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NOTES OF the Week TOWARDS National Guildsmen . the ACT OF God.
. GUILDS. By Marmaduke
the By National .
Pickthall
THE FIRST LOST IDEAL OF Women’s SUFFRAGE. By Henry E. O’Keeffe, C.S.P. . Courts MARTIAL CRAFTSMANSHIP IN Industry By Geo. W. Thomson .
OLD MASTER AS Grotesque III.--Hokusai. By Huntly Carter ART NOTES. By B. H. Dias . RECREATIONS CRITICISM. By Edward Moore . IN RECENT VERSE. By Stephen Maguire . REVIEWS : Echo Personalities. Submarine and Anti-Submarine. From Mill-Boy to Minister. Air Men o’ War . PASTICHE. By Marshall E. Brown, T. C., Geoffrey Pitter, S. M. Rich . .
NOTES
OF
THE
WEEK.
Honest men cannot but be glad that at last Mr. Lloyd George has openly fallen out with the “ Times ” and Lord Northcliffe. No Prime Minister Was ever in a stronger position than Mr. Lloyd George to make such an attack; but, assuredly, also, his immediate predecessor, Mr. Asquith, did not lack opportunity or provocation, but only courage to defend himself-and, incidentally, the nation. Moreover, the peculiar manner and matter of Mr. Lloyd George’s oratory are well adapted to the comprehension of his present subject. “Grasshopper,” “the disease of vanity,” and “Times” as “the 3d. edition of the “ ‘Daily Mail ’ ” -these are not only damaging phrases in themselves, expressive of the utmost contempt, but they are within the range of abuse best understood and practised by the journalists employed and inspired by Lord Northcliffe. They cannot fail, we hope, to reduce to reasonable dimensions the carefully cultivated claim of the proprietor of Answers” to run the Empire during his leisure hours; and if, at the same time, the equally carefully cultivated legend of the semi-official authority of the “Times” is destroyed, the independence of both Parliament and the Press may begin to be recovered. Mr. Lloyd George had no hesitation in excusing or even in justifying the delay in the preparation of the terms of peace; nor, again, did he make much difficulty of disposing of the rumours of personal differences among the four plenipotentiaries. When we consider the superhuman complex ,of problems brought before the Conference for settlement, the fact that such conclusionsas have been reached, and these upon most of the matters concerned, have been reached unanimously,” something that Mr. Lloyd George may well is claim credit for. And credit will in all certainty be accorded to him for it. The discrepancies in his speech, on the other hand, are, not easily ’to be explained; and they are serious enough to deserve to be
kept in mind for future reference. What, for instance, are we to make of his challenge to us to compare his election-pledges with the forthcoming terms of peace and to discover no difference in them? We are still uninformed, it is true, concerning the details of the peace to be ‘dictated to Germany ; hut if, as Mr. Lloyd George affirms, they will be found to coincide exactly with the “ pledges ” on which the recent Election was won, either a good deal of misunderstanding exists in the minds of his supporters, or, we are given to understand, Constituent Assembly of Germany will refuse the to sign them. It is obvious from the discussions that have been taking place in the German Press that the German people are as much in the dark concerning the peace-terms as we are ourselves. It is no less obvious that they are anticipating them to be of the same characteras the Election pledges of Mr. Lloyd George’s is almost majority. But in that case, also, it unanimously agreed in Germany that the German Government's signature will not be put to them. What, in that event, will happen to the peace which will be no peace we do not know. The Allies cannot coerce a nation- of passive resisters ; nor can they assume that a peace has been signed when, in fact, it will not have been. All that can be done, if such a contingency arises, is to modify the terms of peace until they cease to be identical with the “pledges” of Mr. Lloyd George; OF, at any rate, with those pledges as understood or misunderstood by his loudest supporters. On the subject of Russia, the acid-test of consistency could scarcely be passed with honours by Mr. Lloyd George’s speech. We find it, in fact, full of unresolvable contradictions. We are, it appears, at one and the same time pursuing our traditional policy of not interfering in the internal affairs of another countryand interfering. Again, any military intervention would be a blunder; yet we must stand by “our friends,” Koltchak and Denikin. Finally, ’Russia is to be redeemed by her own sons, but the Allies are to continue the “relentless pressure of economic facts.” What it all means is in all probability the conclusion to which, as we said last week, the “Times” in its unauthorised semi-official manner suddenly came on the information of its “reliable authority” situated near Paris-namely,
that it is calculated that Lenin’s administration is about to fall. And of this also, among the conflicting hypotheses suggested by him, Mr. Lloyd George’s speech contained a certain amount of confirmation. ‘‘ There were indications,” he said, “ that while the Bolshevik forces were apparently growing in strength, Bolshevism itself was rapidly on the wane. . . They must have patience. . . . There were signs that Russia was emerging from her terrible ordeal.” But if this is the calculation which our policy rests, what is to happen, we on ask, if it should prove to be wrong? “Until the Allies have made peace in Russia it would be idle to say that the world is at peace” ; yet where is the certain evidence that, in the first place, Bolshevism is on the: wane, and, in the second place, that even if Bolshevism should be dethroned, peace can be made either in or with Russia? The auguries, we confess, appear to us to be unfavourable to both calculations alike. We do not believe that Bolshevism is dying, or that, if it were to die, it will not rise again. And the confusion in Mr. Lloyd George’s speech suggests that he has similar doubts. We are within a week of the date announced for the introduction of the Budget. While it would be useless to attempt to forecast the details of the terrible and menacing balance-sheet likely to be presented to us, we can be well assured, before a word is spoken by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, that the procedure will follow the accustomed path. It is true, of course, that the conditions both of England and the world are absolutely unprecedented ; it is also true that nobody in his senses believes it possible that the Treasury will ever make ends meet again by the adoption of merely the ordinary procedure of banking finance; finally, and above all, it is true that the critical occasion calls for a Committee of Public Financial Safety as urgently as any situation ever called for a conference of the best brains with the utmost goodwill. But the Government is in the position of the sailor described in one of the earliest poems in the Anglo-Saxon language, who finds himself a hundred miles from land with night coming on and his boat leaking, yet within sight all the white of the fleet whose aid he dare not ask. It is literally the truth, we have no doubt, that the banking fraternity have forbidden the Government to lay before the nation an explicit statement the plight in which we find ourselves. of Mortgaged beyond our prospects of being able to repay far by any means short of general impoverishment or the fiercest exploitation of our weaker neighbours in the world, the community is forbidden by the secret decrees of our financiers to seek a remedy in any direction save in that which leads to the further enrichment of the banks themselves. The situation would be one of farce if it were not certain to be one of tragedy. The nation has just come through the greatest war in all history at the cost of a million lives, mountains of plant, and whole islands of raw materials. We have come through ; we have actually paid the price in life, in effort, in plant and in material. Yet, at the end of it all, we find ourselves on the morrow of the victory not only impoverished by the expenditure of all this blood and treasure, but in debt to the calculated money value of it all ? In debt to whom ; and in debt for what? Has not all the expenditure been national, has it not fallen upon everybody, have we not all suffered, each according to his conscience? Apart from loans obtained from abroad, was not all the labour and treasure and life and plant and material a communal possession and the community’sto spend in its own defence? Why should we “ owe ” for it still? Who had the right to “ lend ” to the community what was already the property of the community? And to whom does the community “owe” now the estimated money-value of its sacrifices and exertions in the common cause? Such questions, it goes without saying, will not be asked, and still less answered, in the coming Budget speech of the bankers’
Chancellor of the Exchequer. Nevertheless, sooner or later, they will be both asked and answered ; for the plain truth is this, that the nation cannot and will not submit to die of the mortgage represented by the national debt. Means must be found for releasing us from its stranglehold. It is not the debt alone, moreover, that is likely to prove disastrous; it is, still more, what the debt implies that we have every reason to fear. If, as President Wilson has said, the introduction of foreign capital into a country is equivalent to foreign conquest, because the foreign capital so admitted both claims and exercises the power of control represented by the amount of the loan, it is no less the case that the “ capital ” borrowed by the nation from its own capitalists is equivalent to the concession to the latter of the right of control. This would be obvious in the case of a spendthrift who has finally been compelled to put his estate into the hands of his creditors; but it is equally obvious to the reflecting mind in the case of the nation whose affairs have been brought to their present pass. The bondholders of our national debt of 8,000 millions are the creditors of a spendthrift nation; and neither the fact that they are members of the same community and mere parties to the spending, nor the fact that the expenditure was incurred, not in riotous living but in self-defence,, is likely to have the smallest effect on the parallel between our national situation and that of the fool who has squandered his resources on “ booze and the blowens.” In some respects, indeed, the nation as compared with the private spendthrift is in the more unfavourable position;for whereas the latter has the privilege of declaring himself bankrupt and of compounding with his creditors for something less than twenty shillings in the pound, the nation can declare itself bankrupt only at the risk of revolution and national suicide. The form of control exercisable by our bondholders, and exercised by them, chiefly through the banks, is none the less for being for the most part concealed. The public will not be told, nor’ will even many of the dummy politicians be allowed to discover, the means by which the bondholding banks will exercise their control over what we must continue to call public policy. The fact, however, will be patent to reason that not a Bill will be passed, not an Act signed, not a policy pursued by any Government department, that has not first been approved and passed by the controllers of public control. We direct attention to this situation as being the key of all the situations, political and other, that are likely to arise. The National Debt is the super-legislature of the future ; and the leading bondholders are its legislative and executive combined. It is they, and not their parliamentary puppets, who will dictate measures, putting a veto upon this, introducing that, and pushing forward beyond all popular bounds some other. From China to Peru, wherever British policy is active-our bandholders will be at the back of it. From Irish legislation to the adoption of the findings of the Coal Commission, not an item of our national “ policy ” can be advanced or carried through without the consent of our conquerors-the bondholders and their banks. The bearing of this upon National Guilds will be made clear before many moons have passed ; but we may say at once that the success of any isolated National Guild that may be formed with the consent of the nation’s creditors is not likely to be marked. It would not be such as to encourage the rest of the industries to follow its example. We must see to it, in other words, that we do not allow a National Guild to be born with the serpents of private finance in its cradle. In a still wider sphere!, however-that of our foreign and international trade-the dictation of the bondholder is already becoming apparent. It can be read, we be-
lieve, in the two speeches delivered by Lord Milner in Manchester a fortnight ago. The policy there cautiously adumbrated-for Lord Milner deals in shadows in public but with substance behind the curtain-consists, as will be seen, in the creation of a circulatory system of trade, the whole object of which is to enable the “ nation ” to discharge its debt to the bondholders by the triple expedient of increased production, the exploitation of the Crown Colonies, and increased exports. There is, says Lord Milner, a “ triangle of trade,” of which the three points respectively are home production of machinery, mechanical exploitation of Crown raw materials, and foreign export of the same to the credit of this country; and the object of “ credit ” is to set this triangle whirling. “ Credit ” expended at home will enable our factories to produce machinery for export to the undeveloped lands of the Empire. Credit expended in the Crown Colonies will enable them to buy our machinery and to exploit their resources for the export of their raw materials to foreign countries. Finally, the difference between the cost of the machinery and the value of the raw material produced by it will constitute, when exported to foreign countries, a foreign credit in “ our ” favour by the amount of the “ surplus value.’’ It is an ingenious piece of dynamic geometry, and worthy of‘ the most highly skilled bailiff of the bondholders’ estate; but where, we may well ask, does the nation come in? On every operation requiring credit, the banks, as the sole lessees of the communal credit (lessees, the way, at less than a peppercorn rent), by naturally derive their advantage; the “ rent ” of credit is as solid and universal as the rent of land. Likewise on every exchange of machinery for raw material and of raw material for foreign credit, the banks and bondholders will levy their toll. In the meanwhile, the producers of this country will be sweated to manufacture machinery for export to the unfortunate Crown Colonies; the natives of the Crown Colonies will be employed in forced labour to produce raw materials by means of our sweated machinery; and at the end of the circle foreign nations will be put in debt to our bankers by the sum of the productive labours of ourselves and our fellow Imperial slaves. We do not see, if this picture is in drawing, in what material respect we are better off for our victory than Germany in her defeat. Winning the war and losing the war appear to be much the same thing as far as the producers of the countries are concerned. We, like Germany, are to export solid goods in exchange for the cancellation of a paper debt. The country is to empty itself of machinery and to receive nothing in exchange but the satisfaction of cancelling the bonds of the banks. The extraordinary paradox is reached that, because we have spent ourselves on the war, we must spend an equivalent amount of ourselves on paying for what we have spent! For every millionsworth of shells we have ‘‘ exported ” to Germany, we must export a millionsworth of machinery or raw material to some foreign country ! No need exists to pile Pelion upon Ossa to make a monument of absurdity of the situation; but if it were necessary we could heighten the effect by the addition of the indubitable fact, to which we have called attention of before, that as prices decline the purchasing-power the debt-in other words, its amount measured in commodities-increases. Mr. Kitson and others have long ago warned us of the probability that the bankers, as soon as the war was over, would endeavour to restore the gold-standard for internal as well as foreign trade; and it is no less probable that for the same end, namely, that of raising the purchasing-power of money, the hankers and their confederates will favour any movement for the reduction of prices. It is only degraded human nature, after all, to be anxious to make as large a gain as possible from selling your country into slavery; and if, as appears to be the case, the major
portion of the purchasing-power of the country is allotted by bond and seal and law to the financial classes, the latter may be expected to extract the utmost value for their money. What, in fact, can be done to prevent them? How are we to proceed? In the first place, the whole subject has been purposely made and kept too abstruse to interest the ordinary intelligence ; and, in the second place, since financial control is ex hypothesi supreme control, no superior power exists to combat it. It is perfectly certain that it is no use looking to Parliament, for Parliament is in the bankers’ leadingstrings. It is useless to look to the Treasury, for, as we know from the exchangeability of their officials, the Treasury and the banks are in an understanding partnership. All that we can do is to “expose” the situation to reason while awaiting the inevitable “ crisis ” which must follow on the course of events. That the plans now being hatched will emerge we have no doubt; That they will have a measure of success is certain; but that the nation will not learn their nature before finally consenting to be victimised by them--we are not so sure. Labour’s present demand for “ control” cannot be satisfied by the control of industria1 processes only; it must continue until it reaches the last citadel of capitalist control-the control of finance and credit. For until that control is won, every other form of control is illusory. The statistics just published of the health of the nation as revealed by the recruiting returns are a more eloquent indictment of capitalism than anything that can be written. They speak for themselves; they cry to heaven. Of every nine men of military age called up for examination, three only were fit,” while of the remaining six, two were “unfit ” and four were described as “ human wrecks.” This is to say that two out of every three of the male population in their best years were found to be unfit for “ a man’s work.” And London compared unfavourably with every other city and district in the whole of the kingdom. We are not surprised, of course, by the results of the investigation ; for certain causes have certain consequences which no amount of flagwagging can forestall. Nor are we in the least surprised that the Press should pretend to be, and the general public should really be, surprised by them; for what, after all, does the Press exist for but to pretend that the bad things are better than they are, and its victimised public but to be surprised to find them worse than it thought? The surprise of the public at the facts is a testimony to the efficiency of the Press, for nothing less than a masterly policy of mendacity, pursued over years, could have concealed from the public the meaning of the evidence before its eyes of a rapidly sickening population. Nothing but the supreme efficiency of a Northcliffe could have concealed so long from his millions of readers the certain effects on the general health of bad housing, bad food, had conditions of work, and low wages. What, however, even to the sophisticated, must be a matter of surprise is that the public authorities and the so-called public services of medicine and the like, and all the thousand and one professedly philanthropic, charitable and reformatory societies, should continue to agitate themselves with secondary, tertiary, and even more remote causes and remedies to the complete neglect of the primary cause of private capitalism and the primary cure of socialisation The Cannes Conference of the Red Cross has just solemnly declared a “ world-war ” on tuberculosis by means of the terrific engines of dispensaries, school clinics, hospitals, sanatoria, and popular lectures ; while some of our leading doctors are begging to be allowed to continue to look for cures in the entrails of living dogs. If all these people were in intelligent league with capitalism, they could not labour in its service with more zeal. But a population of which two-thirds is “ unfit is surely a sufficient evidence that their zeal has mistaken its direction,
Towards
National
Guilds.
“ AN Industrial Guild would make its first concern the welfare and competence of its workers. They would have security in employment, protection in sickness, and provision in old age. The next concern would be improved output, to cater for all industrial or communal needs. New industries would be inaugurated through funds paid to the State. The old shareholders, not capable of earning a ‘ service ’ living, would be compensated by a State income for life. Status depends on things other than finance, and if we can get at the real values in humanity we shall have removed the most artificial barriers in life. ” Thus, in effect, Mr. J. R. Raynes, the editor of the “ Leeds Citizen,” in a discussion with Colonel Kitson Clark, of the Airedale Foundry, Leeds, sums up his proposals for re-creating industry. The latter has appealed through the “ Yorkshire Evening Post,” among other channels, for a beneficent alliance between Capital and Labour, and that paper has on this occasion removed the embargo from the discussion in the Press of the Guild idea by a Guildsman. We have no wish to reproach Mr. Raynes with the fact that the instance quoted is the only appearance of the title “ Guild ” in his four contributions to the “ Post. ” Congratulations are due to him for his spirited championship. The only works, however, dealing with the Guild idea at present extant include in their title the word Guild. Men who have never heard specifically of THE NEW AGE, of “ National Guilds,” of “ The Meaning of National Guilds,” are accepting gropingly the essentials of the idea; writers who have plainly been influenced by it seem for some or no reason reluctant to write National Guilds. May we appeal that the silence on the name may be broken, that the idea may have room to grow? Guild, to the uninitiated, is liable to convey only a local significance, whereas the full title assists towards the conception of an industrial organisation corresponding to the present accepted unit of both economic and political society. We dislike shibboleths, but there is something in a name. Replying to that never-forgotten skeleton that appears to exist in Capital’s cupboard but not in Labour’s, the necessity for the incentive for personal gain to make men work for the national good, Mr. Raynes demands : ‘‘ Did Faraday and Newton and Flamsteed search the earth and heavens for the love of gold? “ and adds : ‘‘ Upon great discoveries of men in comparative poverty modern exploiters have built up colossal fortunes.In the quest of personal gain Labour has all the argument and none of the fruits. . . . In that aristocracy of brains, would capitalists fear for themselves after enjoying every advantage for generations ? Would not per year with the esteem of all people be sweeter than with the contempt of the multitude? ” We wonder that Capital is not shamed into putting itself on half-pay ! Mr. Raynes, in the space allowed him, has endeavoured to discuss as many aspects of the subject as anyone might reasonably attempt. Referring to the “ League of Nations,’’ he says that “ national affairs must be right before international affairs can be right,” and there is no misunderstanding the following declaration of faith :-“ I will not argue that nationalisation of itself solves all industrial problems. To me it is but a preliminary. I seek a partnership in industry, but I seek, and many thousands seek with me, another partner-not Capital, but the State, . . . it is impossible to link up Capital and Labour. . . . The worker’s goal is freedom, and he realises that political freedom is but a name. Ten pounds a five-day week, with four hours a day, is exquisite irony, but unless it bought freedom it would not satisfy; and with freedom very much less would seem a feast.” Mr. Raynes hits the mark. That is the shot which throws out of gear the whole of Capital’s calculating
machine for showing how small would be the increase per worker if the national income were pooled and shared. Recently the country has been flooded with Dr. Bowley’s discovery that the reduction of earned incomes to per annum and the confiscation of unearned income would not share out all round at 2s. a week, assuming production to retain its present efficiency. After that, we conclude, Labour should be counted out. All argument based on fiction is weak; argument based on fiction, which is as easy to rebut on the assumption that it is true as in truth it rebuts itself, needs the aid of the Sunday Press to prop it up. The interest on the war debt of 6,500 millions at five per cent. is 320 millions; therefore, on Dr. Bowley’s calculation, the conscription of wealth has taken place, on behalf of the bond-holders. Let us, however, examine Dr. Bowley’s discovery in the light shed by Mr. Raynes. Assuming the national income shared and pooled with the result prophesied, we will further assume that Dr. Bowley could then levy a forced contribution of one penny per head per week. on the whole population. We would then have an annual income of about ten million pounds, and, if he were responsible to the contributors, might receive a salary as Trustee in return for his services in capitalising the amount. Dr. Bowley, however, is counsel for the defence of individualism, and would, no doubt, motor Leeds buy to and up every particle of food in the city, releasing it in return for-Labour! This is not fantastic or extreme; it is the simple inevitable result of the high fever for the accumulation of the tokens of power. He would probably be lynched, but that would be a curtailment of individualist freedom. Freedom, where any essential of subsistence can be withheld from the people by individualists, can never mean anything but freedom to exploit and compulsion to be exploited. Paradoxical it may seem, yet men have been spiritually most free when economically most bound: To be bound on oath to equals is to exercise self-direction; freedom to marry means freedom to remain single, and freedom of contract implies freedom not to contract. Contract between equals is sacred; under duress, it is to be repudiated on occasion; under trickery, to be despised and ignored. Freedom presupposes the voluntary acceptance of a common standard by which men measure themselves, and whose disciplinary necessity they impose from within. The standard of Capital and Labour cannot be common. The standard for Capital is Life, and the standards for Life are values. Freedom- €or Militarism would have meant servitude for Democracy, and Democracy fought. Freedom for Capital spells servitude for Labour, and-it is plain that Labour has decided, if need be, to fight. Man, we are reminded, was long ago defined as the political animal ; for truth, combined with brevity, we prefer to say that man is the artistic animal. We are, therefore, in cordial sympathy with the spirit of the aims of this Society. It has a function, present and prospective : alongside the development of the National Guilds of the major industries, where division of labour must operate, the organisation of Guilds of handicraftsmen is vital to a stable and prosperous Guild society. The improvement of the crafts cannot be too pronounced, nor proceed too quickly. At the same time the appreciation of the writers of "Handicrafts and“ 6d.) for the economic Reconstruction ” (John Hogg. attacking machinery situation is deficient. While the writers. on several occasions, find themselves, perhaps inadvertently, relying on it and advocating it. They have not. therefore, properlyworked out the relationship of the machine to society. Man and machine are to-day in competition, and Man is chained to the wheel ; quantitative superproduction is the purpose of both, and the machine threatens ever to replace the man. The machine as servant will be necessary whether for Mining, Mining Machinery, Centralised
Power, Locomotion, or Printing, and without it we could not have read these papers. The romance of the machine awaits the dissolution of the wage system, which the writers of this work accept. It is undesirable, we submit, even by handicrafts to augment the economic value of the Labourer to the Capitalist, as here suggested, and allotments within the-wage system are the means whereby Labour produces its sustenance in its leisure; the effects have already been felt by the non-allotment holder. We desire a return to Nature, to the conditions, we should perhaps define, under which Life flourishes. The wage system must be wound up before the mass of men can show the rudiments of imagination, and, given that, the devotion of leisure to craftsmanship and art would be a boon to the worker engaged on processes. We plead the justification of NATIONAL GUILDSMEN. events.
The Act of God.
By MarmadukePickthall. IN my last two articles I have spoken of the Turkish suzerainty aver Egypt as a factor which the British Government has failed to estimate at its true value. That failure cannot be ascribed to ignorance, however ; for our exaltation of the Arabs and the strange Hejjaz intrigue are indications that our rulers knew the great importance of the Caliphate; and the Caliphate is but another name for Turkish suzerainty. Simply stated, the ideas behind our recent Arab policy would seem originally to have been: “We, England, can no longer stand alone"-the British Empire could have stood alone, but the men who made this policy were not imperialists-‘ ‘The Russian alliance is necessary to our very existence. Russia insists on the destruction of the Turkish Empire; but Turkey is the seat of the Mohammedan Caliphate, which makes it difficult for us, who own so many millions of Mohammedans, gracefully to take a part in that destruction. If we, with France and Russia, must dismember Turkey and annihilate the Sultan’s power, it is our duty to provide some bright toy-substitute to keep the Muslims quiet and amused. Nobody at present wants Arabia, which is after all the birthplace and religious centre of Islam. The Prophet and the early Caliphs were pure-blooded Arabs. We-will transfer the Caliphate to Mecca, its point of origin”-Its point of origin was El Medinah, but that, of course, is a mere detail-‘‘We will guarantee the independence of a portion of Arabia, and confer high honours on its ruler, who shalI be the new Khalifah, acknowledging his spiritual jurisdiction over all Thus the Muslims of our empire will Mohammedans. be richly compensated for the breaking up of the decrepit Turkish polity.” If the-above is a fair sketch of the official attitude, it did involve full recognition of the value of the Caliphate-that is to say, as things were actually, of the Turkish suzerainty. Indeed, the Muslims of the world without their Caliph and Imam would be very much in the position of the Jews of old without their temple. From the Caliph every Sunnite ruler draws authority ; from the Caliph every Sunnite congregation derives sanction and the sense of unity. And even Shiites at the present day have some devotion for the Caliphate --as witness a late manifesto of the Persian Ulema. The Jews, with their ideal of theocracy, robbed of the symbol of their unity, have given trouble to the world. The Muslims, with the same ideal of theocracy, being fifty times as numerous as were the Jews, and every day upon the increase, would, in the same predicament, give fifty times that trouble. Thus far our rulers were correct in diagnosis. The Caliphate was necessary to the welfare of .the world, and particularly to the welfare of the British Empire; so should be preserved. They were altogether wrong in thinking that there could be an alternative to the existing and acknowledged Caliphate with the prestige of long tradition
both religious and historical. They were wrong in seeking to rule out and plan beforehand. They had started ruling out and planning quite three years before the war-instead of waiting to observe the current of events. To Muslims that has seemed the most amazing and the most objectionable part of recent British policy : that it makes no allowance for the unforeseen event or act of God. Our rulers speak and act as if they had the knowledge and omnipotence which belong to God alone, as if they knew the future and commanded destiny. The collapse of Czarist Russia took them by surprise and left them in a sorry plight, tied hand and foot by plans and undertakings which they had assumed in the belief that Czarist Russia would survive to be the chief Power in the world. They were then powerless, through their own acts, to change a policy ‘disastrous to the British Empire and humiliating to the British name, although the bad conditions which had made that policy seem needful had disappeared as by a miracle. They were powerless to take advantage of the new position of affairs. Is it not astonishing to note how little change the fall of Czarist Russia was able to produce in British policy? With a word we could have disarmed Turkey and regained the loyalty of many millions of our Eastern subjects. But one small change was made. It was announced in Parliament that Great Britain, when required by Russia to transfer the Caliphate away from Turkey, had refused, declaring that the question of the Caliphate was the concern of Muslims only. The announcement came too late, unfortunately. The demand of Russia and refusal of Great Britain was derided as a fairy-tale by people who for three years had experienced our propaganda. The general belief, was that, if Czardom had not fallen, England would have done what Russia wished. If the announcement had been made three years before, it might have saved us from a little of that bitter indignation against England which the anti-Turkish propaganda roused in Muslim minds-a hatred which bids fair to be the heritage of generations. The Arabs of Hejjaz are far from popular in el Islam. The fact arises from their depredations on the yearly pilgrimage. The Turks are popular, as the representatives of law and order, the punishers of all marauders, and protectors of the pilgrimage. In Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, the Meccan Arabs have the worst of names. Our rulers were wrong, therefore, in supposing that their notion of transferring the Metropolis of El Islam to Mecca from Constantinople would cause delight in any part of the Islamic world. And as for their taking Arabs for allies in preference to Turks, I, who know both races pretty intimately, cannot understand it. To return to the announcement, made in Parliament, that Muslims only should decide the question of the Caliphate. Its importance from a British point of view was great, although I doubt whether the Minister who made it had the least suspicion of its greatness. It meant that our whole Arab policy, with all it had involved, the loss of life, the money spent upon it, was a failure in the only sense in which it could have benefited England-I mean, in its appeal to Muslims of the British realm. It meant that our rulers, after forsaking the traditional policy of England at a critical moment in favour of the fad of some eccentric doctrinaire, had been obliged to recognise their error. We
have,in fact, been forced, despiteour frantic efforts to deceive ourselveand other, to acknowledge the that hold on Muslims the of Turkish Caliphate what our is
older statesmen said it was, too strong for us to loose. The admission has been made, not frankly,but be implicitly. And what does it involve?The condemnation of the very policy to which, as far as anybody knows, we still adhere, of partitioning the Turkish
Empire between ourselves and our Allies, whether as conquered territory, or occupied territory or spheres of influence, as or mandatories of a League of Nations is
quite immaterial. But if it was so necessary to make much of a Khalifah whom we ourselves intended to set up; it is a thousand times more necessary to make much of a Khalifah who, though beaten in the field, has triumphed in the loyalty of the whole Muslim world. We and our European Allies may be robbers and proud of the fact. But decent robbers work clandestinely and in the shadow. In this case, we are acting in the light of day, and there are people looking on who do not share our easy view of other people’s property All Asia is regarding us with horror, The agitation over the religious question of the Caliphate, though fierce, is nothing as compared with the impassioned sympathy for Turkey as a nation and an empire, possessing rights like other nations; other empires which is felt by every Muslim, every Asiatic who is not a Christian, at this moment. The whole prestige which we enjoyed of old in Eastern lands was due to our support of Turkey, an Asiatic and non-Christian Power attacked by Europe. The British public only hears of the misdoings of theTurks, their carelessness, their massacres of Christians, their bad government. It has been fed on propaganda which suppressed one half the truth. The Indian, the. Egyptian public knows the other half. It is profoundly moved by the misfortunes of the Turks, the massacres of Muslims by the Christians in the Turkish Empire, which we never hear of, the courage and endurance of the Turks in cruel circumstances, their ruthless and relentless persecution at the greedy, I have bloodstained hands of Christian Europe. purposely piled on the adjectives in that last sentence to give the reader an idea of the state of feeling, which our merry European scramble for the Sick Man’s property has roused in Asia and North Africa. If anybody cares to know the views of Muslim India on this subject, I recommend a little paper-covered work quite lately published-“The Future of the Muslim Empire,” by Sheykh M. H. Kidwai of Gadia*--a mild expression of the wishes of a hundred million British subjects. The views of the Egyptians were made plain the other day, when the crowd of mourners following the coffins of men slaughtered in the riots chanted in refrain :-“O God, restore the power of Turkey. Down with tyranny. ’’ “Tyranny” ! That is the British Empire in the East, as it appeals to Muslims after four years of martial law and ‘‘streng verboten,” and to wartime propaganda I wish that a Royal Commission could be sent out to investigate upon the spot the treatment undergone by Muslims in India, the Straits Settlements and Egypt during the war. And I wish that the Commission afterwards would publish the result of such investigations, keeping nothing dark. That might open people’s eyes to the abyss towards which our Czarist, antiTurkish policy is dragging England. The Muslims cannot reasonably be blamed for holding fast to an opinion and some prejudices which everybody who knew anything about the matter knew they held with fervour, We are to blame for wantonly assailing that They have merely been opinion and those prejudices. in the position of men standing still, bewildered, under the buffetings and insults of a man gone raving mad, who once was sensible. I simply state the case as it appears to them. And they have had enough of it. They draw together, and if we go on with our mad behaviour, now the war is over, they will fight. It is not a case of local grievances to be redressed. They feel that in the historic Muslim Empire their religion and their hope of progress is attacked. Let England make one generous gesture toward:; the Turkish Empire, and the present awful strain would be relieved. The Turks have been more sinned against than sinning for two centuries; we Ourselves have used them badly in the last ten years. We have them at our mercy at * Published by the Central Islamic Society, Street, E.C.4. 158, Fleet
the present moment, and generosity becomes the victor But our rulers are tied up in their own war-time propaganda, and I fear that we have no man great enough to make the gesture needed to relieve the situation in the East. For generosity at such a time is proof of greatness, and we are little men who thieve and barter, too weak to stand alone.
The First Lost Ideal in Woman Suffrage.
(Reprinted By Henry E. O’Keeffe, C.S.P. from “America” by the kind permission the Editor.) of
THERE is sweet solace in the thought that though the laws anent women may be mutable as the sea, woman will remain ever and forever the same, The fluctuations of custom and, fashion may excite her for. the moment, but the novelty dies down and she reacts to her lovable and fundamental self. This is the only exhilarating truth in the general confusion of thought which overshadows us, now that woman has thrust herself into the public conflicts of men, With the measured pace of time, will there come the inevitable slump in the actual voting? The game has been perhaps too rough and she will awaken to discover that she is helpless in the domain of public performance both by nature and grace, in mind and in body. Yet, for the present, her self-assertiveness will blaze up, inflamed by the ardent insincerity of the politician. She being credulous and trusting, as is her nature, will confuse patriots with politicians and in this exalted mood all her geese will be as swans. Already, political manipulation is feeling for the fibres of her heart, since it cannot reach the grey tissue of her brain. The subtle cunning of political method has divined that woman approaches the problems of life with her heart and not with her head. St. Thomas Aquinas said something of the same thing, but he was a Dominican friar and lived in the Middle Ages. Did it take the searching splendour of his genius to discover a truth known to every youth who has loved a maid? Coventry Patmore in an ugly mood clumsily translates the philosopher’s words with the statement that woman is “scarcely a reasonable creature. ” Now we know the Saint completes the distinction between irrationalis and vix rationalis. He does not mean that the devout sex is irrational or scarcely rational, but that deep down in the very roots of its nature the emotional strain is dominant and the rational ever subservient. This weakness or dependence seems to be parcel of the Divine scheme, and hence the perennial source of not only the interior influence, but the inspiration of romance, poetry and art. Moreover, woman’s delicate reserve is the breath of moral life, the origin of her incomparable personal charm. Because of her inappropriateness for the things of strength, intellectual and physical, she will lose out in this unruly public scrimmage of politics. Can she be taught to do something which will subvert the fixed and unalterable economy of the Divine design? Can she upset the past and make anew her nature? If the suffrage movement is builded on a fallacy, wherewith shall we defend woman from herself or adjust the defects of her qualities? Will she, because of the glorification of a vote, wax stronger physiologically, and be adorned with an intellectualism never possessed before? Will her latent genius as she calls it, exploit itself under this novel adjustment of circumstances, or will she retain her natural, primal instinct for motherhood rather than for a Divina commediaor a “Venus de Milo”? Does the forcefulness of genius ride roughshod over untoward conditions? If so, woman’s opportunity has come and gone, long
since, and she still is the creature of infinite variety, but within a circumscribed sphere. The rude demagogue shall find no favour with woman, but what of the refined, wary, if not comely type of professional politician? Will he, like Richard, the wicked monarch, creep into favour with himself for the prowess of his vicious undertaking with the impressionable queen ? This if it be a truth will die hard, but woman’s blatant self-sufficiency is evanescent and the more provoked by her tremendous efficiency in the critical suffering of the cursed war. In that she was her supreme and sweet self, for it sat well her nature. Will she draw conclusions wider than the premises and mistake her deeds in a crisis for normal action in a permanent environment? If, perhaps, she does not, then some chivalrous politician will do it for her. Already we shudder to think that such a type of politician is extant. Will she because of her susceptibility and sacrificial capacity be made a burnt offering on his new altar? So now, instead of one we have two problems embracing the complex structure of womankind. Its prodigious complexity is a byword even for those who have never studied a word of feminine analysists, like Balzac or Bourget or, the less psychological but diverse Englishmen Meredith, Hardy and Patmore. They are of one mind that though there may be several species of woman in womanhood, every woman is several species of womanhood in herself. The gigantic proportions of the ‘difficulty become at once obvious, its manifold aspects are unspeakable. and erudition of the modern To comparethe craft woman with the opulent intelligence and secret power of the woman of bygone times is to draw comparisons between the glow-worm and the star. The iridescences of feminine splendour had everything of accomplishment and grace, in keeping with the eternal womanly. But they had it naturally, for it was part of the Providential plan. Hence they never lost distinction or composure, nor were they ever consumed with hysteria for the possession of a public boon which ran counter to the impregnable walls of the womanly nature. Funthermore, not only the criminologist, but the moralist, will venture to think that never was a more vi tal principle of psychological experience applicable to this urgent situation than corruptio optimi pessima. Can the female become more deadly than the male even in politics? If the Indian squaw in Utah can barter her Divine privilege of a vote for seventy-five cents, what is to constrain the negro wench from offering hers for the enormous sum of one dollar? But this is a mere incidental and can, perhaps, be regulated by a law, if not by a vote. But can a vote alter something deeper than the foundation of the everlasting hills ? The demoralisation of the red woman will react on her papoose as the moral frailty of the black matrix will be vouchsafed to her piccaninnies If the salt be there, but lacking in savour, wherewith shall things be salted ? St. Francis de Sales, who, like St. Vincent de Paul and Fenelon, understood the Divine side of womankind, believed ’that there was nothing so malodorous as the foul stench of decaying lilies. This is, at least, a pungent fact, if the lily be the white symbol of inviolate feminine excellence. Lacordaire was a friar but of a modern type and of a mind which reasoned that the world can corrupt all things, even so fair a creature as a woman. Though shielded by angelic influence, the Blessed Joan of Arc slept in her steel armour. She was dealing with men. This new species of womanhood must be thrice armed to meet the devices of polittical action. It does not matter if her quarrel be just or otherwise. To discourse upon so fine a subject in so gross a fashion : it is the female dealing with the male as never before in history, the ways of a man with a maid. The Spanish women are slender in form and rather
vain of their tiny feet. Of old the feet of the Spanish Madonna were hid in fleecy clouds and folds of cloth of gold. It was the artists’ passion to paint the ideal woman. If his jealousy was provoked by the protrusion of a foot, what would he have said to the exploitation of a modern woman? Would his idealism interpret aright, if he should conclude that the standards had relaxed? Will the feminine ideal eventually die and the people perish? Will our youth no longer see visions or dream dreams? If woman is now the businessvictim of merchant, broker, banker and lawyer, because these professions have no ideal sense, is there a budding evil already asserting itself in her novel relationship with the politician? That he has already dared to batten on the weakness of her strength is the first indication that he, too, is beginning to lose the ideal sense in reference to woman. How is she to make the best of this bad job? There is but one method-to be her honest self and seek the ministrations of the priest, the poet and the lover.
Courts
Martial.
OUR benevolent Government throws so many Committees at our heads that it is really quite impossible to keep track of them all. One day early in March Mr. Churchill announced a Committee of Inquiry into the Court Martial System. But whether this Committee has yet been appointed, is now sitting, or has already sent in its report, it is hardly worth troubling to, discover. For his Committee is bound to be fatuous. Mr. Churchill conceded it only under pressure. Following the example of our open-minded Premier when the latter introduced the Bill to appoint a Coal Commission, he prejudiced beforehand the issue to be investigated, by saying that the Army regarded the Court Martial as a fair tribunal. The Committee is required to report, not on whether the Court Martial should be retained or abolished, but on “how the Courts can be carried to a great pitch of equity and tolerance without hampering that rough and ready justice that is vital.” These vague terms of reference would obviously not satisfy the general public, if that confused body could be goaded into thinking about. the subject at all. Mr. Churchill and his Army Council might be startled out of their complacent delight in a system which, like slums, no really free people desiring to breathe would tolerate for an hour. Mr. Churchill’s mind is obsolete, as obsolete as Queen Elizabeth’s. His satisfaction betrays him. In effect, he announces that the autocracy of “ the Service ” (in this instance, the Adjutant-General and the Judge Advocate-General) find no radical fault in the system, but that, if the public, imperfectly expressing itself by means of questions in the House of Commons, grows importunate over details, it may have an inquiry, carefully limited in scope, wherewith to stay its importunity. Fortunately, the autocracy of the Service is fighting a losing battle, in this and other sections of the field. Strange as it may appear to those who remember the election majorities of last December, the War has given a new impetus to Democracy, even in England. Stranger still, the Army has been reached by it. By the action, generally described as mutinous, of the soldiers themselves, the Nigh Demobilising Parties have already been compelled on occasion to explain themselves. Before long Democracy will insist on something further. Instead of subsequent explanation we shall have previous consultation ; instead of the minor patchwork reforms within the Court Martial System, we shall have such a revolutionary change in the systemitself that only the debris will be left. Our Government historians and Generals on retired pay are welcome the debris. They can take it away with then to to the hunting counties to play with in the closed season.
Take stand for a moment along with those at whose opinion Mr. Churchill and the Adjutant-General would sniff in high contempt. How do the lower commissioned and the other ranks of our unprofessional Army, when they think about it at all, regard the Court Martial? It is they whom it touches must directly. In theory anyone in the Army may suffer Court Martial; in practice others become unusual for anyone not a Chinese coolie, a Y.M.C.A. worker, a private soldier, or a noncommissioned, warrant or commissioned officer up to but not higher than the rank of major regimentally employed) to undergo that inconvenience. Other and more ingenious punishments have been invented for more senior officers. After Loos, the senior officers of the -- Division, many of whom you or I would have shot with great personal satisfaction, Were sent“ home.” English criminal law, outside the Army, rests on the principle that a man shall be tried by his peers and by experts, working in conjunction. English criminal law, inside the Army, rests on the principle that a man shall he tried neither by his peers, nor by experts separatelyor in conjunction, but by his superiors--in rank. Perhaps a system built up on this basis achieves “ that rough and ready justice that is vital.” Perhaps it doesn’t. Whether or no, such justice as it does achieve is accidental. As the philosophers would say , Justice does not follow of necessity from the system but is contingent. When secured, it is the work of the human beings administering the system. No doubt, a similar charge might be brought against all criminal courts. Forms are useless not vitalised by the honour and intelligence of men. But forms are devised to- express ideas and to serve ideals. Criminal courts outside the Army aim at safeguarding the interests of the accused, and neutralising as far as is possible in any human institution vagaries due to human imperfections. Injustice occurs in spite of the system. ‘The Court Martial provides no effective safeguards, and is based on the absurd belief that irrational and biased human beings, by a miraculous conversion of will, and without the help of the skilled craftsman in law, can dole out justice to their fellow creatures. Assume, without proof, in the approved manner of the politician, that justice is given to nine in every ten accused persons tried by Court Martial There is nothing to prevent gross injustice to the tenth, except the inexpert and fitful- sense of duty of three or more random officers, and the limited intelligence of a confirming officer, who, in any event, hears none of the evidence being given, and, as in a Field General Court Martial, may not have before him more than a very incomplete record of it as it was given. Above all, the Court Martial does not deal out justice which the accused can, not to say must, recognise as such. lt drops justice (or injustice) upon him from above, as nonchalantly as an aeroplane drops bombs or propaganda leaflets. Every human criminal, in the Army or out of it, has an inalienable right to judgment according to the standards his equals accept. Inasmuch as he cannot try himself, which is the ideal, civil law recognises his right to trial by those as nearly like himself as possible. This right the Court Martial utterly denies. Nor is it any answer to pretend that the standards- accepted by senior commissioned officers are the same as those held by the lower ranks. So long as inequality is bluntly denied in fact by the sharp class distinction of the commission it is as useless and dishonest to affirm it in argument as to maintain the identity of interests of Capital and Labour tinder wageslavery. Not by a pious trust in sentiment, which works only upwards, or by an appeal to that degrading relationship by which officers are said to be responsible for, instead of to, their men, can we justify an autocratic legal system that derives directly from the Star Chamber.
Nothing faintly resembling trial by equals has yet found its way into the Army, because the Court Martial can flounder along its merry path without it. But latterly it has failed even to flounder without the help oft formulae the legal expert. Despite all the rules and with which its procedure is honeycombed--rules and formulae which were designed to aid and end by bewildering the untutored mind- the Court Martial during the War, and especially in the Expeditionary Forces, did so often break down completely, that Courts Martial officers had to be appointed whose duty it was to keep it going along the narrow, though not straight, track of legality. That was a beginning. It was a surprising admission on the part of the Army Council that knowledge of the rules and conventions of trench warfare did not carry with it knowledge of the laws of evidence. If the public cared at all about the administration of justice in the Army it would demand the immediate application all over of the principle here and If we are to spend 440 there imperfectly recognised. millions on the Army we might use a few thousands to form, a Royal Army Legal Corps. We could easily spare a few lawyers from high places to give it a start.
Craftsmanship in Industry
Modern
It is a sound instinct that makes Mr. Penty conceive of craftsmanship as the substratum of all Guild theory, and I think it may be contended with some show of reason that we are at the beginning of a big movement towards craftsmanship despite the apparently unfavourable tendency to routine and sectional work. The future for craftsmanship, it may be admitted, looks dark and lowering, with huge scale production on the one hand and the simplification of processes on the other. It would appear as if the machines were destined to supersede completely skill of hand, and that, consequently, mental interest in work would die Not only does the present industrial tendency seem to lie along the lines of machine production arid uniformity of processes, but collectivist theory and the assumptions underlying it tend to confirm the impression that this is the inevitable line of development. It is a commonplace in the conversation of Socialists that it is not discussion work that is wanted but leisure. If pressed in it transpires that they believe work general to in There can be nasty, and, at best, an unavoidableevil. foundation. be no sound society reared on such a false To insist, as a permanent hypothesis of society, that culture must always be divorced from labour, is tantamountto admitting the defeat of their own social ideals. So long as culture remains exotic to common life, and so long as work seems a thing to hurry through and have finished with, so long will the achievement of a worthy civilisation be impossible. The picture and the sculpture, as things in themselves, as exhibits in the public gallery or the rich man’s salon, instead of being part of the general scheme of decoration in the temple or the public building, are symbols of the degeneracy of Art. Art should be the flowering of work, and should grow naturally from it, rather than be an excrescence on it. But It is not only the industrial individualist and the collectivist who are at fault but many of the pioneers of the modern arts and crafts movement themselves seek to build the crafts on an insecure foundation. They have turned their backs on the whole of modern industry, and have spent their energy in trying to work back to the past- Craftsmanship has become with them an affair of furniture and enamels ; they have denied the very possibility of craftsmanship in the huge typical industries of the present age. Craftsmanship may enter into architecture, they admit, but into engineering, of the never. But the stone which these builders
future reject may become the chief corner-stone of the building. We must have craftsmanship in our large primary and key industries, such as are engineering and shipbuilding to-day, in the same way as mediaeval craftsmanship was the core of the staple trades and industries of the fourteenth century. A modern ship takes the place of the Cloth Hall and the Church of mediaeval architecture, and should be no less the work of the deep, earnest spirit of the craftsman. This will be conceded, no doubt, not only as a desirable, but as a necessary end by the protagonists of But, it may be contended, the spirit of craftsmanship.. the intractable nature of the materials used rind the employment of machinery on a large scale prevents the acquisition of that individual skill and the sense of touch which make the true craftsman. This, I believe? to be quite an erroneous assumption. If it were true, there would be nothing for it but to renounce craftsmanshipfor machine production, or else limit the employment of the machines, or abolish them altogether, as the inhabitants of Erewhon did. But the dilemma is a false one, and a resolute facing of the facts will prove it so. There are two conceptions concerning the nature of the craftsinan, and whether we adopt the one or the first other or a union of both is immaterial. The conception is that the craftsman understands the whole process and purpose of the industry in which he may take but a small part. It is assumed that he could do The other parts of the process almost equally well. second conception of the craftsman is that he thoroughlyunderstands his tools and can humour them to work his will. Either of these criteria the skilled man in modern industry will satisfy. Does it seem a large claim to make? Let me justify it. Not only do I hope to do so, but to show that industrial necessity in the If such near future will accentuate his craftsmanship. can be done, then, so far as Guild theory rests on craftsmanship, I believe it ultimately does, it will not only as be morally and aesthetically justified, but he economically justified and proven to be practical, by being in the true line of industrial development. I propose to make this demonstration, moreover, not in some industry specially adaptable to modern notions of craftsmanship but in that industry which is the very skeleton of modern industrial society, and in which machinery plays the largest part, engineering itself. During the period of the war the engineering industry proved capable of being run with an immense amount of dilution. In some of the new shell factories this dilution of women and other unskilled workers reached proportions of anything between 80 and 100 per cent. Incidentally, I believe there is a psychology in trades, a psychology which will forever prevent women from becoming craftsmen in dealing with the large, intractable metals of steel and brass. It requires a different kind of touch than women possess to sense the feel of these metals, and the necessarily oily and dirty nature of much of the work is of a kind utterly unattractive to them, though not at all repugnant to men. It has been asked why, with all this capacity for apparently unlimited dilution, there was such a call for skilled men in 1915 and 1916. It was because of the necessity of making and laying down new plant and of keeping the present plant in good condition that the cry for skilled men became clamant. It is not simply as a machine-tender that the worker gives evidence of his skill, although incidentally he does so in that capacity, but it is much more in preventing rapid deterioration of the machine and in securing good results from imperfect machines, where the unskilled person achieves bad results from first-class machinery. This is where touch tells, doubtlessly, but the craftsman's skill lies in knowing and understanding the machine and in his capacity to renew it. The later phases of the war obscured this
necessity for skill, by the importation of plant from America, where the skilled men had not yet been burned up in the fire of war, but the demand for this skill was only postponed and will become exceedingly insistent in the next few years. It is because of the long time taken in some of the processes, say, in turning a shaft for a large Atlantic liner or for a battleship, that the exercise of skill and craft is not noticed. The machine, apparently, does everything, but it is the careful and watchful eye which is the most essential factor in the process. A machine is a colossal tool, and the latter, such as a spade is essentially an extension of the fingers. Can it be said that the invention of spade or chisel spelt the doom of craftsmanship practised by the class? Or is it not the as case that the older craftsmanship gave place to a higher and more subtle one, made possible by tooIs? So with the machines ! The degree of skill and knowledge required in modern industry is, despite highly coloured pictures to the contrary, much greater than was ever required in the past. In the other aspect of craftsmanship? concerning a knowledge of the purpose of the sum of the different processes, it would be an education to the outside observer and to'the would-be educationist to know the amazing amount: of curiosity shown in all processes of the engineering industry by those engaged in one part of it, a curiosity unknown to the outside world because, of the necessarily technical terms employed. The large attendance at technical schools have little significance other than the gratification of this curiosity, as also the insistent desire, suppressed, if at all, with great difficulty, of the apprentices to move from one department of engineering to another. This interest in .craft is evidenced again in the amount of "shop" talked when engineers foregather in the evening, or in many of their lobbies. Indeed, it is a matter for complaint among many that this obsession with craft draws attention away from questions of citizenship. For good or ill this is all evidence of a strong spirit of craftsmanship. This is all the more remarkable because of the elaborate and complicated nature of modern machinery. It was said earlier in this article that the Guild theory, based on the spirit of craftsmanship was in the direct line of modern industrial development. This was said, irrespective of the undoubted movement towards larger and larger industrial combinations. What was meant was that the rapid developmenit of quantitative production by an inward necessity was working itself out. It is true that we seem to be in a similar situation as society was at the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the simplification of processes brought about by the great inventions made the dilution of industry by women and children possible? But there is a difference which is all essential. There is no longer a world market to win and the raw resources of material and power are no longer thought to be unlimited. Industry, like agriculture, must become intensive rather. than extensive. A real efficiency as distinct from an immediate financial profit will be the goal, and in this lies the seeds of a new and more splendid craftsmanship The work will be done by the machines, but their production and use will be questions of craftsmanship in ever greater and greater degree. This whole progress towards the new craftsmanship will be accentuated by claims, made outside of industry proper, claims which must be satisfied. With the satisfaction of the right to work a new motive for the development of industrial skill will be introduced. Its tendency will be to stabilise and equalise wages or pay with the consequence that it will be no longer remunerative to employ unskilled labour rather than skilied labour. If hot the actual exercise of skill, then its potential employment will be in view.
In this discussion, one industry only, but that a significant one, has been dealt with. Other industries and professions could be dealt with also in detail, for all trades and professions, even the apparently dull work of clerical routine, are susceptible of this intensive culture, which yields abundant interest, and in which the spirit of craftsmanship can express itself. Almost any field of activity will yield interest arid satisfaction if we resolutely seek such in our work. The defect in civilisation is a real, although foolish, of the contempt for work, which is the counterpart prevalent hedonistic conception of leisure. Art and craftsmanship have become debased as the playthings of the rich and the idle, instead of being the vital expression of the heroic in man. It was a sound instinct that made many of us turn our backs on modern arts and crafts and abandon their enervating and puerile influences to wring some meaning out of modern industry as, it is, in all its stark reality. GEO. W. THOMSON.
bamboo, and on a moonlight night project its shadow on to a piece of white silk on a wall; the true form of the bamboo is then brought out.” imagine, this shadow abstraction so soft, so rich, so suggestive, just the thing to move the sensibility, and place beside it the hard, academic geometrical abstraction of the Wyndham Lewis sort-the mixture of triangles, rhomboids, segments which are said to represent the miraculous soul of a bamboo. One could continue a very long time quoting these old Chinese who were certainly the forerunners of the post-Impressionists. They gave of the best in art vision and production, and founded a great spiritual tradition of painting which was taken up and continued by the Japanese. In both countries, China and Japan, in €he highest forms of art, the rhythm of the spirit was the essential thing. “ The artist must place himself in communion with his hills and streams, and the secret of the scenery will be solved,’’ is a Chinese-Japanese way of counselling spirit-communion. All who followed this counsel came very close to the fount of life, and therefore to the source of greatness. It is my contention that in the beginning there was greatness, and great paintings, like great books, are great because they are begun at the beginning of the world. They are begun at a period when the extravagant imagination is free to build unto itself an ivory tower of joy whence it may contemplate a polluted world of wild beasts and monsters, as that of certain Japanese painters did. Japan: then, followed the rare path of China, and had many exalted sons in consequence. There was Hokusai (a modern old-master), for example. I shall be told by ultra-moderns that Hokusai is negligible. A draughtsman who spent an exceptionally long life in search of truth of representation and only succeeded in representing a hand that Rembrandt or Ingres would approve certainly deserved the title of “old man mad about drawing. ” An opinion of the kind would not surprise me. I know that thoroughness is out of fashion, and the general faith in accuracy is declining with the fall of intellect; the fact of the matter being that someone has discovered that accuracy is intellectual, and art production is emotional. I also know that though sensibility and spontaneity have the making of immortal things, yet great painstaking with great feeling will make a great work of art, but not without feeling. Feelingless pains taking produces scientific and hard business stuff. Hokusai was both painstaking and emotional. He was born a true artist, and he became a great draughtsman. In my opinion he was thoroughly equipped for the noble grotesque eminence; and I put him there. All sober accounts of him agree that he was an opt-and-out Nature-man whose intense love of Nature gave rise to superb qualities in his work. This was one elemental feature which brought him very close to the source of grotesque inspiration. Another is, he was a primitive capable of viewing an ugly world through a powerful, extravagant imagination. He conceived in truth what he expressed in laughter. By the post-Impressionists his laughter would be considered idiotic-and justly. In Professor C. J. Holmes’ interpretative studies of Hokusai this passage occurs : “ He was master of the life and movements of the men and beasts around him, as no other artist has ever mastered the animate world he or his own country. Besides drawing real things, could design the unreal, and has created ghosts and monsters with a spirit and individuality that are quite unparalleled. He has the misfortune to be a humorist as well, so that his inimitable caricatures, his tendency to the attitude of the laughing philosopher, have given him, with the shallow and ill-informed, the reputation of being merely the funny man of Japan.” For all noble grotesque purposes, Hokusai’s misunderstood laughter rests not upon its form, but upon its content.
The Old Master
as Grotesque.
By Huntly Carter. iii.-Hokusai. I SAID in my article on “Early Chinese Painters” that these old men had everything the new men claim to have, and something more-which admitted them to In proof of this, the temple of the noble grotesque. let me, even at the risk of cumbering space with fine things, quote further examples of Eastern thought from But first, here is a modern “ The Mind of the Artist.” opinion taken from the “ Contemporary Review. ” Although the mightiest mountains in the world divide the Atlantic continent and Japan is isolated from it by the sea, Asia is all one in its boundless love for the Universal and the Ultimate. This unity of Asia is the cause that the principal canon of Japanese, as of Chinese, art is the “life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of Things.’’ Here is another, “The note of joyous liberation is characteristic of the finest art and thought of China.’’ Now, let us see on what principles of picture-making the old men scaled the peaks. According to Hsieh Ho the six canons of art in sixth century China were as follows. “Rhythmic vitality, anatomical structure, conformity with nature, suitability of colouring , art i se i c composition and finish.” The first of these canons is all-important with the new men. Nowadays, rhythm is a term given to a theoretical movement abstracted from actual things, and said to have a real life effect, that is something galvanised into life by a mutual conception of the object and expressed by tricks of arrangement, consisting of patches of colour and fugitive lines, or by an organic design “ instinct with life and motion.” This peculiar search for rhythm has led ultra-moderns to organise the rhythmic activities into systems having ends that distinguish one system from another. There is, for example, the system of rhythmic design of Van Gogh, of colour of Henri-Matisse, of form of Picasso. It is very doubtful if these emotional and intellectual systems have anything to do with the “ life-movement of the spirit. ” The other canons are concerned with methods of attaining rhythms, some of which are certainly followed by the new men, who are confronted with ideas of space, synthesis, simplicity, evocative colour, and significant form. The Chinese conception of synthesis is described by Hsieh No. “The creative spirit in descending into a pictorial composition must take upon itself organic structure. This great imaginative scheme forms the bony system of the work; lines take the place of nerves and arteries, and the whole is covered with a skin of colour.” The pith of a beautiful kind of abstraction is given as follows : “Those who study bamboo-painting take a stalk of
In fine, Hokusai is a spiritual seeker and a religious man of the first order. “Hokusai,” as Professor Holmes remarks further, “was the first to give effect to this sentiment” (the democratisation of the gods of Japan) “in art; indeed, in his determination to mark the links that join the immortals with mortal men, he is not afraid of caricature, The fat Hotei was half human even with the strictest of the old masters; but they never revelled in the extravagant inflation of the paunch that delighted their less reverent junior. . . . . His gods, in fact, are gods of the people, who have put off their austerity and remoteness to become real and familiar comrades. Monsters, ghosts, and demons are treated in the same spirit. Theyremain superhuman because it is the essence of their nature.” To me, the inference is that Hokusai expressed a rare form of the laughter of spiritual democracy different from, but comparable with.. that of the Greeks. The latter covered the earth with the deities of mythology; the former with monsters-“the gigantic spider with the horrible appendages of a cuttle-fish, the fox with nine floating, waving tails., the giants”-symbolic of the monstrous characteristics of mortal men to be refined away by spiritual harmony.
Art Notes.
By B. H. Dias. RUTTER’S AD E LP H I GALLERY. Is noticing Mr. Wadsworth’s show of woodcuts I should perhaps have emphasised the importance of Mr. Rutter’s newly opened gallery at 9, Duke Street, Adelphi. This gallery is intended to meet the “need” both of artists who wish to sell and of “ consumers ” who wish to purchase inexpensive pictures and drawings(i.e., definitely from 10s. to When one remembers Gaudier-Brzeska too poor to buy stone for carving; when one remembers how ready he was to sell drawings of animals at 10s. each (with presumably a reduction by the dozen), and to sell statues at what people would now pay for one of his ‘drawings, indeed at half or a third of what some of his drawings now bring . . . and all this only five years ago, one readily sees what use some such artshopas Mr. Rutter’s might have been at that time; and, denying that all art stopped with Gaudier’s death, one is happy to think of the service the Duke Street room may perform for other young artists. Judging from the few books exposed for sale on the window-ledge, the Rutter-Reed taste has escaped from the Georgian fetters of Devonshire Street ; and the more active literary as well as the more advanced artistic elements are apparently to have a boutique in which they will not be regarded with disparagement or embedded in quotidiana. At present the place seems to suffer from a constant absence of staff; but there is much to be hoped from the enterprise, and we wish it every success. THE FINE ART SOCIETY. The Fine Art Society caters to a more opulent and conservative clientele. Constance Rea, whose work is now to be seen there, is not a bad painter of the ManetChas-Shannon-J. J. Shannon-cum-even-Orpen consignment. Her “ Lotus Eaters ” is hampered with an unfortunate simple-life preraphaelite face ; her I I is extremely well painted. Such titles as “ My Lady’s Dress ” and “ Phillida Flouts Me ” indicate the trend of her labours. “ The Sentimentalists ” remembers Manet not displeasingly. Mary Davis’ silk painting is Conder that doesn’t quite come off. W. G. ROBB. But the gallcery has scored in the Robb exhibit, perhaps the most interesting work they have shown since their Persian miniatures. The show is burdened, like many other shows, with a preface written in bilge of
the purest water by Maj. HaIdane Macfall : “ Uttering the moods of nature, etc.,” ‘‘ cast upon his senses as Wordsworth aforetime sang such moods in verse, ” etc. Now, it is to Mr. Robb’s credit that he obviously paints to please himself. He appears to be of a single mood (about as much like Wordsworth as Diane de Poitiers may be said to be like Jane Austen). His “ world ” is unvexed by Bernard Shaw, by Marinetti, by any art-thought since Conder. I don’t imagine he would be different if Conder had never existed. He goes in for delicate feminine robes, delicate half-lights, mists, gallantries. (All these things being, M. Macfall, the very gist and essence of Wordsworth?) His (Robb’s) nature is decked with artifice and with silks and satins. tone Watteau-Fragonard, with general Corot-Conder sort of formula for the arrangements, technique, soft, faint colours with bright dashes of blue and orange. There are no cubes and no vortices, but there is a perfect veracity to his own intention, and his technique is in his own control; here we find a background in thin paint almost as simply .applied as the flames in the background of VeIasquez “ Don Juan de Austra ” ; in 31, trees flaked in a manner that might have been assimilated from Perugino. These “ influences” are applied in the right way, and Robb has learned his traditional metier as traditional metiers should be learned.. We would mention particularly Nos. 3. 32; 13 for its fall of sunlight ; the bright centre and pseudo-classic pavillions well arranged in 15; the blue skirt in 19, 31, 32 in which last the small delicate figures are done with pleasant suavity. No. 16 is, perhaps, earlier work; the rainbows and the oval are less convincing, the tall trees picture less convincing. On the whole the work is of “ the summer of the mind,” galan, alroso. No, 30 also has its merits, and 5 also; 8 is rougher. Almost any of the pictures would have a permanent charm in a boudoir or drawing-t. room. EPSTEIN. To come nearer the popular heart and to borrow a formula from the “ London Mail ” or the “ Sunday Evening Telegram ” : ‘‘ Is it not about time that ” the country made some use of Jacob Epstein’s indubitable sculptural genius? The plums are falling, they are falling large and luscious into various mouths of lesser distinction than Epstein’s. I will grant any claim of the adversaries. I grant that Epstein is an artist as grumpy as he is great. I grant that he has not been to school with Baldassar Castiglione, but it is the function of an all-wise and beneficent administration to make use of the national resources, and Epstein’s ability is definitely part of these resources. Personal considerations should not intervene, There are more memorials to be made than there are good sculptors to make them. They are not all of them national. With Epstein idle, there is a chance for some municipality to steal a march on the Empire. I, for one, hope some city will do it if the central administration does not.* There are several other directions in which the war museums might show more zeal than they have. It would indeed be interesting to see. a published list of the proportion in which the works of various artists have been acquired for these institutions. After all, we are les jeunes, we are the people who will live the rest of our lives in the face of these memorials. And it is even permitted one to hope that England will not lie permanently under the cloak of Bundy-ism or even of Orpenisation. SIBYL MEUGENS. At the Goupil we find a room full of Oriental decorativism, escaped more or less by Miss Meugens in 12, rather overdone in 19; displaying pleasant humour in * Frivolous correspondent suggests that J. E. should design (purely abstract). monument to transpontine
finance.
Soyons
serieux.
3, a la C. Bax and Summerun, with a little too much of “ that ” angel and cup business in 4. We have Persia vs. China in 9; and considerable Turkestan feeling in 10 (about the best thing in her show). Dulac did it first with rather more technique and less godly sobriety. 14 is presumably a successful portrait. W. DACRES ADAMS. “ Old Bristol ” in the next room is the usual representative painting, simply and cleanly done at its best, with grain of canvas left showing. Sunlight and hardish definition of the lines of buildings. 1, 3, 13, 25, 26, 27, 28 show about the best workmanship. AT THE LEICESTER GALLERY. THE SOCIETY OF TWENTY-FIVE PAINTERS need not detain us long. One of my advisers says: “ There aren’t 25 painters.” Another is of the opinion that there are, but that they are not ’contained in this group. Even Miss Rea’s work is not so convincing as that which she shows at the Fine Art Society. A little ink drawing of Manet’s (no part of the exhibit) compensates one for one’s ’bus fare.
Recreations
in Criticism.
By Edward Moore. THIS age is distinguished from all other ages by one fact : it is an age of readers. Everybody-by which one means perhaps one-tenth of the adult population-now reads, reads promiscuously, without standard, even without preference, and in the end, it is to be feared, without the very power to distinguish one voice from another. In no other age than ours could men have been at the same time disciples of philosophers fundamentally opposed, of Nietzsche and ToIstoy, of Mr. A man of intellectual inteShaw and Mr. Chesterton. grity could not even follow Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw at the same time; nay, could not even follow Mr. Wells at the same time. In literature, however, everything is to be found: every creed and its negation, every aspiration, every cynicism. The worse, then, for a generation of readers. who are not at the same time critics. This age-it was inevitable-is an age of intellectual promiscuity, of universal scepticism, of sovereign opinion : we do not know where we stand, for we cannot stand. It was not so, however, in other ages : our predecessors, whose culture was grounded on the Bible, possessed a faith and its corollary, an individuality-a quality which is ceasing to be characteristic of man. A cuItural problem existed for other generations, it is true, but it was not our problem. Our problem is new: it is pre-eminently the problem of criticism, of right reading. With books it is the same as with men and women : we must become acquainted with them, leave most of them in a hurry, and choose one or two for friends. Reading, like experience of the world, has its uses : it teaches us, for instance, what to avoid. If we believed our eyes in what they tell us about the people who read, we should have justification for doubting whether great literature is, after all, as “ beautiful ” as it is said to be. Why are not critics beautiful, then, or, at any rate, creative?--We have the word of Plato that the seeker for the beautiful, when he beholds it, will “ abundantly bring forth his conceptions. ” Nevertheless, our eyes do tell us that literature is beautiful : the evil, apparently, is that she is courted by eunuchs.
There you have the explanation of the notorious ugliness of this planet. ‘The earth is replenished out of need, despair, and hatred, while beauty is neglected. For ninety-nine men out of a hundred literatureis like buildings, institutions, empires-like everything else that man creates : it outlives its use. In this respect I it is unlike the works of God : these die at the right time. The works of man, on the other hand, have not learnt to die: they, also, are ‘‘ eternal.” What charnel houses of the intellect we are ! It appalls us when we look back and compute the number of things we have read and have believed; and if it were not that we have forgotten them as well we should be overcome with disgust. Our bad memory, however, is the best of signs: it shows that intellectually we have not only died, but been born again many times. The moderate reader forgets nine-tenths, the omnivorous reader ninety-nine hundredths, of what he has read. Yes, reading is mainly a way of “ passing the time.” That, however, is to many people not at all a trifling affair. If you’ know someone to whom reading --whether in art, literature, or music-is a matter, of the first importance, you may be sure he regards “ passing the time ” as the chief problem of his existence and even as an ideal. Pater founded a philosophy upon it. When me consider the opulence-the appalling opulence-of past literature, and reflect that its almost sole virtue now is to amuse and console-some of us, to “ develop our imagination,” to “ make us more humane,” we might be pardoned for suspecting in the very nature of things a fundamental stupidity. That causes so splendid should have results so trifling ! That the works of Shakespeare, Plato, and Beethoven should exist simply, or at all, to amuse us ! Consider in particular the august fate of the musician : his compositions make us happy for half an hour. “ But is it a small matter to make man happy for half an hour? ” It is. Those books which have spoken to us with a voice unique, thrilling, and intimate we can never bear to hear praised. by those who have merely read them There is in everything that those people say a bland futility : for we know they have grasped what the author said while remaining altogether unconscious of what he left unsaid. Perhaps our attitude to every book except the few which speak to us is of this; and we miss what is most valuable in it. Our experience tells us that all true- reading is reading between the lines. The attitude of the reader to literature is more tolerant, more catholic, than that of the imaginative artist; he stands outside, as it were, and does not feel the profound affinities, the profound antipathies of those who are united to literature too closely, by something in their blood and their bones. The reader experiences literature, the writer feels it ; the former is disinterested,
through the artist, to create, create, and again createfor an end which it does not know? Reading does not make the artist creative, but it makes him worthy to create. The alarming number of ideas current at present can nolonger he attributed, except by naivepersons, to the intellectual vitality of our generation. It is, on the
the latter creative-the polesof artistic emotion, two for to be disinterested precisely to be in not creative. To the imaginative artist there is something almost ghoulish the in bookman's unproductive rummaging amogn thoughts and emotions: the spectacle a mind of crammed with dead legends, passions, and philosophies appearsto him disgusting. He himself reads to create; that whichhe does not love with passion he generallyseeksto avoid. Well, from whichof these standpoints is literature finally be to judged? the Is function of literature feed the to imagination, mould to the spirit,to elevate,, to amuse, to console? is it Or like other forms of life, to perpetuateitself, and,
contrary, one of the clearest signs of’ superficiality : sects multiply when men have lost the power of understanding a conception profoundly and completely : one has only to consider the Christian sects to perceive this. On the other hand, an age which has only one or two spiritual issues is likely to be intellectually alive. If our thought could only penetrate deeply enough ! Then we might find that in the end there is only one human problem-a problem, moreover, that is forever insoluble. There are two eternal armies of the spirit, and all of us, by virtue of our-humanity, are enrolled in one or the other of them. It-is true we do not know it : the consciousness of this spiritual drama is given only to generationsmore profound and more sincere than ours. There are two armies, not less than two; for conflict is eternal and truth unattainable. One thing alone is sufficient to demonstrate that, in comparison with the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestantsects are provincial. The great controversies of the former are with infidelity, Deism, Anti-Christ ; those of the latter are with the Roman Catholic Church. This universal tendency of men to die !-to die, that is to say, before they are ready for burial. For instance, the power of human thought to divorce itself altogether from vital things, to become abstract, static, universal, eternal, is almost irresistible. The philosophers are not keeping to the truth when they say that only by unremitting effort is thought separated from all admixture of the temporal and the living, attaining to pure reason. On the contrary, it isthe very nature-the-very original sin-of all thought todivorce itself from life; and he is the true philosopherwho overcome this fatality, can who can yoke life and thought together, who can infuse thought continuously with energy and passion. In man’s actions the same strange perversity is to be observed : the overpowering inclination of our lives towards the habitual, in other words, towards the dead, is a thing we have constantly to struggle against. So we are toId that life is an art. But that is an altogether inadequate recognition of the reality. If life is anything-, it is a continual fight against unconscious suicide. We call a man a charlatan when he writes of something which he understands but with which he has not made himself -acquainted in every detail. What term Is left, however, for the writer who has read everything about his subject, but who, unfortunately, does not understand it ? He is obviously the real charlatan-and we cannot praise him enough ! So great is our admiration of hard work. And assuredly hard work can perform miracles : the proof of it is that industry in itself, the labour of the eye, the ear, and the pen, minus brain and minus spirit, has actually been able by sheer persistence to impose itself upon us as an intellectual virtue. One should distrust heavy, portentous, solemn tones : those who use them in nine cases out of ten do not know what they are talking about. That of which they speak, whether it is a man, a book, or a witticism, has never become to them more than a “ subject ”; they talk of it, in short, from the outside ; they are on the threshold, it is true, but they will never get beyond it : and we all know what a solemn place the threshold is. Those who pass their lives in the inner temple, however, are not so full of solemnity and dullness : familiarity breeds conversational ease : and these are distinguished by their lightness, their wit, their frivolity. To speak frivolously and profoundly-in fact, their aim is the exact opposite of that of the dwellers on the threshold. A solemn voice is sufficient in itself to refute a literary critic; it is even doubtful whether we should listen to any critic who does not possess wit. What he: is expressing, we may be sure, is simply the emotions of the novice before initiation. A paradox for readers : To read the second best spoils our taste for the best. To read the best, on the other hand, increases our appreciation of the second best.
Recent
Verse.
WILFRID BLAIR. Herbs of Grace. (Blackwell. 1s. net.) It was a notion that Mr. Blair had of writing for “ Punch” a series of verses on old English herbs-lavender, sweet marjoram, borage and bergamot, thyme, vervain, dill, St. John’s wort, and rosemary, In one of them he may be said to “ come off ” with a certain amount of success, such as might be expected of a clog-dancer who should attempt the Spring Song; but the rest are failures in various degrees. The Success is “ Rosemary,” of which the first stanza runs thus.Whenas on summer days I see That sacred herb, the Rosemary, The which, since once our Lady threw Upon its flow’rs her robe of blue, Has never shown them white agen, But still in blue doth dress themThen, oh, then I think upon old friends and bless them. This is a fair imitation of the old English and goes quite well with the common idea of Rosemary. But now let us take “ Thyme.’’ How would you describe Thyme? With what sort of rhythm would you weave a fit association for Thyme-remembering, of course, the perfect line in which it once occurred :I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows: Well, Mr. Blair has chosen a short staccato, much more suitable to wind-blown heatherbell than to sultry Thyme. All things true, All things sweet-Summer-dawn dew And love’s heart-beat, All things holyHill-flow’rs lowly, A far church-chime : These things dwell In the smell Of Thyme. ‘‘ Sage ” is an even worse misfit, being in a mixture of dialect and property-verse : I tuk an’ brunt ’un, wud wi’ rage. All silvery in the moon it shone Dree hunnerd an’ fower score years agoneA sickle moon, a mid-May eve, An’ me mwore witless nor a theave. Either the second and fifth lines are interpolations or the others are. W. HARVEY. Gloucestershire Friends. (Sidgwick and Jackson. 2s. 6d. net.) These verses were written by Lieut. Harvey in a German prison camp and are creditable to all concerned, including the German authorities who allowed them to be forwarded for publication uncensored. A few of them are of the war, but most, as the title indicates, concern the writer’s home and associations in Gloucestershire, and are vers d’occasion. As might be expected and excused, if not admired, there is often more feeling than expression in the verses. Take this, for example :Oh, where’s the use to write? What can I tell you, dear? Just that I want you so Who are not near. . . . Just-oh, it Will not ease my painThat I am lonely Until I see you once again, You-you only. That, of course, is a cri du coeur, but it is not a poet’s cry. “ Solitary Confinement ’’ contains a little remembered fancy with a touch of brave pathos. Lastly, as to my bed I turnfor rest, Comes Lady Moon herself on silver feet To sit with one white arm across my breast, Talking of elves and hauntswhere they do meet. F.
No mortal comes to see me, yet I say, ‘‘ Oh, I have had fine visitors to-day ! ” “ A Rondel of Gloucestershire ” is the most successful of all the poems. Whether by art and chance the consonant and vowel scheme is appropriate to the rhythm and subject; and there is no Boeotian boulder to trip the reader up. Rig glory mellowing on the mellowing hills, And in the little valleys, thatch and dreams, Wrought by the inanifold and vagrant wills Of sun and ripening grain and wind; so gleams My country, that great magic cup which spills Into my mind a thousand thousand streams Of glory mellowing on the mellowing hills, And in the little valleys, thatch and dreams. An example the boulder above referred to occurs on of But oh, the little twisty road, The sweet and lovers’-kiss-ty road, which is simply ridiculous. Most of the later verses show a falling-off even from the foregoing. In fact, when Mr. Harvey begins to write professedly for children he becomes as puerile as the average American child-poet. He ran all down the meadow, that he did, The boy with the little bare toes. The flowers they smelt so sweet, so sweet, And the grass it felt so funny and wet. . . . Songs of the nursery, for the nursery, by the nursery. A subsequent poem is nothing more than a verse rendering of the prose essays of Kenneth Graham : White and alluring runs the dusty [Roman ?] road Into the country’ and with yellow eyes A hastening car comes purring with its load : Like some great owl it hoots, and then it flies Past, and is swallowed up in dusk. However, there is a core of real sincerity in the volume and it becomes most visible in the concluding lines of the concluding poem, “ The Bugler.” It is Mr. Harvey’s top-note at present. For me, I do but bear within my hand (For sake of Him, our Lord, now long forsaken) A simple bugle such as may awaken With one high morning note a drowsing man : That wheresoe’er within my motherland The sound may come, ’twill echo far and wide Like pipes of battle calling up a clan, Trumpeting men through beauty to God’s side. Much more could have been made of this passage; hut we must recall in charity the circumstances in which it was written. LANCELOT HOGBEN. Exiles of the Snow and other Poems. (Fifield. 2s. net:) The title-poem was written “ on the return of the political prisoners from Siberia ”--now some unfortunate years ago-and begins in a strain that is borrowed : Who would not sing, who have lived in a day to behold Rise from its travail triumphant, the new-born soul of the world? We who have mourned [wept ?] by the willows, sorrowful hearts and sad, Have found sweet song in a strange land, a song that is glad. Mr. Hogben’s master is plainly Swinburne, and Mr. Hogben is Swinburne’s slave. A dangerous master, for Swinburne sinned against the poet’s creed that denounces anathema upon all who place one quality of poetry against another. In poetry, in pure poetry, you cannot over-distinguish one quality from another. Rhythm, vocabulary, association, substance, emotion, colour, sound,-not one of these is before or after another. If one is more obvious than another, the poem is imperfect; if the poem is definable in any one of its qualities it is short of perfection. In the case of Swinburne rhythm was not merely predominant, it established a Prussian hegemony over all the rest of
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the qualities of poetry. Everything else was subordinated to rhythm, with the consequence that Swinburne one of the worst poets in the language. is As form-master in the school, he has his special place; but woe to the pupil who ’does riot absorb and forget him. Mr. Hogben, as we say, is a slave of Swinburne; and in this volume he does little more than write exercises for Mr. Swinburne to correct. As exercises they are passable, but as poetry they are naturally more distant from perfection than those of his tyrantmaster. We have quoted a verse from the “ Exiles.” Here is the opening stanza of the “ Envoi ” : Thou who didst rise in the fury of multitudes rending, Fetters long rusted with ages lay cloven in twain, Be with us now to the last in the strife never-ending; Make to us music, Our Lady of Song, yet again. It is not parody, but it is not poetry. STEPHEN MAGUIRE.
Reviews.
Echo Personalities: A Short Study of the Contributions of Abnormal Psychology towards the Solution of some of the Problems of Normal Education. By Frank Watts, M.A. (Allen and Unwin. 4s. 6d. net.) It has long been remarked that the best educated people are the mentally defective; indeed, education, in its ethnological sense, did not begin until someone tried to teach an idiot or tame a savage. At a time when the average schoolmaster knocked his scholastic nonsense in at the wrong end of his normal pupil, Pereira, ltard, and others were discovering how to draw: the natural nonsense out of the afflicted pupil, anti to put him into something like normal relations with reality. That the child, like everybody else, learns by experience, is generally admitted ; but normal education is so contrived as to prevent the child from obtaining experience, and compels him instead to play with symbols of experience. History is not what the boy would have done if he had been there, is not even an analogue of what he sees happening around him ; it is a set of peculiar names and printed dates (for which it is a school crime to refer to the book), which, by a sort of‘ arithmetic, are divided into periods. Language becomes grammar, with its parts of speech, its numbers, cases, and genders, long before the boy has really determined what to say to the chump who threw Homer at him; numbers, that fascinatingstudy (for adults) that is applicable to most things from -fortune-telling to fortune-making, becomesa set of rules and problems which will not add a run to the boy’s cricket-score nor lure a tart from the tuckshop. The whole of our present educational system (apart from the tutorial) is based upon the fallacy ‘that abstract and analytical studies can be pursued successfully in community, that a crowd of school-children at least, is a collection of individuals each of whom is in full possession of all his faculties-, and is willing to apply them to unrelated theoretical studies ut a moment decided by a time-table. It was a normal schoolmaster who said to a rebellious pupil : “Methinks, sirrah, you are better fed than taught” : and provoked the fundamental criticism of the pedagogic method : “ Maybe, master; for you teach me, but I feed myself.” The truth probably is that teaching is an impossibility, that learning alone is the valid educational process; and we certainly often speak of a “learned” man, but seldom or never of a “well-taught” man. Monkeys, and elephants, and horses, are taught ; but the human pupil, from the idiot to the genius, knows only what he learns, learns chiefly by experience, and can really only be “ educated” into a more refined and more complex relation with reality. Any system of reaching that does not do this does not educate him, but shuts him within the prison of insensibility, induces an habitual stupidity illuminated by recognised “ accomplishments,” a
stupidity which rejects all new experience because it is strange, because the very effort of adaptation has been made impossible. So these studies of individual, crowd, and abnormal psychology, admirably done in small compass, lead up to the proposition : “The ideal education is the education of an idiot” : although Mr. Watts does no; achieve this violence of expression. The idiot is not only individually trained, but every one of the possible avenues of expression is explored; he is not excluded from experience, on the contrary, experience is his teacher, and the human teacher really only graduates the experience. Seguin’s own summary explains the process and the result : “When we educated the muscles, contractility responded to our bidding with a spark from volition; we exercised severally the senses, but an impression could not be made on their would-be material nature without the impression taking its rank among the accumulatedidealities; we were enlarging the chest, and new voices came out of it expressing new ideas and feelings ; we started imitation as a passive exercise, and it soon gave rise to all sorts of spontaneous actions; we strengthened the hand, and it became the realiser of ideal creations and labours ; we caused pleasure and pain to be felt through the skin and Through the palate, and the idiot, in answer, tried to please by the exhibition of his new moral qualities; in fact, we could not touch a fibre of his without receiving back the vibration of his all-souled instrument.” The physical powers themselves develop pari passu with the sensibility of the physical structures, and may be invoked in aid of further developments; but they do not operate in abstraction, butin definite response to stimulate. It is impossible for anyone to learn anything before he is ready for it; and he is not ready for it until he wants to learn it, and by “willing” is able to effect the necessary adaptations of nervous and mental structures. The ignorance of this fact, whether wilful or stupid, has perverted everything in the training of children. Discipline, which should be the attitude of a disciple to his master, is perverted into more or less successful attempts at government, which make the teacher, instead of the pupil, responsible for behaviour. The time-table, the rationing scheme of teaching, is, like all rationing schemes, wasteful ; everyone does not want the same quantities of the same commodities at the same time, and, in education, the backward child is overstrained. the forward child is held in leash, and riot one of the average children can sec the sense (which, to them, means the immediate use) of what they have to learn. “The principal task of the educator,” concludes Mr. Watts, “is to create powers of self-direction,of self-control, of self-realisation. It seems to us the merest platitude to say that a child will only learn to adopt such habits and ideals as he finds consistent with his deep-seated and fundamental impulses and desires, and that all acquired desires, no matter what pains may have been taken by the educator to inculcate them, will disappear like the rain upon the face of the desert if no opportunities are given for their expression.” The “love of learning” coincided with the revival of individualism during the Renaissance; it has survived in spite of our class-teachers, and we hope that Mr. Watts’ exposition will induce them to foster it. Submarine and Anti-submarine. By Sir Henry Newbolt. (Longmans. 7s. 6d. net.) There is only one thing better than a story of the sea, and that is a true story of the sea; and Sir Henry Newbolt is fortunate in his choice of subject. There is just a little history of the submarine, and a, simple explanation of the principles of its mechanism and operation; and for the rest, we are told some of the stories of actual combats waged by our submarines, frequently in the language of the log. For effective contrast, there is quoted an extract from the diary of a German submarine commander; and if the style is the man, we
may conclude that the mastery of the seas is naturally ours. There is much, of course, that Sir Henry Newbolt could not say; but if this book does not tell all the truth, it tells nothing but the truth, and gives the landsman a sufficient answer to the absurd inquiry : “What is the Navy doing?” Of P-boats and Q-boats, destroyers and trawlers, and of the whole host of auxiliary craft that helped to master the German menace, Sir Henry Newbolt gives a necessarily brief but inspiring account. The volume is illustrated, and will delight every boy, young or old, who is lucky enough to get a copy of it. From Mill-Boy to Minister: The Life of the Right Hon. J. R. Clynes, M.P. By Edward George. (T. Fisher Unwin. 3s. 6d. net.) In spite of its subtitle, this is in no sense a ’‘Life” of the ex-Food Controller. It amounts tu no more than an interview with Mr. Clynes, an interview with Mr. Will Thorne, a chat with some of Mr. Clynes’ comradesin Lancashire, and, for the rest, quotations from the “Times.” However, the book chronicles one interesting fact; as a boy, Mr. Clynes had been aesthetically affected by words, he loved their sound, their rhythm, their various quality and texture. It was the music of speech that afforded him his greatest pleasure; and not until he was in his teens did it occur to him that words had meanings as well as sounds, that, as Confucius put it, words are things. Then he bought a dictionary, and swallowed it; and devoted the rest of his life to the task of letting out the right word at the right time. Mr. George makes no attempt to explain his subject, or to appraise his value to the Trade Union movement, and subsequently, to the country. Air Men o’ War.. By Boyd Cable. (Murray. 6s. net.) There is an immediate attraction in the work of the Air Force that is not possessed by that of any other arm. It has the dash of cavalry, and the individuality of the duel; it usually has a spectacular advantage, and always requires, in addition to the military virtues, a scientific skill that has become automatic. “You don’t get time to think,” says one of the pilots in this book, the one who, on a scout with a fixed machinegun, “crashed” three Germans in one minute; it is a service in which the Falstaffian development of adversaries is always likely to become a literal fact, the flier’s penalty for not doing what Falstaff thought he did being sudden death. It is of this service, with its varied activities, that Mr. Boyd Cable tries to give the reading public a general idea; and most admirably he succeeds. There are stories in this book that make the older epics obsolete, the story of Ailie, for example, who, after “crashing” three Germans, found himself attacked by others, and with both guns jammed, was being driven down until he was really steeplechasing over the ground-and yet won through at last. From artillery observation to dump-bombing, from scouting to assisting the advance of infantry, Mr. Boyd Cable covers the whole ground in a series of incidents the value of which to the ground forces is equalled only by the persistent valour and skill of those who took part in them. Nor does Mr. Boyd Cable forget the mechanics at the base who made these things possible ; they perform that miraculous, medicinal
functionthat used to be
allotted
goddesses in
older
epics, applied, in this case, to the chargers instead of banished from the their riders. The romance of war,
ground,has risen to the air, its native element; the air-service the only service is in which, one of the as characters in this book, says a soldiercan live like a gentleman in war-time, indeed, it has brought into being,in the most literal sense, new "upper class" a which, it lives like if gentlemen, dies like also gentlemen. Mr. Boyd Cable has done his work well, and paid a handsome tributeto the youngest and most attractive our military services. of
Pastiche.
TRISTRAM AND ISEULT. The sun drave down the western sky : The yellow sands of the western sea Shone in the beams of the brooding eye That hungered for love’s intensity Fate-holden to wander in the waste, A hungry soul, without rest, without haste. A ship came up, sunlit the sail, The-west wind blew with an odorous breath : And a queen therein, dark-eyed and pale, Was wild as the wind that wandereth Foam-laden and salt, in the fragrant calms Of the southern seas of pearls and palms. In a rock-set fortress, a firm stronghold, There waited a wounded knight, love-wrought ; And fuller aflame than the sunset’s gold Were the souls of them, and the world was nought And the seas were nought and the daylight paled To them that loved with desire unveiled. And a dark sail loomed at the hour of eve That rode-full slow for the wind fell faint : And a king came there whose wrath did weave Such thoughts as the very winds would taint. And the sea was sick and the waves blood-red In the sun’s light, hungry, unhallowed. The ship came nigh and upon the sand The king leapt forth with a sword of steel : He climbed the path and an armed band Smote the gates and made them reel : And lo! with fire from the awful west The sky was scorched at the sun’s behest. A clash of arms! and a sudden storm Clamoured aghast at a vengeance fell. Then the wind was calm and a spectral form Lovelier than all words can tell Arose in the redness of the sunLove that is found when life is done. MARSHALL BROWN. E. STORY WITH AN EARTHLY MEANING. It was an ordinary suburban road, though certainly well on the outskirts of the Great City. ‘It was perhaps rather quieter than usual, being “ blind ” at one end, save for a narrow passage which disappeared into the gloom between two high walls. About a hundred yards or so up the road from this end began an incomplete row of houses on either side, the intervening space being occupied by the inky blackness of some night-shrouded allotments. At the other end of the dozen houses or so on the left-hand side stood a gaunt, grey church, pallid patches of which, like dead men’s faces, peered coldly at one out of the intense shadow of a massive overhanging tree. It was a dilapidated God-forsaken old place, occasionally lit within by the flickering candle or two left by superstitious mortals, and appropriately dedicated to some- Lady of Sorrows. Taking a wide curve beyond this, the road converged on to a main thoroughfare with a footpath which emerged from behind the back-gardens of the houses and the rear of the sombre grey church. Such were the features of the road down which for two years or so I had been accustomed to grope my way, by the luminous shaft of an electric torch, with my letters just in time for the last collection. On this particular occasion I had trusted to the light of the stars to guide me. Having deposited my letters in the box which was situated a few yards along the high road, I had begun to retrace my steps. But I had barely turned into my own road again when I was suddenly startled to see a faint, dark figure hurrying along the path on the opposite side of the road. Instinctively I was warned that there was something unusual about this sudden apparition. I could not recollect having A HEAVENLY
passed anyone when turning into the high road. But that alone could not suffice to explain my growing eeriness. There was some familiar feature about this ghostly pedestrian which was missing. Quicker than I can tell, I swiftly realised that no sound came from its hurrying footsteps. But before my mind could concentrate upon this fleeting form, my attention was caught by a second one of slightly deeper intensity scurrying down the footpath which passed on the other side of me along behind the old deserted church. I must confess I experienced a momentary sensation, such as a startled cat must feel when the hair suddenly rises all down its spine. By this time my senses were all alert, and I determined to discover the nature of my silent, fleeting companions. Fastening my eyes upon the nearer darker figure, I ran them quickly down it, beginning from the head, Arriving at where the feet should be, I was amazed to find the legs extending and extending, growing fainter and fainter as they stretched across the darker ground of a garden patch, lengthening and lengthening towards me until they came to an abrupt end-within my own boots! And then it dawned on-me. Hostilities had ceased. They had cleaned a couple of street-lamps at the end of the road, and I had thus renewed acquaintance with my own long-lost shadow. T. C. KYRIELLE. I saw a mystic spark of flame, Sans shape or form, but yet the same. Mine eyes did in the dark portray, It came, it stayed, it went away. Three mellow flautists played at night, Some soft lay for a dying sprite, Their melody I heard them play. It came, it stayed, it went away. A satyr small, of hills and woods, Did woo a naiad of the floods; Sweetly he sang his choice-culled lay, It came, it stayed, it went away. Till, with the dark of night half-spent, This soul enthralling vision blent. And verily will I ever say, It came, it stayed, it went away. GEOFFREY PITTER. WHITHER ? Twice twenty souls are in my daily care; And I who guide them in the trodden way Am drawn aside by whispering doubts that say, “ Is’t you who choose the path hereon they fare, Or blindly wend you, either here or there As They direct who hold the world in sway; While you, deceived, a puppet in their pay, But lead to alien ends that They prepare?” For would They see me and my like uprear A race of men unfitted for their use, Who will not live laborious lives and drear That They may eat what these may but produce; Whose keen unhooded eyes with gaze austere Might pierce their purpose like a naked spear? S. M. RICH.
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