandles us in her hands with the assurance that she knows what is best for us. Ah, how universal is the smile! Think of the variety of smiles that exist.31 'Tis all for smiles this life! And that is at once its apparent cruelty and its final justification. On the blackness of Eternity it expands in a smile like a rainbow—a rainbow whose arch begins and ends, as rainbow arches do, uncertain where. And this blossoming in Infinity justifies itself.... How? By the beauty of its smile. Therefore smile. Smile and be in harmony with—if not the spirit of the Universe (for the unknown looking down from the Hill of Heaven upon the Rainbow may for all we know smile also, and on the import of that smile opinion may be divided), and be in harmony at least with the beauty of that fragment of the Universe which, if we do not wholly comprehend, we can at least worship and imitate.... But you are yawning."

"No, obedient to you, I was—smiling."

"And for how long? Until we are resolved—as the drops of the rainbow are resolved after refracting supernal colours. Yet as a raindrop glitters, ere it evaporate upon the flower and be again (who knows?) drawn up in the immense cycle, with some reflection of the glory which its passage served to make, so should we maintain that smile to the moment of our dissolution. As indeed I, whose stormy aerial passage is nearly over, shall do till I attain to mine. For what commoner solace do we hear than that 'he died with a smile upon his face'? Such a smile may each have at his passing! How happy our friends will be to see it, how confounded our enemies! How comforted, too, the philosophers, who will not fail to perceive in it the reflection of whatever faith they hold: the ineffable joy of one whose beatified wings even now mingle with the wings of other spirits in divine assumption; the satisfaction of the racked, whom never again the torturers Joy and Sorrow will wake from endless sleep; the profound irony of one who never expected his pleasures to last for ever; and the disdain, too proud to curve itself in a full sneer, of one who opposes to the silent smile of the unknown a smile yet more silent!"

He paused.

"I have been thinking," said the Princess.

"You wish to know more? Shall I explain?"

"No. It is unnecessary; all this amounts to that you wish to marry me, and the announcement that you have earned the right to do so, but I should inform you that since you were last here a gentleman, who as a matter of fact once occupied a position menial enough but of importance in this household, has by signal honesty and perseverance arrived at a position where—well, in fact, to put it shortly, I have formed another attachment."

"Madam, am I reft of my senses? You astonish me! Who?"

"The Executioner."

"Ah, heavens! Well, let me inform you, madam, that I, too, have formed another attachment."

"You say that to my face! How dare you? But I saw directly you entered this room that you had long ago forgotten what true love is. Your long32 absence from me bears it witness. Who, may I ask, is now the object of your affections?"

"Do not smile—or smile, madam, if you can; I love the Sphinx."

He had but that moment discovered it.

The Princess shrieked and at the sound he bent upon her such a smile as in memory effectually prevented her ever mentioning the Sphinx and its secrets again to anyone.

Then he walked out.

He returned to the Sphinx.

While yet afar off he was puzzled beholding a mountain range arisen in the wilderness. As he drew nearer he recognised it for the Sphinx. If during his thirty years' wanderings she had appeared to increase in size, to what dimensions had she not attained during his brief absence! The vapours of the desert, rising about her, had collected upon her shoulders in a strata of billowy cloud, and her head, unimaginably exalted, had now reached such an altitude that the features were almost indistinguishable in the blaze of the sun.

Night had fallen by the time that he stood within the canyon of her breasts. For a little he rested his head upon the rock. A great weariness descended upon him. Physical infirmity, the inevitable sequel of all he had suffered in body and in soul, now made him its prey. His mind and spirit, however, remained keen and unquenchable as ever. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down. At midnight he awoke. For the first time the Sphinx, speaking in a voice of more than mortal tenderness, had made utterance without being addressed, "Art thou returned, my lover?"

"Thou seest me. All I love I have given thee."

"Few have bestowed upon me so much as thou. Fewer still have arrived where thou hast arrived, while yet possessing the eye not wholly dimmed and the tongue not altogether palsied. One thing, however, thou hast kept from me—the seal that is on thy heart."

"Ah, Sphinx," replied Es-siddeeh, "that I cannot give; it is part of myself. Nor would I—for it was that which first brought me hither to scan thy face and to read thy riddle."

"I am a jealous lover."

"I know it. Yet what care I? Thy jealousy is a measure of my reward; for though I have discovered thy secret in general, yet it is a secret which no man perhaps will ever fathom in all particulars. Happy the hero who attains as far as I, happier yet he who can gaze unwinkingly upon thee as I do now, and hourly fathom something further!"

"I am a jealous lover. Thou hast not much longer to gaze."

"No matter. Eyes do not perish with me, and for myself I am rewarded."

Then was it that for Es-siddeeh the body and the face of the Sphinx achieved a final apotheosis. Her limbs throbbed with a deep and terrible33 energy. From her breast issued an all embracing warmth similar to that of the earth. Her breathing became distinct as an august and stupendous rhythm resembling the ascent and descent of waters from firmament to firmament. Her cheeks flushed with a youthful elation. Into her eyes arose an immense light fixed upon unforetold futurities, and all her face, so worn and beautiful, became more ravaged and even more beautiful—for the very deepening scars, wasting and remoulding the features, gradually resolved the visage into an ethereal harmony hitherto unknown. Around her head, entangling in its mesh the nearer planets, there wreathed itself an enormous halo, iridescent as that which encircles the frosty moon. Her whole being exuded a supreme lustre until she became one living and colossal crystal which distributed in refraction all the colours of the rainbow and which palpitated with powers unguessed.

And to Es-siddeeh, who beheld her through the tears of one who momentarily expects to be parted, the spectra and the palpitance appeared in triple.

"O Sphinx, O Life the Enchantress," he cried, "my true and only love, take if thou wilt my heart and the seal upon it, for thine am I only, thee only would I aid, thee only do I love, thee only would I worship!"

A band of Arabs, journeying across the desert, found him, when dawn came, lying between the paws of the giant—dead, more cold than the stone which surrounded him and which now began to kindle in the morning rays. Though there had been no dew, his garments were deluged as with the falling of an immense tear. Upon his face there lingered a fixed smile, and, gazing upward, they beheld its double in the sunlit face of the familiar Sphinx.

Here ends the story of the Smile of the Sphinx.
Mayest thou also learn its secret.

34

By EDMUND GOSSE

IN and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the northwest of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the head-gear had something pathetic and provincial about it.

All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted family of Simcox—Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household at the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages of mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably have obeyed the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the 18th of December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in the Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot, in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I had never made my bow to her.

Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since the death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors, she did not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her own class. If the Brontës had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case might have been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of Jane Eyre nor the perfection of Cranford, but they were gone before we lost Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while Romola was appearing. Charles Kingsley, whose Westward Ho! had just preceded her first appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial paths. Charles Reade, whose It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856) had been her harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival. Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently and sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation,35 built up slowly such a reputation as no one in her own time could approach.

The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn, what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot. It was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in company with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course, those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar. People who started controversies about "evolutionism,"—a favourite Victorian pastime,—bowed low at the mention of her name, and her own sound good sense alone prevented her from being made the object of a sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of that day remarked that "in problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the sun had gone out," and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, ex cathedrâ, that no writer had "ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable celerity.

The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning, though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle, not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called preraphaelite. She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded her, but Arnold presented an attitude of reserve with regard to her later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore, with his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne repudiated Romola with vigour as "absolutely false." I daresay that from several of these her great contemporaries estimates of her work less harsh than these might be culled, but I quote these to show that even at the height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.

36 She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation. Her early imaginative writings—in particular Janet's Repentance, Adam Bede, the first two-thirds of The Mill on the Floss, and much of Silas Marner—had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of the stories just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in their felicity of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive. Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark as to matters about which, after the publication of memoirs and correspondence and recollections, later readers are exactly informed. We may now know that Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs. Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and were at liberty to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling up a noble English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of pictorial reproduction without flagging. The world would have long gazed with pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.

Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If we had time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know was much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and scandalised Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But when she herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in sympathy with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche de la poésie ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself unreservedly into the poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eût poussée vers les abîmes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense which carried her genius over so many marshy places, that her temperament had often driven her, "au mépris de la raison ou de la vérité morale," into pure romantic extravagance.

But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,37 was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of her strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept to the facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she dealt with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had been drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life were arduous and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance, and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to dreamland from the flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon." But she could not achieve such flights; her literary character was of a totally different formation. What was fabulous, what was artificial, did not so much strike her with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only escape from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical interest to common themes. In consequence, as she advanced in life, and came more under the influence of George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well disposed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the temper of the speaker.

Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other children awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling off inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood," fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her, "You have wit, description, and philosophy—those go a good way towards the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at Coventry. Amos Barton was the immediate result, and the stately line of stories which was to close in Daniel Deronda twenty years later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author? She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the Westminster Review, who had spent years in translating Strauss's Life of Jesus and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous wrestling with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza, who had worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's Moral Philosophy. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously known38 as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in the world rather than a writer of idle tales.

But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the general public than articles upon taxation or translations from German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of the Arbury of twenty-five years before.

If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in Adam Bede. The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has, of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of Adam Bede or than the beginning of The Mill on the Floss.

But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was pedantry, the39 result doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation, Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the Scenes of Clerical Life answer in time to Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, and Monsieur de Camors to Felix Holt. There could not be a stronger or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past. She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the analysis of individual character.

The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this, and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in Middlemarch, but there is much to be said for the view that George Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller, who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was not content to please, she must explain and teach as well.

Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first in the laboured and overcharged romance of Romola. But a careful reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in Amos Barton, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs. Hackit was "speaking, we may40 presume, in a remotely analogical sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the way she "crammed up" for the composition of Romola. She tells us of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On this, Sir Leslie Stephen—one of her best critics, and one of the most indulgent—aptly queries, "What would have become of Ivanhoe if Scott had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious, that Ivanhoe would not have been written."

The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel" that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in Felix Holt), of whom we are told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal."

The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential for her41 success is supported by the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received the admonition Cantate Domino! They sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt: "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes, faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse.

She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful," and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism—what a picture it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, The Spanish Gypsy, of which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read. She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands, Agatha (1868) and Brother and Sister (1869), which are the only "rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible—the root of the matter is not in them. There is an Arion, which is stately in the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but there is the radical42 absence of song. In the long piece called A College Breakfast Party, which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy. There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called Self and Life, stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.

And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the following sonnet, from Brother and Sister, is the best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of The Mill on the Floss:

How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!

At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote Middlemarch, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm, as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for several years. Middlemarch is the history of three parallel lives of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed" of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. Middlemarch is constructed with unfaltering power, and the picture of commonplace English country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.

43 When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can find not a word to say in favour of Daniel Deronda, her next and last novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask one another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated, her effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works was gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious pages of Adam Bede and The Mill like the lemon-yellow pansies and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. Then came Theophrastus Such, a collection of cumbrous and didactic essays which defy perusal; and finally, soon after her death, her Correspondence, a terrible disappointment to all her admirers, and a blow from which even the worship of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might have been repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh:

It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.

On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which George Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as was rather rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It is the inevitable result of "tall talk" about Dante and Goethe that the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now, but it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended upon her works in her life-time. Another matter which militates against her fame to-day is her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by quite other problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence. Perhaps another generation will follow us which will be more patient, and students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never forget, however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to the service of literature, and that she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal of intellectual ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an inborn lack of charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental disposition. After all, to have added to the slender body of English fiction seven novels the names of which are known to every cultivated person is not to have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively, succeeded.

44

By J. C. SQUIRE

HERE is our world in motion.

We see a corner of it through our eyes. A man will march down a street with a crowd, or watch the politicians' cabs turning into Palace Yard, or make speeches, or stand on the deck of a scurrying destroyer in the North Sea, or mount guard in a Mesopotamian desert. A minute section of the greater panorama passes before him.

In imagination he will, according to his information and his habit of mind, visualise what he sees as a part of what he does not see: the human conflict over five continents, climates and clothes, multitudes, passions, voices, states, soldiers, negotiations. Each newspaper that he opens swarms with a confusion of events and argument, of names familiar and unfamiliar—Wilson, Geddes, Czecho-Slovakia, Yudenitch, Shantung, and ten thousand more. For the eye there is a medley, for the ear a great din. As far as he can, busy with his daily pursuits, a man usually ignores it when it does not intrude to disturb him. When most unsettled, the life of the world is most fatiguing. The spectacle is formless and without a centre; the characters rise and fall, conspicuous one day, forgotten the next. The newspapers mechanically repeat that we are at the greatest crisis of history, and that "a great drama is being unrolled." We are aware that the fortunes of our civilisation have been and are in the balance. But we are in the wood and cannot see it as we see the French Revolution. It is difficult, even with the strongest effort of imagination, to visualise the process as history will record it. To pick out those episodes and those persons that will haunt the imagination of posterity by their colour and force is more difficult still. An event, contemporaneously, is an event; a man is a man who eats, drinks, wears collars, makes speeches, bandies words with others, and is photographed for the newspapers.

Yet we know that a time will come when these years will be seen in far retrospect as the years of Elizabeth or of Robespierre are now. The judgments of the political scientist and the historian will be made: these men will arrange their sequences and their scales of importance. They will deduce effects and measure out praise and blame. With them we are not concerned. But others beyond them will look at our time. We shall have left our legacy for the imagination. What will it be? Who of contemporary figures may we guess as likely to be the heroes of plays and the subjects of poems? Which of the multitudinous events of these years will give a stock subject to Tragedy? Which of the men whom we praise or abuse will seem to posterity larger than human, and go with gestures across their stages, clad in an antique fashion? For to that age we shall be strange; whether our mechanical45 arts have died and left us to haunt the memory of our posterity as a race of unquiet demons, or whether "progress" along our lines shall have continued, none of our trappings will have remained the same.

But the soul of man will have remained the same. Those elements in events and persons which fascinate and stimulate us when we are looking at our past will stir them when they brood on their past, which is our to-day. And neither contemporary reputation, nor worldly position, nor conquests in themselves, nor saintliness in itself, can secure for a man a continued life in the imagination of the race.

Contemplate our own past in the light of this conception. Who are the men of whom poets and playwrights and story-tellers have made fictions and songs? Augustus Cæsar when he lived was the greatest man in the world: but who since Virgil has panegyrised him and who—unless some ingenious psychologist of the second-rate like Browning—would make a dramatic poem out of him? William Wilberforce was a very good man, but his deeds and his name have survived his personality, and he will not be the hero of an epic. The Thirty Years' War was a long and very devastating war; Gustavus and Wallenstein, in their degree, survive the purposeless series of its disasters; and of all its events that which most vividly lives in the memory is the small thing with which it began: the flinging of two noblemen from a tower. What is it in things and men that gives them permanently the power of stirring the imagination and the curiosity of the artist? A quality of splendour and of power that grows more certain when the dust that was its receptacle has gone to dust. The artist who shall succeed with a historical personage may make whatever implicit or even explicit commentary he likes, but in choosing his subject—or being chosen by it—moral judgment or scientific estimate will not influence him. He will be the victim of an attraction beyond the will and beyond the reason. Consider who are the figures that truly, imperatively, live in the political story of the past. Not only and not all the Cæsars who fought over the known world; not only such chivalric souls as saw, and obeyed, the visions of Domrémy, and died when the echoes of the last horn faded over Roncesvalles. The Crusades, as a whole, were a great poem, but few of the Crusaders won more than an ephemeral name in art. Cœur de Lion has been in our own time the hero of a romance, but no man is likely again to write of even a Godfrey of Boulogne. The great age of historic Greece passed and left imperishable monuments, "one nation making worth a nation's pain," but how few of her soldiers and philosophers recur to the creative imagination! Those stories and figures from history and pre-history which do so recur are a strangely assorted collection. The Trojan War and its leading personages are a fascination and an inspiration perennially, and among those personages Helen, Hector, Achilles, Ulysses; but not Paris or the sons of Atreus, who live but as appendages. Coldly arguing, men may ask now as46 they asked then, why the Greeks should take so much trouble to recover a worthless woman, why a Hector should die to keep her, why ten thousand should perish in such a cause. But to the imagination Hector, Achilles, Helen, the divine unreason of that ten years' war, make an appeal that never comes from worthier struggles and wiser people. That is true also of Antony and Cleopatra: their story to the historian and the moralist is one of ruinous folly, to the poet a

The figure of St. Francis has been created and recreated in art; like those of Nero, Philip II., and Mary Stuart. With the mythical who are but names we can do what we will; Lear and Hamlet Shakespeare could cast in the sublimest mould; with the historical we are tied by the historical, and few are great enough to come through the sieve. Poets have attempted and failed to make great characters of Becket, of Wolsey, of Strafford, and Charles I.; their degree of failure has varied, but they have failed as certainly as Keats would have failed with King Stephen. The material was not there. Cromwell and Frederick the Great at least equalled Philip II. in achievement, and excelled him in intelligence. But Carlyle's two heroes were no true heroes for an artist; we are too uncertain about Cromwell's inner man, his direction; for all his battles he could cast no colour over his surroundings; and as for Frederick there was no tragedy about him—that was left for his neighbours. A great Cromwell, in one sense, would be an invented Cromwell; and we cannot invent a Cromwell because of the documents. But Philip II., the intense, narrow, laborious, dyspeptic bigot, sitting in a cell of his great bleak prison on the plateau, trying to watch every corner of the world, and contriving how to scourge most of it; he was contemptible, full of vices, a failure, but there was that in him which has compelled the gaze of poets in seclusion from the seventeenth century down to Verhaeren and Verlaine. He had a virtue in excess. There was a touch of sublimity about him. The setting counts for much; monarchs are on pinnacles. But where is Philip IV., except for his horse-face on the canvases of Velasquez? Where even, as against the man he beat, is William the Silent, who waged a great fight against odds and died by the dagger; but was a cool Whig, excessive in nothing but self-control? He is scarcely alive; but Satan, as Milton saw him, reigns in hell. We must have splendour of a sort. The normal man loves a conflagration, though he will lend a hand in putting it out; and if he is putting it out the inmost heart of him will rejoice if it be a large fire and there are very few firemen. Vivid force, moral or non-moral, must be there; a Borgia, though he be as wicked as a Nero, cannot compete with him before the imagination; he was commonplace and sordid and there is no response to him.

47 Such passages and such people kindle us in the records of the past. How, from this point of view, will the last five years, crowded and full of strife, look when we are the materials for art?

Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it—they have tried most things—but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again. There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures) there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance; and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly, so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences, but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them "great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter, symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope, in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man, nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle, with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten.

48 Something of doubt colours also one's view of America's entry and the career of President Wilson, in some regards a close analogue to that of Lincoln. The lines of that story are simple—the watching pose, the gradual approximation to war, the President's mental struggle, his decision to throw America's weight into the scale, his manifestos to the world in the names of liberty, honesty, and kindness, his determination that the war, if possible, should be the last. But the man at the centre of this tremendous revolution of events, the mouthpiece of these great sentiments, has he that last abandonment of feeling which alone captivates the imagination of those who hold the mirror up to certain aspects of Nature? Without denying that it may be a great blessing that he lacks that force, without presuming to know all about him that may later be revealed, I feel doubtful. Death, more particularly violent death, before the end, might have enabled artists to impute to him something that perhaps was not there, to give him the benefit of the doubt. But very likely for our good, possibly with the greatest wisdom, he compromised at Paris. A more spontaneous man might have ruined us all; but if compromise is excellent in politics, it is of small use to poets. I doubt if the President will take his place with St. Francis, Philip II., and Nero.

There will survive from the war, and from the other events of our day, certain episodes which will, as by accident, draw the notice of artists and be, as we speak, immortalised. A few of the countless heroic and self-sacrificing actions which men have performed in every country and by every sea will be snatched from oblivion. Tragedians, in all probability, will brood on the story of Miss Cavell. The names of a subaltern and an airman, fortuitously selected, will live as live those of Hervé Riel and Pheidipiddes. But this is not what we call history. I think that the Rupert Brooke legend will develop. He was beautiful and a poet, and he died in arms, young. He had wandered to the islands of the Pacific, and his comrades buried him in an island of the Ægean. About him they will write poems, plays even, in which, their colour given by actions and sayings which are recorded, he will pass through experiences which were never his, and thoughts will be imputed to him which possibly he never had. Two older artists have taken a more prominent part in the war and its politics, a part that may indisputably be called political. Of Paderewski I know nothing, except that a man's progress could not easily have a setting more superficially romantic; the strength of the man may be guessed at by stray tokens. A person of whom fame in art may more certainly be predicted is d'Annunzio, a man not in every way admirable, but of a demoniacal courage, who has crowned a career full of flamboyant passages with actions that, as a spectacle, are magnificent: orations pulsating with ardour for the glory and power of the Latin genius, words that were pregnant of acts, and following these, after years of reckless flying, the sudden theatrical stroke at Fiume. As a49 "character" he justified himself by that lawless blow; his rhetoric finally proved itself the rhetoric of real passion, a lust for violent life, self-assertion at the risk of death, the flaunting of the Italian name; and, felt as such, it has moved a whole army and a whole people. Whatever the results of analysis applied to his character or the ultimate outcome of his splendid panache, he cannot but become, to the artists of one nation at least, a hero, the material for romance.

There may be others. But, projecting myself as well as I am able, I cannot see on the larger stage, amid the great fortunes of peoples and their rulers, more than two subjects on which I think we may be positive that they will pass into the company of material to which artists return and return, subjects which already outline themselves with some clarity to the imagination and have the air of greatness.

One is the fall of the German Empire. Were it shortly to be restored, the force with which its calamities will appeal to us would be diminished: for an end must be an end. But if what seemed to happen really has happened there is a spectacle there which will appear more prodigious and more moving as time goes on—that triply-armed vainglorious kingdom pulling the world down on itself; the long, desperate, ruthless fight against enemies ultimately superior; the "siege"; the quality, proud and assured if barbaric, of the Prussian spirit which filled the ruling caste and determined at once its fight and its fall. The tale is tragic, and almost epic; the persons are not yet revealed who shall be capable of being made, on the stage or in books, the instruments for telling it. Certainly, though men, misguidedly, will attempt to make Wilhelm II. sustain an artistic load to which he is not equal, the Kaiser will make no great hero or hero-villain. Possibly in some Hindenburg or other general will be found the strength, the simplicity of belief or resolve, which make a great figure; or possibly this will be of the tragedies in which the individual humans are all pigmies subordinate to the main theme. Elsewhere, I think, is to be found a man who has about him the certain atmosphere of imaginative life. He is Vladimir Ulianoff, Lenin.

I talked a few weeks ago with a Russian in exile, a Conservative, an official of the old regime, and (I think) a Baltic Baron. He was not, therefore, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or to Lenin; he hated, though he understood, them and he loathed him. "Lenin has ruined Russia," he said, taking no pains to conceal his desire that Lenin should die. Then the imaginative man in him awoke, as it has a way of doing in intelligent Russians of all kinds, and he suddenly added vehemently: "But a hundred years hence a Hero of Legend, like Peter the Great and the Prince who first introduced Christianity into Russia."

I felt immediately that he had spoken not merely a truth, but an obvious one. Englishmen may have all sorts of opinions about Lenin; few have heard much beyond rumour of him, but even those who are most avowedly ignorant of him or most leniently inclined to him would scarcely like to find him in their midst. Yet there is that flavour of vitality, of greatness,50 about him that is lacking in many who have caused misery to none and even in some of the most potent benefactors of mankind. We feel it almost unconsciously; the recognition of it is, as it were, instinctive; a picture of him, growing from stray scraps of news and rumour, has been forming in our minds, a picture almost from the first differentiated from that, say, of his equally active colleague, Trotsky. Trotsky, one feels, might disappear to-morrow and leave but a name and some wreckage. But the other man, if he be not in the line of Tolstoi (as some of his adherents seem to suppose him to be), is in the line of the great oriental despots, of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan.

And we shall know more of him, far more, than we shall ever know of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon. He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power, struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination—and it must surely be so when he is seen backward—this little fanatic, who for twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered. This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face, with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution, with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as "hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him.

Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured, as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.

We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of the birds,51 shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So, noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds, will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age, however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed, certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us are insignificant and obscured?

52

By ROBERT LYND

HORACE Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand—You love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc., that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's."53 It is not that Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man.

It is not that he was above the foible—it was barely more than that—of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:

The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:

Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole.54 He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert's tomb.

At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct to disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchée of wit." His comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's Tour of the Hebrides was "the story of a mountebank and his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism of Gray in the Lives of the Poets. He would not even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would not deign to write an answer," Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe." Walpole does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a school-girl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." It has often been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their position in society—that he regarded an author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth." Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's Johnson tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives—even their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of caricature. His55 account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with an egoistic author as with a trout.

"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know," he once wrote, "I shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being mediocre." He followed the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "What have I written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?" "It would be affected," he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room."

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not realise that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulæ we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his56 senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the fireworks and illuminations.

He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared, were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man dressing out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." He could not have made his collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:

He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:

It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside57 his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. "As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year." Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter."

Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels in the garden.

Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an excitable creature where small things were concerned—a parroquet or the prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not generally realised58 is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their pantoufles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is uppermost. "In one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, and English (and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."

Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship." "Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect with regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" "I am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and for his thoughtfulness59 regarding those he loved. The earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet:

At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship—the "Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the "Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "One loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway, "when they can have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for the Miss Berrys—his "twin wives," his "dear Both"—to each of whom he left an annuity of £4000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know," he explains to Conway, apologising for not being able to visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them." One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was what is called "sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers." So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford:

60 As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics, and a spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth is stirred—and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, so tame you might have stroked them." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "inferno-human beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics61 never got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him:

There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his friends.

This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out-of-doors to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical figure.

Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen—hand-painted—for the collector of the choice creatures of the human race!

62

By J. C. STOBART

THERE is no doubt whatever about the need for it. Search high or low in our social world, you will find it full of laments and dissatisfaction. In the Services Commanding Officers complain that their subalterns, even though they have been through the Classical course at Public Schools and Universities, cannot write a clear report. Headquarters themselves issue their orders and regulations in barbarous, unintelligible jargon. Government Departments, manned by Greatsmen, wrap themselves in phrases of pompous obscurity, and Cabinet Ministers couch their decisions or agreements in terms of such ambiguity as to leave nobody certain of their meaning. It would, however, be unjust to attribute bad English entirely to upper-class education, classical or modern. The business man in his "esteemed favours," though he may be more terse and polite, is not always able to convey what he intends. He lays the blame, when he fails to do so, upon the faulty education of his clerks and stenographers. The masses of the public too often show in practice that they simply cannot understand printed rules and directions. It is naturally too much to expect a universal diffusion of taste or elegance in the use of our language; but even when we feel the need of fine words to express deep feeling we choose for an obituary lines like these:

or these:

No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from a collection of two-score:

What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements, and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon.

Though Mr. Mais2 justly claims credit for originality in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course" mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination. The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings; for example: "Grammar and Syntax—Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis—Punctuation—Vocabulary—Letter-writing—Reproduction—Paraphrase—Dictation—Précis—Prosody—Figures of Speech—Indirect Speech—Essay-writing—Examination Papers." There are, beside these thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating, Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and a regrettable3 twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense the Vision of64 Mirzah to 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company.

The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay. Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform. The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional, is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented "English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English" on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It's me" must be wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech.

And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete," an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.

Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish's English Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesis of 1864 or Dr. William Smith's English Course. The subject subsists as a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and teachers. If you ask the examiner65 of English why he continues to set such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs. But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation!

To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac, Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be lost almost as easily as it is won.

Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct, and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a little66 book which contains these words in immense type: Shun that ox he is shy. You recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say, have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose, you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash.

If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and reproached me with not being original, I should be sorely tempted to commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!"

In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill.

Perhaps it is in the primary school that we shall find the right principles most clearly marked, if only because with the younger children the teacher is nearer to Nature and mistakes punish themselves more visibly. There also the dead weight of tradition has been less oppressive. Before Madame Montessori's star had risen above the firmament the best teachers in English infant schools had solved the fundamental problems of how to teach good English. The principle is that what the child speaks or writes shall come from its own brain. The first medium of expression is, of course, the tongue. No children, not even English children, are tongue-tied by nature, but they are generally timid and sensitive. If they find their adult world discouraging communicativeness with anger, or sarcasm, or pedantry, they will close down upon the rock of silence like the limpet which you must smash before you move. Probably before he comes to school the child has already been silenced by a mother or father whose love will bear anything for the child except to listen to him. It is wonderful to watch the skilled teacher of infants repairing this mischief, re-establishing confidence between innocence and wisdom, unlocking hearts and tongues, creating an atmosphere of freedom in which she possesses, in reality, absolute control. Instead of67 limpets you behold sea-anemones full open. The children talk at great length in co-ordinate construction about their mother and the baby's tooth, and when they have finished they sit quiet listening to others. Sometimes the teacher takes up her parable and tells them about Cinderella or the King of the Golden River. In other lessons other mediums of expression appear—pencils, chalk, plastic clay, music, dance, drama. The teacher continues unobtrusively feeding the children with beautiful things, she sings and plays to them, shows them pictures and exhibits gentleness, calm, and love.

Amid all the fog of controversy and all the noise of disputing cheap-jacks that surrounds the art and practice of education I see some of these infants' class-rooms as clear beacons showing the incontestably true course. I cannot see any limit of years to its progress. Many boys' and girls' schools have grasped the same principles and extended them to the age of fourteen with the same undeniable success in the results. Naturally, as the child grows the method has to be adapted, but the principle remains steadfast. I would not describe it as "freedom," because the child is not free, though he feels free. One never doubts the existence of a controlling will. But what is encouraged is authentic expression. In writing, topics are set which draw out of the child's own world the child's own thoughts. He is guided to think for himself and to speak his thoughts fearlessly. The skill of the teacher is shown mainly in the choice of subjects and the discretion with which corrections are made. Observation is translated into description, first in speech and then, when the pencil has been mastered, in writing. A child of nine may be asked to describe a corner of the class-room so that a blind man could understand exactly what is there and what it looks like. A child of twelve may be asked to describe the prettiest room she ever saw. A child of fourteen may be asked to describe the Harrow Road (a) on a Saturday night, (b) on a Sunday morning. Why stop at fourteen?

As well as observation and description, the infant school trains the elements of imagination and invention. Cannot the child who at eight years old wrote on "If I were the King...." profitably be asked to write on "If I had been Oliver Cromwell...." at eighteen? In one girls' school the teacher merely wrote on the blackboard "When the Moon went out" and left the rest to the class. In the same way children can be trained to argue pro and contra about problems of their own lives which clearly admit of argument, like "Would you rather be six or sixteen?" "Would you rather be a boy or a girl?" People new to the method might suppose that, although the brighter children could possibly attack such themes with success, the ordinary or dull child would be left staring. It is not so. Whole classes of children trained in this way produce work which is pleasant to read. The essentials seem to be stimulating topics, authentic expression without dictation, and constant practice. To one who has seen the elementary steps there is no magic in the Perse Plays or the Draconian Poems. They are natural. It is dullness that is artificial. Real dullness, such as one finds in68 Common Rooms, Mess Rooms, Pulpits, and Government Offices is the fruit of a long, careful, and generally expensive education in that quality.

In teaching a young person to speak and write you are also teaching him to think, because words represent thoughts. The adult may be able to think connectedly in silence, but the child generally cannot. The child's world is, however, at the largest a little one, and it is necessary to enlarge it by various means, including stories and pictures, songs and books. The book gradually becomes more prominent as the art of reading is mastered. A child constantly encouraged to express himself freely, always giving out and seldom taking in, would develop a number of unpleasant qualities. Therefore reading is only second to writing in its importance. A generous supply of good books is the second fundamental necessity of sound English teaching. So far as I know, no school has ever reached the limit in this direction. There is an excellent society which bases its method of teaching mainly on copious reading and has been able to multiply seven-fold the usual reading programme of primary schools. But they seem to put the book a little too much into the foreground. It is citizens that we seek to educate. For them books should be the background of real life. We do not all possess those opulent libraries into which Ruskin would turn his princesses to browse at will; but I subscribe to his doctrine in principle. Mere quantity of reading is a great thing. The more children read, the better they will choose their books.

Now these two things alone, authentic expression and copious reading, are capable of producing good English. Children taught well in these methods can, without any formal instruction in spelling or grammar, write correctly as well as pleasantly. Something more is needed for those who seek to become scholars in English, and still more if they aim at the study of language. For such as these the teaching may gradually and progressively develop a scientific character. In the earliest stages fluency was itself a chief aim, and the teacher was compelled to be very sparing of interruptions and corrections. She had to use discretion and to judge for herself what mistakes were dangerous. She might not interpose though twenty successive clauses were joined together by "and," because she knew that it is natural for language to begin with co-ordinates and that mere mental growth combined with practice in reading and writing will cure the fault. She corrected vulgarisms, like "he done it," not with any grammatical disquisition but dogmatically. Even where the children come from homes where the King's English is never spoken, systematic speech-training in the infants' school can correct and refine language before pen is put to paper. These infant years seem to be intended by Nature for the learning of language. Ears are sharp and memories retentive. But habits once formed at that age, whether good or bad, are very difficult to eradicate later on. Perhaps pronunciation is best taught through disguised phonetics in the singing lesson and elocution in the poetry lesson.

In the first written work it may be found that the spelling is all wrong. Great controversies rage on this subject. But it seems right to regard bad69 spelling as a disease which needs careful individual diagnosis in the earliest stages, when it can be cured so as to give no more trouble. Most often it springs from some fault in the method by which the child has learnt to read. Some people are allowed to grow up incapable of spelling because they make out the printed word by some process of guesswork and never fix the letters upon their memory. Good or bad spelling very rapidly becomes automatic.

Much the same is true of grammar. As I have said before, accurate use of language can be attained by purely empirical and dogmatic methods. Grammar is no essential preliminary to good English, but nevertheless there may be a good case for teaching it later on to those who can afford the time. It is well that English boys and girls should know something of the history and structure of their language as well as their constitution. It may be necessary for the linguist to understand the common grammatical technique of all languages. Moreover, teachers naturally seek to limit the domain of mere dogma and to give explanations where they can. Thus a child can easily be cured of saying "Between you and I" merely through the teacher's command, "Say me." He can be cured of saying "Like I did" in the same way. He will of course be on surer ground if he understands the reason. Only let it be English grammar and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the child should say "I am taller than he" is, if a reason must be given, that than is historically identical with then, not that "quam takes the same case after it as before it."

If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us to build a sound structure of English up to the University and beyond. Perhaps some day a progressive University may try the experiment of an English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats course.

We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who believe with me that English contains all things necessary to culture will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the phases of adolescence. This was the real virtue of the old classical training, and it is too often wanting on Modern Sides. We must contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied to English Classics for big boys and girls.

I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him. A false quantity70 or a false concord was to him a personal affront: it caused him physical pain. Accents and particles mattered to him and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not?

But at this point I labour with a sense of unreality. Is it possible to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervour? We have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He settled hoti's business. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar. But where are our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical, quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their disciples seriously moved by a misplaced "and which" or an unrelated participle in English. Something is missing.

There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticise, traduce, misinterpret Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private playthings. They are not. They are worthy of their pedestals of worship just as much as Homer and Aristotle.

The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in which tradition crumbles to dust.

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By ALICE MEYNELL

"Inconquerable"—BACON

A GENERAL good habit might long ago have been ruled for our national literature in the use of two negatives—"un" or "in," and "less." A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted. We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word, writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write "inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable." It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had something—but that something has proved altogether ineffectual—to say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand, does not occur.

The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin "in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that "uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable" with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with "ingratitude"—but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose): "unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift," "unskilfulness," and so forth.

Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "Undiscovered: Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring, "Inconquerable: Bacon."

There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That "un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much, point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any phrase of French. There are abysses,72 in those words, at our summons, deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened, a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial—"peu." Let us try to keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated" and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized, or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late. We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our custom.

But for the other particle—"the less"—there is hope or there might be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb. Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and "quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the case first named the grammatical construction of our English words (and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless" pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to gesticulate.

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Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him.

WE are glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy Simpson's edition of Every Man in His Humour, a pioneer volume to the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor, in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know. One walks darkling through the Discoveries. Take Ben's remarks about painting—they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers—and other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of Burlington House.

Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third volume of Mr. Saintsbury's Caroline Poets. The first two volumes of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume, we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers, notably his Hermaphrodite, which was fathered on Randolph, and which he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on, to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to attribute the Hermaphrodite to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary and supererogatory blunder.

While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich, the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has elapsed since Chalmers issued his English Poets, and the book, in spite of bad editing and very imperfect—indeed non-existent—critical apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton. The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is invaluable; everything is in him, from the Ruins of Rome to the Pleasures of Digestion—or is it the Art of Preserving Health? A well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense74 value. And if the Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has already been hinted, be immensely rich

A rather battered Purchas's Pilgrim minus its title-page came into our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem.

The other day we bought a charming little first edition of Candide (1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his publications till they were a success. Zadig (1749) is similarly without author's or publisher's name.

Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a curious and interesting book, Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics written on a single letter, like that which begins:

Odes in this style:

And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first stanza runs:

No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers may be able to give us the information desired.

We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke, written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney, Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had, we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results of75 his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all seems now extremely unlikely.

Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy of Sannazaro's Arcadia, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. Terentius: Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati, Baptista de Tortis, Venice, 1482. Elegantiolae, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by an unidentified printer in 1483. Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit, Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: Les exposicions des euungilles en romant, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484. (Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect copy of the first.) Jo: Balbus Januensis: Catholicon, Jean du Pré, Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, Laus Veneris, Moxon, 1866, and Dolores, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a letter to the editor of The Examiner," an attack on Robert Buchanan, written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and printed for private circulation in 1875.

With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarce Lyric Poems of Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books.

Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite. Barnabee's Journall, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, and Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker's Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London (1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's History of the Civil Wars, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the76 Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I., printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's Carmen Deo Nostro in the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert's Temple, and a first edition of Hesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq., £140.

It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10s.

On the other hand, a first edition of Friendship's Garland can be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10s. 6d., and a first edition of Buchanan's Book of Orm for half-a-crown.

People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10s. and two first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.

A first edition of Trilby (1895) can be purchased for 7s. 6d. at Messrs. Dobell's, and of Daniel Deronda (1876) at 18s. Evan Harrington, in the twelve original parts of Once a Week, is offered at 25s. at the Serendipity Shop.

Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's Odes, dated 1868, but never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it (as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning is £8 10s., and a first edition of The Unknown Eros (1878), with inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10s.

Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's Omar Khayyám (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.

Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.

A. L. H.

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(To the Editor of The London Mercury)

Sir,—On the assumption—I hope justified—that you propose to have a "Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe, called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote some consideration to their physical form.

It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world. The Germans produce—or produced before the war—a larger number of agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed and bound editions de luxe, such as were specialised in by firms like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial" tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions, with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys, who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles" have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric. But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier than ours.

The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the authors, and (3) the critics.

Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books; but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice of commenting on the physical design of books—which, after all, is an ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages.

I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the Mercury, from which we all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.—Yours faithfully,

Original Subscriber.

[We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers. Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book; and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent satisfaction.—Ed. L.M.]

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It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots, their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He; wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that incredible plot in the Widow in the Bye Street; the public-house scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse for The Daffodil Fields. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises that Biography, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has done) seems to have discovered his bent. In Reynard the Fox there is only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's faults of writing are still evident. Lines like

might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will give equal enjoyment every time.

The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does, and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in front of the red-coats:

and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and Pye:

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Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is, unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country. But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable fresh painting. Here is the close:

It is just the end of such a day.

Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like

sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written.

Mr. Waley's 170 Chinese Poems (Constable) was one of the most memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at80 sight that they were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one; those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one. In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood; and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We may quote two shorter examples. One is The Cranes, which has the terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine:

Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in The Lazy Man's Song (A.D. 811):

The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's The Great Summons. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's version of a brief lyric by Li Po, Self-Abandonment:

These translations may be not without their influence on English poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their exactitude and economy will not be thrown away.

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In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot," which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait.

In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped to make our age—as it will in any case be—glorious in song. Brooke and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves; others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some, whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty.

The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest, sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen. There are several such in Eyes:

And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike reflection:

The whole of the second section of Friends is clear and passionate, and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words:

The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:

He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself about

For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.

Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace, was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation, was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry in the book is Via Crucis, which begins:

"Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will not care to begin a poem with

—words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him. He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of The Silver Corpse, and in parts of The Fawn. But he strains after effects and misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries. He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline formally.

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This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at 10s. 6d. net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the exception of The Requiem of the Archangels and one or two other poems it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre.

Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom clear why he begins them.

A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up his feats thus:

Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the allusiveness, of Prior.

"These Verses are not all sad—indeed, I hope that in a very real sense none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation, decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being too simple. It takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the souls of men are bulbs."

Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of Thermopylæ.

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The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail. The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose. Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?

It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion, conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's Jeremy is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why he should have written it.

A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy85 grew older he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to bear the weight of this exhaustive description.

Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African Campaign, Marching on Tanga, the second his collection of poems, Five Degrees South. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can hardly be noticed.

In The Young Physician the persons are not so unobtrusive, and the hero, if we had not been aware of him before, would have forced himself on our attention by committing manslaughter in the last pages of the book. He does, however, live and move before that, and the characters around him at home, at school, at the university where he studies medicine, are living and moving human beings. But the more clearly we see Edwin and his surroundings the less, very unfortunately, we see of those poetical qualities to which we have grown accustomed in Mr. Brett Young. Certain of the human relations are indeed very well drawn. Edwin's love for his mother and his grief at her death make moving passages. The episode in which he is drawn closer to his lonely father is excellently done. But the second part of the book, where Mr. Brett Young voluntarily confines himself in North Bromwich, is not, on the whole, a distinguished piece of work. Here the author is without his hills, trees, and clouds, and is compelled to exert himself in the observation and delineation of character. But though he does his work here cleanly and honestly, as we have a right to expect from him, he does it lifelessly and without enthusiasm. "W. G.," Boyce, even Rosie Beaucaire are alive and credible, but it is hard for the reader not to suspect that Mr. Brett Young takes but little interest in them and impossible, with that suspicion in his mind, to take much interest in them himself. Much the best part of the book is the description of the journey made by Edwin and his father to the deserted mining village in the Mendips, which had been the father's home. Here Mr. Brett Young has his opportunity for description and uses it well in a dozen passages.

This quotation does not indicate, a dozen such could not exhaust, the grace and charm of the episode in the Mendips. Here, perhaps, for a moment in the midst of an unsatisfactory book Mr. Brett Young has attained a higher level of achievement than ever86 before. His persons do not here fade into the landscape, but rather blend with it into one picture, of which they are as essential a part as the hills and clouds. There is still, it must be confessed, a certain lack of vigour in the presentation, but if the author could compose a whole book in this manner it would be a very fine and remarkable performance. Perhaps he may still do so. It would be very rash to decide at this moment that the novel is not the form of art which he ought to pursue. But even if we reserve judgment on this point, there can be no doubt that the scheme of The Young Physician is in any case not well adapted to his particular gifts.

Mr. Compton Mackenzie, however, who invented and popularised this kind of novel, has, in his latest production, thought fit to drop it. It was indeed desirable, after the unfortunate affair of Sylvia and Michael, that he should attempt to break new ground; but we think that many of his admirers will read Poor Relations in a mood of pleasure mingled with dismay. One critic observed of Guy and Pauline that the future of the English novel was, to a quite considerable extent, in Mr. Mackenzie's hands. But the future of the English novel does not really lie in the direction of rattling books for railway journeys, where humour is derived from cows, comic clergymen, and an overwhelming hair-wash. Those who fixed Mr. Mackenzie with solemn expressions of expectation on the ground of Carnival and Sinister Street will probably be hard put to it to know what to make of this romping and boisterous piece of work. It contains little more of what the author has been praised for than his vitality—which was much diminished in Sylvia and Michael—and his verbal ingenuity. But it does show high spirits and an eye not blind to those obvious humorous effects, such as bad wine, mischievous and inquisitive children, the nervous author with his secretary, and so forth, which when they are whole-heartedly embraced are, after all, still humorous. If the future of the English novel really is in Mr. Mackenzie's hands and if he continues in his present mood, the English novel is going to have a queer time of it. But if he has done nothing else, he has proved himself free of priggishness.

Among these novelists only two, Mr. Swinnerton and Mr. Lynch, much concern themselves with what was once an urgent topic of conversation, with the business, namely, of giving the novel shape and compactness. This, it was at one time announced, was the direction in which English fiction was moving, and perhaps it is still the most significant movement, though it is accidentally a little veiled at present. But Mr. Swinnerton, who is a novelist pure and simple, who follows no extravagant theory, has no doctrinaire axe to grind, seems bent on making shipwreck of his powers. Some novels can be written, as was Mademoiselle de Maupin, in six weeks. But Mr. Swinnerton has not yet written a novel like Mademoiselle de Maupin, nor does it appear probable that he will do so. He seems to have fallen into the habit of producing a cross between a good book and "the commercial article" in good time for the autumn publishing season once a year. Thus are the hopes raised by Nocturne disappointed; and those who were disconcerted but cheerful last year under the stroke administered by Shops and Houses will possibly falter in despair this year under the more poignant blow of September. It is the theme of a beautiful woman, whose placid life does not flower into passion until she is nearing middle age. Cherry Mant, who hardly hurts Marian Forster by tampering with the affections of her good fellow of a husband, wounds her deeply by making off with her youthful lover, Nigel Sinclair; and both acts of rapine are cleverly introduced by a silly joke about the name of a brand of cigarettes. It is true: Mr. Swinnerton knows his business. And if he has not the final fusing fire of genius, he has talent in great quantities, experience, and knowledge and cleverness. He has learnt his art, but rather than apply his learning he gives us once a year the irritating phantom of a good book. His theme and his conception of its treatment are excellent. But he will not pursue sufficiently deeply his researches into character, and unless he can resign himself to missing the season now and again, he will be lost to the English novel.87 His is not one of those talents that shine in rash and careless brilliance. It requires intensive labour to make the best of it.

The same judgment applies with equal force to Mr. Lynch's talent. The difference between him and Mr. Swinnerton is that he has taken the trouble to make the best he can of his theme, which is exiguous and yet sufficient. The story turns on Jimmy Guise's gradual discovery of his wife's worthlessness; and the hasty reader might complain that in a short book Mr. Lynch has spent a great deal of time over a very small matter. But those who range through contemporary fiction, anxious to be hopeful, will be more interested in the care which he has spent on every facet of the tale. The device, by which Jimmy is at once presented, full length and in detail, to the reader, while Blanche is gradually discovered, is one of those solid and sufficient inventions which immediately command respect. The exact and measured discovery of her worthlessness takes place by slow, inexorable degrees which show that the author has never once relaxed his vigilance over his composition. There are, it is true, irrelevancies even in so short a work. Jessie Carruthers was not really necessary as a foil to Blanche. The "New Department," though it is deliciously sketched, takes too prominent a place. But these irrelevancies do not noticeably distort the general scheme, and are in fact probably the result of Mr. Lynch's unconscious recognition that his plot was a little too slender for even so brief a novel. But, in spite of this initial difficulty, The Tender Conscience is a very creditable and satisfactory performance and gives grounds for looking forward with much interest to Mr. Lynch's future development.

The novels of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Stephen Hudson are of the sort in which an attempt is made to simulate distinction by gratuitous eccentricity. Some painters, in order to improve the landscapes with which nature has provided them, screw up their eyes until the scene before them runs into a confused blur. Mr. Cannan and Mr. Hudson make this grimace before the spectacle of life. It is a fashion like another, but it has less usefulness and, we imagine, less durability than the novel of adolescence.

Mr. Cannan's book contains a gentleman named Perekatov with a "massive Jewish face, thick, sensitive lips, a heavy blue chin, and tragic, short-sighted eyes," another gentleman named Stephen Lawrie, whose characteristics are not so obvious, and a young lady named Valérie du Toit, who appears to be the incarnation of all that Mr. Cannan considers glorious. The thesis of the story, so far as we have been able to discern it in the gyrations of these and other characters, is that the true England was not in the war, but sat unheeded, forgotten, alone, in a little garret until the fighting was over. Mr. Cannan is plainly dissatisfied about something, but he lacks a brain sufficiently clear to make the reader understand what it is or what he wishes done. Meanwhile he creates unreal scenes of physical and mental misery and squalor through which the stoutest hearted could not drag themselves unyawning or undepressed. Their yawns and their depression are, it is true, in some sort a tribute to Mr. Cannan's powers. He creates these scenes with a certain vigour and finish, but his qualities will be for ever wasted unless he can raise himself out of his present state of aimless gloom.

Mr. Hudson, perhaps even more than Mr. Cannan, has forgotten the limitations imposed on him by his material, which is life. In this story of Richard Kurt, his shallow and philandering wife, Elinor, and his crafty young mistress, Virginia, he seems to suppose that nothing more than his bare word is needed to carry off impossible events and unnatural psychology. But the novelist's task is not so easy as this. He cannot secure originality by willing it or by producing an unexpected situation out of the void. The unusual situation must be justified, not only by itself, but by all that has preceded it. The novel effect which is obtained by suddenly altering a character already defined is below childishness. As for the rest, this is a tale of the idle and indigent rich and their experiments in adultery. Richard Kurt appears to be a perfectly worthless person, so irritating in his sins and weaknesses, that it is easy to understand the feelings of his88 disagreeable father and his frivolous, selfish, restless wife. Virginia, unfortunately, does not in a strict sense, exist. The maiden, whose one desire it is to be seduced without appearing to consent or even to be aware of the incident, may live somewhere in the case-books of the pathologists; but Mr. Hudson has not delivered her from that prison-house. He tells us that such was her behaviour and such her motives, but the reader involuntarily declines to accept the assertion. Nor is it likely that the reader would much care if it were true.

This is a curiously naïve and artless story of the adventures of an airman, as seen through the eyes of one Warton, whom we meet crossing to France for the first time and leave going back to England on transfer to home service, with a Military Cross and two bars. It is written with evident knowledge and covers most of the typical incidents in an airman's life at the front. It is written, too, with complete sincerity, and it is easy to discern the author's personality behind the speeches of his characters and his own asides. Yet for all this it is hardly a success, hardly so convincing or informing as a number of books that have been built on a much slighter foundation of first-hand knowledge. The fights described are not clear or lucid, the persons introduced never become real. All this goes to show that both some natural gift for, and some practice in, literary composition are necessary for any book as well as experience of the life it depicts.

The New Decameron is a fascinating title which covers a disappointing book. The greatness of the original Decameron springs, after all, in the first place from the extraordinary beauty of the introduction, which sets the reader in a proper state of mind for the stories that follow and which lingers with him ever afterwards if he reads a story here and there at random. But the state of mind produced by the setting here, in which a miscellaneous collection of rather disagreeable persons is becalmed in mid-Channel in an excursion steamer, by no means recalls the magic of the Tuscan garden. The stories vary greatly in quality, but none of them is entitled to be considered very seriously. The best would make pleasant patches in our magazines, and the worst would be bad anywhere. The jokes at the expense of German dullness in the "Professor's Tale" are made with neatness and point. The Stone House Affair is not a bad detective story. The Upper Room is a decadent effort of a somewhat antiquated kind, but it is not too ill-written. There is no reason why these stories should not have been both written and published. But the great name under which they are announced and the elaboration of their frame make them seem perhaps more insignificant than they really are.

The squalors of theatrical touring companies seem to be, and no doubt are, capable of indefinite exploitation by novelists. Readers who care to be mildly harrowed by these topics will find in this volume all the pabulum to which they have been accustomed in innumerable other books. But those who have no particular taste for this sort of thing beyond moderation will confine themselves to wondering in what the revolt of youth here consists and in what way they are expected to find it a moving performance. Louie breaks away from home, goes on the stage, is a failure, returns and marries her cousin. There is a suicide and a good deal of illicit love-making, and at the end the heroine behaves with conventionally noble unconventionality. But these things are wearisome if one has no special taste for them.

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Diversions? In a sense they are all, they have always been, diversions. Mr. Gosse has never allowed the chains of the critical vocation to weigh heavily upon him. It has been consistently his especial characteristic that he has approached the most difficult problems in literature with undaunted courage and vivacity. Where others have sat down to the difficult siege of Donne or Swinburne with the pedantic long faces of writers determined not to flinch even though all their readers fall asleep during the fray, Mr. Gosse advances lightly, blows a pleasant blast on the trumpet of his familiar prose and topples the most obdurate walls over before him, without ever losing the least part of his dignity. This it is which makes his reputation one of the assets of modern English literature. He represents among us a school of critics of which the disciples in this country are by no means too numerous. During a long career he has found and continually practised the secret of being almost always sound and never dull, invariably vivacious, and hardly ever superficial. His critical essays have always the gay, untrammelled air, if not the frivolous substance, of pure diversions.

In his new collection he ranges among a variety of subjects and takes now a well-worn road, now a path that has tempted few enquirers. The Songs of Shakespeare is not precisely a subject to attract the dealer in literary fireworks. It is, on the other hand, a subject ripe for the most portentous, the most meaningless, the most tedious aberrations of the pedant. Yet how delicately does Mr. Gosse, in no more than five pages, steer between these extremes and plant the arrow of his comment exactly on the necessary spot! Benjamin Disraeli, in his capacity as novelist, makes a theme not much less forbidding to the critic who doubts his own ability to be original. But Mr. Gosse is, with justice, serenely confident in the power of his style to overcome this difficulty. There is perhaps little in this essay which has not been both perceived and expressed before. But it is Mr. Gosse who crystallises mature opinion on the novels of Disraeli in a passage which might be taken as a model of discrimination and style or critical prose:

90 We have chosen this passage, not because it is the most remarkable in the book, but almost at random, and in preference to some which are more brilliant and more highly wrought. But it is a fair example not only of the grace, but also of the precision, with which Mr. Gosse habitually uses his pen. His Three Experiments in Portraiture are specimens of the same skill in delineation with the added advantage that the author knew his subjects directly. This is an art in which he has always excelled. His slighter, and his more elaborate, portraits of Swinburne stand easily among the first things of the kind in our language; and though perhaps Lady Dorothy Nevill, Lord Cromer, and Lord Redesdale did not offer material so variegated or so unusual, it may be for that reason that Mr. Gosse's portraits of them are even more interesting as studies by a virtuoso. When we come again to pure criticism, we find in The Message of the Wartons, a lecture delivered before the British Academy, the same graceful and distinguished gesture with which Mr. Gosse points to the interesting and useful traits to be discerned in his subject. Mr. Gosse will never be a true or a factitious fanatic elevating some spark of genius in a neglected worthy above the true fire discovered in others by the just sense of mankind. He makes no exaggerated claim for the Wartons, but he does see in them what has not been sufficiently insisted on before.

They had a faint conception: they demand respectful attention. These are indeed the accents of moderation, but then, as Mr. Gosse knows, to praise the Wartons with enthusiasm would be unjust. It is the centre of his critical talent that he is always moderate and precise in his estimates, and this fact gives his commendation more value, his blame more weight, and makes his judgments more readily acceptable.

It is possible to bring forward charges against Mr. Gosse. The two essays in this book on contemporary literature, Some Soldier Poets and The Future of English Poetry, suggest that, at least when they were written, the author was not fully acquainted with the buds of the new spring. The opinions expressed in them are, within the limits of his apparent knowledge, equally acceptable to both older and younger critics; but these limits are somewhat narrower than they might have been. But it would be ungracious, as well as disproportionate, to make much of this point. What is important is that Mr. Gosse is a veteran of English criticism, who has enriched our literature with a body of work which has no parallel and whose powers show no signs of flagging. When we consider his latest, we involuntarily turn our eyes back to his earlier books, and we cannot resist the conclusion that he has rendered to English letters a very remarkable service indeed. The latest is a continuation of the earliest, and this is, after all, the most important thing which can be said of it.

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This volume appears, rather regrettably, with no indication of how it came into existence, how Wilde wrote the essays of which it is composed or who chose them for republication and on what principle. But the references given at the heads of the essays show that they are reviews collected from the Woman's World, the Pall Mall Gazette, and other papers. Wilde did not gather them together nor, so far as we know, even contemplate such a book. It is probable that he would be a little dismayed by it if he could see it.

In some of these pieces there occur phrases and judgments which are the genuine Wilde at his best, witty and well turned if not always wise. There is, for example, a pleasing pertness in his remark on dialect poetry:

There is a long essay on Lefébvre's Embroidery and Lace which is very characteristic, and has, we think, been quoted before. There is a short essay on Dinners and Dishes, from which the following passage may be extracted:

These are worth having, if Wilde is worth having at all, because they are characteristic. There would have been no great occasion for weeping if they had been lost or if they had never been clipped from the papers in which they appeared. But since someone has had the industry to collect them, and since there is a sufficient demand to warrant their issue in volume form, we may receive them with a moderate pleasure.

The greater part of the volume, however, does not rise to this level. Even the most brilliant and versatile of writers cannot consistently display his individual powers in journeyman work; and Wilde, though his wit was irrepressible, almost involuntary, was no more conscientious than any other reviewer. When the good sentences came they came: when they did not, he made no particular effort to maintain either his style or his ideas on any very elevated plane. There is no great value for the reader of to-day in a picture of Mrs. Somerville in a review of a book on her by a Miss Phyllis Browne. And no reader is likely to take a very vivid delight in Wilde's comment on a book called How to be Happy though Married, that

or in the jokes that Wilde quotes from the book. Unfortunately it is by no means clear that the anonymous compiler has realised how much uninteresting matter he is reprinting. He closes the volume with twenty-odd pages of Sententiæ, selected from reviews in which the gems of thought and language were detachably scattered. But these gems include such remarks as "No one survives being over-estimated," and "No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor." We cannot therefore excuse him on the ground that he knew he was dragging lumber into the light, and did so from a pious if mistaken motive.

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Swinburne's book, as Mr. Gosse explains in his introduction, is the complement of his work The Age of Shakespeare. He had intended a comprehensive survey of the whole of the Elizabethan drama, the glories of which he spent a great part of his life in celebrating. He did enough of it to show what the complete work would have been; the outlines are all here, but they are only filled in patches.

That, carrying on as he did the Lamb tradition, and expressing it in his own language, he was sometimes over-enthusiastic, every reader of his sonnet on Tourneur knows. That he was liable to say incompatible things on different pages, where his purposes were different, is also common knowledge. We do not go to him for an exact "placing" of men or for temperate statement; it might be roughly said that he was willing to regard any minor Elizabethan writer as a master, unless he desired to use him to point a contrast with someone else, in which event the unfortunate playwright might be treated as a buffoon, an incompetent, and an impostor. Yet even of just and balanced criticism there is much in this book. No critic before him has so acutely dissociated the great Marlowe from the Greenes, Peeles, and Lodges, who are indolently classed with him. (It is characteristic that in making this dissociation he says of one of Peele's plays that it is "a riddle beyond and also beneath solution" how a man of any capacity could have "dropped upon the nascent stage an abortion so monstrous in its spiritless and shapeless misery as his villainous play of Edward I.") And the essay on Chapman, here reprinted, is one of the finest panegyrics and most illuminating pieces of imaginative criticism in the language. He may, when he turns his searchlight on little men, illumine them too much; but Chapman was not a little man, and with space to move in and time to think in Swinburne here produced a masterpiece. The long passage on Browning and his obscurity is almost as good, so good that a digression, otherwise unpardonable, is self-excused.

The book as a whole is among Swinburne's best prose books. His writing is what it ever was. Almost every word and sentence is duplicated. He would write: "No man and no woman who has ever ridden on a bus or driven on a cab down the quiet bye-streets and crowded thoroughfares of Paris or of London could fail to have noticed with interest and to have condemned, or at least deprecated, without hesitation or afterthought, the design of the posters displayed on the hoardings or exhibited in the windows, even as, with no greater hesitation and no less microscopic afterthought, he would have," &c., &c. We feel that the sentences might have been split into halves and two books of precisely similar meaning made out of the one. Yet his manner is a part of him. Even his most serpentine sentences have vigour and directness when they are read aloud; and his invective is as entertaining as ever. Swinburne had a very small vocabulary as a poet, but a very large one as a writer of denunciatory prose. He refers to a play of James Howard's as "a piece of noisome nonsense which must make his name a stench in the nostrils of the nauseated reader," and through a series of "laughing jackasses," "howling dervishes," and things ignoble, impure, infamous, and abominable he reaches the climax of his abuse with the beautiful appellation, "verminous pseudonymuncule."

Mr. Robertson also has planned a large work on the drama, but his is restricted to Shakespeare. He proposes to complete a series, of which his Shakespeare and Chapman was an instalment, on "the canon of Shakespeare." He has more concentration and more industry than Swinburne, and he may complete his task. He is not an inspired critic and, unlike Swinburne's, his manner does not contribute to the93 readableness of his books. He is often—though an engagingly acrimonious controversialist—heavy-footed; and he has a passion for words like "theorem" and "confutation" which is almost incomprehensible in a man who obviously loves the simplest and most beautiful art. In the present volume he tackles the problem of Hamlet. He ridicules those who think that Hamlet was very vacillating; who would not be upset if he discovered that his father had been murdered by his uncle and his mother, and who would not hesitate before killing a man on the word of a ghost? But he admits, as we all must admit, that there are inconsistencies in the play, and he argues, with what we think conclusive force, that these are derived from Kyd's lost Hamlet, which Shakespeare used as a basis. Here, as elsewhere (in Othello and The Merchant of Venice for example), Shakespeare was handicapped by his sources. Mr. Robertson sometimes pushes his arguments too far, and he exaggerates, we think (where he finds it convenient), the inexplicability of Hamlet's character. But he has spent immense industry on the book, and it is a contribution to Shakespearean study that no scholar will be able to ignore. We wish, by the way, that he would not spend so much of his time, here and elsewhere, arguing with people, German and other, who are not worth arguing with.

Hearn was a sensible critic. But it is a fact—and a pity—that his criticisms of English literature were addressed to an audience of Japanese students. In examining a few of them (and we have already had two immense volumes) we get some instruction and entertainment from observing what he selects for Japan and how he explains it—a comparison and a contrast of the Eastern and Western points of view. Here and there, too, trying everything "on the dog," he reveals unexpected merits in English writers. In the "Interpretations" he demonstrated not merely the worth of Longfellow, but the intermittent genius of Mrs. Norton. But we can have too much of a rather interesting thing, and it is inevitable that these lectures on Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Morris, and various minors should be too elementary, however sound they may be, and however happy the quotations, to give serious English readers much satisfaction. We note with pleasure that many years ago Hearn was pointing out to Japan the great qualities of Robert Bridges as a poet of landscape.

Every schoolboy, in the Macaulayan sense, has at some time or other determined to write a history of the world in twenty volumes from the earliest times to the present day. Achievement is fortunately given to few. Omniscience becomes yearly more impossible, and, since the human mind can no longer single-handed cope with the accumulations of human knowledge, in history, as in so many other things, we have reached an age of intensive specialisation. These are truths which are continually being impressed upon us by the schools of modern history, and that they are to a great extent truths will be shown by a glance at any well-loaded shelf in a library devoted to the output of the modern historian. Yet there is distinct evidence of a reaction against this meticulous specialisation; there are signs that several most learned historians are discarding the historical microscope for the historical telescope and are yielding to the old fascination of writing histories of the world. The free airs of the New World94 seem to encourage this new phase of an old fascination. It is not very long ago that Professor Hayes of Columbia University took a large brush and a large canvas and produced two excellent and impressive volumes which he called A Political and Social History of Modern Europe. These two volumes were in effect a world history from 1500 to 1915. The mere thought of such a venture would produce a feeling of intellectual vertigo in most historians of the old world. But now Professor Abbott of Yale University comes along with two great volumes, and a promised third, in which he approaches world history with an even larger canvas and larger brush. He tells us himself that he is presenting us with "a new synthesis of modern history." We confess to as profound a distrust of the word "synthesis" as some people have of the word "definitive," and when a professor tells us that he has produced a new synthesis of history we are inclined to believe that this is another way of admitting that Providence has not granted him the gift of clear thinking or clear writing. But Professor Abbott's preface does him and his book an injustice. Some doctors, if you go to them with a swollen arm, will tell you that you have œdema of the arm; but there is no need to be frightened—the doctor is only telling you, what you know already, that you have a swollen arm. So, too, there is really no need to be frightened by the historian who assures you that his book has a synthesis; he probably only means, what you know already, that his book has a subject.

We have not discovered the synthesis in Mr. Abbott's 1000 pages, but we have discovered that he has a very good subject and has written, in many respects, a very good book. The book itself proves that he is well equipped with knowledge and has made full use of the intensive and microscopic study of the modern historian. But he approaches history from the standpoint of enthusiastic and large-minded youth. He has thrown away his microscopes and determined to look back at history through a telescope. Immediately a large and dominating fact has attracted his attention. The age we live in is pre-eminently the European Age. The world is dominated by Europe and Europeans: there have in the past been eras in which a race or races have by migrations and conquests spread themselves and their civilisation and government over wide spaces of the earth, but never before has there been so universal and permanent a domination and expansion from one small quarter of the globe. Professor Abbott, seizing his historical telescope, has looked back and tried to discover the origin, the causes, and the courses of this amazing phenomenon. And the more one investigates the phenomenon the more amazing it appears. Take the case of migrations. The European Age or the modern world, as Professor Abbott has no difficulty in showing, began in the fifteenth century. (In history, of course, there is really never any real beginning or any real end; there are no abrupt transitions, only faster or slower currents in the stream of change; nevertheless there are periods in which the movement quickens so perceptibly that they are clearly turning-points in human history; and the fifteenth century is undoubtedly such a turning-point.) Now one of the most striking facts in the modern world has been the migration of Europeans. In North America, Northern Asia, Australia, South Africa, and to some extent in South America we see the Europeanisation of vast regions of the earth still being accomplished by the most ancient form of migration and colonisation. At the same time Europe has sent out a continual stream of conquerors and traders by whose efforts practically the whole of the rest of the world, where the inhabitants were not exterminated, has been subjected to European rule and the European's political and economic system. As Professor Abbott points out, this was a complete reversal of the rôle of Europe and the European in history. "Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the discovery of America Europe had been rather the passive than the active element in that great shifting of population to which we give the name of folk-wandering or migration." And it is a curious fact that the new period of history, of the expansion of Europe, and of the modern world begins95 with an event—it is the event mentioned in the very first sentence of Professor Abbott's book—which involved not the expansion but the most notable shrinking and invasion of Europe and was characteristic of the old world. To the European of 1453 the fall of Constantinople before the victorious Turk seemed to portend one more desperate and disastrous struggle against a horde of Asiatic invaders, and the inevitable and universal blindness of contemporaries to the great movements and currents moulding their destiny and history could not be better illustrated than by this fear and foreboding of the European in 1453. Within a hundred years of the fall of Constantinople, instead of Europe fighting desperately against the non-European world of invaders, the non-European world was already engaged in a hopeless struggle against the swarm of European invaders. In fact, however, the movement, which within a generation was to send Portuguese and Spaniards ranging over Africa, Asia, and the New World, had already begun in 1453. Contemporaries thought the end of a European world had come with the capture of Constantinople; they should have seen that the fall of Ceuta to the Portuguese prince in 1415 and the discovery and colonisation of the Madeiras in 1418 marked the beginning of a new European world of colonisation, conquest, and territorial expansion.

It is the story of this expansion, this change from the mediæval to the modern world, which Professor Abbott seeks to unfold in his two volumes. The estimation of his success or failure raises an important question for the historian. He is clearly right in his view that "a proper basis for the understanding of what has happened during the past five hundred years" cannot be found merely in the history of territorial expansion. If you look at the past through his historical telescope you soon see that you cannot isolate the voyage of Columbus from the break up of the feudal system and mediæval institutions, or the exploits of Hernando Cortez from those of Martin Luther. Consequently Professor Abbott attempts, as he says in his preface, to combine three elements into a narrative of European activities from 1415 to 1789. The three elements are described by him as first "the connection of the social, economic, and intellectual development of European peoples with their political affairs"; second, "the progress of events among the peoples of Eastern Europe, and of the activities of Europeans beyond the sea"; and third, "the relation of the past to the present—the way in which the various factors of modern life came into the current of European thought and practice, and how they developed into the forms with which we are familiar." The real question for the critic of Professor Abbott's book is how far he has succeeded in this tremendous undertaking. The undertaking is so tremendous and the attempt so gallant that we hesitate to give an answer which is in fact so easy. With all its good points, its wide learning, its scholarly arrangement, its great interest and enthusiasm, the book cannot really be said to succeed in its chief aim. To judge from our personal experience, the reader, when he is about a third of the way through the two volumes, begins to have an uncomfortable sense of having lost his way, and this feeling gradually grows stronger and stronger. The man who writes a history of the world which is not to be a mere catalogue of facts, but is to illustrate and explain the present by the past and is to keep us on the track of great world movements, has to select his facts, and it is mainly upon his intuition for relevant facts and his skill in selection and presentation that the success of his enterprise depends. Professor Abbott's failure to keep our vision clear and our feet steadily upon the right path comes from a failure to select and an error in method. His book as it proceeds tends to become more and more a catalogue of facts, divided into chapters and labelled with such labels as "Europe beyond the Sea" and "Social and Intellectual Europe"; the general theme which should connect these innumerable facts becomes lost and forgotten, or at least no longer visible to or present in the consciousness of the reader. The measure of this failure is the frequency with which Professor Abbott makes the connection between his facts purely one of time, for it is96 almost a confession of failure on the part of a world historian with a synthesis when he has to point out to us that the summoning of the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg, the conversion of John Calvin, and the conquest of Peru all happened in the same year. Professor Abbott's mistake seems to us to consist largely in having overloaded his book with detailed facts. As it stands it is invaluable as a mine of facts bearing upon the change from mediævalism to modernity and upon Europe's conquest of the world; but an immense number of these facts are irrelevant to his general theme and purpose. Open the book at random and this immediately becomes apparent. Here is page 384 in a chapter called "The Rise of Holland," and on it we find ourselves immersed in the details of the Thirty Years' War. Here Professor Abbott has failed to decide whether he is writing a text-book of history in which the military exploits of the Margrave, John George of Brandenburg-Jägerndorf are relevant, or a wide survey of the great currents of history in which John George had but a microscopic place. Here the author abandons his telescope and world history for the microscope and John George, with the result that the feet of his reader wander from the path and his eyes are clouded. It is fatal to attempt to use a telescope and a microscope at the same time on the same object.

The author of this book was born an Englishman, but at the outbreak of war he was living in Germany, a naturalised German. He was called up and served in the German Army on the Eastern front, was taken prisoner, sent to Siberia, and was a witness of the Russian revolution there. The book is a record of his personal experiences and views. He is as bitterly hostile to his adopted country as he is to Bolshevism and Bolsheviks. His book does not add very much to our knowledge of the war or the revolution, and his own knowledge may be measured by the fact that he apparently thinks that the "secret treaties" published by the Bolshevik Government were made by Kerenski.

Mr. Freeman was Official Correspondent with the Grand Fleet, and he accompanied Admiral Browning to Kiel after the surrender of the German fleet as "Keeper of the Records" to the Allied Armistice Commission. The book contains an interesting record of the various inspections and of conditions in Germany immediately after the armistice.

If he never sacrificed a kingdom, Mr. Allison at least abandoned a first-class in his schools for the sake of horses. That day was, indeed, evidently the turning-point of his life. He was an admirable writer of Latin verse, and when he was in for Moderations at Oxford the Latin verse paper fell on the same day as the Derby. He left his composition unwritten to go and see whether Prince Charlie had won the Derby. Mr. Allison, with the modesty proper to heroes, now calls his action "extremely silly," but few readers of this book of recollections will agree. Many men get firsts; few men pursue horse-breeding and racing with the poetic fervour which Mr. Allison brought to them. His recollections are of Rugby under Temple and Balliol under Jowett, and this part of his book is an amusing mixture, recalling now Tom Brown's Schooldays (for Rugby still kept the Arnold stamp) and now Ruff's Guide. When he left Balliol he was called to the Bar, but never gave it undue preference over the paddock. He ran a famous breeding establishment, and when the Stud Company Limited failed Mr. Allison97 combined practice at the Bar with journalism. As editor of St. Stephen's Review, which was started with £500 capital in 1883 and lasted till its famous conflict with the Hansard Union in 1891, Mr. Allison deserves praise for one notable act—he discovered Phil May. The cartoons of May's which he reproduces will not compare with the artist's later drawings, but it is not possible to estimate the value to May of the training he obtained in this early political work. The Fleet Street of the '80's, when Romano's was a place the quieter journalist entered with trembling, is portrayed in a dry, matter-of-fact way far more effective than any elaborate, highly-coloured description. There may be people who are not interested in horses or journalism; to them we can recommend the pleasant tributes to Bacchus which lace engagingly the more serious chronicle. As a boy Mr. Allison was not strong, and a good old-fashioned doctor ordered him a glass of port every morning at eleven; this "advice was followed scrupulously, both at home and when I went to school," and Mr. Allison never actually says that he has abandoned the prescribed dose.

Mr. Allison writes with no pretensions to literary art, and he sometimes chronicles very trifling occurrences; but he has an engaging modesty and a genial "take it or leave it" attitude which redeem his book from the charge of triviality. My Kingdom for a Horse! should be invaluable to the historian of social manners and to the novelist who is anxious to get material for the reconstruction of a time which already seems historical. There are plenty of illustrations—mostly process reproductions of old photographs and examples of Phil May's work. We wish, by the way, if Mr. Allison owns the copyright, that he would persuade some publisher to issue a new and worthier edition of May's The Parson and the Painter, which first appeared in the St. Stephen's Review.

There is very little disagreement to-day, we suppose, as to who were the prime authors of the War. But on the minor question, whether any blame attaches to the Entente Powers, opinion is, as it was from the beginning, far more divided. The controversy as to our own position in the crisis, which had almost faded out of the public mind, is sharply revived by Lord Loreburn's book. Lord Loreburn, let us hasten to say, does not deny the guilt of Germany. Indeed, he is at pains to show how the Bismarckian tradition, improved upon by chauvinistic professors, a more or less demented monarch and a ruthless military caste, had sapped the morality of the German nation and made it all too ready to follow its rulers into a deliberate attack on the peace of Europe. Nor does he lend any support to the suggestion that the British Government or the British people wanted war with Germany. He pays a tribute to the efforts made by the Foreign Secretary to avert the disaster at the eleventh hour. And yet Viscount Grey cannot, in his mind, escape a large share of responsibility for the final conflagration. For what made the war inevitable, he asserts, was our entente with France. That entente was a departure from the traditional British policy of holding aloof from all Continental entanglements. It was developed by Sir Edward Grey, with the assistance of Mr. Asquith and Lord Haldane, behind the backs of Parliament, and even of the Cabinet, from the end of 1905 onwards. Not only was Sir Edward Grey working in secret; he was committing this country to the support of France (and through France of Russia) without taking the necessary steps to increase the army so as to make that support effective. And, worst of all, he had nothing in black and white to define exactly to what amount of support we were committed. The result was seen on August 4th, 1914, when it became manifest that we were under an obligation of honour98 to join our arms with the French against Germany. Sir Edward Grey, of course, maintained that we were not so bound, that we were free to decide whether to declare war or not. And it is certain that a large part, if not the whole, of the nation, was convinced that it was the attack on Belgium which did finally bring us in. But this, says Lord Loreburn, was a delusion, which flowed from the arch-delusion of Sir Edward Grey that our hands were free.

Lord Loreburn's case, it will be seen, clearly has two heads. He did not like the policy of the French Entente, and he did not like the methods by which it was promoted. On the first point most readers will disagree with him, and, in any event, the matter is now of merely historic interest. On the second point, public opinion will be more interested in his criticisms. Some will say that Lord Loreburn's old hostility to the Liberal Imperialists inclines him to magnify the faults that were committed between 1905 and 1914. Some will say that he exaggerates the ignorance under which we are alleged to have laboured in regard to our relations with France. His opponents will certainly suggest that everybody knew where we stood, as towards France, and that the secrecy was secrecy in name only. But these are not matters for discussion in these columns. Lord Loreburn thinks that "the persistent danger of secret diplomacy is hitherto tolerated and abused in this and other countries" is one that the nations ought to lose no time in taking to heart.

This massive volume (it runs to some 650 pages) is a very interesting account of the Japanese and Korean peoples, their customs, their religions, their politics, and the influence of Christian missions in their countries. Dr. Brown is an American with an agreeable style, a sense of humour, and, in general, a nice critical faculty, and, though we are very doubtful of some of his conclusions, we do not hesitate to say that his book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the Far East.

From a political point of view the Far East means to-day—and it will mean more and more in the future—Japan. Every schoolboy knows the story of Japan's rapid emergence from feudalism to the position of a first-class modern Power, of her successful struggles with China and Russia, of her mastery of the Korean peninsula, of the great part she played in the late war. And schoolboys, as well as statesmen, may presently watch the effects upon world politics of her status in Asia. Dr. Brown is a candid friend of the Japanese. He is not under the illusion that they are a model people, nor is he of those who describe them as "varnished savages." He comments severely on the lamentable labour conditions that prevail under their newly-created industrial system. He is no lover of the autocracy of their government. He does not deny the faults of their diplomacy. Nevertheless he is their friend, who believes in them. He expresses his sympathy with Korea and with China in their subjection. But he takes what he calls "the large way" of viewing Japan's Korean policy. "The large way," he says, "is to note that, in the evolution of the race and the development of the plan of God, the time had come when it was for the best interests of the world and for the welfare of the Koreans themselves that Korea should come under the tutelage of Japan." As for China, she is "an enormous and backward country ... like a ship without a captain or pilot, helplessly drifting on the high seas, apparently unable to right herself and, in her present water-logged condition, a menace to other ships." And so he sympathises "with the feeling of the Japanese that they cannot ignore this incontestable situation." He is an enthusiastic believer in Christian missions, and he hopes that Christianity will be the salvation of Japan. Japan's great need, he says, is to be spiritualised. Neither Buddhism nor Shintoism have the necessary moral influence. But Christian missions are a great reconstructive force—economical, social, intellectual,99 political, spiritual, international. What, then, is the position of Christianity in Japan? Dr. Brown produces statistics to show that it has made enormous strides, and quotations from Japanese statesmen and publicists as evidence that its growth is welcomed by the rulers of the country. Yet all the public schools are forbidden to teach religion; Buddhism has been driven to reform itself; Shintoism, as he admits, is a waxing rather than a waning force. In another passage he says that the old religions of Japan are losing their hold on the educated classes. Thus a recent census in the Imperial University of Tokio showed fifty Buddhists, sixty Christians, 1500 atheists, 3000 agnostics. It would appear, therefore, that the missionaries have a long row to hoe before Christianity becomes the general religion of the Japanese.

There is some chance, now that the heat and passion of the war are past, that the vexed questions of nationality and nationalism will be discussed with a little more intelligence and discrimination. Dr. Oakesmith certainly sets a good example. He tells us that he was formerly one of those (they were the vast majority, we think) who had but a vague idea of what they meant by nationality, till he set himself to study the question and classify his mind. The results appear in this very interesting book. He criticises alike the theory that nationality is based on "race," and the opposing theory that there is no such thing as nationality at all. In his own view nationality develops as an evolutionary process, and the full-grown thing may be defined as "organic continuity of common interest." He argues strongly against the internationalist pacifist's contention that nationality is the cause of war, and that peace is to be obtained by the spread of cosmopolitanism. On the contrary, he avows, nationality is "actually the one instrument destined, if wisely directed, to secure lasting and universal peace." This is a statement which most sane persons to-day will accept easily enough. But the crux is the "wise direction." Dr. Oakesmith does not give us much practical guidance on this point. Generalities and fine words are not very helpful, whether they come from the side of passionate enthusiasts for the League of Nations or from those who, like Dr. Oakesmith, are a little doubtful whether the world is quite ripe for it. However, the book is well worth studying, especially on its critical side.

Mr. Hartley Withers is not only a "financial expert"; he is also a really interesting writer. Even though one may not agree with all his views, one can enjoy this collection of vigorous essays on war finance, company law and banking, currency problems at home and abroad, the conscription of wealth, the theory of Guild socialism. Mr. Withers does not spare his criticism of the Government's financial policy, which has brought us to the verge of bankruptcy. He dismisses the "capital levy" as impracticable; but he advocates a high income tax, with super-tax beginning at a much lower level, and "with skilful differentiation according to the circumstances of the taxpayer."

This book is a painstaking attempt to show the evils of celibacy (including the common state of "pseudo-celibacy") both to society and to the individual. Mr. Gallichan arraigns the false ideals and the economic pressure of our industrial system, the perverse influence of ecclesiasticism, and the other causes which produce the myriads of involuntary or voluntary celibates in the western world. He advocates no "fancy"100 remedies, such as free love, polygamy, or the taxation of bachelors, but rather an attack on poverty, the spread of education, the moralisation of the marriage laws. The book is not a profound or scientific study, but it might be instructive to those who have never given any thought to the subject.

This little volume is one of the clearest and the most interesting books that we have seen on the Irish problem. Mr. Good gives us a survey of Ulster history from the seventeenth century, which shows the unifying influence of the genuine democratic ideals common to both the contending parties. He argues that this unification has been, and is, thwarted by "religion," and by "Carsonism," "the supreme example in modern times of the triumph of the influences that make for divisions in Ireland." Sinn Fein, in Mr. Good's view, offers no practicable way out of the difficulty of Ulster. "If Sinn Fein is," he says, "as it can now claim to be, the creed of the Irish people it must propound a solution of the Ulster riddle based, not on abstract theories, but on the realities of the situation." Mr. Good's concluding chapters on "Ulster as It Is" are excellent reading. We do not suppose Ulster Unionists will agree with all the views he expresses there, still less with his conclusions—one of the chief of which is that Ireland is really one nation and not two. But his book may induce a good many mere Englishmen to take a more intelligent attitude towards Irish politics.

Mr. Taylor is an enthusiastic Guildsman, though a heretic, in that he stands for a localised system as against the orthodox National Guilds. His book is a very naïve account of the Guild proposals, and we can hardly imagine that it will convert anyone to his views. There is a vast amount of idealisation of the Middle Ages—an idealisation which frequently verges on the ridiculous. Many of the historical statements are extravagant. We are told, for instance, that Queen Elizabeth "had perhaps the most honest and most efficient ministers of State that this nation has ever possessed." And is it not going rather far to say that "the French peasant remains much as he has been for centuries—the most substantial fact in European civilisation, and perhaps its highest product"? Mr. Taylor's style would not suffer if it were less arrogant and less splenetic. He lets us know, till we are sick of it, that there is but little wisdom in the world save in the common-sense simple man and the hard-headed Guildsman. And his virulence against politicians and University professors almost assumes the dimension of a disease.

The greater part of this brochure is taken up with a defence of the capitalist against the attacks of revolutionaries, impossibilists, and all the tribe of intellectual "high flyers"—such as Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Orage, and the late Mr. Sidney Ball. The author's own plan is to harmonise the interests of capitalists and workers in a system of "separate autonomous industries co-ordinated with a National Federal Parliament of Industry." It is in fact something like Guild socialism with the socialism left out. "Oxon" hardly appears to appreciate the limitations or the difficulties of his scheme.

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This is a purely elementary volume which explains the revenue and expenditure of the British Government and local authorities, the National Debt, and the study of financial statistics. It is clearly and simply written, and might be a valuable schoolbook. For the interested and courageous student there is some useful advice on further reading. But Mr. Higgs will strike fear into the heart of many beginners by telling them in the first chapter that the science of finance is so vast a subject that Professor Jèze of Paris is preparing twelve bulky volumes upon it, and that his elementary treatise alone consists of over 1100 large octavo pages!

Certain Nonconformist ministers had a habit—it is now fast dying—of interspersing the reading of the Lesson in service-time with comment and illustration. Mrs. Macandrew has applied a similar method in this volume. Writing to satisfy the needs of an agnostic friend, Mrs. Macandrew retells the story of the four Gospels and supports the narrative with critical expositions of her own or, occasionally, of such authorities as Edersheim. It is not easy to see for whom the book is intended. Mrs. Macandrew is frankly uncritical. She not only ignores the whole body of "higher criticism," but she makes no reference to textual difficulties, and, in discussing such a passage as the Confession of Peter, does not even mention the fact that a considerable controversy has gathered for some years around the precise significance of the promise, "On this rock I will build my Church."

It will not be to everybody's taste to have the annunciation described in this way:

And when we tried to read Mrs. Macandrew's paraphrases of the parables we recalled with a sigh Mr. Birrell's complaint against Canon Farrar, "who elongated the Gospels." It no doubt gave Mrs. Macandrew some months of happiness to write the book, but we think she was ill-advised in submitting it to the public.

In spite of the difficulties which war-time placed in the way of publishers, the production of scientific books, both in England and Germany, has been astonishingly large during the past five years. The greater number of them have—naturally enough—been devoted either to technical subjects or to branches of science having an immediate technical application. The field of industrial chemistry, especially, has been well tended by the writers, and not only new books, but new series of books—such as Messrs. Longmans' Monographs on Industrial Chemistry, Messrs. Churchill's Textbooks of Chemical Research, and Messrs. Baillière, Tindall, and Cox's Industrial Chemistry series—have appeared to bear witness to the activity of the English chemists. Certain subjects in particular have been extensively treated; we may instance synthetic colouring matters,102 colloid chemistry, and catalysis, the last-named subject having books devoted to it in all the series just specified. In these the subject is handled from the industrial point of view, but it is frequently seen that the commercial and the theoretical developments of a science are mutually stimulating, discoveries made in the laboratory without any object but the wresting of knowledge from nature finding commercial application, and the commercial processes suggesting fresh theoretical problems. The great industrial importance of catalysis has led to a revived interest in the scientific theories of the process, and the latest book on the subject, by Drs. Eric Rideal and Hugh Taylor, deserves praise for having devoted considerable attention to the historical and theoretical aspect of the subject, which has been rather neglected of late.

There are many chemical reactions which are promoted or accelerated by the addition of a small quantity of some foreign substance which is not used up in the process and does not appear in the final products. Thus one of the romances of chemistry was the discovery, occasioned by the chance breaking of a thermometer in the vessel, that the presence of a small quantity of mercury greatly hastens the oxidation of naphthalene to phthalic acid, a process of great importance in the manufacture of synthetic indigo. Similarly the presence of finely divided metals accelerates many reactions, such as oxidations and hydrogenations—for example, asbestos impregnated with particles of platinum promotes the oxidation of sulphur dioxide to the trioxide in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. The researches of Baker and others, showing that certain gas reactions, which ordinarily take place rapidly, proceed very slowly indeed if the gases are thoroughly dried, point to a catalytic action of small traces of moisture. The enzymes of the human body which accelerate the chemical processes of digestion and assimilation constitute another class of catalysts, and Drs. Rideal and Taylor class under catalytic action the effect of radiant energy in promoting such combinations as that of hydrogen and chlorine, although it is perhaps rather extending the usual conception of the term to do so. These examples will indicate the wide range of the subject and help to make intelligible Ostwald's famous generalisation that "there is probably no kind of chemical reaction which cannot be influenced catalytically, and there is no substance, element, or compound which cannot act as a catalyser," which is no doubt true if very slight accelerations of reaction be taken into account. Of course a catalyst cannot affect the final state of equilibrium, but only quicken or institute (the discussion as to whether, in some cases, the catalyst initiates or merely accelerates a reaction already taking place imperceptibly slowly seems to us pointless) a reaction theoretically possible. Other, the so-called negative, catalysts hinder reactions; other substances "poison," or stop, the action of ordinarily activating materials; others again, the "promoters," increase the efficacy of the catalyst. The phenomenon is a complex one.

By no means the least interesting and valuable feature of the book before us is the exposition of the historical development of the subject. We who are apt to look on the feminine scientist as a product of the last twenty years are reminded that there was at least one woman chemist of ability in the eighteenth century, Mrs. Fulhame, whose Essay on Combustion, published in 1774, emphasised the importance of the presence of moisture in gaseous reactions. Faraday, "the prince of experimenters," also worked on catalysis, and, in fact, originated the adsorbtion theory of the process, which attributes the action to the extended compressed film formed at the surface of a porous solid. It is not only in the chapter expressly devoted to the early history that we find an account of the original workers; the advances made by them receive recognition throughout the book in connection with the branches in which they experimented. The treatment of the various theories of catalysis—the intermediate compound, the adsorbtion, electrochemical, and radiant energy theory—might have been extended with advantage. The mathematical exposition of the adsorbtion theory is one of the weakest things in the book, and McLewis's work is not very clearly handled. The difficulties of giving an103 adequate summary of this part of the subject are undoubted, but the need of it is so marked that we regret that the authors have not spent more energy on the task. This is not the place to deal in detail with the account of the practical applications of catalysis, which is excellently done and includes the most recent work, some of it, such as Partington's improvements in oxidising ammonia, only made public last year. The use of catalysts in, to take a few examples at random, surface combustion, the hardening of oils by hydrogenation (used so extensively in margarine making), the fixation of nitrogen, and electrolysis is well described, and there is a good chapter on ferments and enzymes, and another on the Grignard reagent. Omissions may be noted here and there, but the book is not, of course, intended to give detailed instructions to the commercial chemist. Rather, we believe, is it meant to supply to chemists in general, and even to the lay reader, an idea of the nature of the process of catalysis, which is becoming more important every day, and the extent of its applications, with sufficient detail to make the reactions clear, as far as they are at present understood. As a general exposition of the subject the book is really needed, and will undoubtedly find a place on the shelves of all who follow the advances of science.

Writing of the life of Rankine, Professor P. G. Tait gave as his opinion that "the life of a genuine scientific man is, from the common point of view, almost always uneventful," and, if the man in question has no interests but science, this is, in general, true. Engaged in researches on the laws of nature, the most that he demands from life is that he shall have his study, his laboratory, food, shelter and peace, and such an attitude does not lead to high adventure or romances of passion. Consequently, in writing biographies of physicists it is advisable not to dwell too long on their everyday life, marriages and meals, for there is a certain monotony about the material lives of these great men. In the lives before us, which are little more than sketches, the author has rightly laid most stress on the scientific achievements of his ten physicists, but he has a tendency to reduce his account to a catalogue of the discoveries and advances made. An estimate of the place of each man in the thought of the time, and of his scientific character, of the general tendencies of his work and the place it now occupies in the history of the science, deserves to take a rather larger place in these short biographies than it has received.

Happily many of the ten are men of very interesting personality. The selection—James Clerk Maxwell, W. J. M. Rankine, P. G. Tait, Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, William Whewell, Sir G. G. Stokes, Sir G. B. Airy, J. C. Adams, and Sir J. F. W. Herschel—if based on no clearly-defined plan, has the merit that it includes one or two men who have been unduly neglected. Rankine, in spite of his important work on thermodynamics, does not receive much attention from the physicists of to-day, possibly owing to his unattractive "molecular vortices," and Babbage is known to most people rather from the sneer in the Ingoldsby Legends:

than for his really great, though imperfect, achievements. Why Babbage is set down as a physicist, when his whole effort was devoted to the perfecting of calculating machines, we do not know, but the life is one of the most interesting, and makes an attempt to expound the causes—obvious enough, perhaps—of his misfortunes. It is a generous appreciation of an ill-starred genius, now seldom heard of. Whewell, again, is scarcely known as a physicist, but rather as the historian of inductive science; we suppose that104 his writings on the tides have secured him his place. Joule is mentioned in early life, and was certainly one of the leading physicists of the century, yet he is not among the selected ten—neither, for that matter, is Faraday, so it is evident that scientific prowess has not been the test of admission.

On the whole the ten are versatile men, although no one of them could come near in diversity of performance to the great Thomas Young, who was not only a physicist of the first rank but also a physician, a classical scholar, and one of the first successful decipherers of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rankine and Whewell were fair poets, and Clark Maxwell deserves higher praise for his verses. His description of Kelvin's reflecting galvanometer, in the form of a parody of Tennyson's "Blow, bugle, blow," illustrates the ease and finish of his light verse:

The poem is quoted in the life of Kelvin, and two of Rankine's songs are given. We hope that physicists can still show the same accomplishment.

The lives are well written, and, while not a very profound contribution to the history of the science, make very pleasant reading for scientist and layman. There is, however, occasionally a lack of proportion, as when Clark Maxwell's work on electro-magnetic waves receives little attention compared to his other far less important achievements.

105

Paris, October, 1919.

IN France as much as, and perhaps more than, in England the novel has been since the eighteenth century the central massif of literature. While in England the poets and the novelists formed two quite distinct groups, while the poets Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Burns, Tennyson, Swinburne remained pure poets, in France there have been few poets who have not wished to write novels. Lamartine, Hugo, Musset, Vigny, Gautier have done so. A pure critic like Sainte-Beuve wished, with Volupté, to try his hand at the novel. Taine left in manuscript the novel Etienne Maylan and Renan the novel Patrice; they did not publish these books because they recognised them to be mediocre, but both wished to obtain the glory of the novelist. The novel is in France the highest object of literary ambition. It alone assures a position of material and social importance. Thus it is that a novelist who is read by the upper and middle classes is necessarily admitted to the Academy while a historian or a philosopher is admitted only in exceptional circumstances, and great poets like Baudelaire, Gautier, Banville, Paul Fort remain outside unless they have certain connections and certain sources of support. The prosperity of the novel at a given moment may then be considered, in France, as the most obvious mark of a powerful literary activity. No form of literature addresses a larger public, provokes more discussion, or gives more of its own colour to a generation or to an epoch. I will endeavour to indicate here in a few pages the condition of the French novel on the morrow of the war.

Beyond doubt it is passing through a moment of mediocrity. This is not because its public is beginning to break up. Publishers and readers demand novels. In default of genuinely new novels many old ones are reissued and read again and cheap reprints are swarming. Every new novel in which any grain of originality can be perceived is discussed and brought into the light and sells satisfactorily. And yet nothing so far has told us of the appearance of the Flaubert, the Zola, the Maupassant of to-morrow.

Naturalism proves to have been the last great school, massive, compact, and powerful, of the French novel. Well, the survivors of the naturalist movement, such as MM. Céard, Hennique, Descaves, have ceased to write novels or else, if they still write them, have given up completely the methods of naturalism, and seek, without success, to adapt themselves to new tastes. It is not, however, impossible that in a little time from now naturalism in several ways may again be somewhat in fashion. There is a tendency among young writers and critics to revise the judgment given in the case of Zola, as the judgment on Dickens has been revised in England, and to consider that the poverty and emptiness of his last books has unjustly thrown a shadow on the profound and powerful works of his maturity. Those works, born of the war, which have been most favourably received, have been on the whole inspired by naturalist methods of observation and composition. The European success of Le Feu is due in large part to the fact that the author applies to the great war the point of view and the methods of Zola. It was also from the point of view of the story of a squad that Zola wrote La Débâcle.

So far the novel of manners and psychology born of the war has only been attempted by writers of the older generation, that which knew the masters of the naturalist novel, which lived their life, which took part, from one side or another of the barricade, in their struggles.

I am here thinking especially of the works written during the war by the doyen of the French novel, M. Paul Bourget. M. Bourget occupies to-day in the novel a position analogous to that of Zola in his last years. The young literary generation is hostile to him or regards him with contemptuous indifference, except that part of this generation106 which is grouped round M. Maurras, whose political ideas he has adopted. He is justly reproached with a painful style, with conventional psychology in upper and middle class surroundings, with laborious intrigues carried out according to antiquated formulæ. He must be regarded, nevertheless, with respect as a great worker, who seeks conscientiously to extend the limits of his manner, and, above all, as the sole representative to-day of the old tradition of the French novelists of the nineteenth century—that of Balzac, of Sand, of Flaubert, of Maupassant, of Zola. Perhaps he marks the irremediable decadence of this style which the twentieth century will replace by one more supple and more precise.

The war novels of M. Bourget, Le Sens de la Mort, Nemesis, are mediocre, though showing always the same technical qualities of solid construction. But he has written a short nouvelle of profound beauty, Le Justicier, on a great theme of human peace and reconciliation within a divided family; and this sketches perhaps the general lines of to-morrow's reconciliations on our torn planet.

Among the innumerable books written by combatants, in which novels abound, no novel has achieved the powerful interest of certain collections of letters and journals which render, without literary modelling, fresh, authentic, and actually seen impressions. The generation which has lived through the war as an immediate and tragic reality has not written and certainly will not write the novel of the war. The Thackeray, the Balzac, the Tolstoi of to-morrow have probably been born, but are hardly out of the nursery.

The two forms of the novel preferred by the young generation of to-day are the novel of adventure and the little novel of irony and sentiment. Neither has yet produced any great result. The first, after a year, is already out of fashion, and the second will probably follow it in a few months. And the writers of value who have passed through these phases are now passing through some other.

The English novel of adventure has been in favour in France for some time. The novels of Wells have found here for twenty years, like those of Kipling, great numbers of ardent readers. Before that, a long time ago, in symbolist circles, it was the fashion to speak with the greatest admiration of Stevenson. And the novels of Chesterton, the influence of which was visible in André Gide's Les Caves du Vatican, have been appreciated by a narrower, but select, circle. Nevertheless it was only during the war that the younger writers were tempted systematically to compose romantic novels of adventure. The two novels of M. Pierre Benoit, Königsmarck and l'Atlantide, are clever books, in which old methods are enhanced by a true novelist's temperament. An Englishman will find little in them which Stevenson, and even Rider Haggard, have not already given him. The Maître du Navire of M. Louis Chadousne seems to introduce in addition a note of irony which shows that the author writes to amuse himself and does not believe in his adventure. And this note of irony is still more obvious in Le Chant de l'Equipage of M. Pierre Mac-Orlan, which parodies the novel of adventure. The French novelist is a rationalist who pretends to believe in his mystery and does not believe in it. Between the adventure of the English novel and the adventure of the French novel there is the same difference as between the ghost in Hamlet and the ghost which Voltaire brings on to the stage at full noon, without deceiving anyone, in Semiramis. The novel of adventure proves to have been a season's fashion which those who launched it abandon in the following season.

What I have called the little novel of irony and sentiment has had a longer, a more vivacious, and a more durable existence. It is almost peculiar to French literature and produces every year a good harvest of agreeable books. It is generally an invertebrate composition, made up of humorous episodes and reflections, the slight daily impressions of a man of letters, delicate and fatigued, in Parisian surroundings. It is, as it were, the chronicle-novel of French literary life.

A great number of the works of M. Abel Hermant belong to this style, and among them, in particular, the Anglo-French novel, half of Paris, half of Oxford, which he is107 now publishing, and the first two parts of which are called L'Aube Ardente and La Journée Brève (the latter in course of publication in the Revue de Paris). These are, like M. Hermant's books, the elegantly but frigidly written compositions which come only from a literary and conventional atmosphere and appear to have been developed in the author's mind as in an artificial incubator.

The true novel of this sort comes into existence under freer and more fanciful conditions than obtain in the intelligent and tidy, though somewhat melancholy, manufacture of M. Hermant. A young writer, who died a score of years ago, Jean de Tinan, produced masterpieces in Pense-tu réussir? and Aimienne, which have not been surpassed. To-day this type of novel has a right and a left—elegance on the right and Bohemianism on the left, the latter as a rule being more picturesque and more highly flavoured. On the right there is what one might call, using the word in the sense in which it is used by historians of mediæval literature, a littérature courtoise—I mean a literature of the court with some refinement and some sensuality. Here the author describes his little amatory adventures, endeavouring to relieve their inevitable banality with a certain piquancy in the introduction of portraits of his men and women friends, chosen among an elegant society. Les Papiers de Cleonthe, by M. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, and Le Diable a l'Hôtel, by M. Emile Henriot, which have just appeared, though they fall sometimes into banality, make agreeable reading. On the left there is the little Bohemian novel, which deals with Montmartre as ancient stories dealt with Miletus. Its characters are artists and their more or less interesting friends, young women and their more or less interested friends. The novel of Montmartre, in which style Charles-Louis Philippe wrote the earliest masterpieces, is practised to-day in the most agreeable fashion by M. Francis Cares, author of Bob et Bobette, M. Mac-Orlan, author of La Clique du Café Brebis, and M. André Billy, the author of Scènes de la Vie Littéraire. Nevertheless these sometimes shady cabarets, where boredom is chased away, must not be confused with the higher spheres of literature.

The French novel, regarded as a whole, is at the present moment going through a crisis. The qualities of original, free, and vigorous creation which were the causes of success from Balzac to Maupassant have become rare. The novel no longer produces those real and living characters round whom, as Taine said, it is possible to walk. But it is remarkable for qualities of intelligence.

Alphonse Daudet somewhere makes a distinction between creative novelists and essayist novelists. The distinction is very just. We lack to-day creative novelists, but we have a number of essayist novelists. Our contemporary novelists are very intelligent persons, who are often admirable in their knowledge of human nature, but who rarely succeed in making it live. It is nevertheless probable that there is nothing to be gained by retracing our steps. We shall no doubt reach something new by continuing to the end this exercise of the intellect, by applying it to an increasingly profound and refined psychological analysis. If we take examples from the English novel, the sign-post of our French novel of to-day would not be such a name as that of Dickens or of Eliot or of Kipling but rather that of Meredith. This is what is indicated by the great success now enjoyed by two complex and delicate writers, M. Marcel Prevost and M. Jean Girandoux. A l'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en Fleur and Simon le Pathétique are both novels of rich and fugitive personalities, who are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves, and who thus find a real world of inward adventures. It seems that the French novel is now moving by choice in this direction, and that the public is assisting the movement. This should not be astonishing in a country which has always regarded psychological analysis as the supreme goal of literature.

ALBERT THIBAUDET108

STONEHENGE was formally handed over to the nation on October 26th, 1918, and H.M. Office of Works at once made plans to secure some of the standing stones in danger of cracking, and to excavate the entire area without disturbing the monument. The archæological supervision of the work was entrusted to the Society of Antiquaries, and the programme was to have a season of about three months for several consecutive years on the same lines as in 1901, when the great leaning stone was raised with interesting results. Professor Gowland's health, however, prevented his participation in the scheme, and his successor, Lieut.-Colonel Hawley, unfortunately met with an accident, which, with a strike among the contractor's men, prevented any but preliminary work being carried out on the site this year. If funds are available—and the opportunity of solving the riddle of Stonehenge must appeal to all interested in antiquity—there is a good prospect of starting in earnest next summer, without prejudice, it is hoped, to the society's enterprises at Old Sarum and Wroxeter, the Roman town near Shrewsbury, on both of which sites considerable progress had been made before the outbreak of war. The recent death of Professor Haverfield is one of many severe losses incurred by the society during the past summer.

For years the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has been associated with the work of protesting against the destruction or spoiling of good examples of the building art of the past. This year it is developing the more constructive side of its activities. The following instances will suffice to illustrate this development.

First, the Society is endeavouring to show that the humbler forms of English architecture—the old cottages—should not only be saved, but used, and how they can be made decently habitable, though much injured by time and neglect. Works replete with old-time building lore should not be permanently condemned because they lack damp courses, proper ventilation, larders, or upstair fireplaces. Instead of building new at £800 or so, the Housing Committees should acquire cottages of this kind and repair them at, say, £250 or £300. To draw attention to this subject the Society has issued a well-illustrated booklet (Batsford, 94 High Holborn; 2s.), which it hopes to follow by a practical demonstration on a pair of old cottages, proving the possibility of remedying common defects. It hopes to publish the results in a second booklet which would in fact be a pictorial specification.

The second illustration of the Society's constructive activity is the offer to give lectures on the objects and work of the Society, in which special emphasis is to be laid on what may be learnt in matters of economy and beauty, from old buildings.

The Royal Numismatic Society has removed from 22 Albemarle Street to 22 Russell Square, W.C.1, where meetings will be held and the library is housed. On October 16th, Sir Henry Howorth, Vice-President, in the Chair, Mr. Lawrence read a note on some of the difficulties of distinguishing halfpence from farthings during the period between 1465 and 1523. Parliament in the latter year directed some alteration of type of the farthings, as it was shown that halfpennies and farthings were with difficulty distinguishable owing to both denominations having been struck from the same "coin." A discussion was also raised on the profile half-groats of Henry VII. bearing the mint-marks martlet and rose. Some of these have keys below the shield on109 the reverse and others are without the keys. The question raised was whether these later coins were to be considered as having been struck at York in consequence of the martlet mint-mark, previously only known at York, or whether the absence of the keys denoted their issue at London. Mr. Brooke and Col. Morrieson urged that these coins were sede vacante issues of York.

Mr. H. Mattingly read a paper entitled "A. Vitellius Imp. Germanicus," in which he attempted to determine the reasons for the variations in Vitellius's obverse legends, between the forms Imp. Germ. and Germ. Imp. After distinguishing clearly the class of coins on which these titles appear, he brought evidence to show that the title Imp. Germanicus is characteristic of the non-Roman coins of Vitellius and of the early period of the reign before the victory over Otho. It implied a definite challenge thrown out by the German armies to the rest of the Empire, and in consequence when Vitellius became constitutional Emperor at Rome the title was deftly deprived of offence by inversion to Germanicus Imp., a normal form of title already borne by Claudius and Nero.

The forty-second annual meeting of the Library Association was notable, not by reason of its bibliographical or literary interest, for either was to seek, but as marking a definite cleavage between librarians and the Board of Education upon a matter of national importance. Were it not that education in this country has always been the province of the amateur, one might say that the cleavage was between amateur and professional opinion. The third interim report of the Adult Education Committee to the Ministry of Reconstruction proposed to hand over the control of the Public Library to the Local Education Authority; the Library Association, as a body possessed of a charter for the support and advancement of the public library movement, opposed the main recommendations of that report and returned to the Minister of Education a memorandum of counter argument. The four points of the memorandum were: (1) "That, with the already heavy responsibilities of the Education Authority, an additional duty—problems requiring detached consideration—will result in the convenient relegation of the library to a mere appendage of the school; (2) that, although co-operation between school and library does exist, the initiative has come almost wholly from the latter, and that assimilation by the comparatively untried and empirical "1918 model" education will be fatal to its general usefulness; (3) that the interest of the public is the main interest of the library, and that this is subordinated by the Adult Education Committee to the special interest of the school; (4) that the recommendations upon the provision of technical and commercial books were unduly extravagant and wasteful as regarding the first, but unduly parsimonious and wrongly conceived in the case of the second. To this document, beyond a bare acknowledgment, no reply has been given. Its form and tenor were unanimously approved by the Association at Southport.

The Bibliographical Society opens its 28th Session on November 17th, with a paper by Mr. R. F. Sharp, of the British Museum, on "Travesties of Shakespeare's Plays." The Society has not only kept up its normal output of books during the war, but has produced some volumes of exceptional importance, notably Mr. Gordon Duff's wonderfully complete record of English Fifteenth-Century Books, with facsimiles of all the types used in them; Mr. E. F. Bosanquet's illustrated Monograph on English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications; the first volume of Professor Carleton Brown's Register of Middle-English Religious Verse; and two exceptionally interesting volumes of Transactions. A Bibliography of Landor, by Mr. Stephen Wheeler and110 Mr. T. J. Wise, will shortly be issued, and the second volume of Professor Carleton Brown's Register should be ready early next year. The books of the Society are only printed for its own members, and until 1914 it was a close corporation, with an English and American membership limited to 300. In the January before the war it opened its ranks in order to obtain a hundred additional members and further increase its output. It is still open to book lovers to join at the old subscription of a guinea, but unless the Annual Meeting in January next decides otherwise, the roll of the Society is due to be closed on the third Monday of the new year. That the Society has done so well during the war is largely due to its genial President, Sir William Osler, who has held office longer than any of his predecessors and is soon further to help the Society by producing for it a Monograph on the Medical books published by the earliest printers, i.e. not later than 1480. Among the earlier presidents were Dr. Garnett and Mr. Fortescue, of the British Museum, the late Earl of Crawford, Mr. H. B. Wheatley, and Mr. A. H. Huth, owner of the splendid library which has already furnished material for eight sales at Sotheby's. Mr. A. W. Pollard, the present Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, has been its Hon. Secretary since 1893, and was given some years ago a notable partner in Mr. R. B. McKerrow, the Editor of Nashe.

During the war the Folklore, like other societies, has suffered by the absence of some of its most active members on service, but the work of the Society has not been interrupted, its meetings have been regularly held, many valuable contributions have been received, and the attendance has been well maintained. Folk-lore, the quarterly Proceedings, has retained its position as one of the leading authorities on popular beliefs and superstitions of races in the lower stage of culture. Its principal function is to publish papers read by members at the Society's meetings, and to review the more important literature on subjects in which it is interested. But it also welcomes from the general public notes and queries on British and foreign folklore and beliefs. The foundations have been laid for two important works which, it is hoped, will soon be ready for publication. As regards the folklore of these islands, the leading authority is the Observations on Popular Antiquities, by John Brand, subsequently edited by Sir H. Ellis. Large collections have been made under the supervision of Miss S. C. Burne, an ex-president of the society and author of a valuable book on the folklore of Shropshire, with a view to the compilation on the basis of Brand's work of a cyclopedia of British folklore. The second work now in progress is a general index to the long series of special books and Proceedings issued by the society since its foundation, the work of compilation having been entrusted to Mr. A. R. Wright.

The Society of Pure English, which was founded shortly before the war, and which during the war was temporarily suspended, has now begun to carry out its original purpose, and probably before this note appears its first two pamphlets will have been published. Pamphlet No. 1 will contain a list of the members of the Society and a reprint of the original prospectus, which was privately printed in 1913, and which contains a statement of the Society's aims in general terms. Pamphlet No. 2 will consist of a discussion by the Poet Laureate of a curious and hitherto almost unnoticed phenomenon of contemporary speech, the great increase, namely, of homophones, or words of the same sound but different meanings, in the English language. As the original prospectus shows, the Society does not in the least aim at the absurd project of "fixing" the language—its conception is rather that, since all living languages change and must change as life changes, an attempt should be made to guide this necessary process by acknowledged principles of tradition and taste.

111

THIS section opens amid a furore for improving the Drama in this country. Leagues have sprung up, with imposing committees of enormous length, and are canvassing for money and members with considerable success. A Conference of the Theatre, lasting a fortnight, was held in the summer at Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in history, at which actors, dramatic critics, trade unionists, authors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, theatrical managers, voice trainers, poets, scenic artists, school teachers, clergymen, and one bishop expressed day after day their intense determination to have more drama and better drama than we have ever had in England before. This assemblage of people, whom as one of them I may perhaps be permitted to call without offence fanatics, may have appeared to the detached onlooker to have been of very little use. The Conference melted away, leaving the British Drama League and the Arts League of Service still without sufficient money to do any of the practical things without which the gathering of conferences and the sitting of committees are merely occasions for the ventilation of private grievances.

But the Conference could never have been held if there were not, widespread through the country, a genuine passion for the theatre far more extensive and far stronger than it had ever been in England during the whole of the nineteenth century. There are no statistics available to give us the percentage of the population who were regular theatre-goers during the last century, but it was certainly very small, and everyone knows that it has increased enormously during the last ten years, and has probably even doubled again during the war. This is a fact which is generally overlooked, but which really provides us with the soundest basis for hope. What is the matter with the theatre in England is mainly that there is not enough of it. Nearly all its faults and shortcomings may be put down to deficiencies of matériel, both structural and human. There are not enough theatres, those in existence are obsolete, cranky, ill-ventilated, absurdly constructed, badly placed buildings, an eyesore to passers-by, a hell of discomfort for 90 per cent. of the audience, a death-trap for actors. Only a fanatical human passion for the theatre could drive people into such places away from the comparative comfort of their own firesides. There are not enough actors, and those that survive the barbaric tortures of rushing week by week from one cold and slatternly apartment-house to another, always arriving in their next provincial town on the dismallest of Sundays, generally find that they are the one spark of life in the place, and end, like Sir Henry Irving, by expiring in their miserable and draughty dressing-rooms. The English provincial town in its dreariness and dirt awaits the coming of the actor much as the Esquimaux in winter await the coming of the sun, but the actor during the day when he is free wanders through its streets as Virgil wandered by the banks of the Styx—forlorn, and like a man among shadows who have no commerce with him, but belong to another world. It is no wonder that they become more and more divorced from their fellow-creatures, more and more inefficient, more and more lacking in zest for experiment and enterprise, until neglected and isolated the profession sinks, with bright exceptions, to a level of illiteracy, incompetence, and sloth that lately even in London moved a commercial manager like Mr. Cochran to express his astonishment.

But the municipal councils, which are the civic committees of the townspeople entrusted with organising their social life, cannot remain for ever indifferent to their duty in face of a growing popular demand for the theatre; that is why I point to the enormous increase in the number of habitual theatre-goers as our strongest basis of hope. Or112 if they do so persist private enterprise will inevitably step in, as it did in the case of so many electric-lighting, tramway, gas, and water undertakings, build up a profitable theatrical business, mulct the town annually of thousands of pounds in profits, and ultimately will have to be bought out by the municipality at an inflated price. As Mr. Granville Barker pointed out in an extraordinarily able speech at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the people's greatest need is to become articulate. Art means nothing if it does not mean giving speech to the people, and the art of the Drama is the most democratic, the most popular, the most wide-reaching, the most easily understood, and the most stimulating, because the most social of all the arts. There was a time, and it is not so very long ago, when primary education in its most rudimentary, that is to say, its school form, was left to private enterprise, and if private enterprise could have done it at all it might possibly have done it better than the nation; but every argument that can be used in favour of teaching everyone to read and write applies still more forcibly to giving the people a real education. It is far too important and too urgent to be left to the chance provision of speculators out merely to make profits for themselves, and it is to enlighten public opinion on the subject that these leagues have primarily been founded. But let me not be mistaken. There can be no intention of priggishly educating the people in the "higher drama." We must carefully discriminate between advocating for theatres—municipal, if possible, but if not, private—and advocating for the performance of plays by any dramatist or school or coterie of dramatists. The Drama is a much bigger thing than Mr. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, or anyone else, and what has always prevented these movements from gaining popular sympathy has been their lack of breadth, their curious fascination for pedants and cranks. Almost every decent, sane human being will appreciate and support a demand for a theatre to enlighten the dismal misery and boredom of the winter evenings of his native town and to take him out of the narrow groove into which he will inevitably stick if left alone with his books and his relations; but he will not support a scheme to ram down his throat obvious propaganda.

I have sat for hours in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, watching the people. The most heterogeneous collection of persons imaginable assemble there. Washerwomen, soldiers, artisans, clerks, clergymen, navvies, all classes and ages. Some wander aimlessly about, some stand petrified before one picture for a quarter of an hour, some look only at portraits, others search for familiar landscapes, others again are attracted by historical interest. There is hardly one of them that would not probably earn the contempt of Mr. Clive Bell if he were to give Mr. Bell the reason of his enjoyment; but I assert with all the emphasis I can command that there is not one of them who has not gained by even ten minutes within that building something impossible to value and precious, beyond estimation. Can any human being go out of the dirt, the indignity, the ugliness, the noise, the formlessness of the modern city into the serenity, the colour, the dignity, the peace, and the beauty of the rooms of the National Gallery without a quickening of the spirit, however imperceptible? What is there in Trafalgar Square apart from the National Gallery which in any degree witnesses that man is more than an animal? True, there is St. Martin's Church, but the associations of the church—irrelevant if you will—adulterate and weaken its spiritual influence on men's minds to-day. But the National Gallery exerts a completely catholic and irradiating power on all who enter.

So does the theatre, even exactly as it stands to-day. I am in profound disagreement with those who raise up their hands in horror at the present state of the theatre where it exists. What causes me to join the chorus of Jeremiahs is the scarcity of theatres, their complete and utter absence in hundreds of large towns where they should exist, and113 the smallness of their numbers in our largest cities. My mention of Mr. Clive Bell in connection with the National Gallery was doubly relevant, for there is a set of high-brows connected with the theatre who have set their eyes so fixedly on an unreal and abstract perfection that they have become blind. They talk about Serious Drama in the same solemn, pompous and hopeless way that the Calvinists used to talk about salvation, and the mass of the people, cheerfully ignoring them, continues to go tranquilly to perdition. Ask anyone of these apostles of Serious Drama to show you one serious drama, and the odds are that they will say, Man and Superman or Ghosts or Justice. Well, there is something to be said for the authors of these three plays, although not one of them is a really first-rate dramatist, the equal of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, or even Racine, but for their followers—the dealers in the doleful realism of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the London suburbs—there is in the main nothing to be said whatever. Their works are for the most part immeasurably inferior to the average London Revue, and to accuse the theatre of sinking into degradation because it prefers the wit, humour, beautiful dressing, vivacious dancing, and high spirits of an Ambassador's, Vaudeville, Pavilion, or Alhambra Revue to a serious, machine-made play by Mr. Sutro or two hours of mechanical dulness from someone I had better not name is simply to accuse it of preferring life to the undesirable "seriousness" of the tomb.

It is not as if there were no drama better than the Revue or the Musical Comedy, but the stupidity of the high-brows, their dull acceptance of the solemn and the pompous, of anything in fact that is not bright or imaginative or stirring, but is sufficiently pretentious, does incalculable harm to that annually growing fraction of the public which, fully appreciative of Revue and Musical Comedy, is yet unsatisfied and is really thirsting for finer things. This public is continually essaying samples of the drama of the high-brows and is continually being driven back from such dry, unprofitable verbiage to those theatres where there is humour, wit, charm and beauty. And for this evidence of good taste it is roundly abused. I frequently wonder whether anyone of these misguided zealots has ever been inside the popular theatre, the theatre of the Musical Comedy. Have they any idea what a revelation of beauty it is to large numbers of the population? I dare to assert that in London the popular theatre has done more to develop and educate the taste of the masses in dress, furniture, and decoration than fifty years of propaganda from Ruskin, William Morris, and all their disciples. The theatre, of course, has learnt from the artists of all countries, but it has been the great cultural organisation which has taken the fruits of the artists' work to the people and opened their eyes.

In educating the senses the popular theatre has done and is still doing invaluable work; it is when it comes to educating the finer emotions that it fails so lamentably, though hardly so utterly as the high-brow theatre, in which there are no emotions but those of despair, disillusionment and derision. And yet it is strange that in spite of the general abuse of the low standards of London plays, on the rare occasions when a really fine play is put on it is generally met by the critics with a chorus of disapproval or the praise that damns. We have had a good example in London recently. Mr. Henry Ainley, by common consent our finest actor, begins his management of the St. James's Theatre with Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, the title being changed to Reparation, in consideration of the mental state of a public frightened out of its wits by the high-brows and the cranks. Tolstoy was a great man, and The Living Corpse is a fine play, a play that ought to have a great success; but do the critics say, "Here at last is a magnificent play, a play which everyone must see"? Not a bit of it. The general spirit of their114 notices is one of chilly respect for the famous name of Tolstoy, with an insinuation that the play would have been much better if it had been handled by a competent dramatist like Sir Arthur Pinero or Mr. Sutro. "What is the central theme? We are not quite sure," says the critic of the leading London daily. Is it a mere coincidence that on the same page that journal's musical critic, in reference to Prometheus, the work of Tolstoy's compatriot, Scriabin, one of the greatest of modern composers, says he does not understand it and, asking himself whether Scriabin was "sane or deranged," declares that he does not know? Here is a lesson for Drama Leagues, for it is almost certain that when we do get good drama scarcely anyone will know it.

A society called "The Phœnix," with headquarters at Dudley House, Southampton Street, Strand, has been formed to revive plays of Elizabethan, Restoration, and later times. The following plays have been selected for early production:

The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), Marriage à la Mode (John Dryden), The Fair Maid of the West, Part I. (Thomas Heywood), Don Carlos (Thomas Otway), Volpone (Ben Jonson). The Duchess of Malfi will be given on Sunday, November 16th.

Mr. Shaw is one of the most consistent authors living. His readers know almost to a comma what he is going to give them every time they open his latest book. That is perhaps the chief reason why there has been such a falling off in Mr. Shaw's popularity of recent years. Another reason is, of course, the war; but it is strange that Mr. Shaw's opinions, or his particular way of expressing his opinion, during the war should have alienated and even made bitterly hostile men of wide knowledge and experience of his writings and his character who, if they could be persuaded momentarily to reflect without prejudice, would have to admit that what offends them now was precisely what offended so many others in the years before the war, when they on the contrary were Mr. Shaw's ardent champions or, at the very least, his apologists. It only goes to show how very far anyone of us is from being able to judge a man's work rationally once our own particular prejudice is touched. We are all raw somewhere, and woe to the man who touches us on the raw, for then all hope of dispassionate criticism, of Christian toleration even, is gone. It has been Mr. Shaw's most vivid characteristic that he has never lost his intellectual integrity. It is easy to be honest among one's enemies, but to be honest among one's friends is a virtue so rare, so uncomfortable, and outwardly so contrary to the spirit of fair play that it is not surprising it should be generally detested. Mr. Shaw has always retained what he believes, perhaps conceitedly, to be his right to say the worst that can be said of his dearest friends, and of the advocates of whatever cause happens at the moment to be nearest to his heart. However ruinous such conduct may appear to be to the immediate interests of the movement he is supposed to support, he will not abandon his right to forge weapons for the enemy more damaging than any discoverable by their own brains. When life or one's country or one's family is at stake, such conduct appears little less than devilish, yet Mr. Shaw has his right to express his opinions as lucidly and as pointedly as he can, and it may be that when we are far enough removed from the heat and blinding dust of the moment's conflict we shall realise that Mr. Shaw has been faithful to the truth that is in him, and if we have any reason to complain it is certainly not of Mr. Shaw, but of the God who made him.

It may seem that what the ordinary man would call, and call wrongly, Mr. Shaw's unreliability does not square with the assertion that he is consistent, and that his readers115 know beforehand exactly what Mr. Shaw is going to give them. But Mr. Shaw's consistency lies in his artillery, not in his object of attack. The enemy varies, but the same guns are always going off. In Heartbreak House there is at times all and more than all the old brilliancy. The dialogue of the first and third acts is concentrated, savage, and burns with an intensity that casts a dull imaginative glow over the play. The characters of the Hushabyes, of Captain Shotover, of the sham millionaire Mangan, of Mazzini Dunn, and the fluteplayer are drawn with a pen steeped in vitriol and, exaggerated as they are, they have a genuine imaginative reality deeper than most Shavian figures. There is a moral passion in this play gloomier and more savage than in anything Mr. Shaw has yet done, and an absence of that childish and inconsequent flippancy which so often mars his work. The other plays in the volume vary in quality from some excellent fooling in Great Catherine to a depressing mechanical liveliness, almost utterly without humour, in Augustus Does His Bit. The best of them is O'Flaherty, V.C.; but although it frequently makes one laugh one finds oneself, at the end, closing the book with that tired yawn that seems to be the fatal consequence of reading a great deal of Mr. Shaw at one time.

I am not sure that I do Mr. Milne any injustice by asserting that the best thing in his first volume of plays is the Introduction, describing how the five plays came to be written. It is turned with that inimitable grace and lightness of touch which have made Mr. Milne famous as a journalist. Mr. Milne's charm and quaint humour need a certain space in which to display themselves. It would be fatal to hurry him or to try to straighten his meanderings and digressions, but that is exactly what the dramatic form does do. It is not that Mr. Milne cannot express himself in a few sentences, he can; but however few the sentences they will be allusive, indirect, full of parabolas and curves that seem to lead away but really come back to the point. These qualities are difficult to transfer to dialogue, especially when one is hampered by the consciousness of theatrical convention, and in his first effort, Wurzel-Flummery, after inventing that wonderful name, Mr. Milne fails entirely to get his own individual qualities into the play. The dialogue is in short, flavourless sentences that seem to have been shot out of a popgun, and the characters being mere lay-figures, the play is simply dull. The Lucky One is a much more ambitious and more successful experiment. The people are alive, but Mr. Milne is probably right in seeing no hope of its being produced. It is intelligence without frills or decoration; and, as he says, "the girl marries the wrong man." It is in Belinda that Mr. Milne is most successfully himself. Mr. Milne calls it an "April Folly in three acts." and that describes it exactly.

W. J. TURNER

116

IT may be of interest at this juncture, now that the "close time" for artists between the spring and autumn exhibitions has come to an end, to review past events in artistic circles, and attempt to place readers au courant with events to come. The war has not been without its effects on some branches of artistic development. The supporters of Burlington House, it is true, pursue their way more or less undisturbed by the startling incidents of the last four years; I would be inclined to rank with them the greater part also of the members of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, whose twenty-sixth exhibition is now being held at the Grosvenor Galleries.

It is only fair to say, however, that the so-called revolutionary in art can sometimes find a place for his work even on these august walls.

The New English Art Club has been handicapped by the commandeering of its gallery by the Government. Still, here again the god-fathers and professors still hold the sway, and it is only in such bodies as the Allied Artists Association, the Friday Club, and the London Group, that the new blood can be more or less assured of a place to exhibit their work and obtain their share in the business of acceptance for, and arrangement of, exhibitions. All these societies are now firmly established, though the last-named has sustained a great loss by the death of its admirable president, Harold Gilman. The Allied Artists is a thoroughly democratic institution and a step towards a trade union of artists, if such a thing is possible: that some step in that direction is needed there can be no doubt, as the artist suffers very severely indeed from the middleman. These societies, then, in their exhibits generally, show renewed signs of energy and development in art.

The employment of younger men in an official capacity as war artists instead of such Academicians as were not too infirm to bear the weight of a steel helmet, showed unusual wisdom and perspicuity on behalf of the responsible bodies concerned. The direct result was a fine collection of paintings by men who, for the most part, had been able to depict their impressions of war in war's surroundings, or record their experiences, not easily forgotten, after they had been freed from the ranks. An exhibition of these paintings held in America was attended with marked success, and helped to make known the work of young English artists in that country. C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis, and Eric Kennington, to mention only a few, have produced some fine and lasting records of their impressions in medias res. The public will have an opportunity of seeing the fine collection of paintings commissioned and collected by the Imperial War Museum this winter. The effect of this official employment is particularly noticeable upon the more extreme body of painters known as the Vorticists with Wyndham Lewis at the head: they have voluntarily or involuntarily made certain concessions to representation ("compromise" is in bad odour now) in their work, but these concessions have in no way weakened the results of their toil, as appeared evident at the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition this spring.

Turning to other events—the exhibition of foreign artists at the Mansard Gallery, which has recently closed, is, I believe, the first one of its kind since the post-impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries before the war. Now, as then, I fancy, it will be found to be a case of a little garden in a patch of wilderness. Mr. Clive Bell would perhaps have us bow unreservedly before the lions of the continent, but I feel that some of the artists are only repeating with variations the themes given out by their forerunners. Even the work of the accepted masters, such as Picasso and Derain, and so forth, does not seem quite convincing at first sight, but perhaps these were acting117 purposely as foils to their younger contemporaries. The Exhibition was, nevertheless, of great interest, especially if we may take it to show roughly the various tendencies of continental art.

The Memorial Exhibition of the works of Harold Gilman at the Leicester Galleries deserves special notice. Harold Gilman died suddenly of influenza this spring. To everyone who knew him his death must have come as a severe shock; his unfailing courtesy and true gentleness of manner had endeared him to many. As an artist, the sane outlook and sincere purpose in his work were valuable assets to whatever movement he was connected with. It is difficult at this time to estimate his value as a painter, but I am inclined to think it will be considerable. He had elaborated a fine sense of colour which was as effective in his painting as it was useful in his teaching. His work, hung all together in this exhibition, seems far more striking than when seen in isolated examples, the drawings forming a decidedly important part of the whole. He was not accustomed to show these drawings nor did he seem to value them very much, except as a means to the end; and I am surprised by their excellence. No. 23 is a design for a large painting commissioned by the Canadian Government, and left unfinished at his death. No. 37 is one of the gems of the collection. An illustrated memorial volume of Gilman's work will be published shortly. Other picture shows forthcoming in London during the autumn and winter are—an exhibition of the works of Matisse, Mr. Marchant's Salon, open for the first time since the war at the Goupil Galleries, the Imperial War Museum Exhibition, and the London Group at the Mansard Gallery in November.

To the most hardened critic the sounding title of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Engravers may seem a little overaweing; each time, as the Society's exhibition comes round, he must feel this peculiar thrill; the catalogue also, with its crescendos of lay members, honorary lay members, and deceased honorary lay members, has a conscious feeling of "well-to-do-ness" which is very impressive, and may tend to undermine impartial judgment. The twenty-sixth exhibition of this Society is, notwithstanding, very like many others which have gone before. A long search for instances of any serious purpose, with a few exceptions, meets with nothing but superficial cleverness or work of a purely negative value. As in the exhibitions of Burlington House, so here, the artists seem entirely concerned with the portrayal of the anecdote for itself, without the least regard for design, in fact with the least amount of solid purpose or feeling, and with the free use of cheap bravura painting. There are, of course, the well-known stand-bys who provide what is expected of them with satisfactory regularity. Mr. MacEvoy's portraits of the nobility and gentry seem more and more evanescent, and one would hardly credit them with a drop of red blood, let alone blue—but they have their charm. The portraits in general are not peculiarly interesting, characterised as they are by good but uninspired painting. Mr. Frampton's No. 29 is a case in point. The only bright exception, both as a portrait and a work of art, is Mr. Alvaro Guevara's portrait of Miss Edith Sitwell, which alone is worth paying 1s. 6d. to see. The painting throughout is curiously realistic, the colour is very fine, and the arrangement of the figure so as to present a view looking down upon it, together with the placing of the mats on the floor, make a most interesting design. Placed as it is among the portraits of Mr. MacEvoy, the contrast is startling and a little cruel, not unlike a bird of paradise amongst a batch of ring-doves. I am surprised to see that the perseverance of the firm of Nicholson and Son, though the business is now mostly carried on by Mr. Benjamin Nicholson, has not yet been awarded by royal warrant. No one, I hope, will be so obtuse as not to distinguish the filial from the paternal jug. Considerable mention has been made of the landscapes in water-colour by Miss Frances Hodgkins, and though I118 cannot quite agree with all that has been said, I think her work has charm and a strong sense of pattern. No. 214, Threshing, is especially attractive. The drawings of J. D. Revel will repay attention, particularly No. 194. Mr. Keith Baynes contributes two pleasing drawings, one of which has an interesting design of boats, while Mr. William Rothenstein has a good but very war-like self-portrait. I feel glad my acquaintance with him has been so far only in a civilian capacity. It would appear that sheep-skin jerkins are regulation dress for official war-artists.

With the autumn number of Art and Letters the periodical completes its fourth publication since the beginning of the new series. Art and Letters was first published in July, 1917, under the editorship of Frank Rutter, Harold Gilman, and Charles Ginner, and was devoted to the reproduction of the graphic arts and the publication of short essays, stories, poems, and reviews. After the first four numbers the magazine came under the management of Mr. Frank Rutter and Mr. Osbert Sitwell, who changed the cover from a set design to one of a varied pattern each quarter.

Art and Letters has continued to supply a certain demand as an artistic quarterly, and indeed, with the exception of Colour, it seems to be the only periodical which reproduces the works of younger contemporary artists. The first numbers contained some excellent drawings by Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman, and Charles Ginner, with woodcuts by Lucien Pissaro; later, work by Paul Nash, MacKnight Kauffer, and Therèse Lessore formed a pleasing contribution. With the inception of the new series in 1918, the paper was given fresh impetus and still maintains its high level. A criticism which applies to many other like publications may be also applied to Art and Letters: it is too precious. There is need of a wider scope and more general appeal to the public.

The chief item of artistic interest in Volume 2, No. 4, of Art and Letters, which has just appeared, is the drawing by Modigliani, who was one of the most promising exhibitors at the recent exhibition of Continental Artists held at the Mansard Gallery, and referred to above. This is really a beautiful drawing, delicate and sensitive; the artist, while relying chiefly on the rhythmic value of his line, has introduced ever so slightly into the face the literary interest, so to speak, of a subtle expression which is the quintessence of placid kindness. There are also excellent drawings by the late Gaudier Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis, and a wood-cut by Paul Nash which, at the risk of being censored for partiality, I venture to think is of interest in another branch of his art. The drawing by Miss Anne Estelle Rice is competent and decorative. A new periodical entitled The Owl was hatched in the early summer, in which the excellence of the literary contributions greatly outweighed the value of the artistic reproductions. I hope in the future that the art editor will range a little wider in his choice of drawings.

Mr. Harold Monro is publishing a series of monthly chap-books, which has already run into three numbers; it purports to be a record of the poetry and drama of to-day. In so far as it bears upon these columns, Volume 2 is of interest as containing reproductions of Mr. Albert Rutherstone's theatre designs for Bernard Shaw's play, Androcles and the Lion, produced at St. James's Theatre before the war. This is altogether an admirable and valuable little book. The most recently published number is entitled Poems Newly Decorated, and contains some charming and effective designs by the younger artists.

JOHN NASH

119

IT has been good to see the Queen's Hall filled once more with a happy crowd, after the thin and uncertain audiences which listened to the Promenade Concerts during the war. Even to a jaded professional critic there is a peculiar sense of pleasure to be derived from them which no other concerts can convey. One is free to smoke, to begin with, and free to move about and see one's friends; for that is one of the pleasant things about a Promenade Concert, that one always finds friends there. And just as one finds unexpected old friends on the floor of the house, so one finds them in the programme. There are many works from which the hardened concert-goer flees when he sees them put in to fill up time in an ordinary symphony concert. At the Promenades he may find himself listening to them in the company of someone who has never heard them before, and suddenly discover that they have taken on a new aspect in relation to all the music which memory has accumulated since the last time that he came across them. The more heterogeneous the programme, the more delightful it is, and one wonders what goes on in the minds of those listeners who crowd to the evenings that are given up to Wagner alone or to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. It is on a Wagner night that one begins to be conscious of how badly the band is playing. They are trotting through the old stock extracts, which they are supposed to know by heart. The old hands are bored to death, the new ones do not yet know their way about. At least so one is tempted to think for the moment. And on a classical night one is tempted to quarrel with some of Sir Henry Wood's interpretations.

Such judgments are unprofitable, even if one could be sure that they were true. It is the homogeneous programme that alters one's critical angle. The last new versification of a suburban house-agent's advertisement in the second half of the programme restores a juster balance. To judge from old Promenade programmes, the "one-style" night must be a relic of earlier tradition. When Mr. Robert Newman first started the concerts, in 1895, there would be a Scottish night, an Irish night, a Military night, and, besides a Wagner night, a Gounod night. The Irish night meant a programme of Stanford, Balfe, Wallace and Sullivan. Sullivan still figures in our programmes; the others have dropped out, and so has the Gounod night. The programme of a Military night does indeed seem a curiosity to-day. Here it is: Military March (Schubert), overture Les Dragons de Villars (Maillart), The German Patrol (Eilenberg), Trumpet Overture (Mendelssohn), The Red Hussar (Solomon), The British Army Quadrilles (Jullien), The Drum Polka (Anonymous), and the "Soldiers' Chorus" from Faust. Maillart's overture still figures in this year's list; but probably no one wants a military programme in these days, even if it were made up from the classics. It is interesting to note that what we called a "Popular" night differed very little from the Saturday programmes of this year, in spite of the number of novelties that have in the course of time been gradually added to the repertory. The operatic selections were dropped a long time ago, but such things as Handel's Largo, Grieg's Peer Gynt, the overture to William Tell, and Bizet's L'Arlésienne have probably been played once or even twice in every season.

The book of programmes may be regarded as a fair index of average taste, and as such is instructive. English people, on the whole, have had too much common sense to allow their musical interests to be distorted by the war. It is true that modern German music is no longer heard, and that the names of modern French, Russian,120 and Italian composers figure largely on the programmes. But it is probably also true that the accident of the war has merely helped to consolidate a tendency that was apparent some time before. Brahms was never a composer for the man in the street. What the ordinary man wants in music is a clear-cut tune, a vigorous rhythm, and an exciting volume of sound. He gets these in William Tell and L'Arlésienne. In the presence of these and other old favourites we are all ordinary men. They are the things which the man in the street enjoys at a first hearing, the things which the cultivated musician never ceases to enjoy. It is through such music that the average man has gradually learned to enjoy Beethoven's Symphonies and the Brandenburg Concertos, for they too possess those essential qualities.

On the other hand, there is a very large section of the public which demands a more sensuous and emotional type of music. The emotion which these people seek is not necessarily erotic, nor is it consciously religious, though the prelude to Tristan and Handel's Largo (with harp and organ) are among the works which appeal to them most. It was they who made the popularity of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, and it is they who will establish the popularity of Scriabin. Together with this desire for sensuous emotion there is often combined a delight in curious and amusing orchestral effects. This was another factor in the enjoyment of Strauss, and it can be satisfied not only in such works as Scriabin's Prometheus, but in Sir Henry Wood's ingenious orchestral transcriptions of Moussorgsky. Brahms has always been too difficult of understanding for the William Tell public, and too austere for what one may call the "wallowers." He is hardly a composer for the Promenade Concerts at all; the Requiem, the chamber music, and the songs are his best works, and those can always be heard in their proper places.

The complaint is frequently made that the music of the modern English composers is crowded out, not so much by foreign contemporaries as by the classics. New works by English composers are played once, it is said, but never again. Yet even if we leave out Elgar, as being a classic as surely established as Saint-Saëns, there are several English works which are played over and over again. Sullivan's In Memoriam is one of those which might well be laid on the shelf; but like Walford Davies' Solemn Melody it brings in the organ, and to many English people music of this kind would appear to offer all the spiritual advantages of church-going without its discomforts, intellectual or physical. Besides these there are Mackenzie's Benedictus and Edward German's Henry VIII. dances, as well as various pieces by Balfour Gardiner and Percy Grainger, which undoubtedly possess those desirable qualities of tune, rhythm, and a jolly noise. In one case Sir Henry Wood has managed to add the attractions both of organ and batterie de cuisine, thus combining mirth with devotion.

It is perhaps because a Promenade audience is so kind and so undiscriminating that these concerts have become the recognized trial ground for new works. This year's novelties have been, on the whole, of little interest. Malipiero's second set of Impressioni dal Vero was the most original, Roger Quilter's Children's Overture the most attractive.

The want of discrimination shown by the audience is most apparent in the case of the vocal and instrumental soloists. A few years ago, it is related, the students of the Paris Conservatoire used to make a hostile demonstration against every concerto on the ground that the concerto was of its nature a bad form of art. There are indeed a fair number of musicians in this country who in private conversation will confess to much the same opinion. Generally, however, if pressed, they will make four or five exceptions, such as the favourite concertos of Mozart and Beethoven, together with Schumann's and the B flat concerto of Brahms. As regards the rest, they at least afford proof of the good manners inculcated at our music schools. The more recent ones, such as those of Rachmaninov and Tcherepnin, are no better than the others. That of Delius alone stands out as a work of real beauty. The real disfigurement of the Promenade Concerts121 is provided by the singers. One might have supposed that a public which had enjoyed a scena of Wagner or Verdi would refuse to tolerate the vapid domesticities of the second half of the programme. But, alas! it is probably this very domesticity that evokes the applause. The promenaders will admire Isolde's Death Scene or Eri tu, but they must worship at a distance. When they hear the other stuff they know that it is something which they themselves can sing successfully in their own suburban drawing-rooms. Sir Henry Wood was once heard to express the hope that some day there might be a Promenade Concert in London every night of the year. Could that hope ever be realized it would be the noblest monument to the man who for our generation at least has created the Promenade Concerts. But must there always be those songs? They are symbols of bondage to commercial interests.

After five years of absence Busoni has returned to England, and his recital at the Wigmore Hall on October 15th showed that his playing has lost none of its former strength and vitality, whilst it has undoubtedly gained in dignity and serenity. His audience consisted mainly of musicians, and his programme was evidently intended for serious and cultivated listeners. He began with the first prelude and fugue from Bach's Forty-Eight, producing a wonderful effect at the end of the fugue by a continuous haze of pedal, through which the counterpoint yet stood out with perfect clearness. His reading of the Goldberg Variations was startling, both in its quality of tone and in its departures from the text. But it was clear that there was a considered reason for everything that was done, and as a commentary on Bach the performance was of singular interest. Busoni was at his best in Beethoven's Hammerklaviev sonata. It is probably the most difficult work in all the literature of the pianoforte. When Busoni plays one does not take technical difficulties into account; but this sonata is both supremely difficult to understand and supremely difficult to interpret to an audience. To grasp its vastness of conception and to present it without the least appearance of struggle in perfect balance of poetry and philosophy is a task which Busoni alone of living pianists can accomplish. It was evident from the behaviour of the audience after the end of the sonata that they all realised how in comparison with Busoni most other pianists, despite their admirable qualities, are very small fry.

EDWARD J. DENT.

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