THE A WEEKLY REVIEW OF POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND ART. . Vol. VII. NO. 24. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1910. 13, CONTENTS. PAGE THREEPENCE, PAGE NOTES . . . . . . 557 THEUSES OF OSBORNITY. By Cecil Chesterton THE PHILOSOPHY OF A D O N . - - X X 1 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 558 THEPANTHEIST TOMB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 560 MODERNDRAMATISTS. By Ashley Dukes . . . . . . . . . 561 THE SORT OF POEMSMODERN POETS WRITE. By Jack 562 Collings Squire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MEDlTATlONS AND REFLECTIONS. By Francis Grierson ... 563 All communications intended for the Editor should be addressed to THE N E W AGE, 38, Cursitor Street, E .C . WEEk FORElGN AFFAIRS. By OF THE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ... s. Verdad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 553 556 USELESS LESSONS. By Anton Tchekhov ........ FERDINAND LASSALLE.--IV. By Alfred E. Randall . . . . . Books A N D P e r s o n s By Jacob Tonson Reviews AESTHETIC ........................ AIMS By T. Sturge Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... . 564 . 565 567 568 571 LETTERS T O THE EDITOR from L. W. Tonner, Ashley Dukes, John Kirkby, Dr. Eden Paul, Charles E. Hooper, Jas. Chappell, Wilfrid Whitten . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573 ARTICLES OF T H E Week .................. 575 NOTES OF THE WEEK. WE are not surprised to learn that in face of the probable consequences of drift certain members o the f Cabinet, as well as a good many of the Coalition rank and file, are in favour of precipitating a General Election in the early spring. There are, in our view, many good reasons why in fact a General Election should not be long postponed. From hints let drop by those who know, we may conclude that the celebrated Conference has failed and will fail to come to any agreement. How could it not, indeed, when the views of the two parties were diametrically opposed and neither had anything to gain, but a great deal to risk, by a compromise? I t is possible that the eight personae dramatis may have themselves discovered terms of personal agreement; but this is very different from discovering terms on which their respective foIlowers could agree. Nor, as we have many times reminded our readers, is the situation in point of the disposition of forces much changed from its configuration a momentous year ago. King Edward is dead, but the Irish party are still alive; and their support is still a s indispensable to the Government as ever. Consequently with the announcement of the failure of the Conference the Irish party are in the position to turn their thumbs down or up with the certainty of commanding the event. Precisely to avert the appearance of being ejected by the Irish party the Cabinet may decide to anticipate their fate and to dissolve themselves. Lloyd George said they would b e ; and, on the other hand, the Unionist land policy of small ownership--a modern variant of the Three Acres and a Cow mythcommands absolutely no enthusiasm outside Fleet Street and the Unionist wirepullers' offices. Whatever thunder and shouting the opposing captains may indulge in, the Budget and the policy underlying the Budget are gaining rather than losing in popularity; and from an electioneering point of view they are still the trump cards. * * * * * * Such a step, if it were taken to the accompaniment of the drums, would, we are convinced, carry the Liberals some leagues on their way to an increased majority a t the resulting election. For in no respect have they made themselves generally unpopular, and in certain respects they have already made themselves, o r could easily make themselves, very popular indeed. The circulation of ten Unionist journals for every one Liberal journal tends to distort the appearances of things in favour of the Unionist party and programme; but journalism is nowadays singularly ineffective. There is, in fact, only a distant relationship between newspaper and real grievances. Those, therefore, who form their views of politics on newspapers alone go sadly astray in their judgments. In actual fact, whatever these latter may say, the Budget, and particularly the Land clauses of the Budget, have proved almost a s popular as Mr. W e are not now discussing, it will be observed, political principles as such, but expediencies and what may be called political dynamics. The question is : W h a t Government will actually be returned at the coming Election, and by what forces it will be returned? The use to which a Government may be put must be discussed a t a later phase. Meanwhile we have no hesitation in saying that the political capital still stored up in the Old Age Pensions Act is very considerable. T h e Budget is popular a s much on account of its promise as on account of its fulfilment; but the weekly experience of the beneficence of Old Age Pensions, in rural districts particularly, is adding continually to the debt of gratitude felt towards the party that passed the Act. Liberal politicians will do well to dwell on it, for there they are on the safe ground of a demonstrable achievement. Add to these things the obvious fact that the Unionist party is for the time being leaderless, torn asunder by factions and utterly at sea in regard to policy, the conclusion is irresistible that even without a programme of much promise the Liberals may look to being returned a t an immediate General Election with increased strength. With a programme of anything like democratic hope we do not see why 1906 should not be repeated. * * * There are, however, two issues of vital importance which cannot be postponed even in a promissory form until after the election, but which must be decided within a few weeks or so from the present date. One of them is the policy of the Liberal party towards the House of Lords question; and the other is the question of the Osborne judgment. On all other outstanding problems of popular importance the party has defined its attitude and taken, on the whole, the progressive view; on both these the official Liberal attitude is still somewhat obscure. Regarding the House of Lords, for example, we are still in doubt whether the Cabinet entertains the notion that a Second Chamber of plenary powers can o r should be made of it. N o such intention, we are certain, exists in the minds of the rank and 554 THE N E W A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, file, but for some time certain members of the Cabinet are reputed to have played with it. However that may be, it is clear, we believe, that the idea is not only not popular, but the idea cannot be made popular. At the very moment when Mr. Lloyd George is conducting an attack on ancient economic privileges with the increasingly articulate approval of the masses of the electorate, it would be fatal to give the appearance of strengthening those very privileges by adding to their political power. Whatever else happens, the House of Lords, under that name or any other, with its present composition o r re-composed, must not be allowed to increase its weight in the Constitution. On the contrary, events, as Mr. Balfour admitted a t Edinburgh, point steadily to the diminution of the power of the nonelected House, and it is with these events that the policy of a popular party must conspire. I t will be found, we think, when every other proposal has failed, that the old Campbell-Bannerman resolutions still hold the field. They are by this time fairly well understood by the electorate; their novelty has gone; and by comparison with the proposals dimly outlined in the mist surrounding the Conference they will, we confidently expect, be welcomed as a very moderate compromise of the question. returned them. W e will do them the justice of admitting that they are economically indispensable to their unions. A s trade union leaders they are no doubt as honest, able and active as any leaders anywhere; but it is not fair that because they are indispensable to their unions in economic matters they should demand political autocracy as well. Members of Trade Unions might very well say to their leaders, “ Yes, we gladly elect you as our economic spokesmen in conference with our empIoyers; there and in that circumscribed field you are admirable; but in general politics, unconnected or only remotely connected with the purposes of our union, we deny that you necessarily have the right to speak for us, still less to be compulsorily supported out of our funds; outside union matters we claim the right to choose freely from among all the candidates who offer themselves. ” * * * * * * The problem of the Osborne judgment is, however, even more difficult to solve; and we do not wonder that Mr. Balfour declined to commit himself, while out of office, to any proposal a t all. Why should he, remembering Confucius’ sage advice to politicians : When not in office devise not the policy. On the other hand, the declaration of a policy cannot be long delayed by the Liberal Cabinet. W e have said enough in preceding issues to make our own view of the principles involved clear to our readers. Whether they are the views of the Cabinet remains to be seen. Several considerations may, however, be added. In the first place we doubt very much whether the attitude of the Labour leaders on this question is not largely bluff. Impressive bluff, no doubt it is, but we should be inclined to risk its turning out to be anything else. W e know on the one side that the principles of representative government are entirely opposed ’ t o the admission of sectional delegates into politics ; we know further that, however inarticulately, the will of the English people is set in the direction of representative government. On the other side, that will and those principles appear on the face of it to be opposed, and very violently opposed, by Labour leaders who claim, at any rate, to have the working classes behind them. In these circumstances what is to be done? If we abide by the presumably settled theory and convictions of the nation we shall undoubtedly be compelled t o maintain the Osborne judgment and to deny to Trade Unions the right to enter general politics. But in doing so we shall appear to be doing violence to the very class in whose interest presumably democracy was established. As we say, however, the opposition is more apparent than real. W e do not believe that the Labour leaders have behind them nearly as much force either a s they imagine or as some Liberals imagine. W e do not even believe that they are representative of the opinions of their class ; and in any event, since the maintenance of political standards is necessary to save us from anarchy, we would cheerfully risk a few party losses for the moment, in confidence that the future would recompense us. If at this point of illumination by experience a n Act for the Payment of Members is actually offered, the argument just advanced seems to us to be greatIy strengthened. At present on mere grounds of expediency the Trade Union leaders can urge in reply that unless they can draw on the funds for political purposes there will be no representatives of working-class opinions in the House of Commons at all. But Payment of Members would obviously remove the ground of this plea. Precisely the same Labour members a s a t present could, if they chose, offer themselves for election, and the unions might return them. I s it likely that if such were the case there would be much demand left for the reversal of the Osborne judgment? If Mr. Asquith is wise, therefore, he will be slow to commit himself or his party one way or the other in the matter of the Osborne decision. I t is really not necessary for him to make any public pronouncement on the subject. To affirm the judgment will inevitably give needless additional offence to Labour leaders whose amour propre has already been wounded. To oppose it and to promise to reverse it will just as inevitably give offence to thousands of democrats like ourselves who are set on perfecting representative government. Further than this, as we have pointed out, the establishment of Payment of Members would in all probability put an end for ever to the Osborne agitation by robbing it of even the appearance of justice. * * * * * * Those losses, moreover, would certainly be reduced to a minimum by the offer of Payment of Members in place of reversing the Osborne judgment. That is, perhaps, the secret of the Trade Union leaders’ lukewarm support of the principle. As the paid delegates of organisations held together, not by politics, but by economics, their control in the matter of politics is a t present almost absolute. But if a s candidates they were in free competition with other candidates their special “ pull ” over economic organisations would be gone. Like the rest of candidates, they would be compelled to consider the actual political opinions of the people who Of the arguments for and against Payment o f Members we shall take note as time goes on. But the essential thing to seize is the theory involved in it. This has nothing, or only little, to do with mere expediency. Expediently it happens that Payment of Members is a very excellent Ollendorfian reply to the demand for the f reversal of the Osborne decision; but the enfilading o this demand is only the occasion and not the cause. In fact, Payment of Members has been both expedient and necessary in principle from the time when Cabinet government was established. W e do not think it is sufficiently realised yet that we are governed in England by a Committee sitting in camera and exercising practically autocratic power. For the control of this omnipotent Executive the nation elects six o r seven hundred representatives, whose main function under the existing order is not to legislate o r even to assist in legislating, nor, of course, to administer or to assist in administering, but simply to reflect the judgment of the nation on the doings and proposals of the Executive Cabinet. In other words, the function of the ordinary Member of Parliament is to criticise the Cabinet on behalf of his constituents. Now, by what tortuous ways it has come about that this is almost the last function discharged by the ordinary member of Parliament we need not stop to inquire in detail. Suffice it that the Executives, actual and prospective, have been able and not unwilling, like every other Executive, to purchase comparative immunity from criticism by the employment of party funds; and the efficacy of these latter has been determined by the simple fact that membership of the critical assembly has been made a costly business for the deliberate purposes of excluding the unamenable. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE N E W AGE 555 Democracy, we may say a t once, offers no sort of objection to an Executive a s strong as you please. I t is quite wrong to assume that popular government means weak government. There is not only no desire that we can see to reduce the power of the Cabinet, but on the other hand there is no support in democratic theory for those who desire to reduce it. Democracy, in fact, implies a strong Executive acting with plenary powers, but with and not without the consent of the people. I t is the consent that is all-important in democratic theory; and where a n Executive is supported by popular consent, the limits of its power a r e practically none. W e can conceive a much more powerful Cabinet than any that has yet been, ruling England to the cornplete satisfaction of the mass of the nation; and, a s we say, without let or hindrance from democratic theory. The condition, however, is, and must be, that the consent is full and free and given after the best opportunities are afforded for denying consent. In this last condition lies, indeed, our only guarantee of freedom. If we were to set up a n omnipotent Executive which then proceeded to abolish the machinery by which the expressed and effective consent or dissent of the nation to its doings were made impossible, we should have established a tyranny; and, by the same reasoning, an Executive that does not, in fact, extend the machinery of popular consent as widely as its own powers must sooner or later drift in the direction of tyranny. And in what direction but in the direction of tyranny are we drifting now? Remove, a s we maintain they should be removed, the delegates of interested unions from the House of Commons; and leave there only the classfriends of the Executive or their paid hacks, and the nation at large is absolutely cut off from the means of granting or withholding its consent to Cabinet government. And that is the situation from which Payment of Members would save us. * * * the system would tend to lower the tone of the House of Commons and with its tone its status. But why? The tone and status of a great public body a r e not determined by the methods of its election, still less by trivial questions as to the means of its members. Both depend entirely on its personnel. If as is now the case the House of Commons contains the ablest men in the country (with exceptions) its tone and status a r e thereby fixed on a high plane. Moreover, so long as the House of Commons has real power over the Executive, it will attract to itself the most powerful men. And this whether they are paid o r not paid. Payment simply enables a class hitherto disabled to send its most powerful individuals to join the powerful persons of the previously exclusive classes. W h a t in fact we should fear more in the interests of the tone and status of the House of Commons is any decline or diminution of its actual power. Exactly a s the House of Lords has declined in status with the decline o its powers, s too f o would the House of Commons. But there is no immediate danger of this except a t the hands of the Executive; and as we have shown, the only effective check on the Executive is free criticism by freely elected and independent representatives, that is by members whose position is dependent on their constituents and not on their party caucus, which is the Executive's toot. * * * W e are by no means maintaining that Payment of Members might not bring evils in its train. Every bit of machinery in politics has to be paid for in one form or another. Moreover, modern thinkers have emancipated themselves from the notions either that national happiness can be obtained by a single simple device or that the theoretically ideal device in political machinery is necessarily ideal in practice. As Lord Morley says, in politics it is always a choice between second-bests. There is and can be no perfectly working innovation in politics. Consequently we should not complain if Payment of Members were to involve us in a few new evils; if the evils it eradicated were on the whole greater. No one will deny that politically it is fatal to representative government (that is, be it remembered, to the only alternative form of government to a tyranny of one kind o r another) that a whole class of the population ranking as citizens and equal before the law should, nevertheless, be excluded from direct representation on account of their poverty. N o one will deny that in proportion a s intelligence dawns on the poor their political disability will prove intolerable. Again, there is that other consideration, namely, the duty and not only the duty but the necessity, imposed on the nation of maintaining its right to criticise freely the omnipotent Executive. But this duty can only be discharged if the services of members of all classes and of none, of the poor a s well as of the rich, are a t the disposal of the community. How little reality lies in the objection is obvious from the fact that, a s Mr. Lough has pointed out in a letter to the “ Times," over two hundred members of the House of Commons a r e already being paid by one means or another for their parliamentary services. The forty odd members of the Executive of course are paid; and we may add to them the forty odd front bench opposition who have been or hope to be paid. The Irish members and the Labour members are being paid and how many others are in receipt of monies from interested corporations, companies and societies we can only guess. I t is therefore somewhat naive to pretend that the status of the Commons will be lowered by universalising and equalising and avowing a system that already prevails, secretly or openly, over a good third of its members. Moreover, outside the members of the Executive who are paid out of party funds, the method of payment is the worst possible. Positively an invitation is offered to corrupt and anti-public bodies to subsidise delegates f and to pay watchdogs o their interests in a Chamber which in theory is sacred to national interests. W e repeat that the two methods of lowering the status of the House of Commons are in operation now, if only in a modified form ; the absence of a n effective control over the Executive and the presence of paid delegates of non-national interests. Both would tend to disappear under Payment of Members. * * * * * * W e do not need a t this moment to dwell on certain other advantages arising from Payment of Members, such as, for instance, the partial dissolution of the party system by the partial dissolution of the party funds. Party, we are convinced, will never be destroyed; but its rigours can at any rate be migitated. Payment o f Members, we believe, would mitigate them to the extent at least by which a few individuals might retain their independence without, as now, infallibly losing their seat. This would bring some liberty even into a Labour party; and a t worst would leave things no worse than they are now. On the other hand, we gather that the serious argument against Payment of Members is that Nor can we see much to disturb in the prospect o the f rise of the professional politician. In actual fact all the best politicians a r e professional politicians in the sense that they make politics their main concern. And in these days of technical, detailed and encyclopaedic legislation only politicians who make a profession of their a r t can possibly do their duty by their constituents. I t was all very well in the Arcadian days of barbarism to send men to Parliament who were gentlemen first and instructed politicians after o r never. Such amateur politicians were either incompetent or became corrupt through their ignorance or idleness. In any case they are out of the running nowadays. Political criticism, especially in the House itself, needs to be as well informed as the Executive; and this requires an amount o f reading and experience that nobody who does not give h i s mind to the subject is likely to possess. W h a t we suspect the objection arises from is the instinctive fear of the country squire and the county magnate lest their membership of the best Club in the world shall be imperilled by competition with candidates whose qualifications they cannot emulate without taxing their brains beyond their gentlemanly wont. If that is the case the sooner the struggle for survival and the inexorable laws, etc., etc. (Anti-Socialists know the phrases) are put into operation the better. Amateur politicians a r e like other amateurs, amiable, corruptible and incompetentt. 556 THE NEW AGE OCTOBER 1910 13, ~ ~ - Foreign Affairs. By S. Verdad. THREE weeks ago one of my friends among the Portuguese Revolutionists informed me of the coup which has just been executed at Lisbon, but at that date I understood t h a t it w a s timed for November. Owing to hurried journeys to and from Finland and the Salisbury manœuvres I missed one o r two important cables, and the assassination of Dr. Bombarda brought matters to a climax. As I write a t the last moment before going to press, I c a n do little more than correct a few of the misleading impressions which have been brought about by the meagre reports. I n the first place, not much stress need be laid on t h e ‘‘ escape ” of the Royal family; the Revolutionists were not hunting down King Manoel and his mother and uncle like a pack of wolves. They knew very well that outrages on the King o r his relatives would inevitably have necessitated the interference of other Powers, and this they wished t o avoid. Young Manoel was never trained for kingship; and his enemies, and t h e assassins of his father and brother, were the Monarchistic professional politicians who held office in rotation and were prepared to go to a n y lengths rather than have this convenient arrangement upset. T h e King’s flight leaves the few loyalists in the country without a rallying-point, and makes the Republic almost a certainty. T h e Spanish Government is much perturbed, fearing the effect of the coup on the Republican elements in S p a i n ; but King Alfonso has a personality (which Manoel has not) ; he is very popular with his subjects, especially the middle a n d lower classes ; and the Army is intensely loyal to him. Portugal wanted to g e t rid of a corrupt Monarchy ; Spain merely wants to g e t rid of a corrupt priesthood. f This brings us tu t h e effect o t h e news a t the Vatican. T h e Pope was anxious about the future of the Church; but Cardinal Merry del Val at once s a w t h a t the event tended to strengthen the hands of the Spanish Premier in his dealings with the Vatican, and this considerably upset the harmony of the Papal authorities. T h e influence which Brazil has exercised o n Portugal w a s certainly very must be left for later discussion-it great. As for those who a s k somewhat derisively, “ Of what use to us is a n alliance with Portugal,” I beg them t o consult a map o the Atlantic Ocean a n d observe the f position of the Portuguese islands there. It is now about eight months since I was last in Constantinople. It is not a very long time, especially for Turkey, although a superficial observer, o r a reader of the newspapers, might be led to imagine from recent events that the Ottoman Empire w a s beginning to move more rapidly. And I know from trustworthy reports which have since reached me, a n d from a few items which have appeared in the Press here a n d there, that matters are in much the same condition still. Like most men who have witnessed the old a n d new régimes in Turkey and Asia Minor, I could not help being struck at the time by the extraordinary fanaticism of the population-when I say this I refer not only to cities like Constantinople and Salonika, but to the country towns. W h e r e religion is concerned, of course, the Moslem differs considerably from the representatives of the other great world religions, the Jewish, the Christian, and the Buddhist. The Jew has always had the good sense to keep his race as pure as possible, hence he does not proselytise. T h e Buddhist and the Christian proselytise in diifferent ways, hut those ways a r e at all events peaceful. T h e Moslem stands a p a r t in that, b y a fundamental law of his faith, he must propagate Mohammedanism a t the point o the sword, exactly f as the great Founder of the religion did some twelve centuries ago. Those who have taken the trouble to make a deep study o biology and ethnology will not f need to be reminded of the great benefits which accrue to a race as the result of war, a n d , although of late years the Mohammedan has ceased from overspreading non-Moslem countries and offering the Christian dogs the alternative o Islam or death, the feeling that f religious propaganda by the sword is highly desirable still remains. I t is this conviction, combined as it is with a feeling of contempt for the more effeminate a n d humanitarian morality of Christianity, which accounts t o a great extent for the “ outrages ” in Macedonia and elsewhere by the T u r k s against the Christian population. I put the word “ outrages ” in inverted commas to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that it is purely a relative term in this connection. If bands of T u r k s raid a Christian village in Macedonia and massacre the inhabitants, the Christians call it a n “ outrage ” whereas the Moslems look upon it as a matter of course, a mere incident, which is not only justified by the faith but i s a fundamental principle of it. I t is all a question of point o view. f Well, this bellicose propaganda was kept under to a great extent by Abdul Hamid. One advantage of having a s t r o n g man like Abdul on the Throne w a s that he governed the religious element and the nation with a strong hand-recollect that the Ottoman Emperor is also Caliph o f the Mussulmans, a much wider designation. Despite this feeling of contempt for those of other religions, however, certain Christian dogs a r e deemed of sufficient importance to be presented to the Sultan, and of these I had the honour to be one shortly after Mohammed V. succeeded his elder brother, Abdul Hamid, in the spring ‘of 1909. Both on that occasion, and at a subsequent interview, I was struck with the childishness of the new Sultan-his bland a n d naïve innocence-as compared with the quick intuition a n d penetration of Abdul. Kept practically a prisoner for years, his Imperial Majesty is a mere tool in the hands of his Ministers. About the history o Europe during f the last two decades the present Sultan’s knowledge is very poor. H e speaks a little French; but there is n o foundation for the glowing accounts, published in certain of the snobbish newspapers, to the effect that he is an excellent linguist a n d h a s consistently followed modern political a n d sociological movements with the deepest interest, etc. To do Abdul justice, he was the actual head of the concern while he held office. At present there is not one head; but a divided Cabinet. An Oriental country, however, prefers one head and one strong hand to several weaker heads and hands. Now, the Young Turks, in order to consolidate their position, endeavoured from the first to stir up the more fanatic elements of the population and to win their favour. They succeeded. But the country, nominally united previously, now became sharply divided. In Turkey-in-Europe there are nearly as many non-Moslems as Moslems, and there is no ground to Iose. T h e Faithful must be on their guard. Well, then, the Young Turks have encouraged the military spirit of their Moslem subjects, which needed little encouragement. They are forming a good army and navy. But they are doing practically nothing for the internal administration of the Empire, nothing to amend its chaotic finances, its poor legal administration, its means of communication, its industries. Since 1854 the T u r k s have existed by means of loans, partly English, principally French. Apparently the new régime intends t o continue this method, spending too much of the borrowed money on armaments and hardly enough in other directions. Then, too, the new Cabinet h a s not been nearly so successful as Abdul Hamid single handed in playing off the Powers one against another. Since the new Cabinet took up office certain provincial authorities, such as the governors of vilayets, have been frequently changed, and there is much dissatisfaction in consequence. I n short, without at the moment mentioning any specific instances, there is reason to complain that the Young Turks have not shown the aptitude for internal administration t h a t might have been expected of them. T h e negotiations over the loan, too, were bungled. F o r years t o come Turkey must look to France or England for money, and it is a mistake to “huff.” In the long run the money markets of Vienna and Berlin can d o nothing against the money markets of London and Paris. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW A G E 557 The No ONE Uses of Osbornity. By Cecil Chesterton. impossible Demand. I .-The has a right to be surprised a t the outburst of indignation which has greeted the Osborne decision in Labour circles. That indignation was natural and, up to a certain point, justifiable. The broad facts of our political system must be taken into account in explaining it. I have already endeavoured to make it clear to readersof THENEW AGE how completely the rich have captured the political machinery of this country, how they control the Ministry, the House of Commons, the Caucus, the choice of candidates and of programmes. Yet it seemed to many that one small breach had been made in the high smooth walls of privilege. There was just one way in which a poor man might hope to get into Parliament without seeiing himself to either of the two rich parties. That way was by the use of the Trade Union funds for political purposes. And now the narrow side door by which a few workmen had managed to make their way into the House of Commons is sharply slammed in their faces and a notice board is exhibited, “Trespassers will be prosecuted by order of the House of Lords.” N o wonder the Labour man is angry. No wonder he calls on Parliament to reverse a t once what he regards as a monstrous act of class injustice. H e knows very well that the object of the rich men who financed the attack upon the unions is to keep him and his class out of Parliament. H e knows that the judges who gave the decision are the ever-ready tools of the class to which they themselves belong. H e knows that ninetenths of the ordinary politician’s defence of the judgment is pure hypocrisy, that while he professes a wish to protect the workman from the tyranny of the Union, he really wishes to subject him unprotected to the tyranny of the capitalist, that while he declares that members of Parliament must be independent of Union levies, his real desire is that they should be abjectly dependent on the party funds. N o wonder, I say, that he rages with impotent anger and cries that a t all costs the Osborne judgment must be reversed. And yet he is wrong. Wrong, not in his diagnosis (which is only too accurate), but wrong in his remedy. In demanding the reversal of the judgment he is, I am convinced, a t once pursuing a hopeless will-0’-thewisp, and letting slip a real chance of doing something to democratize our politics. W h y do I say this? Well, I will try in this article to explain why I think the present Labour policy impossible and undesirable, and shall then in subsequent articles endeavour to indicate what seems to me the true path of Labour statesmanship. First of all, I think the Labour men are making a grave miscalculation in supposing (if they do suppose) that they can get the judgment reversed. I t is obvious that neither of the great political parties is likely to reverse it willingly. The Tories will not do so because they regard the Labourites as their enemies. The Liberals will not do so, because they know that the more straitened the financial position of the Labour members the more obedient they will be to the Liberal whip. Did not Mr. Ramsay MacDonald avow at the I.L.P. Conference that the reason why the Labour Party deserted their own motion on the grievances of Government workers was because they dared not face another election with an empty war-chest ? The Liberal politicians are quite astute enough to see the power which the bankruptcy of the Labour Party places in their hand. Moveover, a s a Liberal organiser admitted to me recently, they are hoping that their bankruptcy will a t length force the Labour men to accept Liberal money and so part with the last rag of their boasted independence. But can the Labour Party force either of the capitalist parties to give in to its demands? I do not think it can. The parallel of the Trades Disputes Bill, which the Labour leaders are fond of quoting, is not a parallel at all. The Taff Vale decision hit every individual Trade Unionist throughout the country ; the Osborne decision hits only the leaders. In fighting for the Trades Disputes Bill the Labour members had behind them the effective backing of the whole rank and file of the movement irrespective of their politics. Can they count on such backing now? I mean effective backing, angry, combative backing, such a s alone can carry legislation in the teeth of a hostile plutocracy? The question answers itself. If it were so, the Labourites would be able to raise all that they need by voluntary levies. Notoriously they can raise nothing, or next to nothing. And if the ordinary Trade Unionist will not pay for his politics, we may be sure he will not fight for them. I say that this is s o ; I do not say that it need have been so. I think that if from 1906 onwards the Labourites had really shown themselves an effective People’s Party, if they had been tireless in the cause of the workers, tireless in their criticism of capitalist Governments, really independent, really democratic, they might now have appealed to their class for support with some hope of response. But now? For myself I say frankly that I cannot much blame the working man if he looks twice at his hard-earned sixpence before he gives it to support a man who spends a fifth of his time in championing Labour, and four-fifths of it in championing Pacificism, Free Trade and Compulsory Teetotalism, and in the thick and thin support of the “ Liberal” team in the silly and corrupt game of Party Politics. I know that there is a suggestion of intimidating the Government by a sensational display of law-breaking to be followed by imprisonment and martyrdom. I a m not at all averse to law-breaking, but I cannot say I look forward to this demonstration with either hope or relish. If the Labour members had been revolutionists from the beginning it might have been impressive; a s it is I fear it will be very much the reverse. The bitter cry of the unemployed could not move them to the faintest display of rebelliousness. When Mr. Victor Grayson broke a paltry rule of procedure in order to protest against the neglect of the workless and the starving, they repudiated and maligned him. I do not think they will gain anything by raising, a t this time of day, the Red Flag with the device “ H a n d s off our salaries ! ” The contrast between their tameness on behalf of others and their ferocious zeal on their own, will, I am afraid, strike the public mind in quite the wrong way. I am sometimes accused of hostility to the Labour Party, but I really am enough their friend t o hope they will avoid challenging such invidious comparisons. The second reason why the demand for the reversal of the Osborne decision is a weak demand is that it really means no more than a reconstitution of the status quo ante; and the status quo ante was itself highly unsatisfactory. If the only end of all our agitation is t o be to place the Labour Party where it was in 1906 and enable it t o repeat all the ignominious history of the last four years, there are many of u s who will refuse to take off our coats to achieve such a 558 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 13, 1910 result. Whether it was wholly the fault of the Labour members themselves, o r partly or wholly the fault of the conditions with which they were faced, it is certain that their presence at Westminster did practically nothing to mitigate the control of our political system by the wealthy classes and the politicians who represent them. A mere return to the old régime is not worth fighting for. The third reason why the Labour Party is taking the wrong course in demanding the abrogation of the Osborne judgment is that such action lands them in a controversial position which is really not easy to defend. There is a perfectly valid case against the old method o paying Labour members, and the fact that those f who urge that case are often hypocritical does not destroy its validity. I t is certainly better that a member should be paid openly by a Trade Union than that he should be paid secretly by rich men who dare not disclose their names. But it is not the right way of paying him. I t is better that a man should be responsible t o a Trade Union than to a Party Caucus. But the sound democratic theory is that he should be responsible only to his constituents. Again, the case of the dissentient Trade Unionist is a valid one. I t would be weaker if the Labour members confined themselves exclusively to Labour politics, which might be represented a s a mere branch of Trade Union activity. But they do not do this; perhaps they cannot do it. As a matter of fact the Labour f f members devote most o their energies to the defence o causes which have no more to do with Trade Unionism than with flying. It is not in any sense a Trade Unionist principle that the Navy should be weakened or that public-houses should be closed. A man may be a perfectly loyal Trade Unionist and detest these things as much as the average Englishman detests them. Such a man seems to me to have a real grievance in that he is compelled to choose between abandoning his Union and helping to support a political propaganda which his conscience rejects. Do not let the Labour Party suppose that they get rid of these objections by abolishing their pledge. I have no objection to that action on their part; on the contrary I welcome it as tending to make Labour politics less hypocritical. I suppose at any rate that we have now seen the last of such absurd spectacles as that of Labour members shuddering at the thought of speaking on Liberal platforms, yet speaking readily at meetings convened by Liberals and with Liberal money and in support of Liberal measures. But the position of the Trade Unionist who dislikes the political policy of the Labour Party remains unchanged. He knows very well that what Mr. MacDonald calls “ loyalty to the party ” (plus the control of the purse-strings) will still keep the Labour members in subjection just as it does the Liberals and Conservatives from whom no written pledge is required. Nobody acquainted with Labour politics can doubt that the dependence of the Labour members upon a party fund has hampered the action of individuals just as the same cause hampers the action of members of the two capitalist parties. Everyone will recall how an attempt was made to intimidate Mr. Grayson by threatening to withdraw his salary. Mr. Grayson was fortunately in a position to despise such a threat; but there are other Labour members who are not in that position. And it is painful to think of how much more effective might have been the action of several members of the Labour Party, whom I could name, if they had been free from the kind of pressure which the party organisation knows so well how to exercise, and were responsible to their constituents aIone. I conclude then that in demanding the reversal of the Osborne judgment democrats are quite on the wrong tack, and that they are losing a chance which may never recur of striking a real blow at the control of politics by the rich. The right policy is to face the situation created by the judgment and see what we can make of it. I think that we shall find that we can make a great deal. The Philosophy of a Don. XXII.- The Superman as Dramatist. WHILE professing the most exalted contempt for his fellow-men, my late friend Shav was, as has been seen, quite unable to do without them. His great desire was to be eminent, t o shine in the public eye, to be much in the mouths of the people he despised. That was a weakness I never could understand. I could not conceive myself longing for the appreciation o creatures f for whose intelligence I have no respect. W h a t satisfaction can a man derive from the applause of cows? How could the approval of our Junior Dean enhance my self-esteem? Yet, odd and paradoxical though it may seem, Shav valued such appreciation more highly. than anything else in life : it was one of those inconsistencies in his character that made him sometimes almost normal I t was that inconsistent desire alone that prompted him to seek dramatic renown ; for no one who watched his theatrical career attentively could, even with the best will in the world, detect in his performances any proof of a natural aptitude for the stage. As he himself never tired of complaining, the critics invariably found his plays unutterably tedious. Nor were the critics the only persons who felt bored by Shav’s plays. I myself, though frequently compelled by a sense of loyalty to g o to those plays, cannot conscientiously say that I ever succeeded in sitting one of them out. They always seemed to me written with a view to impress à force d’ennuyer. Shav’s failure on the stage was something of a puzzle to me ; for he lacked neither fervour, nor imagination, nor aplomb. Indeed, so vivacious and theatrical was his manner that he would have been pronounced by anyone who listened to him for five minutes as fashioned by Nature for a dramatist. I wish he had not destroyed that impression by writing for the theatre. As it is, all who knew him will acknowledge that his personal talent far outshone his dramatic exercises. One of his ordinary conversations-if the surprising tirades which constituted his usual talk could be called ordinary or conversations-as recorded by me, shows incomparably finer elements of perspicuity, veracity, and general capacity than all his dramas taken together. In fact, unless I a m much mistaken, if my memory of those dramas survives their author, it will survive entirely through my own casual allusions to them. I am sincerely sorry to have to speak SO ; but, though Shav was dear t o me, Truth is dearer still. And Truth bids me place it on record for all time that Shav’s plays were not good plays. Indeed, they were not plays at all. They were collections of paradoxes put together with little heed for logical or artistic design. The only relationship they could claim with the drama was a certain family resemblance to the old gentleman Euripides after Medea had translated him into mincemeat. Whatever pains Shav might take to revise and animate them, they remained to the end heaps of scattered and disconnected limbs-strings of fantastic situations, apparently chosen for their fantasticality only, following one another a d libitum and ad nauseum, without any more organic correlation than exists between one camel and another in a caravan marching wearily across the desert. S o much concerning the form of Shav’s plays. As to thought, one found, after careful searching, that really there was room for more. T h u s what Shav actually did for the English Theatre was inconsiderable enough, and not at all commensurate with his powers : even at its best it made one feel that the author ought to have done something infinitely better. As to what it lay in him to have done, had he lived longer, this is a speculative question now, alas! beyond the possibility of settlement. A more interestingand profitable inquiry is this : How did Shav contrive to miss success? How is it that a man, so entertaining in himself, proved the reverse of entertaining in the career to which he devoted most of his energy and ambition? Let me first state the causes to which Shav did not owe his failure, so that the cause which was responsible for it may stand out the more clearly. I t was not want of OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW A G E 559 perseverance that robbed my poor friend of the playwright’s crown which he coveted, for no galley-slave ever toiled harder at his compulsory pursuit than Shav at the pastime of his choice. Neither was it w a n t o f vulgarity, for no courtier ever strove more arduously to win the smiles of his prince than Shav to secure the favour of his public. Nor was it want of confidence, €or no man of letters ever suffered less from self-questionings and disquieting self-doubts than my poor friend -all this fatal modesty which frustrates the endeavours of so many writers was totally foreign to him. His faults, such as they were, were quite on the other side. I t was to these faults that his lamentable failure must be traced. Shav persisted in attributing his phenomenal nonappreciation by the public to the stupidity and malignity of his critics. The critics, he said, were not clever enough, or generous enough, to recognise the intellectual excellences of dramas describing real men and women ; depicting the clash of human passions, interests, and opinions ; candidly interpreting the serious problems of actual life. He could expound this view with great eloquence, and his forcible exposition sounded convincing. Yet the fact remains that his dramas failed, not through any external opposition, but through their own intrinsic badness. I t needs no abnormal intelligence to enjoy a play describing real men and women; depicting the clash of human passions, interests, and opinions ; candidly interpreting the serious problems of actual life. Every man and woman born on this planet spend their whole existence among these things-it is these things that make up their lives. The truth is that Shav did not give us plays dealing with these things, though he imagined that he did. His practice, quite unconsciously to himself, was diametrically opposed to his own theories. His men and women were not real men and women. Their passions, interests, and opinions were not real passions, interests, and opinions. The problems that convulsed them were not the problems of actual life. His plays, in truth, were nothing but presentations of Shav himself in his varying phases of moody perversity. Therefore, it is small wonder, or blame to the critics and the public, if they failed to recognise themselves or their neighbours in them. Shav was also fond of denouncing other playwrights as men whose sympathies were cribbed and confined by the artificial walls of the stage, and to compare their works to houses haunted by imaginary ghosts in which no one believed. Yet he himself was singularly devoid of any sympathy with the world in which he lived, and his own works could justly be described as houses haunted by imaginary ghosts in which no one except their creator could believe. H e hated the purf suits and the prejudices o the people around him and loved only his own pursuits and prejudices. His plays were written without any other aim except that of affording the writer a n opportunity for giving vent to his own individual ideas, whims, fancies, and outbursts of spleen. From all this i t will become plain that Shav’s dramatic work laboured under the same limitations as his .‘philosophy.” On the stage, as of it, Shav was an Egof maniac, who liked to pronounce judgment on the human race entirely from the poor premises of his own spanwide personal experience. H e wrote about himself and said it was life. f This lack o sympathy with his environment would in itself suffice t o explain why Shav’s plays did not appeal to the general public for which they were ostensibly written. But they might still have appealed to that small section o the public which can understand f and appreciate a gospel even when it does not agree with it. Shav failed to capture even that small public. His plays told us nothing either about life as it is, or about life as Shav wished it to be. They neither constituted a picture o the actual world, nor did they conf vey any coherent impression of an ideal world. W h y ? The reason is this: Shav’s moral deficiencies were accentuated by intellectual defects equally disastrous to anyone who wishes to make his mark on the minds of his contemporaries. Some men seem to be predestined to failure, whatever their line of activity may be, because they cannot recognise the necessary conditions, o r natural laws, which govern that line of activity. They are men who mistake their eccentricity for originality. Shav was one of these men. In spite of its restless vivacity, in spite of its pitiless perspicacity, in spite of its fearless unconventionality, it was easy to see that Shav’s mind was odd rather than original. In his dramatic compositions, as in his everyday conduct, he was a rebel ; and his rebelliousness was not of the positive kind that aims a t bettering something, but of the negative kind which derives its being entirely from dissatisfaction with everything. The first kind of rebelliousness may, in certain circumstances, prove fruitful ; the second is bound, in any circumstances, to waste itself in barren opposition. Shav’s rebelliousness belonged to this latter category. Impatience, not merely with particular things, but with the whole constitution of the universe, was his habitual attitude. His intellect was critical and the destructive, not at all constructive or creative-and dramatist must be supremely a creator. His faculties were of the active rather than of the contemplative order f -and in all expression o thought, even in dramatic expression, contemplation must precede, inform, and control action, otherwise the upshot is, not an architectural monument, but an amorphous and incoherent mass of crude m a t e r i a I - Now, Shav was born without any of the qualities that go to make an architect. H e had no conception of any of the necessary conditions which govern architecture : the law of proportion, the law of economy, the law of harmony, the law o co-ordination and subordif nation-even the law of gravitation-were wholly unknown to him. H e strangely imagined that all that was needed to turn , cartload of bricks into a finished a building was to upset them pell-mell into one yardthat was his idea of dramatic unity. Hence the chaotic confusion of his plays : his situations and his characters were only united by the accident that they were placed on the same stage. Even his brilliant dialectical powers, of which my poor friend was so proud, failed, when employed in the theatre, to save his work from dulness; for in the theatre, as out of it, he never recognised the difference between disciplined dialogue and a desultory diatribe. H e thought that bustle and noise were an adequate substitute for logical sequence, and he was ready to commit any violence upon artistic propriety in order to introduce into his work his pet crotchets-in order, a s he said, to express himself. H e never realised that the most effective form of self-expression can only be achieved through well-considered self-suppression. The result was that through everyone of his characters, male and female alike, might be seen protruding the author’s heretical head trying to let the world see how clever Shav was, and, alas ! only succeeding in letting his critics see how clumsy he was. These limitations of my poor friend’s moral and intellectual equipment were so fundamental that they nullified all the midnight oil which he so unsparingly lavished upon his work, all the painstaking industry with which he endeavoured to apply to it Aristotle’s rule of the unities (as he understood that rule !), all the earnestness with which he strove to belabour his audiences into wakefulness and to bully his critics into kindness. It was all to no purpose. His persons remained lifeless mouthpieces of their maker’s irresponsible moods, fads, and disapprovals; his plots elaborate and disconnected records of his arbitrary caprices ; his plays altogether masterpieces of artistic decomposition. I did all that I could to correct the constitutional deficiencies of my friend’s mind. But with small success. Shav neither had any artistic education nor did he suspect that such education was necessary. He was both ignorant and obstinate. I do not say this in disparagement of Shav, but only in explanation of my own failure to instruct him. Having himself so little of the scholar, he naturally could not appreciate the value of 560 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, scholarship. His extensive ignorance, encouraged by his equally extensive arrogance, rendered him as contemptuous towards culture a s towards every other qualification that he lacked. I t was one of his most fondly nourished hallucinations that writing is a spontaneous function, and I never could persuade him that it is a matter of conscious art-a thing of connoisseurship, of discretion, of taste, of technique-in one word, a craft; and that, like every other craft, it can only be mastered after a long and arduous apprenticeship. In vain did I point out to him that all artists of repute have achieved their best work by the greatest effort, and inasmuch a s they have found success difficult they have found it durable. He dismissed all that as a stupid academic superstition. “ Art,” he declared, “ is not a matter of education but of inspiration-a thing that happens. Its constituent elements are force, imagination, invention, sincerity of feeling, strength of conviction, virility, vitality, originality. ” In vain did I strive to make him see that these are mere subsidiary qualities whose value depends on ephemeral fashion, not on eternal necessity. “ In every age,” I argued, “ literary craftsmen did the kind of work which the age demanded from them. Thus time was when the English public expected from its writers nothing but spontaneity, originality, virility, sincerity, strength; and it got its Marlowes, Beaumonts, Shakespeares, and other barbarians of genius who split their infinitives and perpetrated puns, errors of grammar, and eccentricities of spelling for which a modern schoolboy would be ignominiously caned. We have advanced beyond that primitive stage. The public now demands form, rhythm, assonance, elegance, proportion, correctness-in one word, style; and so it gets its Tennysons, its Matthew Arnolds, its Ruskins, and the rest of our great modern craftsmen. Understand, my friend, that the writers of the past wrote for men; those of the present day must write for bookmen.’’ All these valuable precepts were completely thrown away on Shav. Not less fruitless proved my friendly animadversions regarding his egoistic habit of writing about himself and calling it life. “ T h i s kind of writing,” I told him again and again, “ is not literature, but journalism. The really great writer aims a t producing, not his personal prejudices or the ephemeral views which are for an age, but the fundamental and universal truths which are for all time.” “ All the highest literature,” he retorted with characteristic assurance, “ is journalism. Nothing that is not journalism will live long a s literature. The writer who aims a t producing the platitudes which are ‘ not for an age, but for all time ’ has his reward in being unreadable in all ages. H e can only live among the dust and ashes o thousands of academic, punctilious, f most archaeologically correct pedants who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalist’s vulgar obsession with the ephemeral. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. And so, let others cultivate what they call literature : journalism for me ! ” “ But, my dear fellow, don’t you think it is the height of egoism to magnify yourself and your private circumstances into mankind? I t seems to me that this is nothing less than an infatuation. The greatest of individuals is, after all, only an individual-the representative, that is, of a single person’s experience and aspiration, or, a t most, of the experience and aspiration of a single period. T o maintain the opposite is to convict yourself of unpardonable immodesty and presumption. I t is just the other way about. “ Not a bit of it. The man who believes that he and his period are so distinct from all other men and periods that it would be immodest and irrelevant to allude to them o r assume that they could illustrate anything but his own private circumstances-it is he who is the most infatuated of all the egoists. I t is he who is guilty of unpardonable immodesty and presumption. I am modest enough to believe that in expressing my own views I give expression to the thoughts which all men who now live or who will ever live ought to think-must think. Besides, even if I wanted to do what you advise me, how could I do i t ? As a dramatist I have no clue to any person save to that part of him which is also myself. Therefore, in writing about myself I write, at all events, for some part of every other person.” I could record many other discussions of the same sterile sort ; but what would be the use? They all ended in a cordial recognition of each other’s error. They were essays in cacophony which made me think of a primitive tom-tom beating a n accompaniment to a pianola of the most highly finished pattern. Shav was absolutely impervious to academic influence. Despite all my efforts to save him, he remained a s unfit for the ideal world of the stage as he was for the real world of the schools. The result, of course, would have been equally deplorable had he adopted any other literary form of self-expression. His mind, utterly incapable of self-control, was in conflict with the mind that controls the world, and so it could never have worked in that voluntary subjection to rules which is necessary to produce anything durable and valuable. H e had some instinctive love of truth, but since it was not allied with the truths which govern all art, a s academic tradition defines art, it would never have found any certain and lucid manifestation, but could only have revealed itself in spasmodic flashes and splashes. The Pantheist Tomb. (Translated front the French by Eugene Demolder, by Nora Charrington.) MONSIEUR CHEUNUS had no fear of death. He had read Spinoza the consoler. “ W h e n I a m dead,” he told me one day, pushing his spectacles high on his forehead, “ I want to be buried in a chosen place, in a corner made by the dunes of the North Sea. I have often rested there, in the country of sand and wild flowers. O h ! there are not many plants to be found there; silver thistles, reeds that bend in the wind, and sweet heather. The sea-birds swoop to it ; the curlews and gulls and swallows. Between the rising of the dunes are the shining pearly waves, the passing steamers, and the fishing-boats with their brown sails and their golden prows which bite a t the foam. There the life of villages ends and the sky and .the ocean stretch out to the infinite.” M. Cheunus sighed. “ I n my youth I lay there and dreamed when that wide field, pale and blue, was the breath of my dreams. Like the herons that hover over a country-side I wondered into what cranny of light and hope I should dive.” M. Cheunus laughed. “ H o w poetic I become. ” He pulled the spectacles down on his nose that I might not see the emotion that gleamed in his eyes. And he continued: “ Theredwells a complete silence, for the murmur of the sea is only another silence. When the wind comes over the land the sound of bells will come too, sometimes, a sound that persuades to gentle musing; at other times come cries of the sea-birds, melancholy as a farewell; they breathe the sadness of parting and of the unknown ; their white and silver wings sweep the air with hope and joy ; yet they awake, too, a sorrow, stirring far-away thoughts of unrest.’’ M. Cheunus slowly filled his Iong white pipe, taking tobacco smelling of cherry-wood and pepper-spice from a jar painted with Chinamen and parasols. “Will you have a pipe, too?” “ Willingly. ” “ And a glass of anisette.” “Always.” The anisette, not a thought too sweet, had the clear look of a melted diamond. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW A G E 561 “ Epicure ! ” said M. Cheunus, absorbing half the glass of anisette a n d clicking his tongue. He lighted his pipe, took a puff or two, and started again. “Yes, there I shall be buried. I hate cemeteries, where one becomes the prey of worms, o r where one mixes with unknown dust, or serves as food for imbecile willows or the romantic pines, and, for a n ending, where the grave-diggers stir one up with a shovel.” M. Cheunus started to laugh. “Am I gruesome? ” “ N O , no! ’’ “ My tomb,” went on M. Cheunus, who w a s determined to confess all, “will be pure and light. I shall sleep my last sleep in the sands, among the fragments of shells and roots of fragile plants. I want t o be hidden in the earth without a coffin or a shroud that I may feel the caress of the soft damp earth. There I believe that I shall still breathe--I shall hear the sound of the bells, a n d I shall hear the sound of the sea and guess the coming of the tides. Sometimes the whistle of the sirens and the cry of a fisherman, o r the shivering of wind in the rushes will reach me ; all the noises of my solitude and the voice of the petrels bringing me tidings from the skies will tell of the passing seasons and the flight of years.” M. Cheunus was silent again. Then trifling with emotion, ashamed of his sentimentality, he asked : ‘‘ Shall I not be well-off in my little corner? ” “Very well-off. But put off dwelling there a s long as possible, for life is very full of joy.” M. Cheunus cried out : “Yes, life is very full of joy ; but down there, in the shelter of the dunes, I believe greater joys will wait on me! ” M. Cheunus became very serious. H e spoke with a grave, confidential voice : “ I shall live again in the grains of sand, a n d in the silver of the thistles, heart of their blue flowers. I shall live a g a i n in the sweet heather, and my blood will be the blood that flushes them. T h e stars will draw t o themselves fragments of my force; they will gather them into the swirl of the waters a n d the vibrating air ; so I shall share in the fury and cajolery of the wavesI shall give a spark to the universe. T h e love in me will go to the insects a n d birds, shared by the thousand butterflies that chase one another through the spring, and by the curlews a n d gulls a n d swallows. One day, perhaps, the birds o passage, or the tempest wind, or f the sea itself will snatch at one of my atoms. And I shall go to the countries of my dreams, across the ocean t o the golden islands. I shall become the soul of a great passionate flower, heavy with perfumes, o r I shall mingle with the perfumes that cling to the mouth of some Java dancing-girl.” M. Cheunus seemed very excited. But he became calm again quite suddenly, and he told me phlegmatically : “There are my plans for the future.” “They are charming. You can enjoy many posthumous travels that way : a voyage t o Nippon-you a r e so fond of bric-a-brac; or to China-you may perhaps be able to introduce yourself into the celestial family.” “ Mocks and gibes.” Yet, I was moved by the confessions of my friend. I wondered : “ Does he believe himself tu be dying? ” But I would not show my trouble, and I tried to give our conversation a genial turn. And really I found n o way, “Smoke, smoke,” said M. Cheunus, seeing that I allowed the pipe he had lent me to g o out. He added : ‘‘Another glass of anisette? ” “Willingly. ’’ Sipping the sweet liqueur I thought of a suggestion that would tickle M. Cheunus. “And if one of your atoms fell in England? ” M. Cheunus detested the English. He cried out : “ T h a t atom would become belladonna, o r some poison far more violent. ” Then he struck t h e table with his fist, a n d at once started to laugh so much that this time the spectacles fell off his nose. Modern Dramatists. By Ashley Dukes. (Continued.) II 1.-Wedekind. of t h e delicacy that redeems “ Frühlingserwachen.” Karl Hetmann is the typical Wedekind h e r o ; a n ingenuous prophet buffeted by a world of the sophisticated, But what a world, a n d what a hero! Beside this bear-garden of “ Hidalla,” Shaw’s “Misalliance ” is polite and musical. Hetmann is the founder a n d secretary o a n “Interf national Society for the Breeding of a New Race.” Its watchword is beauty. Through beauty alone can men approach the gods. T h e members of the Society, then, a r e chosen solely from a m o n g persons of marked physical charm, and they must conform to certain rules. Hetmann summarises the conditions as follows :The object of the Society is the breeding of a new I. race. Within the Society the bourgeois conventions of mar2. riage and the family are suspended. 3. Every member has an inalienable right to the services of every other. Within the Society all women are i n subjection to men, and all men in subjection to women. “HIDALLAshows the other side of Wedekind. Here ” he is fantastic, bitter, cynical, egoistic, without a touch Complications, of course, follow immediately. T h e Society attracts a mob of promiscuists, free lovers, fools a n d idlers ; empty-headed women and speculative business men eager to exploit it for their own purposes. Launhart, one of the latter, establishes a weekly journal as t h e Society’s organ, and Hetmann contributes a n article entitled “ T h e Family Life of the Bourgeois Classes as compared with that of our Domestic Animals.” T h e number in which the article appears is instantly confiscated by the police. Launhart, who as editor is legally responsible, makes a bolt of it ; but Hetmann is arrested and sentenced t o several months’ imprisonment. T h e International Congress, arranged for the following week, i s postponed indefinitely, and the Society itself becomes dormant. Hetmann is a perfectly sincere fanatic. During his term of imprisonment he writes a new book named “ Hidalla, o r the Gospel of Beauty,” and upon his release he sets to work once more. Some illusions are gone, but his ideal remains. “ I a m not one of those men,” he says, “ w h o take leave of their hopes and dreams when they reach thirty. I a m forty, and my dreams a r e more childlike, my expectations higher, my hopes more glorious than, ever.” His method is no longer agitation, but sacrifice. Still he cannot escape notoriety. His views have become known as “ t h e Hetmannite theory,” and provide matter for the theses of young University men eager to obtain a doctorate. T h e journal of the Society has thrived upon confiscation, and now has a circulation of eighty thousand. Launhart has returned, and finds the editorship a gold-mine. Morosini, the Grand Master of the Society, has collected a large harem from among îhe members, a n d lives “like Mohammed in Paradise.” Hetmann is dragged into the propaganda of these vultures. They need him as a n advertisement, a n d use him to create a new sensation. Lectures a r e arranged for him. But he no longer endeavours to convert t h e members of his audience. He insults them, points out their own physical ugliness, and holds them up to contempt. His first lecture ends in a riot, a n d h e barely escapes the mob. T h e effect of his appearance at the second is described as that of “ a camel w h o treads upon a n ant-heap.” H e is rescued, in a somewhat battered state, by the police, and placed once more under arrest ; this time in order that inquiry may be made into his mental condition. Fur three months he remains in a lunatic asylum, a n d at the end of this time the mental specialists declare him sane. H e is accordingly allowed to return home. A further change, however, is now seen in his attitude. “ I n spite of my own convictions,” he remarks, “ t h e doctors have declared me a sane man. . . The . 562 THE NEW A G E . OCTOBER 1910 13, more I reflect upon their verdict, the more overwhelming . . How grows my belief that they a r c mistaken. c a n I be a normal man, seeing t h a t from my earliest childhood I have found myself at every point in antagonism with the normal world? I s i t conceivable t h a t a n y of my views c a n ever be generally accepted? Take, for example, my assertion t h a t t h e preservation of virginity as a marketable commodity is immoral. Can t h a t ever be accepted as the utterance of a s a n e m a n ? ” Henceforth, h e says, he will aim solely at maintaining his own personal freedom. Publicity, recognition, notoriety-these a r e only forms of tyranny. T h e world is sane. So be it. He will remain a .free madman. There is g r i m satire in this, b u t the grimmest of all is yet t o come. A circus manager calls, with a n offer. He will pay Hetmann five hundred m a r k s a night to appear in his show as “ d u m m e r August.’’ “ D u m m e r August’’ is the clown of t h e German circus. His characteristics a r e t h a t he “falls over every obstacle t h a t is put i n his way, always arrives just too late, always wants to help people who understand things ten times better t h a n he does himself, and, above all, ... And we saw the ringdoves cooing in the little vale below, (It was Youth and Life and Love, dear, by the shining Devon sea!) Whilst the East was all a-gloom and the West was all aglow. O I lost my heart in Devon when the bloom was on the bee !) But now my footsteps wander through the city’s toil and bustle, (An’ I long to be in Devon where the bloom is on the bee,) An’ the rushes are a-rustle and the tushes are a-tustle, (An’ I eat my heart for you, dear, and the shining Devon sea.) NO. VI.-THE MY-OATH-IF-YOU-ONLY-KNEW -WHAT-A-LIFE-I’VE-LED STUNT. I crossed the outer gates ‘of fire. I scaled the purple towers of sin And brake the doors, and walked within The midnight chamber of desire. My cheeks with nard and myrrh I smeared ; I bathed in crimson blood, nor feared To slake the slakeless thirsts of sense. Dead women lay about my feet; I trod on them, I did not reck, I bound their hair about my neck, And ate their breasts, for they were sweet. Strange beasts did lurk about my ways That round my throat their folds did twist; I drank their saffron breath and kissed Their snouts of pearl and chrysoprase. And things I did I may not tell With men whose names may not be told, Strange men whose breasts were tipped with gold, Whose eyes did gleam with sparks of hell. I burnt my brows with frankincense: him.” I n Hetmann’s case, t h e manager thinks, no rehearsals will be necessary. Hetmann accepts t h e offer, signs the contract, shows the delighted manager out, and then g o e s into t h e next room and h a n g s himself. So t h e apostle of beauty comes to a n ugly end, a n d the curtain falls upon Launhart rummaging callously among his manuscripts in search of something to publish. And the moral? Wedekind underlines t h e moral so heavily t h a t ,it cannot be passed by. H e finds life a hideous desert of advertisement, a noisy triumphal proW h o brays loudest holds the cession of charlatans. field. Ideas a r e powerless, because every idea is swamped by t h e folly o r dishonesty of i t s adherents. This world belongs to t h e clown a n d the adventurer, not t o the man of genius. T h a t is Wedekind’s personal conviction. I t may be justified. But in “ H i d a l l a ” he h a s not proved his case. If he were, Hetmann is not a man of genius. “Hidalla ” would be a g r e a t tragedy. It falls short of greatness just in so f a r as Wedekind has failed to make Hetmann’s personality convincing. I t falls short of beauty just in so far as he h a s failed to make Hetmann’s aims sublime. T h e t r a g i c idea is always a symbol. I t stands for something accessible to t h e common experiW h e n Lear is flouted by his ence of mankind. daughters we a r e moved t o pity, but when Hetmann f o r m s a Society for t h e Breeding of a New Race, delivers a lecture on t h e physical drawbacks of his audience, a n d g e t s a broken head, we a r e inclined to laugh. H i s aim is not inspiring. Wedekind, with all his satire, still takes Hetmann seriously. H e tries t o make a hero of his monomaniac ; a n d he succeeds only in making a monomaniac of himself. ‘‘ Hidalla ” is l i k es o many attempts at modern tragedy, from Bernard Shaw’s “ Doctor’s Dilemma ” to “ T h e Seagull ” of Anton Tchekhov. I t would be great-but for its author. [ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.] that he never knows w h y the audience is laughing at I cursed the saints, yea with a curse I flung God from the pedestal. . . . No. VII.--The PROSE-POEM-OH-SO-SIMPLE. I sat in my chair. I gazed into the fire, the fire with its caverns of light, with its luminous recesses the pulses of which undulate, rise and fall, heave and subside, like the bosom of some beloved woman. The fire with its wavering rainbow tongues. I sat in my chair, gazing, On a sudden I heard a step, soft as a snowflake, There behind my chair, standing yet not standing, suspended as it were yet not suspended, stood the form of a man, which was neither of earth nor of heaven. Pale was his brow. His eyes o a profundity and liquidity f like the liquidity and profundity of pools in the utter depths of some remote sea where keel never swam nor lead sounded, shone with a light that was neither of heaven nor of earth. His cheeks were faintly hollowed as with the last loving touch of a sculptor’s thumb, and his white tremulous lips, beardless as a b y ’ s , spoke yet did not speak. “I have come,” was the message. The-stranger turned towards the door with a slight beckoning gesture. I knew him and I followed. NO. VIII.--THE BACK-TO-THE-LAND-ANDFEDERATED-DIALECTS MORCEAUThe yellow leaves from yonder tree Is vallin’ wan by wan, Jist like they valled on ’er and me This vourty year agone. The saft and wistful drop of them Oi niver cud abide Syne angels tuk awa’ my gem The year that Mary died. Gor dal zur, woy, stroike me pink ’ee ’Er wuz my ownly j’y; ’Er bore me fust an’ lawst, I think, Ten maidens an’ a b’y. Ten maidens an’ a b’y, Ochone! But now they’ve wandered wide, The youngest left me ’ere alone The year that Mary died. The Sort of Poems Modern By Jack ColIings Squire. NO. V - - T H E NEWSPAPER PASTORAL. (N.B.--Every other Line must be in italics.) The summer is a-coming and the bumble bee’s a-humming, (An’ it’s O to be with you, dear, by the shining Devon sea !) And the finches in the coppice know the golden whin’s a-blooming, (An’ it’s O to be in Devon when the bloom is on the bee!) Last year with thoughtless rapture we trod the springy turf, (An’ it’s O to be in Devon when the bloom is on the bee !) Whilst we watched the light-foot breakers rolling on the mighty surf, (An’ it’s sweet it was with you, dear, by the shining Devon sea !) Poets Write. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE N E W A G E 563 Meditations and Reflections. By Francis Grierson. * * Intuition without experience in worldly affairs is a trap which sentiment sets for the inexperienced. * Failures are forced events; successes come spontaneously . * * * Eccentricity and affectation are twins who think alike but act differently. * * * The laws that govern genius are mystical in that every obscure man of genius is followed sooner or later by another who is inspired by the former and who finally propagates his works. For the laws of Nature are not to he shaken by the artifice, envy., and ambition of man ; and if the ordinary events and accidents of life are followed by other manifestations of a like nature, this is yet another reason why genius-the most important manifestation of all-should encourage others, the later ones born of those preceding, and so on in perpetuity. * * * In youth we are hemmed in on one side by superstition, on the other by prejudice. The rest of one’s life is passed in combating the first, and recovering from the effects of the second. * * * The youth of a man of genius is commonly marred by incongruous or adverse conditions--too much luxury with Tolstoy, too much agitation with Hugo, too much ease with Goethe, too much misery with Wagner, too much adulation with Byron. * * * from the school or personal influence which the discovery often implies. * * * A writer who has been discovered by some literary Columbus is fortunate if he can shake himself free Love, vanity, mystery : three tyrants which in every a g e change their dress but never their character. * * * The spirit and the body experience sensations of joy and may dance together a t life’s banquets, but the soul finds delectation in a secret and incomprehensible manner which is neither passion nor sang froid. Ignorance and indifference are twins nourished by optimistic parents. * * * * * * The nations possessing too much morality undergo a reaction precisely like those that have too much vice. Nature refuses to supply more virtue in one country than in another. A penchant for the mysterious and the romantic engenders illusive notions and dangerous ambitions, which work together to lure the senses and deceive the judgment, * * * * * * To each intellect belongs a special power. We belong to ourselves, and we lose control o our own f when we try to be someone else. The original mind is a magnetic centre for the attraction of other minds. But the lodestone loses nothing by attraction ; it remains the same. The thing we call Progress has its rhythmic movements like music. A frivolous age corresponds to the tempo of the dance, a sentimental age to that of the adagio, appassionato, a heroic age to the tempo of the march. * * * * * * The figure of John Bull with his cannon-ball head and frog-like corpulence has a pendant in the figure of Jonathan with his nut-cracker jaw and peau de chagrin beginning to contract. N o other countries in the world are afflicted with such abortive attempts at human nature. Just in proportion as John Bull is fat and tubbish, Jonathan is long and flinty. Nature keeps her wits sharpened by trying to strike a balance between these two. * * * There is something elemental about genius. I t controls humanity a s much as heat and cold, rain and sunshine ; it is not a question of liking it or not liking it. People who offer the greatest opposition to it are those who fall before its onward march. Indeed, it seems to be, from all historical accounts, no better than a car of Juggernaut t o those who oppose it. And this is not surprising since it is the greatest power of which man has any personal knowledge, created and supported by the fundamental forces of the whole material and spiritual universe. Thus it crushes every opposing object mechanically, like the car of Juggernaut. * * * If the world contained no poetry but that of England, it would suffice to express every sentiment of the heart; if the world contained no prose but that of France, humanity would possess sufficient philosophy to guide it in every walk of life. England is a practical nation given to commerce, yet her dreamers outnumber those of any other nation ; France is renowned for her frivolity, yet her thinkers surpass in lucidity and judgment those of any other country. Nations, like individuals, are composed of paradox. Y Y Music, poetry, the theatre, all those pleasures that dispel ennui and make one forget daily cares, are powerless the moment the mind is captured by a great passion which leaves the judgment in doubt. * * * People who a r e inconstant in their affections carry the stamp of infidelity in their faces. * * * Bad books are talked about when they are sensational, good books when original. * * Y *’ There is a certain narrowness of mind which is commonly allied to sentimentalism. This is why devotees are so often malicious. In Nature the influence of mystery is manifest in its eternal suggestions of the possible and the probable. * * * * * * To-day no one speaks o Rivarol, whereas Rousseau f is continually discussed. “ Bon sens “ often means just the contrary-egoism united to routine, and mind without heart. The superficial applaud facile wit, and for a good reason-for them the bons mots are the expression of the highest genius. People who cannot think for themselves require others to think €or them ; in their passion and prejudices they are fastidious and contradictory, and the day that the witticisms are no longer forthcoming they forget their idol. * * * Wise men change their opinions by a process of mental evolution ; fools and fanatics change theirs by fits and starts, t o suit the caprices of fashion and the follies of the epoch. festations of Nature ! With what mysterious majesty the glories of the past a r e revived and quickened in new forms, faces, and phenomena. The seasons come and go ; they seem new, but they a r e old as the foundations o the world; strangers arrive and seem to bring with f them new influences, but we discover in them something that we recognise from the vague and distant background of slumbering ages. Every single thing is related to every other thing. Time is a miracle of perpetual transformation. Men of genius a r e the periods that separate the manifestations, but not the laws, of human progress. It is the form that is new ; the principle and the power remain unchangeable and eternal. Solomon was unique in all his glory, but Athens had a Pericles, imperial Rome a Caesar, modern Europe a Bonaparte, and the New World a Lincoln.. How old and how new are all the moods and mani- 564 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, “ T h e French language has twenty-six letters, the first A, the second B.” “ Excuse nie,” interrupted Vorotov, smiling, “ I must By Anton Tchekhov. warn Mdlle. t h a t in my case she must alter her usual It is a g r e a t drawback for a n educated man not to method. I have a good knowledge of both Latin and know languages. Vorotov felt this keenly when, after Greek, and some acquaintance with comparative philoleaving his university with a degree, he wanted to logy. I think we might dispense with the g r a m m a r and occupy himself with scientific work of a minor kind. begin on some book.” And he thereupon explained to “This is dreadful ! ’* he said, panting a n d blowing. the young lady how a n educated man sets about learnI n spite of his twenty-six years he was corpulent and ing a language. bulky, and suffered from difficulty in breathing. “ T h i s “ O n e of my friends had to learn two modern lanis dreadful! Without languages I a m like a bird withguages. H e s e t before him a French, German, and o u t wings. I shall have to give up the work.” Latin copy of the Gospels. By reading the parallel H e decided at a n y cost to conquer his innate laziness, texts and carefully comparing each word, what do you and began to lock around for teachers of French a n d think? I n less than a year he knew the two languages. Ger man. Let us work in the same way! W e will take some One winter afternoon, when Vorotov was seated in book and read through it.” his study working, his servant knocked and told him Mdlle. Enquête looked a t him with surprise. Evithat a lady wished to see him. dently Vorotov’s suggestion appeared ingenuous t u her, “ Ask her in,” said Vorotov. not to say absurd. If it had been made by a child she A young lady entered dressed fashionably and elewould probably have g o t very angry a n d would have gantly. She introduced herself as a teacher of languages scolded; but here was a fully-grown and corpulent man --Alice E n q u ê t e - a n d said she had been sent by one of whom she could not scold. So she shrugged her Vorotov’s friends. shoulders a n d remarked, “ A s you will.” “ I a m delighted; sit down if you please,” said Vorotov went to his book case and took down a n old Vorotov, panting f o r breath, a n d covering the collar of and much worn volume. his pyjamas with his hand. So that he might breathe “Will this do? ” he asked. more freely he was accustomed always to work in his “ It doesn’t matter what it is,” she replied. pyjamas a n d dressing-gown. “Very well, then, we’ll begin a t the title page.” “ A h ! You were sent by Iván Ivánovich. Yes ! I “ Mémoires, memoirs,” translated Mdlle. remember now. I had asked him. . . . I a m glad “ Memoirs,” repeated Vorotov, smiling goodindeed, very pleased.” naturedly and breathing heavily. After he had come to terms with Mdlle. Enquête he F o r a full quarter of a n hour he occupied himself with examined her shyly and with curiosity. S h e w a s a typical the word ‘‘mémoires,” and with the word ‘‘les” for the Frenchwoman, very elegant, and still very young. H e r same time. This bored Mdlle. Enquête. S h e answered delicate complexion and languor, her short curled hair his questions languidly, became confused and evidently a n d unnaturally slender waist gave her the appearance of understood her pupil hadly; indeed, s h e made n o atnot being more than eighteen. But glancing at the tempt to understand him. Vorotov p u t questions to broad well-developed shoulders, the beautiful back, a n d her and at the same time glanced at her bright blonde the serious look in the eyes, Vorotov thought she was hair. H e was thinking: probably about twenty-three, or might even b e twenty“ H e r hair i s not naturally curly; s h e must curl it five. After a little while she again seemed t o be only herself. Wonderful ! S h e works from morning to eighteen. The expression o n her face was cold a n d night and yet has time to curl her hair.” business-like-the expression of one who had come to Exactly at eight s h e got up and went away with a discuss money matters. Not once did she smile o r frigid “ A u revoir, Monsieur.” S h e left behind her frown, the only change that came over her features was the same faint, delicate a n d disturbing odours. due to the knowledge that she would be expected not to T h e pupil again sat for a long while unoccupied. teach a child, but a fully-grown corpulent gentleman. O n the following days he became conscious o the fact f “Very welI, Mdlle. Enquête,” said Vorotov, “ we that his teacher w a s a very serious a n d punctual young will have lessons daily from seven to eight in the evenlady, t h a t she was, of course, quite uneducated, a n d i n g at one rouble a n hour.” had no idea how to teach languages except to children. Then he asked her if she drank tea o r coffee, a n d H e made up his mind not to waste his time, but to what the weather was like outside. Smiling goodpart with her a n d engage another. W h e n s h e came for naturedly, and smoothing the table-cloth with his hand, the seventh time he took from his pocket a n envelope he inquired in a friendly manner who she was, where containing seven roubles, and holding it in his hand she had finished her studies, a n d how she lived. began confusedly : Mdlle. Enquête replied in her cold, business-like way “Excuse me, Mdlle. Enquête. I must tell you. . . . that she had finished her studies at a private school, I regret to tell you. . . . ” and that she was qualified to give lessons; t h a t her Catching sight of the envelope the young lady father had just died of fever, that her mother was still guessed what he meant, a n d for the first time her face alive and made artificial flowers, and that she, Mdlle. g a v e signs of some real emotion, and the cold, businessEnquête, was occupied in the mornings at a boarding like expression disappeared. S h e coloured slightly, a n d school for young ladies, and in the evenings, after with d o w n c a s t eyes began t o finger nervously a thin gold dinner, g a v e private lessons. chain. Her evident distress told Vorotov how much a She went away leaving behind her a faint and derouble meant to her, and how hard it was to be deprived lightful odour of feminine attire. Vorotov could not of it. work for a long time after, and as he sat by the table “ I regret to tell you. . .” he began again, getting nervously smoothing the green cloth he said t o himself : more and more flurried, his heart beating heavily. Put“Yes ! I t is very good to see young girls working ting back the envelope into his pocket he went on : €or their living. But it is not good to know t h a t want “Excuse me, Mdlle. Enquête . . . if I leave you does not spare such a refined and beautiful creature as alone for a few minutes.” H e said this with the air of this Mdlle. Enquête, t h a t even she has to fight for a n one who had na intention of dismissing his teacher, existence. T h a t is not goad at all ! ” but had simply forgotten something, and then went However, as he had never met a rigidly virtuous into the next room. He sat there for about ten minutes, Frenchwoman in Russia he thought that possibly this corning back more embarrassed than before. The elegantly-dressed Mdlle. Enquête, with her well-delessons began again. veloped shoulders and preposterously slender waist had Vorotov now occupied himself without any interest. some other means of living besides teaching languages. Knowing that the time was really wasted be g a v e the Next evening, on the stroke of seven, Mdlle. Enquête lady full liberty. H e no longer asked her questions, arrived, flushed with the cold air. S h e opened her a n d never interrupted her. She translated at her French manual which she had brought with her, a n d pleasure some ten pages a n hour a n d he did not listen, began without any prefatory remarks. but breathed heavily. Having nothing else to do he Useless Lessons. . OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW AGE 565 gazed a t her small curly head, at her neck and soft white hands, and inhaled the odour of her attire. Certain thoughts that came involuntarily t o him brought a flush of shame t o his cheeks, and at times he found himself gazing a t her amorously; then he was annoyed with her for being so business-like, and treating him as a pupil. She seemed afraid of his touching her. All the time he was thinking how he could gain her confidence and become intimate enough to let her know, poor girl, how bad was her method of teaching. A little later Mdlle. Enquête appeared a t her pupil’s in a delicate pink gown cut rather low in the neck. She diffused a n aroma that enveloped her as in a cloud. T o Vorotov it seemed that too vigorous a puff of wind would blow her away. She was going t o a ball and wished to be pardoned for not staying longer than a half-hour. Gazing a t her neck a n d uncovered back he thought he could understand why Frenchwomen in Russia a r e supposed t o be very easy in matters of virtue. H e sank in a delicious cloud of perfume, beauty, and nudity, and she, not knowing his thoughts, and probably very little interested in him, went on with her work of rapid and unintelligent translation : “ H e went into the street and met a gentleman of his acquaintance. ‘ Where are you going,’ he said. ‘ Seeing that your face is pale it makes mine pale also.’ ” The Mémoires had been finished for some time, and Mdlle. Enquête was working on some other book. Once she came a n hour ‘earlier, telling her pupil that she had to be at the theatre by seven. After the lesson, when he had shown her out, Vorotov put on his coat, took his hat and gloves, and went also to the theatre. H e explained to himself that going to the theatre was only amusement, and that he had no thought of meeting Mdlle. Enquête. H e would not admit even t o himself that a serious man preparing for a scientific career, a man of sluggish temperament, could leave his work to go to the theatre merely on the chance of meeting there a girl who was neither intelligent nor clever, and of whom he knew scarcely anything: All the time his heart was beating wildly, and in the interval he was surprised t o find himself running up and down the corridors impatiently looking for someone. At last he caught sight of the pink gown and pretty shoulders covered with tulle, and his heart sank with a presentiment of happiness. H e smiled joyfully, and for t h e first time in his life felt a pang of jealousy. Mdlle. Enquête was attended by two unattractive students and a n officer. She was laughing and talking loudly, and apparently flirting. Vorotov had never seen this side of her. Evidently she was happy, serene, contented, warm. W h a t could be the reason ? Perhaps these people had more in common with her, belonged to the same set, and Vorotov felt the wide gulf between him and them. H e bowed t o his teacher, but she acknowledged his salute coldly and passed by. Evidently she did not wish her companions t know t h a t o she had pupils, that she was so poor as to be obliged t o give lessons, After his meeting a t the theatre Vorotov found himself in love. During the lesson he devoured his teacher with his eyes, and no longer struggling gave a loose rein to his thoughts, pure and impure. Mdlle. Enquête’s features still kept the same cold expression. Exactly a t eight every evening she uttered her icy “Au revoir, monsieur,” and he felt that he had no interest his case f o r her--that she would always be cold-that was hopeless. Sometimes during the lessons he would begin t o dream, to hope, to make plans. He would silently compose a declaration of love, remembering t h a t Frenchwomen a r e of easy manners and yielding; but it was enough for him to glance at his teacher’s cold face-his thought vanished like the flame of a candle i a gust o wind. n f Once, intoxicated with love, he lost control of himself -he protested his passion for her. “ You a r e everything to me. I love you. Let me speak.” Mdlle. Enquête turned pale, evidently frightened by the thought that his explanation would make it impossible for her to give any more lessons at a rouble a n hour. A look o fear came into her eyes, and her voice f was louder than usual. “Impossible ! You mustn’t tell me, I b e g of you It is impossible! ” Vorotov could not sleep all night. He was tormented with shame. He reproached himself for his stupidity, and a thousand thoughts passed through his brain. H e imagined he had hurt the girl by protesting his love, and that he was certain not to see her again. He decided t o find o u t her address in the morningwrite her a note of regret. But Mdlle. came before the letter was posted. At first she seemed a little uncomfortable, but once she had opened her book she translated with her customary fluency. “ O , young gentlemen, do not pluck these flowers from my garden; they a r e intended for my daughter who is sick.” She is still giving lessons t o her pupil, and has now translated four volumes, but Vorotov knows nothing except the word “ M e m o i r s ” ; and when he is asked about his scientific work he waves his hand deprecatingly a n d changes the subject to the weather. (Translated from the Russian by Helen Brayne.) A Grand Pretender. By Alfred E. Randall. IV. “CONSTITUTIONS be built, even constitutions à la can Sièyes, but the frightful difficulty is that of getting men to come and live in them,” said Carlyle. The General German Working Men’s Association proposed the establishment of productive societies financed by State loans, and to be able t o bring pressure to bear upon the Government, it demanded universal suffrage. But if Bismarck toyed with both ideas when Lassalle urged them upon him, the masses seemingly were in no greater hurry to gain their political and economic freedom. After a n existence of three months the association numbered only 900 members, and it began with 600. “Like most of the workers, most o the advanced f democrats and middle-class Socialists, whom Lassalle invited to join the association, kept away from it,” says Bernstein. Lassalle found that by accepting the presidency he had become the head o a propagandist f society, and he wanted to be the leader of a popular movement. H e wanted to overthrow the existing Government, but instead of urging the masses to demand universal suffrage, he argued Bismarck into denying the expediency of its immediate introduction. When it was introduced, after Lassalle’s death, the Government was not overthrown : Bismarck practically became Dictator, and proceeded to overthrow Napoleon III., who had gained his presidency and his crown as the apostle of universal suffrage. Lassalle did everything to make the association powerful, except, as Bernstein says, “the main thing, the agitation among the masses, and that he left severely alone.” As he had allowed Helene to slip from his grasp, and become betrothed to another man, so he now offered what he believed to be the means of gaining his political prize to Bismarck, who used them for what they were worth. That Lassalle should have been “ disappointed and annoyed with the apathy and indifference of the working classes ” is surprising; for although he was accused of trying t o overthrow the Government by his agitation in favour of universal suffrage, his defence shows that he had scarcely appealed to them, and certainly did not regard them as the means to his end. “Very well, gentlemen, although I am a private individual, I can tell you this. Not only do I wish to overthrow the present Government, but I shall do it within a year. Perhaps, before a year is over, universal suffrage will be granted. It is a bold game, gentlemen, and cards must be on the table. Matters have gone too far for secret diplomacy, for they are based upon iron necessity. Here in these historical surroundings, I prophesy to you all that perhaps before a year is over Herr von Bismarck will have 566 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, played the rôle of Robert Peel, and general and direct representation will be granted.’’ I t was natural t o Lassalle to call Bismarck “his delegate,” a s he did once when talking to Countess Hatzfeld; but events showed that Bismarck, like all men who know t h e secret of power, was his own delegate. F a r from being in any way the tool of Lassalle, Herr von Dönniges a little later demanded Lassalle’s banishment from Switzerland a s a political agitator and a tool of Bismarck. Lassalle had turned from love to politics, but the auguries were not more prophetic of success. Lassalle’s incessant activity resulted in a nervous breakdown, and he went to the Rigi-Kaltbad for a cure. I cannot better describe the inscrutable working of events than by quoting a passage from Helene’s letter to Holtoff :“Just look at the extraordinary sequence of events. Why did the doctor order me a change of air just then? Why did it so happen that my parents could not accompany me, and that I had to go with a friend? Why did that friend suggest a tour on the Rigi, instead of the Bernese Highlands? Why was Lassalle on the Kaltbad instead of the Scheideck. and why did we choose the most difficult route, instead of taking the one over Küsshacht or Gersau; also why should Lassalle, who is hardly ever at home, be occupied just at that moment in writing to you? Enfin, you see, Papa, It had to be! T h e lover who, sixteen months before, had proposed to her on his knees, was a t last asking for letters of introduction to her parents. If Helene had become provisionally engaged to Yanko in the meantime, Lassalle had been very near transferring his allegiance to a Jewess in Vienna, a t the suggestion of his sister. It was probably of this woman that Lassalle was thinking when he wrote to the Countess Hatzfeld :“As to having been dead in love with another woman, such a state is beyond my comprehension; that, so far as the captivation of the senses is concerned, the woman alluded to is more attractive to me than Helene, but I look for something more in my wife, and in Helene I find a sympathy of tastes and purposes I have never met before.” A poet in the a g e of Swift had written :“Ye Gods, annihilate but Space and Time And make two lovers happy!” Whether the gods noticed the bard’s appeal I know not ; but if the Princess is to be believed, Heaven and Earth, and perhaps Hell (for she calls Lassalle “ the demon”) conspired to bring these loth and laggard lovers together. That they were happy in each other’s company we may believe; but the “ sympathy of purposes ” of which Lassalle wrote is not so credible. Various sentences of imprisonment had accumulated against Lassalle, and he was seriously thinking of expatriating himself rather than serve them to the detriment of his health. I t was probably for this reason that he proposed an elopement, to which she refused to consent. If he said nothing about his legal difficulties, she said nothing about her engagement to Yanko, although her dread of breaking poor Yanko’s heart was one of the principal reasons for her refusal. Lassalle used his eloquence, his will, and the other golden weapons of his mind, against h e r ; but he was beaten by the remark, “ W e cannot do it for your sake! Imagine the terrible scandal there would be if you-the leader of a Democratic, or, a s you call it, Socialistic party, were to carry off the daughter of a noble house.’’ Although he had proposed to her, and been accepted by her, sixteen months before, he could not get her to promise to marry him then ; she wrote to him from Wabern her decision and conditions. They were as follows: Firstly, that we should do everything possible to conciliate my parents, in order to gain their consent for the sake of appearances. Should this fail, in spite of our efforts, eh, bien! alors, tant pis pour eux! In this case, his plan is to elope with me to Egypt-a plan he says you know and approve of. My second condition is, that now we have decided matters, everything is to be carried out as quickly as possible. . Firstly, because of Yanko (Lassalle knows nothing of this). Secondly, because I do not wish the world to gossip about matters that do not concern it, and of which it would only take a one-sided view. This would lead to all sorts of terrible scenes, which, in the present state of my weakened health and nerves, I really could not stand. Lassalle was beaten, had he but known it. H e had boasted eighteen months before that he would manage everything without her help, and he had done nothing. She had passed beyond his control when she became engaged t o Yanko, and now that his political work had brought him nothing but prosecutions, and flight alone w a s left to him, he could not prevail upon her to join him. She had no will, but she could impose her conditions, and order the campaign as she pleased. Everything w a s to be done to conciliate her parents, wrote Helene: Lassalle’s only idea was to bombard them with stormy‘ eloquence, as he wrote to the Countess. W h y Helene should have been so anxious t o conciliate parents she detested, a n d Lassalle should choose t h e best conceivable means of making himself abominable to them, is one of those mysteries that can only be explained by roundly asserting that neither o them wanted to kill f a romance with “ t h e dreadful reality ” of‘ marriage. Helene returned home to find her family rejoicing over her sister’s engagement t o Count Kaiserling, and confided the news of her own engagement to her mother. The heavens fell ! Frau von Dönniges brought her husband, and the romance w a s shattered. At first, I could not understand this sudden and violent attack. I tried to explain to this enraged couple that the man they were attacking was a world-famed philosopher and scholar, but they gave me no chance of speaking. They used expressions which I would have deemed impossible in people of their birth and education. My father used such insulting language that at last I felt the Viking blood of the “Tönniges’’ (the old Norse name of my family) rise in my veins. I called out proudly and distinctly, “You can do as you like! I mean to marry Lassalle.” “ I would rather shoot you down like a mad dog,’’ my father shouted as he rushed away. These were the people of whom Lassalle wrote : “ I sincerely hope and believe that her parents will consent at once, or at least, after a few attacks of the stormy eloquence with which I intend to bombard them ; otherwise, by heavens, I will stand at nothing.” If threats were a n y proof of the desperate measures to which a man will resort, Herr von Dönniges w a s a foe worthy of Lassalle. H e might lack eloquence, but he did not lack vigour or promptness of action: and the manner in which he received this intelligence would have convinced anyone but Lassalle that this w a s no matter for parleying o r dramatic posturing. Helene sent a letter to him by her maid, and followed it almost directly. She met him as he was aIighting from his cab, and together they entered his hotel. After his first explosion of wrath a t her disobedience, which, he said, had “spoiled everything,” she said : Now that I know my parents to be inexorable, it would be impossible for me to remain with them. Therefore I have come to carry out the plans we made before, and to fly with you abroad to be married. For one moment he folded me gently in his arms, then instead of being delighted with my decision, said, “No, I will not run away now. With whom d o your haughty parents think they are dealing? Now I will only take you from their hands as my bride, and they themselves shall lead us to the altar.” “Ferdinand,” I said warningly, “ m y father will never give his consent-believe me. Let us fly!” But he shook his head obstinately and said, “His will must give way to mine; he shall learn to feel my power; I shall conjure up heaven and hell against him. You must go back to them.’’ “ Never !” I answered indignantly, etc., etc. Strange language for a man in such a situation! Lassalle must have known that his “will ” was not invincible : he had broken off communications with Bismarck because he could not prevail upon him to introduce universal suffrage a t once: he had failed t o do more than address a few cheering crowds who would not join his association : he had failed to conquer Helene’s reluctance to his proposed elopement ; and yet he w a s trusting t o this ineffective will and his broken-winded eloquence to charm Herr von Dönniges into compliance! T h e man was ignorant of reality, a n d crumpled into incoherence and incompetence a t his first contact with it. When Helene told him that Dr. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW A G E 567 “Adieu for a short time. I will never forget what you are Arndt, her relative, had been telling her parents “dreaddoing for me now in returning to your parents, and can ful stories about him and the Countess; calling her never thank you enough. I ask nothing more of your will an immoral woman--even worse ; a n d this had enraged and strength. I know this is sufficient-all else will be my her father more than his politics,” he dismissed it a s care. Do not allow yourself to be ill-treated, but do what nothing. “ His motives are mere petty vengeance ; only they ask of you. I shall know everything they do to you, a few months ago I had him turned out of my universal Reand shall fetch you away at the slightest injustice. union for working-men on account of his narrowmember this, and do not be unhappy. They shall not keep you l o n g Conform for a short time to their will: mindedness a n d want of tact ;” as though the diagnosis mine is stronger: we shall win-and now, once more, adieu of a man’s motives. made his actions of no account! for a short time.’’ If ever Helene was to be his, this was the time: she He kissed my mouth and hands passionately many times, implored him to take her away, a n d her maid added her and then, left. entreaty. “ F o r heaven’s sake, fly at once. I have It was the last time I ever beheld him. He had hardly left, brought a carriage with me. Everyone is looking for when my mother poured a volley of invectives on me, in the you at home, and the train starts in a quarter of an midst of which my father entered, brandishing an old rifle hour.” Lassalle offered his a r m to Helene, saying, and exclaiming, Where is this insubordinate daughter ? Let me kill her.” “Come, I will take you to your friends, a n d you must My friend tried to pacify him, but he seized me by the stay with them until my mother and Holtoff arrive.” hair, which I wore in flowing curls, a n d dragged me across So he led her to a scene that is one of the most farcical the street into our house. Here my window and door were in literature, a n d I must transcribe it in full. nailed up, and I remained a prisoner. My friend received me most kindly. She promised I Lassalle’s action in this scene would be incredible if should see no one but Thérèse, and Lassalle said, quite one forgot his political methods. H e looked to educarelieved, “Then you are safe here.” At this moment tion of the masses in political economy for his revoluMadame R., who was standing at the window, called out, tion, a n d imagined that he could prepare a Socialist state “Your mother is coming.” I was terribly frightened, but in twelve months. Helene’s parents were to be eduLassalle, relying on his power over women, said, cated also, into the belief that he w a s a gentleman, and “Heaven sends her to us. I will see her and speak to her.” therefore worthy of their daughter’s hand. Scholar, The scene that followed between him and my mother was so terrible that it killed for ever any spark of feeling I poet, orator, politician, and gentleman : the mere menmight have had left for her. As soon as she saw us, she tion of these words, if he were allowed to mention them, exclaimed, “ I wilI not stand this man in my presence ! Out must have a miraculous effect on peuple who hated him with him !” Lassalle approached her with dignity, assured as a Jew, a demagogue, and an immoral monster. His her of his respect for her, and his love for me, and said will was matched at last with “ t h e brute force of the at last, “For Heaven’s sake, tell me what you have against rusty Middle Ages,” in a conflict provoked by himself, me.” She turned her back to him and screamed out, “ I and he opened battle by giving the prize t o the enemy ! owe you no explanation why, but my husband will have you banished. You shall be thrown out. Now, out of my ( T o be continued.) I was indignant. I approached Lassalle, and, sight!” laying my hand upon his arm, said, “Come, let us go; I cannot stand hearing you spoken to like this; no one shall treat you thus in my presence.” He took my hand, and said quietly and politely to mother, “Do as you please, madam, you are unable to (AN OCCASIONAL CAUSERIE.) put me out, for always and in all circumstances I can only see in you Helene’s mother. I shall not forget this for one By Jacob Tonson. moment, nor shall I allow myself to be carried away into saying hasty things. ’’ THE new monthly, devoted t o original creative Instead of calming the excited and enraged woman, it literature, “The Open Window ” (Locke Ellis, IS.), is only made her worse, and when Lassalle said that he would now out. I t contains two poems, by Vivian Locke go to my father like a sensible man, and arrange everyEllis and Keith Henderson; three drawings, by Maxthing quietly, she replied rudely, “My husband will not rewell Armfield, Keith Henderson, and Claude Shepperceive you; he will have you turned out by the servants.” s o n ; two stories, by Stephen Reynolds and H u g h de “No, he will not do that,” said Lassalle quietly. “I am not a man whom one ‘turns out,’ but as I do not Wish to Sélincourt, and something between a sketch and a humiliate us all by exposing Helene’s father to such a story by Harold Child. T h e best thing in the number temptation, I will write to him.” is undoubtedly Mr. Vivian Locke Ellis’s poem “ T h e “ He will return your letters unopened. ” Old Herdsman.” I t is poetry. Mr. Keith Hender“ I t he does that, Madam, even my patience will be exson’s verse, “ Zoo,” and the illustrations, “ Behemoth hausted ; we shall be justified then in helping ourselves, for in Hell,” both belong t o a familiar category of pretty we shall be forced to do so.” trifles whose secret sentimentality is not completely She answered him ironically: “You have done this already ; you have led away my daughter to this unheard-of hidden by a vesture of factitious power. Mr. Claude step. She has left her parents’ roof and refuses to return. Shepperson’s drawing “ T h e Lark “ is pleasing and unYou are a brute, you have stolen my child.” exceptionable. All the three stories are good. Mr. At this I flared up. “ H e did not! I went away because Stephen Reynolds’s is a straightforward tale of a I feel I belong to him. You have destroyed the love I village idiot, very well done, full of first-hand obserhad for you, and I never wish to return.” vation, and perfectly convincing. Mr. Harold Child’s I was terribly excited; my whole being turned against my study of a mystical crisis in the emotional life of a unkind mother, and towards him whom I loved madly; but once again he damped my ardour when he said quietly, bookman, and its resolution, is charmingly accomeven smilingly, “DO you think I have stolen your child, plished, with a touch of sentimentality in the “mastery Madam ? You shall see how wrong you are ! Helene, tell of the w o m a n ” in the forest. That “ m a d week,” and me, would you do anything I asked you? Would no sacrithe common pillow under the beeches, do not convince fice be too great for me? Would you, if I wished it, go me. But there is an idea in this sketch, and it is deaway with me-do anything I ask you?” veloped. Mr. H u g h de Sélincourt, in his story of the “ Certainly,” I answered unhesitatingly, although with death of a very old man, has exercised real imaginaan anxious heart. “ I will do anything YOU like: go away with you at once. Ask anything you like of me-anything tion ; the pages describing the talk after dinner and except return to my own people.” the thoughts of Mr. Venables thereupon a r e admirable, “And it is just that which I ask of you. The very greatest decidedly better than Mr. Venables’s vision before sacrifice you could make for my sake. Will you do i t ? death. Indeed, little fault can be found with the first Will you?’’ number of “ T h e Open Window.” “If you really ask me this, then, Yes ! But think what *** you are doing. I am so frightened-do not send me back to them. I am trembling at the thought.” And yet I am disappointed with it. I believe I am “You Will do it for me,” he said firmly. “And now, disappointed with it because I have discovered nothing Madam, I give you your child back again. Listen! I, in it to shock me. I know the difficulties which surwho could have done with your daughter what I pleased, round t h e production of a new periodical-especially have returned her to you, although only for a short time. one whose sincere aim is exclusively artistic ; but I She is only going with you because I wish it. Never forget He turned to me and said, that, and now, farewell.” maintain nevertheless that the editor ought to have- Books and Persons. 568 THE NEW AGE OCTOBER 1910 13, succeeded in shocking me. The fact is, there is nothing in this number which might not have found a place in “ Blackwood’s,” “ Cornhill,” or “ T h e Nation.” There is no defiance of the older, o r even of the middle-aged generation ; none of the brutality or cruelty of youth ; no sign of a new technique or a new creed of any sort. The whole thing is too respectable. “ T h e Open Window ” will not have a single bad Press notice. Draughtsmen will not gather together and get angry about the originality of the drawings and call them perverse, degenerate, o r silly (as they did, for instance, with “ T h e Yellow Book ”). Alfred Austin will not ask with pessimistic disdain what in thunder has come over our younger poets that they should outrage every canon of form a n d decency and dare to call the result poetry. Nor will the short stories make “ Q ” sniff from his southern eyrie. I looked in vain through the faultless pages for a sign that I myself a m getting old-fashioned. I looked in vain for a n artistic enemy. This, I maintain, is bad. At any rate it is a disquieting symptom. My only interest in “ T h e Open Window ” s p r a n g from my hope that it might demonstrate that English letters are definitely on the move. At the very least it might attack the men or the ideas now in possession. I would defy anybody to get up a genuine altercation over anything in this first number. And I urge upon the editor the advisability of diverging at the earliest possible moment from his present policy of artistic correctness and decorum into a lusty and defiant experimentalism. There is a great deal too much artistic correctness and decorum in these islands. * * * Certain criticisms can be made of the physical characteristics of the periodical. I t is carefully produced, but the shape of the page (of paper) resembles a small quarto, b u t the shape of the page (of print) is like a duodecimo; with the result that the outer margins are far too wide and the lower margin f a r too narrow. Also the rules above and below the running titles are ugly. Such rules have never been used in first-rate printing. T h e size o the page is so f small (6in. by 41/2n.) that no illustration can have a chance unless it is done specially to suit the size. Lastly, the actual quantity of stuff given for the money i , in this first number, somewhat too slight. s Four “D.T.” columns would more than hold the lot of it. I would not insist too strongly on quantity, but I would insist on it a little. A fine poem may be a fine poem, but a fine shilling is also a fine shilling. I anticipate that future numbers will be thicker than this first one. I would draw the attention of the proprietors of “ T h e Open Window ” to an analogous venture in Paris, “ L a Nouvelle Revue Française,” which costs a franc, and gives a hundred and forty ample pages. T h e matter of those pages might conceivably also interest them. REVIEWS. Sable and Purple. William Watson. (Eveleigh Nash. 2s. 6d.) I t is hard to avow, yet we must avow, that we languish among the unhappy folk who have never been able t o decide whether Mr. Watson is a poet or not. Nor does “ Sable and Purple ” elucidate our deplorable problem. W e are as far from the light as when we peered over the Coronation Ode. W e envy in circumstances of this sort, when we realise how feeble we must be not to discover and reveal the true opinion that is bound t o bowl us over one day o r another,-at such times we do sincerely admire critics of the order supported by Mr. James Douglas, who finds every new masterpiece grander than the last, and isn’t afraid to say so. Of this very “Sable a n d Purple,” which we a r e still fingering, Mr. Douglas exclaimed long since : “This volume alone proves that Mr. Watson is a consummate craftsman. ’ ’ How one would love to be able to say that and mean it ! W h a t a shilly-shallying, fidgety, shuttle-cock nature ours appears beside yon bold, bluff vigour and zeal. But there it is. Say t h a t Mr. W a t s o n is a great poet we simply cannot. We repeat for succour the advertised eulogies of his critics : Grand, severe, masterly; grandly-severe, severely-grand ; majestic ! Such epithets are, o r should be, applied only to genius working in the g r a n d style. They have been interminably used of Mr. Watson. Once again, therefore, let us read and try to come to some conclusion ! Let them not dream that they have known the ocean Who have but seen him where his locks are spread ’Neath purple cliffs, on curving beaches golden ; Who have but wandered where his spume is shed On those dear Isles where thou and I were bred, Far Britain and far Ierne; and who there, Dallying about his porch, have but beholden The fringes of his power, and skirts of his commotion, And culled his voiceful shells, and plucked his ravelled hair. It was once famously defined of the grand style severe t h a t it arises in poetry where the poet’s mind becomes “charged with so many and such grave matters that he would not deign to treat any one .of them explicitly.” But to apply that test to the lines above quoted is at once t o raise several questions. W h e r e a r e the grave matters, where the poet’s disdain of detail? I n spite of our willingness to believe with Mr. Douglas that such a passage proves Mr. W a t s o n to be a master there remains still our mise-rable inability to discern in it any resemblance to poetry in t h e g r a n d style severe. But there is another grand style, the grand style simple. That, too, has been immortally defined : “where a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and directness.” I n this manner Spenser wrote, By this the northern waggoner had set His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star That was in ocean waves never yet wet, But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are. Compare with these flowing simplicities Mr. Watson’s The fringes of his power, and skirts of his commotion, Or, plucked his ravelled hair. Those expressions, so far from being simple, sound, to our ears, ignobly elaborate. One is forced to see Ocean in a sort of d r e s s ; a n d what, ‘what is “plucked his ravelled hair ” ? W e cannot imagine. T h e notions started in our mind a r e ridiculous, and concern bathers splashing a n d babies snatching pails of sea-water-and we fear lest we should never be forgiven if we mentioned things like those. So we a r e left again with the Ioose end of our estimate of Mr. Watson’s place in poetry. If only we might read his great critic’s decision itself as a prose effort in the grand style simple, and take ‘(consummate craftsman ” to mean that and nothing more! But experience warns us that such a reading might be found offensive. And, besides and alas! even going so far, we should fail to meet Mr. Douglas. For when Mr. Watson, contemning those luckless who have seen “ b u t ” British ocean, cries, “ Let them not dream,” etc., we feel t h a t that blurting way of driving home one’s insignificance proves “ b u t ” indifferent craft. “ Mr. W a t s o n is rather truculent,” me mutter. “ Everyone hasn’t the money for foreign travel ; ” or some words of t h a t sort. Byron exhibited the grandeur of the high s e a s without wounding us. Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean-roll! Again ; we find “ b u t ” small inspiration in Mr. Watson’s rhyming. Flatter than shed-bred is golden-beholden ; quite depressed is there-hair : and ocean-cornmotion awakens in us a memory “ b u t ” little favourable to Mr. Watson’s lines. Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion, Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean. . . T h e rest of the verse in “Sable and P u r p l e ” only increases o u r bewilderment. Patriotism o r , rather, other people’s patriotism inclines us to say of the Funeral Ode n o worse than that, since Mr. W a t s o n is not Poet Laureate, he was not obliged to write it. OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW A G E 569 “ T h e Threatened Towers ” almost revolts u s with its Macaulayese. Let the wild waves that would submerge All ancient things and great, With hoarse and ineffectual surge Break on the towers of State. The ages, pondering at their toil, Welded this stone and lime. . . . So I o n g a s a poetical image c h a r m s us we follow t h e imaginative poet as the rocks followed Orpheus. But what is to be said for bricklayers’ terms as introduced above? Do they actually describe the subject; o r d o they idealise it ? Do they not, rather, basely s u g g e s t Windsor Castle o r the Houses of Parliament? “ K i n g Alfred ” is a dramatic poem concerning t h e last words of the hero. Bishop Asser beseeches his liege to “Talk henceforth of happy things alone.” Such as that famous pleasantry of thine, When Hasting with his ships lay in the Lea, And thou did’st lure the stream out of his courseALFRED. Out of his ancient bed! ASSER. His well-loved bed ! W e d o not know what the critics can be about t o give that kindergarten sentimentalism a n y other name. Grand, severe, o r majestic it is not. now “suffuses t h e chamber. “ A strange light Alfred sinks o n his knees.” ( W e said this was a dramatic poem.) H e foresees and laments the sorrows of his descendants. Behold, I see him great And mighty, at his feet submitted thrones . . . . And after him another mightier yet . . . . And then, dim forms a t strife . . . beyond them, crown And crozier warring . . . . and deeds of hell . . . . and now Glory and power new-stablished . . . . and again Blind welter, and the brood of dire misrule . . . . A groaning people, a sundering realm . . . Ah, Lord Of Heaven! in mercy show Thou me no more. In “Paradise Lost ” Adam foresees t h e future sorrows of men. H e too would die a n d shut out the vision : O welcome hour whenever! Why delays His hand to execute what his decree Fixed on this d a y ? Why do I overlive? Why am I mocked with death. and length’n’d out To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be earth Insensible, how glad would lay me down As in my mother’s lap! There I should rest And sleep secure; his dreadful voice no more Would thunder in my ears, no fear of worse To me and to my offspring would torment me With cruel expectation. Mr. Watson has grown many a weed in Milton’s garden, but surely none of his sowings has produced so full a crop as “Sable a n d Purple.” T h a t final speech in “ K i n g Alfred,” that mess of Miltonese and d o t s for dying gasps--that speech alone, we say, proves t h a t Mr. Watson is a consummate charlatan. And now some people may g o fancying t h a t we have formed a conclusion. “ . Poems and Ballads. By Alfred H. Miles. (Stanley Paul. 3s. 6d.) Mr. Miles scarcely salves our wounded pride in poetry by informing us t h a t his verses are merely the ‘‘outcome of vocal moments in working hours.” That’s not the s o r t of thing to tell people, without a blush. Mr. Miles appears to think he h a s done rather well considering it was all between business hours. So do w e ! but we g r u d g e t o admit it after the writer’s disgusting confession. Therefore we begin, joyfully, with a n absolute condemnation of “ P a n , ” a s doggerel. O Pan, you shabby fellow, Why leave us all so long? “ T h e Coming of the Dove ” is a lively set of verses containing many poetical expressions ; but such an aside as “ ( T h e wind blew in from the sea)” is scarcely strong enough for repetition twelve times. Of the historical “romances,” “ T h e Winning of Cales ” is a fine bluff narrative ; again, however, we find the refrain unto fifteen times, a few too many. O n the whole the historical pieces run soundest. A desire to have seen the face a n d heard the voice a n d kissed the hands of Shakespeare’s mother wanders through nineteen verses. T h e “ S o n g s in the O p e n ” d o not carry the country. H o w might they--between business hours ! T h e bare, bald, though doubtless sincerely-loved, enumeration of birds’ names a n d a few trees leaves us merely commiserative. The “ L a r k ” is imitative; moreover, forty-seven fourlined verses is far too long a spell, even though we start from the time-honoured “ heaven’s gate.” A little song beginning “Love, a l a s ! the sun declines,” is very dainty and chivalric. Hardly so the following lines a f t e r Motteux :Man is for the woman made, Woman for the man; . . . His the soul of high emprise, Hers the lure of beauty’s eyes. T r y it a s you may that sum w o r k s out without remainder rWoman for the man is made. There are a g r e a t many verses in this volume, and many of them a r e not so good as the others. Perhaps only the week-end ones will be published in the next edition ; then we may g e t a more serious view of them. Exmoor Lyrics. By Rose E. Sharland. (Arrowsmith. IS.) Miss Sharland’s opening “lyric ” is addressed to “ A Fair Angler,” a nasty, unpoetical little beast who waits “ with sweet face rosebud-tinted ” a n d “ hope-enraptured,” t o pull a hook through a troutling’s gills. “ Raptured,” of course, must come in for “captured.” Very poor indeed are these Exmoor efforts. About Horner W a t e r cataracting t o the sea, we hear :With its tumbling. headlong torrents, and its pace that naught can slacken. And its limitless unbounded energy. T h e final line is atrociously hobble-footed :-My spirit should find rest in some calm sea. Miss Sharland’s gift of expression riots among such things a s “vistas of arching greenness ; evening glory ; wondering soul ; lingering sweetness ; mellow cadence ; life’s dusky gloom ; countless numbers ; petty pride ; puny passions. ” She voices finally, in “ The Soliloquy of Man,” a n idea we seem to have heard somewhere or other. I am the heir of all the ages past. If we hadn’t heard it before in “Locksley Hall ” we should congratulate Miss Sharland. * The Merry Tales of Hans Sachs. (Nutt. 6 s . ) Translated, o r a s he himself puts it, “ Done into English,” by William Leighton. T h e taste of dedications is very bitter on our tongue. It is perfectly sickening to find mother after mother, fathers, aunts, all kind friends a n d relations immortalised by our great modern poets. Nobody ever dedicates anything to a reviewer, whose suffering of verse-wounds is endless. In this case Mr. Leighton’s dedication has a t least some dignity. His sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett, helped in the preparation of the translation. There is a helpful preface to the ballads, recapitu- The Chained Titan. By W. G. Hole. (Bell. 4s. 6d.) “ T h e Chained Titan,” needless t o say, is as bound as ever. W h a t Shelley failed to do Mr. Hole attempts. We cannot discover any reason why the matter is here f lined of like blank verse. No music in the lines sugg e s t s poetical inspiration. T h e prose “ Arguments ” prefacing each of the eight books a r e morse natively melodious than all the lines together. T h e Swinburnian echo in the “Song- of Prometheus ” by n o means makes a s o n g of these lines :Dawn at its orient birth leaping up from the sea with a shout; Dawn where was darkness and dread, and splendour of day where was doubt; Dawn with imperative hand, in abolishing blindness and night, Bestowing on men, with the god-gift of seeing, the godship of light. T h e most to be said for such verse is that it is sincerely modelled on its betters. 570 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, lating the life and adventures of the meister-singer. His translator informs us that Sachs was a very moral man. W e a r e not surprised t o hear, then, that after losing seven children and his first wife, he married “ The seventeen-years-old Barbara Harcherin. ” However, she, also, was a German! Morality is the geographical virtue ; but humour’s much the same everywhere. Hans Sachs was certainly a humourist. Such quaint verses a s “ S t . Peter and the Goats,” “ T h e Crafty Maid,” “ T h e Pork Thief,” and many others appeal to us, we declare, a s much as t o any German peasant, which is no small boast-for one of us twain. The bare-faced cruelty of some of the narratives may affront our civilised taste, but to set that aside (as safely obsolete) with Sachs’ alleged morality, is to leave some good things unspoiled. contain more poetry and something less of philosophical opinion. By T. C. Lewis. (Fisher Unwin. 6s.) Mostly a n anthrology of foreign poets. A very wide range o translation includes selections from S’adi f Hafiz, the Koran, Heine, Lemoine, D e Musset, Philemon, and many others. And the author presents some original poems, “ Various Verses,” of a thoughtful and sympathetic order. Of the “ Gulistan ” verses, perhaps “ T h e Two Ministers ” exhibits the most lively dramatic power. The metre used for most o the others runs f occasionally rather too slowly :H o w long shall man go trampling o’er my head? For endless ages after I am dead. From king to king this crown has come to me, And kings shall wear it when I cease to be. The “ Divan ” translations, following Hafiz, mend their pace somewhat, and the tavern song, “ Hist ! ’Tis the Breath of Morn,” is full of the right humour. The tenderer verses of Heine a r e chosen. T h e translator seems over-partial to the effort of endowing inanimate life with animal and even intellectual qualities. Lemoine’s exquisite lines on “ A Meadow Flower,” and Arndt’s puerile “ S t a r s of the Night,” contain, respectively, the right and wrong expressions of this perilous topic. The final poem, “Lines in Loneliness,” is a n echo, in charming and simple tones, of the pilgrim’s eternal invocation. From t h e East and from the West. The Demon. By Lermontoff. (Nutt. IS.) Miss Ellen Richter describes her translation of this poem from the Russian as “ a literal translation in the metre of the original.” A curious claim ! W e never suspected that Russian and English coincided like that -the lines are rhymed, too. There seems to be not much music in the verseHaving weaned the noble steed, The impatient bridegroom doth speed To the nuptial feast at close of day. T h e r ea r e scores of lines in that choppy style, but sometimes the ideas triumph over an unfortunate (whether in English or Russian we should say) metre. The Demon’s oath fills a fine passage of three pages. grandmother. O, there are moments when my soul is bound By shining visions, and by flames of gold! Roaming those lands where nothing can be found That leads to barren death or groweth old! Nothing much there to dedicate to anybody. Pretension was not power, nor mammon might, To Grecian youth imbued with golden fire! To Grecian maid, whose spirit was more white Than the white robes she spun to sounding lyre! The shriek-marks a r e not ours ; but we endorse them. Occasionally this writer gets a rhythm, more rarely she expresses a n old idea in that rhythm ; but the net result o the volume is scarcely worth f mentioning. Poems. By the Hon. Eleanour Morton. (Mathews. IS.) These verses a r e dedicated to the writer’s great- The Singing Caravan: S o m e Arabian Poetry. (Murray. 2s.) Echoes of Mr. Henry Baerlein’s book deals as frequently with the development of Islam in its social, religious, and political character as with the poetry of Arabia. In view of the need for a short, popular book on Islamic civilisation-a need this volume very fairly fills-we will not say that there is too little poetry. But a further and more extensive translation of Arabic verse would be welcome. The “ Echoes ” a r e introduced happily to confirm Mr. Baerlein’s very interesting information ; where information fails and a rather too opiniative philosophy creeps in, we confess t o coldness. Like all Eastern poetry, the Arabian sounds modern a s may be. Here is a scrap from Abu’l-Ala, who is describing Conservatives :They walk upon the road their fathers trod, And amiably receive their father’s God. What if they linger at Mahomet’s tent? They care not much for whom their knees are bent. In wakefulness and sleep their sole desire To keep the settled plan of things entire. And, to what a g e belongs such a gem as this? Hail, jasmine flower, on thy liquid stem, Among the mountain peaks, delighting them. Pure as the mountains that arrayed Are in green sandals and green, silky shade. What seest thou, what passing flight Of dream is in thy sight? We can but see that emerald eye And how the pearls around it lie. So admirably translated, these lovely lines strengthen our wish for a further volume from Mr. Baerlein, to Ballads. By H. De Vere Stacpoole. (Murray. 3s. 6d.) Mr. Stacpoole singing a ‘‘ Hymn to Selene ” presents a spectacle either more or less than impressive. His courage is of the sort which usually wins the Victoria Cross; a moment’s reflection jeopardises one’s respect for it. But, certes, to rush after the glory of “ A voice ran over land and sea crying, ‘ Pan is dead, great Pan is dead,’ ” with feet like the following is, to say the least, an ineffable business. Then the Hamadryad rose and shook Her hair from the oak by sorrow strook And the dread cast a long, last look Where far Penaeus saw. The moment o reflection comes :f TO A TANAGRA STATUETTE. The gracefulness we gaze upon, Lent to our eyes by grace Of Time, who wrecked the .Parthenon, Yet spared thy rosebud face. Has Mr. Stacpoole never read Keats? If so, how could he d o i t ? f Thou still unravished bride o quietnessThou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme. In a something o r other entitled “Verlaine,” Mr. Stacpoole declares :Paris poets daily fill Books that in a year are fameless. Not only Paris ones, we fear ! A Voice from t h e Trees. By Charles Herbert. (Fifield.) Thoughtful, gentle verse and, for the most part, very readable. The morning deepens, with increasing stir The tiny serfs of Nature are on wing And fill the air with busy harmony, Fluttering from store to store of pollened flower. The author apologises prettily f o r publishing. He needn’t. H e lacks neither taste nor clear expression. That which he does not claim, lyrical power, we need not criticise him for not possessing. P o e m s and Crigonetto Baglioni. By M. Reuben Lange. (Palmer. IS. 6d.) The horn of Elfland sounds faintly (but how welcome, even that) in these poems. If one avoids the Baglioni, a tiresome and incorrect little drama, and begins at the “ Poems,” there will be found little to vex and several things t o please. “Prince of Men,’’ OCTOBER 1910 13, “ THE NEW A G E 57 1 Bitter Queen,” “ The Nun,’’ ‘‘ The Sea Prince,” and “ The Kiss ” are all good poems, romantically charged. Five in one small volume! And, doubtless, some people may not dislike the others. But f’or us, Maiden ” is almost unintelligible ; “ Squire and the ‘‘ The Fiddler ” is commonplace and “ The Drunkard ” sentimental--a rare fault this, however, in Mr. Lange. The Heart o a Dancer. By W. W. Peploe. (Schulze.) f Solemn rubbish and a hash of threadbare platitudes and images. Do you remember, dear, the sudden sob, Sharp as an anguish, of the violin? Pale yellow tongues of passion, quiv’ring with tortured edges. Yet once again within your room I sat, Feeling your presence with me, as of yore. . . The cost of publishing this silly stuff must have been enormous. The binding is very fine. Three Modern Seers. By Mrs. Havelock Ellis. (Stanley Paul. 3s. 6d. net.) It is difficult €or a mere man to understand this book. A reviewer ought to be able to commend a book to those for whom it is written, or, in the event o its f being unworthy of notice, to warn them against it. Mrs. Ellis does not specify the type of reader she desires. True, she speaks much of wise women and good women ; but as two-thirds of the book expounds the gospel of ’James Hinton, who posed as “ a saviour of women,” it must be intended for the unregenerate. But with this class, the mass of the human race, the Saviour has always failed ; even Christ, the most distinguished of the Redeemers, exclaimed : “ Ye will not come unto Me that ye might have life.” So it may be said that Mrs. Ellis is offering salvation t o the wise and good wornen, who do not need it, and to the unregenerate women, who will not have it. The new Gospel is born to the second death. But what is this new Gospel? I open this book, and find myself baffled by passages like this : “To have the courage to face problems according to Hinton, to dare to knock down the traditions and conventions according t o Nietzsche, to be serene and brave enough to live out what we have discovered, through our introspection and destruction, according to Carpenter, is the way to the larger vision and the definite action.” The uselessness of all three courses as a means of social salvation is obvious : these men and their followers have been doing so for years, and Mrs. Ellis still has to face problems, to destroy conventions, and to emulate the serenity of “gentle Edward” by talking in the air. Problems are not to be faced, but solved; conventions are not to be destroyed, but vivified and made real ; and serenity and bravery according to Carpenter are the result of an agricultural life made miserable by occasional incursions into literature. W h a t has Carpenter “ discovered ” that needs serenity and bravery to “live out,” and to what larger vision and definite action has it led? According to Mrs. Ellis, he is a vegetarian not because meat-eating is bad or accursed, but because butchery is cruel: he has not discovered that clothing is unhealthy or inartistic, but that “ the Holy Ghost encompassing the body” should not be prevented from contact with the skin: he has not discovered that votes for women are of use to them or the State, are a source of power to the sex or an added strength to the Constitution, but that “justice is essential to the true life of either a man or a woman.” I could go on enumerating, but enough has been said to show that no great bravery or serenity is required to “live o u t ” abstractions. The final question : “ W h a t has Carpenter done? ” shows the utter unreality of the matter. H e has lived in a hut, dressed curiously, and eaten of strange foods: he has written books not too remarkable: he is supposed to have written poems, and I have some recollection of a play called “ T h e Promised Land.” But he has left no mark on our national life : he and his followers alike By Stanley Morland. are dismissed as cranks, and “his message t o his a g e ” has fewer readers than the football news. Mrs. Ellis says very stupidly that “it is by what we bear that the world is redeemed.” I hope that the world will not say that I have damned it by stating that I cannot bear Carpenter. No public man has done less for life or literature, and the public is t o be commended for ignoring him as a mystic while Bibles are plentiful. Apart from this, though, the book baffles me by its terms,, “good and evil,” “right and wrong,” and so on. People don’t discuss morals to-day : Nietzsche gave the whole subject its death certificate years ago. Besides, life is not regulated by speculative introspection. To whom can a book about morals be commended? I confess myself beaten by such phrases a s this. “ Uncontrolled impulse, elaboration of worldly detail, a hypocritical upholding of immoral so-called moralities all around us, all this is evident enough ; but what of the simplicity and beauty of the lover who has passed beyond mere impulse and elaborate restraint into a perfect freedom? How many of these lovers, either among men or women, can any one of us count on our fingers? ” The answer of course is, “ None.” Such a lover would make a lovely corpse, for he would be dead to “the deliciousness of sex,” of which Mrs. Ellis writes so alluringly. But what are “immoral so-called moralities,” and in what way is the matter improved by substituting another morality ? Let us agree for the moment that the morality that makes a mystery of the bed-chamber is immoral : does it necessarily follow that the morality that teaches us the “ true lover’s secret ” is any better? Sex, it may be said, is a function that can and does moralise itself ; and the people who refuse to describe their uxurious ecstasies t o other people are not necessarily ignorant of true love. Why, then, should we have all this bother about “the mystery of pain ” and “the mystery of pleasure,” this prattle about ‘‘service ” and “ forward ends ” ? It teaches u s nothing, and it complicates the relation o the sexes. Mrs. Ellis may f find this elaborate ritual necessary to the complete enjoyment of matrimony, but the world in its wisdom leaves the Decalogue at the door. Because “the Kingdom of Heaven is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy,” I cannot agree with the fundamental axiom of this book that “sexual pleasure, rightly understood, is the most spiritual thing.” Mrs. Ellis may suppose that tragalism is the equivalent of mysticism, but not one of the world’s great teachers agrees. Moreover, the equality of the sexes does not mean “ t h e worship of women.” Aesthetic Aims. By T. Sturge Moore. IN two previous “Art Supplements ” I have pointed out how an aesthetic aim through isolation degenerates into absurdity. Light shines from recognising that the mere realist is found in factories, the mere impressionist in asylums; that the decorator, who ignores the relation between his pattern and the scale and surface of objects on which he employs it, has rioted €or many a long year in commercial production, and is now a little discredited with persons o discernment-while f the symbolist, who prizes the sign above its beauty, belongs to the dark ages o wizardry and is o u t of f date. The corollary of these facts is that Sane intentionsare always complex. Though single-minded, an artist with only one idea acts like the half-witted. E v e n morals, where singleness of aim is the equivalent of honesty, it is not enough. Success is the name o composite f achievements. There a r e two kinds : popularity and true success. The first calls for no comment, since it is characteristic of all large publics not to know whether they have had their money’s worth. The second m a y be subdivided, since it consists now in pleasing a refined few, now in approach to an ideal. 572 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, Success with a Refined Few. I n the “Malade Imaginaire ” we read :“ The public is accommodating. Nobody takes you to task ; and, so long as the regular procedure is observed, who troubles about results ? But grandees are vexatious ; for, when they fall ill, they absolutely insist on being cured by their doctors. ” M. Diafoirus naively describes the kind of patients he would confine his attentions to, namely, those who are not surprised if his treatment fails so long as he has conformed to precedent in discourse, in prescription and in demeanour. Some artists like him are offended when actual stimulus is demanded from picture or statue. W h e r e is their drawing wrong? Are not their values right? Do not they know how to model? Somebody the artist must address, and, unless his perceptions and moods a r e extremely raw, he turns to the intelligent and accomplished, who, like Molière’s grandees, make enlightened demands o n their doctors, and on artists. Among modern painters, W a t t s eminently knew how to profit by the best contemporary gift and breeding, sympathising with its ideals, entering into its refinement, and portraying those who embodied it. A chief superiority of Velasquez over Whistler a n d Manet lies, perhaps, just here : they were social rebels, he was not. Great artists have been outlawed from the culture of their day by misfortune and prejudice; but to acquiesce in such a fate, still more to court it, must be stultifying. Modern distinction is f’ocussed in no centre, such as was Reynolds’s London, Raphael’s Rome, the Florence of Michelangelo’s youth, o r even the HoIland House which patronised the young Watts. This is a real misfortune. However, the isolated mentalities, like the broadcast but extremely tenuous refinement of to-day, a r e dominated by one idea, by one faith, ill-understood, foolishly applied, but evocative of interest wherever there is capacity for attention-Science, its methods, its perspectives, its success. Science in Art. Unfortunately artists seem to have conceived of science as fidelity to accidents, and, mesmerised by momentary appearances, have beer? drawn from the common-place to the trivial, from that again to the utterly insignlificant. Always pathetically hoping t o be sincere, to be honest, to be faithful at least in a little : not, alas, where such a policy is saving health, in conduct, but in choice of subject and method, where the infinite variety of human nature demands such manifold resource and felicity before it can be reached, impressed, and stimulated to gratitude by delight. Science is only possible where properties and characters are constant, o r at Ieast general. Accidents, freaks, exceptions, adumbrations and mysteries a r e what they are because the circumstances which determine them cannot be foretold, and the routine of which they form part has never been described. Many Greek artists probably, a n d Dürer certainly,” thought that if the fragmentary excellences entangled in and dispersed through nature could be extricated, collected and combined, the perfect would appear. And this purpose, though they could only have given it a theoretically crude expression, informed their art with the dignity of a ripe sanity. Michelangelo shifted emphasis from completeness t o direction, from balance t o impetus, from serenity to passion; he sought for types of growth, of spiritual awakening o r of intellectual prowess. F o r him beauty must bespeak capacity for effort, and embody the result o r the promise of strenuous habit. I t seemed a prize offered rather than a gift given. H e i s the father o f all those romantic natures who have hoped to take Apollo’s kingdom by storm, even though it must thereby suffer violence. But in discovery of forms with which t o engineer that onslaught he, like the Greeks, was as cautious and thorough a s though he had consciously emulated science. H e was wholly convinced t h a t the exceptionally strong or big man was by no means always the really fine one, whom to pick out n o superficial survey will suffice, but wide experience and rare penetration prove requisite. Types in Portraiture. I t will be surmised that for the portrait painter this discipline could only defeat its own end, as his aim is t o depict any single persan. f Yet from that accidental aspect o the sitter, momentarily before them, W a t t s and Reynolds strove to disengage their faculties, and to form a general notion, then, by its aid, to select from t h e aspects a n d expressions they were watching those alone which to a gentle mind must distinguish and might endear. An individual is a series as truly as a hundred men are. His successive aspects, like a n army, may be marshalled in a diversity of sections, according to their mental, their moral, o r their physical beauty, and take rank as they approach or retreat from a racial, a n ideal, or an animal type. Thus the civilised, the urbane, in contradistinction t o the chaotic, barbarous, or eccentric portrait, becomes a master test of refinement. Does Difficulty Forbid ? So heavily must a n experimental method tax foresight and patience, that we find the master draughtsman, Ingres, asserting that study of anatomy is fatal t o naïvete a n d spontaneity; while, for a like reason, the absolute Michelangelo declared that a man who would be a sculptor must have calipers in his eyes. Yet the great sculptor Barye was indefatigable in ta king a n d r recording measurements, while Buonarroti himself was a n ardent dissector. The truth is t h a t enthusiasm preserves freshness and vigour, not observance of o r abstention from any practice. Danger lies in every process t o which our ardour is not equal. Success in Approaching an Ideal. Success with the select few generally presents itself to a n artist a s a token that his ideal has been approached; even popularity may do this. But if his aim has not transcended the external demand, i t is to be feared the man is not sufficiently autocratic to be a conscious artist, and his success should he esteemed a lucky hit. He, howel-er, who not only places his ideal above the current demands of even good judges, but anxiously studies to avoid self-delusion, will soon find himself a t the head of a n army. T h e mere organisation of the ideas he must command, threatens to deprive him o all f free action or advance. Hence young men of parts, divining the immense labour involved, dispense with this great muster, and hope by dash to forge ahead with one simple excellence. Of necessity they choose The Creation of Types. We say that great artists have created types, which is to assert that some work of theirs, like a scientific generalisation, resumes and sisimplifies our imp res sion s, and thus provides a norm by which to measure variations. Or else, by describing a n extreme instance, it is meant that they have defined a tendency which in most men is confused and overlaid. In these two ways great a r t has always been akin to science, and appealed to the scientific frame of thought. Not because it has absolute value as a deduction from facts, but because, circumspect, it matures the concept, beauty, in a temper parallel to that of science approaching truth. Xeuxis chose five models from whom to paint his Venus, but we may suppose him to have studied, or even measured, hundreds of other women while gaining the knowledge or taste by which he selected those five. * ‘”Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer” (p. 166). By Sir Martin Conway. Also “Albert Dürer,” Duckworth’s Red Art Series (pp. 277-300). -__--_..- OCTOBER 1910 13, THE NEW AGE 573 such quality at random, without having grasped t h e character o those they renounce. F o r w a r d they plunge f applauded, but too often only because youth a n d moveW h e n these ment are in themselves so attractive. dwindle, they find their pearl was of n o g r e a t price, and it may be, snatch at another, a n d another, each time with less conviction a n d less good fortune. To approach a n ideal is to satisfy a n ever more sensitive and complex taste, just as a living conscience is always more universal and more delicate in its demands. T h i s is why a r t is long and difficult. No wonder t h a t a flash in the pan should be so tempting-to acquire a trustworthy sureness of a i m i s to devote t h e whole ’of that. I agree. that life is on the whole agreeable, but that has nothing to do with my question. Since most people base their social theories on the need for keeping alive the human race, perhaps some one will explain where this need comes in. May I suggest in conclusion that it would be a good subject for a Symposium, such as we have recently seen in THE NEW AGE. It would be interesting to know what people like Shaw and Wells have to say about it. VICTIM OF CONSCIENCE. * * * life. . . W h e n I was a child, at five .o’clock in the afternoon the heater was hooked out of t h e kitchen fire, carried red-hot to the table, and dropped into i t s empty metal pocket which centred the urn’s wells, and these it would keep boiling throughout the half-hour set a p a r t for tea. Everything had been prepared a n d was eminently ripe for the momentous advent of t h a t heavy, incandescent lump of iron. T h e artist who would a d a p t t h e methods a n d spirit o science to t h e creation of beauty must fill with seethf ing knowledge the various compartments of his mind, then, when all is ready, his long-cooked enthusiasm must descend amongst those boiling wells so intense that its fervour will outlast t h e final hours of actual execution. There a r e splendid aesthetic and creative temperaments incapable of this kind of effort, b u t for t h e many artists who a r e subject t o t h e glamour of science, t h e only hope o effectiveness lies in approach to this f ideal. So f a r the uses of the experimental method in discerni n g beauty or significance in the object studied, have been chiefly considered. Still more essential for a n a r t i s t is capacity to instigate a n d profit by those experiments which test whether combinations of surface, stroke, o r colour a r e or a r e not agreeable to the eye which h e wishes to enchant. In this field of inquiry, every artist, w h o h a s progressed from one kind of success t o another, is perforce a scientist, for he h a s divined t h e nature of a problem, mooted hypotheses, a n d carried through the experiments required to solve them. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. Sir,-May I, through the medium of your columns, insert an invitation to your readers to satisfy me on a matter which is causing me a great deal of mental trouble. I n my course up the self-constructed ladder of Philosophy, I have been suddenly arrested, and am in imminent peril of toppling over into a nothingness, the mere thought of which appals me. I have not much spare time for reading ; indeed Shaw is about the only philosopher whom I have any pretence of understanding- T o the Life Force I have clung since the decease (so to speak) of God, and unless I can clear up the present difficulty, that too will slip away as completely and irrevocably as my former guide. And then. . . I a m (inter alia) a Socialist and a Feminist. That is to Say, I believe that Socialism and the Emancipation of Women would benefit Mankind. But this horrible question confronts me: What is the good of benefiting Mankind? What are we but mere forms of Nature owing our existence to the Sun? What would it matter if the Earth disappeared to-morrow? In short, I am looking beyond the mere facts of the World, into its relations with infinity. I want to know that this Mankind, which we are all so anxious to benefit, itself benefits. And I can conceive no answer. There seems to be absolutely no justification for our existence. I refuse to shirk the question; besides, I couldn’t if I wanted to. Of course I a m young, This may be-I earnestly hope it is-a mere passing phase. I have heard of the so-called “sceptical age” before now. But that does not satisfy me in the least. I can see no objection to threshing out the subject--or any subject, for that matter-however unpleasant. Either there is an answer, or there isn’t. I ask merely for information. I have no intention (Mr. Grierson please note) of committing suicide or anything like A QUESTION FOR PHILOSOPHERS. Sir,--I have been reading some interesting reviews and criticisms of Mme. Yvette Guilbert‘s autobiography, and I have been much struck with an illuminating article on her art in the “Manchester Guardian,” in which the reviewer says : “Mr. Harold Simpson’s endeavour to make himself clear about Yvette Guilbert’s art, to fasten it to a description, very naturally fails to come off.” In this connection it is interesting to note what Mr. A. B Walkley said when reviewing Mr. Francis Grierson’s “Modern Mysticism,” at the time of its publication :“ There is a brief paper on ‘ Modern Melancholy,’ which, as they would have said in Addison’s day, is merum sal. It opens with a very adroitly managed surprise. ‘Modern melancholy has, before everything else, its gesture. Its natural motion is the gesture of ‘disillusion, a weary, languid mien of abandonment. What resignation there is in its most typical phases! For the spirit of disenchantment is ennui, and fatigue is antidramatic.’ Now how do you suppose Mr. Grierson goes o n ? Guess a thousand times and you will never guess right. . . . ‘And so is the acting of Mme. Yvette Guilbert.’ . . . When I read that I feel impelled to write to Mr. Grierson (more or less) in the words of M. Maeterlinck : ‘You have deliciously and profoundly surprised me-you have written something which is just what I should like to have written myself.’ I finish my quotation : ‘She expresses abnormal emotion by normal methods. Her art is the synthesis of modern pessimism and disillusion. It contains weird suggestions of passing chimeras, vague reminiscences of vanished dreams, vivid reality, and poignant simplicity.’ Mr. Grierson, in passing, takes a shot a t the absurdly overpraised art of pantomime, and knocks it endways. ‘If the natural form of disillusion is one of mute dejection, it is the antithesis of pantomime with its imbecile extravagance and affected emphasis. The f very effort o pantomime puts a damper on imagination and feeling.’ And here is a passage which I should imagine to be quite the best thing ever written about Yvette Guilbert. ‘By the gesture of two long phantom-like arms, by the listless posture of a statuesque neck, by the languid roll of the eye, by a peculiar inimitable movement of the .shoulders, she suggests and depicts a world of ideas, passions, emotions, illusions, both poetic and commonplace. She invokes the everyday sentiments and sensations that lie beyond mere words and phrases. Her art is never vehement. It is smothered passion. It is the fire of love covered with the ashes of disillusion. And yet it is not acting; it is simple, unsophisticated gesture.’ ” I have read many critical and descriptive articles on Mme. Yvette Guilbert in French, as well as in English, and I was living in P a n s at the time she began her career there, but I have never read anything so striking and original on the subject as the lines quoted by Mr. Walkley. L. W. TONNER. GRIERSON ON YVETTE GUILBERT. * * * MODERN DRAMATISTS. Sir,-In reply to several correspondents, I may say that to my knowledge no translations of Bjornson’s plays have been published in England. One play by Strindberg, “ T h e Father,” has appeared, and others, including “ The Stronger Woman” and “Simoon,” have been played from time to time. A complete edition of both authors is published in German, and isolated plays have appeared in French. The Reclam series (Leipsig) includes eight plays by Björnson and four by Strindberg. Wedekind’s “Kammersanger ” was given by the Stage Society in 1907. None of his other plays has been translated. DUKES. ASHLEY * * * LABOUR AND POLITICS. Sir,-It is a pity that other absorbing matters such as the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy should distract the attention of your readers from the portentous happenings in your front pages week by week, I refer to the unmistakable and steady drift of THENEW AGE towards anarchism. Your first three paragraphs of October 6 prepare the way carefully by allaying suspicion. You seem therein to be satisfied that the removal of the Labour Party Pledge ends all reasonable objection to Labour representation. The 574 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, which it has never been proposed to withhold from that middle-class body, the National Union of Teachers, whose representatives have always, as you put it, been “perfectly free to vote and speak as they please” on questions “outside the scope of the Union’s objects.” But, in the fourth paragraph, which begins in the middle of the first column of page 530, after making as though you were about to serve the Labour Party gander with a s h a r e of the sauce of the Teachers’ goose, a preconcerted compunctious visiting unnerves your a r m ” and makes you drop the ladle. Or, if the start was genuine, it was a sudden apprehension that Pledge or no Pledge, Labour’s representatives, like John Wesley, would take all the world for their parish and vote solid against national armament. So you spake these memorable words :Both Trade Unionism and the working classes generally would be better off out of party politics. Italics mine. I imagined at first that you wanted to repeal the Reform Act, and have England governed by gentlemen; and then I remembered that you had opposed the House of Lords. Then I thought that perhaps you wished to establish at once a reign of peace on earth, until I recalled your recent commendation of industrial pressure. Next I thought of Bottomley arid Business Government; but I did not seem to remember that you had taken those to your heart; besides, I never could make out what the gentleman meant. Then it was that I took fire with the suspicion that, when you said the working classes were better out of party politics, you meant that party politics were in themselves useless and mischievous, and that ,the State ought to be abolished. My fears were immediately confirmed by this sentence: There is no . desire . . on the part of workingmen . . to act contrarily to the intention of political institutions. If they were, in fact, less instinctively “constitutional ’) they might be more effective rationally. Observe the “voluntaryism,” the scorn of constituted authority ! Only your plain statement that you have withdrawn your objection to the reversal of the Osborne judgment, in consideration of the removal of the Pledge, will abate my alarmed expectation of a Propaganda by Deed on your part. Finally, my brethren, instructive are the adventures of Mr. Sidney Webb. He has always been an Imperialist, and might naturally be expected to condemn all such expression of anti-militarist and anti-patriotic sentiment as is inevitable in every assembly of organised Labour. Therefore, in Industrial Democracy,” he (with his wife) carefully circumscribed the sphere of Trade Unions in politics, in the passage at p. 271 of that book, from which you quote. But Mr. Webb never was a bomb-thrower; and, if the Trade Unions were willing to touch their caps to the middle-class expert and to “this great Empire of ours on which the sun never sets,” Mr. Webb, for his part, was content to back Labour, and did back it, politically, to an extent thus expressed by Mr. Bernard Shaw in a pamphlet called “ T h e Charter of the Poor” : ‘‘Industrial Democracy,” a monumental record of investigation and induction, elaborated the theory of the minimum wage, and showed that its enforcement is beyond the power of trade unionism, and must be a function of government. Mr. Webb thought, when he was writing that book, that this question, being in his view a national one, could be kept clear of party. Being a middle-class patriot, he had no apprehension of that fact of which the upper and lower classes are instinctively aware, viz. , that every Conditionof the-People Question is mixed up with the Maintenanceof-Ancient-Boundaries Question, and that every serious attempt to better the mass of the people brings u p for revision all the average man’s fundamental assumptions, by reason of that intimate connection between economic slavery and national spirit which I pointed out to you a fortnight ago, and which is rarely noticed by middle-class people like the Webbs, who, on the one hand, never have the working man’s experience of the hardship of war and armed peace (except of the former in an attenuated shape as volunteers), and, on the other hand, never see right into the meaning of foreign politics as the oligarchy do. The plight of Mr. Webb, a most consistent and courageous shunner of the limelight, suddenly forced into the .glare of party politics which he so detests, and into which he never dreamt his minimum-wage crusade would drag him, is an object-lesson to which I would point everyone who has taken the trouble to read my letters, but still thinks there may be some such thing as “the interests of the nation as a whole.” to deny to the general organisation of Labour a privilege abolition of the Pledge, it would appear, makes it absurd . .. . (( MR. EDEN PHILLPOTTS’ “LITANY TO PAN.” Sir,--I cannot but think that Mr. Eden Phillpotts’ otherwise admirable Litany to Pan,” published in your last issue, is marred by a piece of false mythology (or false psychology, if you will), in the seventh stanza, which ruas as follows:By madness caged and madness running free, Through this our conscious race that heeds not thee, In its concept insane of Liberty, O hear! The rest of the poem is an impressive answer to the futility of the common contented theism of our day, which is enthusiastic in its worship of Oromasdes, whilst blandly (or blindly) ignoring the existence of Arimanes ; which delights in the adaptations that are useful and agreeable to man, whilst refusing to give equivalent weight to those that are hostile and displeasing to man, “the swift, far flung poison of the germ,” “the stillborn, stricken young and tortured old,” and the like. The cheerful optimist assures us that all partial evil is universal good; but it is equally arguable that all partial good is universal evil! Indeed, I think Mr. Phillpotts should have dedicated his Litany rather to Arimanes than to Pan, since Pan, the Nature God, though assimilated to Arimanes by the early Christian theologians (so that the mediaeval “Devil” was endowed with Pan’s horns and Pan’s cloven hoof), was responsible for the Nature that from the human point of view is beneficent, as well as for that which is maleficent. But this is not the ground for my criticism of the abovequoted seventh stanza. That criticism is based on the fact that Pan, the Nature God, is the God of Nature as considered apart from Man the God, and also of Man the Instinctive, but not the God of Man the Reflective Being. Now the “ concept “ Liberty appertains to Man the Reflective, and not to Man the Natural Animal, and it has therefore no place in a Litany to Pan the Nature God. One word in conclusion. Mr. Phillpotts regards the concept of Liberty. as a n “insane ” one ; agreeing, presumably with the late Mr. Justice Stephen, that what man needs is not Liberty, but Discipline. I think myself he needs both : viz., Liberty and Self-Discipline ; but I cannot ask for space to argue the point here. In lieu of argument, I will quote a passage from Shelley’s “Queen Mab.” The Man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whateer it touches ; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanised automaton. M. EDEN PAUL. * * * JOHN KIRKBY. A VOICE FROM T H E TOMB. Sir,-In a letter headed “Chestertonism,” which appeared on October 6, Mr. J. Russell Sowden suggested that (‘Mysopseudes “ might be “ s o mediaeval as not to know that Rationalism has been destroyed (for all practical purposes) long ago.’’ This reminds me forcibly of similar statements which are made by some surviving rationalists about the mediaeval character and moribund condition of religion ; statements which I personally cannot endorse without considerable qualifications. But i f religion survives, despite the progress of scientific thought, rationalism also survives and is continually being reinforced. Destroyed? On the contrary it is very much alive at the present day, and is steadily progressing. The Rationalist Press Association, Ltd., of which, from its foundation, I have been the secretary, represents some small fraction o those who, in Engf land and the Colonies, are practically rationalists-at heart opposed to all religions, or at least to all religions which involve the supernatural and claim to be divinely revealed. In France and some other Continental countries Freethought is perfectly respectable. In England it is not so, and there are various and fairly obvious reasons which deter rationalists from avowing their heterodoxy. Still, a few figures and facts as to the progress of the rationalistic body with which I am specially acquainted, may give Mr. Sowden food for thought. The Association was registered eleven years ago, and each annual report has shown a steady increase in the number of members and subscribers. There are now more than 2,000 names on our books. It has always been one of the chief objects of the Association to popularise high-class rationalistic literature-the writings of rationalists who are also thinkers of distinction; and in fact, nearly two million copies of the R.P.A. sixpenny publications have been put into circulation. The Roman Catholic press has on more than one occasion paid compliments to our sinister activity, bewailing the fact that its own orthodox Church, with all its members and power and wealth, has failed to produce any worthy counterblast. It is only writers of the confident class to which Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Sowden belong who are quite satisfied OCTOBER 13, 1910 THE NEW AGE 575 that we do not exist. Some, who admit that we do, disparage our existence by maintaining that we dish up the stale rationalism of the nineteenth century for the benefit (or perversion) of the ignorant working classes who, knowing no better, devour it with avidity. To this I would reply briefly under three heads:( I ) The writings of such men as Spencer, Huxley, Mill and Arnold are not played out; they sell in spite of the superior persons who scorn them, and they are not scorned by serious thinkers who may on many points disagree with them. (2) The Association does not explicitly endorse the views of writers whose works it publishes. Rationalism affords a broad platform for truth-seekers, and, though zealous for the ultimate unity of truth, is compatible with types of philosophy provisionally differing. It does not necessarily .exclude religion in a natural and humanistic sense. (3) The Association derives its chief moral and financial support from persons of education and culture. The legal, medical, and more responsible commercial professions are largely represented in its membership ; its subscription list contains names well known in the universities, in literature, and in art. A phase of rationalism which has or has had among its avowed supporters men of such weight in science as Berthelot, Lombroso, Westermarck, and of such leaders in literature as Björnson, Brandes, and Furnivall, cannot be doomed to sudden destruction-still less to destruction “long ago ”-by Mr. Sowden ; not even though Mr. Chesterton should come to his rescue. The philosophy of rationalism has not said its last word, and it is not by any means bankrupt. As science and humanity grow, so must the philosophy of science and humanity. It is only the philosophies of the supernatural, only the theologies and their mystical and muddled substitutes in modern English journalism, which fancy that they have said some final word when they have merely repeated some hoary fallacy. CHARLESE. HOOPER. Articles o the Week. f ANON., “ T h e Over-supply of Teachers, ” Times, Oct. 4 (Educational Supplement). ARCHER, WM.,“ The Ferrer Anniversary,” Morning Leader, Oct. 8. BERDOE, Dr. E., “ A Savage of Science : Prof, Mantegazza’s Research, ” Morning Leader, Oct.8. BLATCHFORD, ROBERT, ‘‘ Written in Smoke,” BRAILSFORD, ROBERT, “ Ms. Lloyd George and Woman Suffrage : The Truth about the Bill,” Daily News, Oct. 3 (letter t o the Editor). B R O W N , Prof. G. BALDWIN, “ Town-Planning,” Morning Post, Oct. 8. C H E S T E R T O N , G. K., “ Four Fallacies,” Daily News, Oct. 8. CLAYTON, J O S E P H , “ In Finland,” Clarion, Oct. 7. CRANE, W A L T E R , “ F i f t y Years of Change in British Homes,” Public Opinion, Oct. 7. D I M N E T , E R N E S T , “ Forty Years After,” Saturday Review, Oct. 8. FORBES-ROBERTSON, J., “ A Talk About the Theatre,” Outlook (New York), Oct. G R E E N , F. E., “ T h e Small Holding in October,” Daily News, Oct. 5. H A R D I E , J. K E I R , M.P., “ A Socialist Daily,’’ Labour Leader, Oct 7. HOBSON, J O H N A., “ Changes in o u r Social Conditions,” Public Opinion, Oct.7. HOUSMAN, LAURENCE, “ Mr. L. Housman and the Censor,” Times, Oct. 3. KENEALY, Dr. ARABELLA, “ The Woman’s Movement,” Times, Oct. 8 (Woman’s Supplement). LANG, ANDREW, “ T w o New Writers o n Jeanne d’Arc,’’ Saturday Review, Oct. 8 ; “ A Scapegoat for Byron,” Morning Post, Oct. 7. LODGE, Sir O L I V E R , “ Fifty Years of Science,” Public Opinion, Oct. 7. MACDONALD, J O H N F., “ Ups and Downs : The Varied Career of King Pataud,” Daily News, Oct. 7. M O N T E F I O R E , DORA B., “ Some Echoes of the International Socialist Women’s Congress, ” Justice, Oct. 8. MOORE, F R E D K . , “ Peasant Life in China,” Daily News, Oct. 3. P U G H , E D W I N , “ A Modern Thackeray,” Clarion, Oct. 7. ROOK, CLARENCE, “ The Hoarder’s Art,” Daily Chronicle, Oct. 4. R O O S E V E L T , T H E O D O R E , “ Criticism of the Courts,” Outlook (New York), Oct. RUNCIMAN, J O H N F., “ Dull Opera and Duller,” Saturday Review, Oct. 8. S C H W A R T Z , J U L E S (Editor, Revue Internationale Illustrée), “ The Real Story of the Turco-Roumanian Alliance,” Looking Glass, Oct. I . S H A W , CHARLES, “ Revolution of Latin Races : Madame Sorgue Utters Prophecies of New Republics, ” Manchester Dispatch, Oct. 8. S P O O N E R , Canon (Warden of New College, Oxon.), “Some Thoughts on Education,” Times, Oct. 4 (Educational Supplement). T H O M P S O N , ALEX. M. “ W h a t is Man?”, Clarion, Oct.,7 T I L L E T T , BEN, “ The Pickle of the Politicians,” Justice, Oct. 8. T I T T E R T O N , W. R., “The New Woman as Heroine,” Vanity Fair, Oct. 5. W H I T E I N G , RICHD., “The ‘ P a s s i n g of the Editor, ” Public Opinion, Oct. 7. W R I G H T , C. T. HAGBERG, “ Fifty Years of Literature, ” Public Opinion, Oct. 7. Clarion, Oct. 7. * * * CHESTERTONIS-A CORRECTION. Sir,-In my criticism of “G. K. C.,” published in THE NEW AGE of September 29, in the reference to the biblical legend of Jonah and the Whale (through illegibleness of my script, doubtless) there occurs an odd misprint. For “Weed of the Church Army ” read ‘(Head of the Church Army.” Inasmuch as the misprint in question may have puzzled the readers of the critique, I venture to ask you kindly to permit this correction to appear in the next issue of THE NEW AGE. MISOPSEUDES. * * * Sir,-Will Mr. Jacob Tonson’s remarks in last week’s “Books and Persons” causerie, that I have fallen into a bad error in this matter. Somewhat too easily I took it for granted that genuine artists ” produced was art : whereas all work that “ it must be of the pot-boiling variety. In that sense Mr. Tonson is undoubtedly correct. That during their pot-boiling artists by accident create something artistic I will admit as being probable; but that the unchainable creative spirit within the artist can be called forth at the bidding of a landlord would require a tremendous amount of proof. Corot, for instance. Scott’s pot-boilers are not exactly exhilarating. Mr. Tonson is a creative artist; yet I have read a pot-boiler written by him that opened finely, sparkled with wit for half the course, and petered out like a Brock’s Benefit after 12 hours’ hard rain. I do not think it would be hard to prove from the Books Causerie that artists create because they are compelled to from within, mot from without. JAS. CHAPPELL. POVERTY AND GENIUS. you allow me to acknowledge, in answer to * * * T.P.’S MAGAZINE. Sir,--In your last issue a correspondent stated that an of Courage ” appearing in the article entitled “Two inaugural number of T.P.’s Magazine” is in reality a passage taken from the English translation of Maurice Maeterlinck’s ‘‘Wisdom and Destiny,’’ published some twelve years ago. This statement is unfortunately correct, but you will in justice allow me to make this simple explanation (which has already been courteously and unreservedly accepted by Messrs. George Allen and Sons, the owners of the copyright), that the article in question was purchased in a regular and reputable way, and in the belief that it had not before been published in England. The documentary proofs of this purchase have been handed to Messrs. Allen, and the origin of the mistake is still the subject of inqùiry. Your readers are entitled to this explanation, especially as I imagine they do not share the unfriendly attitude to new magazines taken up by your correspondent, whose Signature, “Pay pay,” is presumably a compositor‘s inversion of “Yap, yap.” WILFREDWHITTEN (Acting Editor “T.P.‘s Magazine). Kinds 576 THE NEW A G E OCTOBER 1910 13, and is free from all defects. “ I t A. W YOUNG EM.. F I P O.J Car NEPTUNE FOUNTAINPEN DELICIOUS COFFEE RED WHITE & BLUE For Breakfast & after Dlnner. MEDALS, BUTTONS, ROSETTES, BADGES, FOR A L L SOCIETIES. MADE AND SUPPLIED BY TOYE & Co,, 57, THEOBALD’S ROAD, LONDON, W.0 QUEEN’S (Minor) HALL, Langham Place, W. SECULAR LECTURES on Sunday Evenings, By G. W. FOOTE. Music at 7 p.m. (Under the auspices of the Secular Society, Ltd.) Discussion invited. Reserved Seats. 1s.. and 6d. all meetings. “THE EYE OF FAITH, A N D W H A T I SEES.’’ T October I 6th. Chair taken at 7.30 p.m. Free seats at Just Published.-Royal 16mo, 4s. 6d. fret. THE CHAINED TITAN A Poem of Yesterday and To-day. Dramatic,” By W. G. HOLE, Author of “ New Poems,” “ “ Poems Lyrical and Queen Elizabeth,” &c. This remarkable and powerful poem deals with some of the social problems of the present day. The “Chained Titan” is Prometheus still bound to the rock of Ignorance and Selfish ness, and still waiting for the hand that shall liberate him. NEW AGE VOLUMES LONDON: G. BELL AND SONS, L T D , YORKHOUSE,PORTUGAL STREET, W.C. EXTEMPORE FIFTHEDITION. The most complete and practical text book on this subject. The system herein taught is very simple and easily acquired. There is no possibility of forgetting a discourse during delivery if prepared according to instructions. By the Rev. J. EDGAR FOSTER, M.A. SPEAKING, A SET OF NEW AGE VOLUMES, New Series, Vols. 2, 3, 4, and 5 (Vol, I. is entirely out o print) wiIl be sent post free in f the United Kingdom for 12s. 6d. (Orders from abroad should be accompanied by 2s. extra for postage.) 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