NOTES OF THE WEEK. DEMOCRACY -- I. NEW VALUES. By Edward Moore. P. Selver. Scientist. AMERICA AND ECONOMIC By Major C. H. Douglas. THE HOUSE OF RECENT VERSE: Ruth Pitter. By Stephen Maguire. VIEWS AND REVIEWS: By A. E. R. A Pure COMMONS By Hilaire Belloc. -- III. MODERNART AND THE PUBLIC. By B. Windeler. DRAMA: Mr. Pim Passes By. By John Francis Hope. MUSIC. By William Atheling. READERS AND WRITERS. By R. H. C. PSYCHOTHERAPY. By J. A. M. Alcock. REVIEWS: The Coining of Cuchulain. In the Gates of the North. The Triumph and Passing of Cuchulain. True Love. Keith’s Dark Tower. PRESS CUTTINGS. NOTES OF THE WEEK. At the interview with Mr. Lloyd George last week, the Miners’ hope was again deferred. This is a bad omen, and weconfess that we expect the worst of it. Mr. Frank Hodges may profess to believe that the Miners’ campaign in favour of Nationalisation has been astonishingly successful; but either he is astonished in the ironical sense or he is self-deceived. The effect of the campaign on the mind of the public, to which by preliminary announcement it was directly addressed, has been little or nothing; and it is more than doubtful, judging by reports that have reached us, whether the more the miners themselves hear of nationalisation the less they do not dislike it. This is hardly a condition of affairs in which it is policy on the part of the Miners’ leaders to talk of “forcing” the Government, even of “forcing” the Government to limit the profits now being made in the mining industry. “Forcing” the Government, even when it is really possible, can always be met in the last resort by the simple expedient of a General Election; and there canbe no doubt what the result of that would be if the issue were -- as it would be -- Mr. Lloyd George and the Nation, or Mr. Smillie and Bolshevism. The “direct action” of the General Strike would, in the circumstances, be no less ineffectual. In fact, in the last resort also, it could be turned into a General Election with even worse consequences to Labour than those already imagined; for the shadow of Bolshevism, which Mr. Smillie is supposed to cast wherever he goes, would in the event of a General Strike be almost substantial. We could trust the governing-classes, aided by the panic-fear of the middle-classes, make the most of the fact. to * * * There are those in the Labour Party who believe that Mr. Smillie us really acting as a beater-up for the political guns; and there us something to be said for the hypothesis. For, as a Miners’ leader pure and simple, with only the industrial axe to grind, what other object, it is asked, can Mr. Smillie have (and Mr. Hodges with him) in attempting to force a General Election, than that of giving more Labour candidates a chance of being returned? He does not think, the argument continues, that Labour at the next Election will return a Parliamentary majority. Such an event is improbable in any circumstances within the next fifteen or twenty years -- by which time, we may add, the last vestiges of real power will have disappeared from the House of Commons. Nor even (resuming the argument) is it reasonably calculable that the Labour Party would double its strength at a General Election fought, as Mr. Smillie’s would be, on the issue we have described. No, it appears to those who have considered the matter, that Mr. Smillie (and Mr. Hodges with him) is a far-seeing, and, at the same that time, modest and self-sacrificing man. Convinced one of these days “Labour will rule,” he is content to employ his position as leader of the Miners to “force” the Government to hold a General Election just in order that sixty Labour Members should be increased in numbers to, let us say, ninety or a hundred. When that had been done, Mr. Smillie, presumably (and Mr. Hodges with him) would call upon the rank and file to abide by the decision] of the electorate, pending another day when they would repeat the same tactics. We are not convinced, of course, that this is the explanation of Mr. Smillie’s policy. There may be -- and it is more probable -- no explanation of Mr. Hodges’ policy whatever. He may be drifting on according to time-table like a tide. On the other hand, it is plausible enough to pass away the time until a better explanation is offered us. * * * The “Daily “Times,” has some of the movement by instance, and, Mail,” followed or preceded by the considerably surprised and delighted less sophisticated members of the Labour fighting the Pearl directors, in the first in the second, by prophesying, as if it were to be to-morrow, the advent of a Labour Government. Several observations, however, must be made before the true’ value of Lord Northcliffe’s conversion to Socialism can be estimated. In the first place, we should ask ourselves what Lord Northcliffe’s party has to gain by his action; and the answer, in the words of one of his own phonograms, is clear: “So long as Labour believes it is about to form a Government, so long will the country be spared the upheaval of a General Strike.” Put the bundle of hay on the donkey’s nose, in fact, and not merely in the next street-and its direction will then be where you wish it! That, however, is not the only advantage to be anticipated from Lord Northcliffe’s timely conversion. Anybody, save a friend, can bamboozle Labour leaders and persuade them that if they are good boys (statesmen is the word) to-day, to-morrow shall see them in paradise. The more difficult task is to bamboozle the old birds of the older political parties. This, however, will be accomplished, if we are not mistaken, by Lord Northcliffe’s new policy; for what can be more demonstrative of the need for the Coalition of old parties than the elevation of the Labour Party to the position of present Opposition and future Government? The Carlton and Reform Clubs will meet and kiss one another. There shall be Unionists and Liberals no more. All that is not Labour shall be National. * * * One reaction upon the Labour Members themselves has been mentioned-the additional stimulus, as if there were not enough already, to “moderation.” But that is by no means the worst consequence to fear from the flattery the Labour leaders imagine themselves be receiving on their beautiful eyes. The to worst consequence of all is the apparent confirmation, by what Labour leaders regard as the final authority upon policy, of the mistaken belief they entertain that their present policy accounts for their success. Quite a number of years ago we prophesied the rise of a Labour Party, not on account of any positive merits, but simply as a logical necessity of the political situation. There had to be a Labour Party; and we may even say that if it had not appeared spontaneously, it would have had to be created by the capitalist parties. We do not know, in fact, that the political Labour Party is not just the cunningest invention of Capitalism up to date. However, we were saying, there is no necessary direct as relation between the policy of the Labour movement and its present position of more or less imminent success. Rather, indeed, the relation is inverse; in other words, Labour owes its “success” (such as it is!) to its mistaken policy, to its failure to define and follow a policy, to its lack of ideas, rather than to unfortunately, it is any presence of ideas. And, precisely this weakness which Lord Northcliffe’s move is certain to intensify. “Look at what we’ve done,” Mr. Henderson and the rest will say, “with, none of you intellectuals to help us. Haven’t we made the Labour Party the next Government by our own unaided exertions? And if we’ve brought it so far without having what you call an idea, doesn’t it show that ideas are over-rated factors? What’s wanting is -- just what we’ve got!” The argument, we are afraid, will prove unanswerable; and not twenty years of hopeful opposition or, worse, a spell of ignominious office, would convince Mr. Henderson and his generation that, nevertheless, is all wrong. When we reflect what the he Labour (or, rather, social) movement might have been and done by this time under moderately intelligent leadership: when we consider that during the adult life-time of most of its present leaders wages have remained stationary while wealth has doubled and trebled; when we compare our Labour leaders with the ordinary men of business to-day -- for honesty, competence, modesty, willingness to learn, -- finally, when we look forward to an intensification of their faults under the careful flattery of Lord Northcliffe -the probability of a Labour Government seems more, and more deservedly, remote than ever. We may be quite certain that a Labour Government under present circumstances will be possible only with the consent of the governing classes. It will be Capitalism’s Labour Government, * * * Mr. Thomas has contrived to get the Railwaymen’s affairs into a situation that nobody can understand. Of course, the recent settlement, if it was a settlement, was an “honourable” one arid a great triumph for Mr. Thomas. No railway settlement in Mr. Thomas’ time has ever been anything but “honourable” and a triumph to Mr. Thomas. On the face of it, nevertheless, it appears to us that for once, at any rate, Mr. Thomas does not entirely deserve all he thinks of the settlement. In short, some of its features are anything but “honourable” to the Railwaymen’s Union, and anything but a triumph for Mr. Thomas as the Railwaymen’s leader. The provisions for “the future government of the industry” -- to which it seems that Mr. Thomas has definitely committed himself -- are perfectlycompatible with the Imperial conception of the gradual devolution of powers from a white to a black race. If the Railwaymen’s Union were, in fact, composed of illiterate coolies demanding a share in their own Government, the arrangements made and agreed to by Mr. Thomas would certainly meet the case for a generation or two. Minority representation on all the governing-boards, and a Court of Arbitration (or Discipline!)before which wage and other disputes can be brought. Illiterate coolies, as we have suggested, would expect nothing better; they would be dissatisfied with less. But why does Mr. Thomas assume that the Railwaymen are coolies in relation to the railwaydirectors and fit only for a novitiate of management even of the paltry affairs of railways? Why is he satisfied with a beggarly and apparently permanent minority representation? We know, of course, that he could not have obtained anything better. The demand, if we may say sowithout explanation for the present, was wrongly formulated. But was it necessary to pretend that something was being conceded when, in fact, all that was offered was an insult? Would not abstention have been more “honourable” and a greater triumph for Mr. Thomas’ character? Nor is this the only serious blot on the semi-settlement. The acceptance of a sliding-scale that adjusts wages to prices marks, as Mr. Thomas has the sense to see, an innovation; but an innovation, which he does not say he sees, of an absolutely fatal kind to all real economic progress. The Insurance Act, we have always maintained, was the first of the great Servile measures forced upon the proletariat of this country; and this new device of adjusting wages to prices is clearly the second of them. The implications, it will be found, are similar to those of the Insurance Act, and equally servile. It assumes, as a permanent feature of the social landscape, the division of society into wage-earners and non-wage-earners. It assumes, as a canon of justice, that the worker is entitled to his keep-but to no more. It assumes, as an order of nature, that, whatever the amount of income, the working-classes shall always have skimmed milk; and that by no chance whatever shall wages (the reward, be it understood, of work done) ever exceed in general the cost of replacing the bone and muscle expended in earning it. If Mr. Thomas or Labour or any of the advisers who flock round Trade Union offices were consistent, their acquiescence in the imposition of the sliding-scale on railwaymen would be the signal for ringing down the curtainon the final collapse of the Labour movement. But they are not consistent; and they may very likely repudiate to-morrow the action they have performed to-day. The capitalists will, no doubt, taunt them with an inability to keep their pledges. We shall continue to urge that the pledges of infants are not pledges at all. * * * Much more promising, for the moment, than any action taken by a centralised Executive (for all centralised Executives appear to lose their wits as they grow in the conceit of power) are the actions being now and about to be taken by decentralised and local bodies. We have in mind the scheme put forward by the “Manchester Building Guild Committee,” the plans for a Municipal Bank now being discussed by the Bradford Corporation, and the proposal of the Labour members of the Wigan Council to borrow money on the credit of the city without toll to moneylenders. More interest, and, consequently, more hope of progress lies in any one of these three local events than in any of the grandiose schemes of Mr. Smillie for “forcing” the Government, or of Mr. Thomas for winning another personal triumph. If any one of these schemes should succeed -- we do not say, of course, that they will -- should any one of them succeed, then, indeed, a new species of reform would have been brought into existence by an act of creation comparable to that of the demi-urge. We are not exaggerating. Social creative ideas are as rare and as difficult as leaps in By them alone, however, is progress made. nature. * * * We have naturally no wish to discourage what, after all, is a child of THE NEW AGE; but wecannot, in justice to ourselves, pretend that the Manchester Building Guild Committee is carrying out the complete or even the vital parts of the “Guild” idea. As far as we understand the proposal from the generous reports of the “Manchester Guardian,” the Guild Committee proposes to enter into a contract with the Corporation for the work necessary to the building of a couple of thousand houses. It contracts to supply to the Corporation as employer an amount of labour, both as to quantity and quality, sufficient to build 2,000 of the 10,000 houses required in the Manchester area, and to receive in return a lump sum which itself, as a Committee, distribute among its members. Very good, will it is an interesting proposal; and we see no reason (least of all from the standpoint of the Corporation) why it should not be carried through. But let us be under no illusion that this is all of the Guild idea, or, even, of necessity, a step towards its realisation. On the contrary, it may quite possibly be a diversion from the direct path to the Guilds, if even escapes being a path it away from them. It is true, of course, that if the proposal adopted, several important and historic assumptions be will have been created: the solidarity of Labour as an economic organisation; the self-proprietorship of Labour as a collective entity; the bargaining equality of Labour with Capital. But the “Guild idea,” as we conceive it, proposes to take all these propositions practically “as read,” and to build upon them and not merely up to them. When such a colIective contract as the Manchester Committee has initiated (and we congratulate them on their initiative) has been carried through, the relative situation as between Labour and Capital remains unchanged. Labour has parted with its skill: and strength for wages, while Capital has got possession of the. product. There is no new feature in such a transaction: it is only the old order of things in a new costume. * * * Why it should be left to municipal bodies to inaugurate the real revolution by dealing directly with finance it would be hard to explain. Not only the “Manchester Building Guild Committee” has found finance the first great obstacle on the road to the future, but every similar enterprise, whether on a small or on a large scale, will equally discover the same formidable lion in the path. Various authorities are very anxious just now to pretend that it is not a lion, but a domestic cat. Sir Leo Chiozza Money is almost as contemptuous as Mr. Tawney of the alleged threat of finance. Finance, he says, is a bogey, a red-herring, a nothing; and Labour should continue to ignore the subject -- and prosper. Capitalist -professedly Capitalist -- watchdogs are of the same opinion, with only this difference, that they affirm that finance is too difficult a subject for a mere Labour or Socialist brain to grasp. The City Editor of the “Morning Post,” for example (as may be seen on reference to our Press Cuttings) becomes unusually melancholy when contemplating the propositions of the Wigan Town Council. (We unfortunately missed his comments on the Bradford Scheme.) These Wigan people were actually proposing-let us paraphrase the substance--to follow the example of the Government and issue currency on the taxability of the town. They were proposing to follow the example of every proprietor and issue IOU’son the security of their property. What ineffable ignorance! How sad, yet how serious! Serious indeed, but not sad, it may be and become, if the discussion set going be continued. It is probable, as we have aIready suggested, that nothing will come of the Wigan scheme. The opposition will be tremendous; and in all probability it will be secret and personal. It is even more probable that the Bradford proposal to set up a Municipal Bank (though a proposal to which no objection can be taken by anybody but the profiteering private bankers) will fail to be carried out, at any rate, upon the present occasion. Many seeds will be sown in vain before one is allowed to grow. Nevertheless, as these proposals prove, the subject of finance is now under examination. In a year or two, the Labour and Socialist movement all over the world will be coloured by it. A single successful experiment is needed to set the tune for the whole world to follow. Shall it he Wigan after all? IN WINTER. up everything, O thou white snow! green leaf! Not a green leaf! the stones, O white, white snow, brown bright paths where the people go. Cover Not a Cover In the Cover the yew and the cypress over! Not a green bough! Not a green bough! Cover the moss, O white, white snow, In the narrow green-ways where the people go. Cover the blossom-buds all the mound over. Not a green leaf! Not a green leaf! Soshalt thou cover, O white, white snow, Even her grief, her grief. E. LIMEBEER. FAERY DENIED HEAVEN. Too fine, too slender, Woeful as every rathe consummation, Shineth the tender Aspect of thine half-mortal habitation: A thousand years thy citadel, and then Darkness must claim thee. Thou art less happy than the tears of men, Though still they name thee In the device Flower of felicity, phantom of paradise. Thou hast looked in at the door before the time, And livest on that look alone, Thine eyes forth shadowing the peerless Rime In which thy part is none, Even the Rime that shall make singing vain, And vain our youth; And er are peers, for that we have our pain And esperance, thou wanhope and thy truth, RUTH PITTER. By Major C. H. Douglas. I. In the days, not so very long ago, when London regarded New York much as New York regards Chicago --human, no doubt, but regrettable -- it was popularly supposed that every incoming steamer was boarded at Sandy Hook by a picked band of reporters, eager to learn of the passengers, both individually and collectively, that America was making a favourable impression. Times have changed; the reporters are now massed at Liverpool to meet the returning traveller, who is supposed to carry the last word on some aspect of those questions, common to every country, of which the focus is instinctively and possibly with justice, located in the New World; but the value of the opinions obtained in the latter case is no doubt dependent on much the same factor as in the former -- i.e., on what the observer is looking for. The United States, possibly more than any other country, has driven the Factory System to its logical conclusion, and the opportunity I have recently been fortunate enough to enjoy, of observing certain aspects of the result, has perhaps just this general interest to the readers of THE NEW AGE, that it has been utilised to check, modify, or confirm the views with which they have become familiar, as well as to obtain the considered opinion of Americans who had interested themselves those views, as to their application to the in International situation, and the soundness of the proposedremedy based on them. the It may he said at once that in all essentials Transatlantic situation is exactly such as to confirm the The many representative diagnosis begun at home. men and women who gave THE NEW AGE theories sustained and serious attention were in possession of the actual facts necessary to confirm or refute them; and it is characteristic of the hest American methods that, after being convinced of their soundness, within a week concerted measures adequate to the magnitude of the issue were formulated and launched by them through channels offering every prospect of success. So much for the particular; now as to the general situation. It is perhaps hardly necessary to remind readers of these pages that there are three separate and distinct charges against the present economic system: (1) It does not deliver the goods. (2) It makes the wrong (3) The goods it does make, it makes with goods. ruinous human and psychological inefficiency. It may be of interest to see how the conditions in America at this time seem to substantiate this indictment. Let it first be grasped clearly that the United States as a producing community is in exactly the position that ourSuper-producers would have us strain every nerve to attain. Rarely scathed by the War, a creditor of every nation with whom she has dealings, militarily impregnable, “rich” beyond the dreams of avarice, with a highly-trained, almost feverishly hard-working artizan class, she should be a convincing demonstration of “What more will do.” We find, however, that the difficulties so menacing in Europe are, if anything, accentuated in America. There is the same infiation of economic figures that we are familiar with over here, but on a larger scale, and there has been the same wave of war prosperity, with its crop of millionaires, the same rise in the cost of living and the same unrest in consequence of it. There is an immense subordination of the individual to the industrial machine, greater, I think, than in this country. Mr. Henry Ford is said to boast that no agitator -- i.e., no one who speaks a word against the Ultra-Industrialistic policy -- can get past his Labour Bureau, He is said to employ 90,000 workers. An America and Economic Democracy. official of one of the greatest American railway companiestold me that they claimed and enforced the right to supervise their employees twenty-four hours a day, and to discharge them for “misconduct” of hours, out as much as for transgression of rules when at work. Whatever, for instance, may be the merits of Prohibition, per se, there is no doubt that it would never have been allowed to become law if the Trusts had not decided that their employees would stand harder driving “on the water wagon.” There is said to be some disappointment in regard to the results, so far. There is the same tendency, in an exaggerated form, to expand manufacturing plant, and to restrict the outputof every form of ultimate commodity, by sabotage, open or covert. This is particularly noticeable in the case of the railways, where the freight traffic may be considered to be an intermediate product, and passenger traffic largely an ultimate commodity. Passing rapidly through the period in which the comfort and convenience of passengers has been sacrificed to the exigencies of traders -- the American railways are now probably the most uncomfortable and inconvenient in the world -- a stage has been reached in which any sort of service is a diminishing by-product of financial manipulation and transfers of credit. Every board of directors is interlocked with trading corporations furnishing supplies, rolling-stock, etc., with the pleasing result that the worse the mangaement, the quicker everybody gets rich. It is only fair to say that there are many rich men in the States. The psychological side of the Labour movement there is not easy to summarise, nor should I care to pretend to a sufficient knowledge of the facts. It is quite clear, however, that the average American is far less under the dominion of catchwords than we are here. As a result, phases of Socialism which have dominated us for years seem to get very short shrift. Nearly every worker has at some time or other dabbled in stocks, has a bank account, and, in general, is familiar with the exterior mechanism of commerce, consequently popular resentment is far more active against Wall Street than it is, for instance, against Lombard Street with us, and probably with more reason. While, therefore, the savage and insensate persecution of Radicals is raising administrative issues in an acute form, the average worker understands quite well that it is not primarily his political institutions which are at fault, but the economic control behind them. It would be obviously improper to explain thespecial reasons which make a fundamental change in affairs well within the compass of probability of the next two years, but there is little doubt that unless the position changes rapidly for the better in this country, to America will belong the honour of inaugurating the new Era. The House of Commons. By Hilaire Belloc. III. The Reformation, like every other great revolution the foundation of the Catholic in history --excepting Church -- had for its main effect things quite unexpected by its original agents, things not observable until long after their death. Here in particular, here in England, the Reformation was essentially due to the determination of a Government with high mechanical power (although morally not so secure) to affirm itself, by a temporary expedient, against all other authority, domestic or foreign. But the result was utterly different from anything that the main author -- Henry VIII. -- or his chief servants, or any associated with them, intended or could foresee. A temporary expedient of pressure against the Pope turned into a final policy, and led at last to what no one then dreamt of -- an England without the Faith. Subsidiary attacks upon the monasteries (as the principal support of the Papacy) produced an enormous economic catastrophe. Doctrinal falsehoods (which neither Henry nor any of his intimates could bear) became overwhelmingly important. Indeed, it may he said that there was here another of those many historical cases where a power calls in auxiliaries to aid it, and these in turn oust their employers and become themselves the masters. Henry VIII, the tool of a red, vicious, and very unwise woman, had proposed, as many a monarch had proposed before him up and down Europe, to play the Pope for a time himself in his ownrealm. To confiscate monastic property seemed to him at the moment, and to most others (including half the monks themselves), a “modern,” and therefore an “inevitable,” thing: a singular example of that ephemeral influence upon the human mind whereby the fashion of the moment takes on the colour of necessary things! The confiscation of the monastic land was at least intended to support the revenues of the national authority. These revenues were aboutto decline in real value through the rapid change in prices following on the Spanish conquest of the New World, through the expansion of the functions of the State (a necessary result of the Renaissance) and through the absence of any machinery whereby the old traditional revenues of the Crown could be normally and regularly supplemented. It is debatable whether a stronger and more sober character than that of Henry might not have retained these monastic revenues in his own hand. Had he done so, it is conceivable that the British Crown would have been the strongest in Europe, would have rivalled, surpassed, and survived its French competitor. In point of fact, the monastic revenues were lost to the Crown. The squires and merchants were already too strong for the king; too strong for a kingof that sort and in a crisis of that sort. The other parliamentary estate, the Commons, heartily supported the loot of the monastic land -- and shared in it. Take the list of the county members summoned to that Parliament which witnessed the dissolution of the monasteries and you will find that every one of them, without exception, carried off his portion of the swag. Quite apart, of course, from these selected representatives of the territorial and merchant classes there was the great mass of their colleagues outside. All shared in the general sack. The squires grew rich, and the merchants too, at the expense of the Throne. On Henry's death the process was accelerated. A little group of West Country squires, whom his weakness had favoured as the brothers and relatives of his dead queen, and who were hardly gentlemen by origin, indulged in unlimited rapine and set the pace to their fellows. When the national reaction came, which supported Queen Mary, it was not strong enough to restore the abbey lands. On the contrary, Queen Mary was compelled to acquiesce in the further strengthening of the classthat was to destroy the monarchy; and as fur Elizabeth, her reign is nothing more than a confirmation of the new great landlords, with the Cecils at their head, who played the Queen as a card in their hands. On the death of Elizabeth there were men still living who could just remember the older England. But this is all one can say. The religious revolution was certainly not accomplished. The mass of men were still either indifferent or attached in various degrees of sentiment to the Catholic civilisation of their fathers. But the' strong minority in the saddle had broken entirely with the ancestral legend of England. Many of this minority sincerely, and all by profession, accepted the various forms of religious revolt, and, on the economic or social side, the results were firmly established. The mass of the people had begun -- though at first slowly -- to lose their economic independence, and a wealthy oligarchy was now rooted and about to rule England. That rule was expressed through the new claims and the new life of the House of Commons, which now -- after 1600 -- became quite a new thing. The House of Commons became, in the first generation of the seventeenth century, something hitherto quite unknown in English history. It became -- as the mouthpiece of the big merchants of the towns and of the new big landowners of the country -- a power which challenged the king: by its now consolidated rules, by its organic continuity and strength, by its regular debates and its inmixture in foreign and domestic policy, its control of revenues, the Commons became an increasing, hourly necessity, without which the State could not proceed. We all know how this conflict between the growing and the failing thing, the new oligarchy and the kingship, came to a head. The squires and merchants -creating already that House of Commons which we know to-day -- challenged the Crown. The lawyers, formerly clerical, were now more and more of the gentry, or allied with the gentry. Formerly dependent upon, or supporting, the Crown, they were nowmore So were the and more identified with its opponents. Universities, for popular education had been destroyed by the Reformation, and the canalisation of educational en do win en t towards the wealthier classes had begun. A new doctrine of constitution was invented. Magna Charta was revived from the deadand glossed at random in favour of the Commons. The rising quarrel (confused in its eddies, clear in its main stream) produced the Civil Wars, and with them the destruction of the English kings. The new oligarchy put to death the last true monarch, in 1649. His son came back eleven years Inter, but only as a salaried puppet, and from that day to within the last few years England enjoyed a great national adventure, the like of which no other modern nation has enjoyed, and the marks of which have been a continuous advance in total wealth, in population, in domestic security, in the arts, in dominion abroad, and in recurrent and advancing successes against external enemies. Throughout this long period of greatness the House of Commons has been at once the symbol of the national character on its political side, and the motive source of the State in action. It has directed, mode rated, and confirmed all England. it remained so long the epitome of the State that a man might almost have entertained the superstition that its decline or peril might prove coincident with that or the nation. But why was all this? Why should the supplanting, after civil war, of monarchy by oligarchy, of the king by the squires and merchants, have produced so large an effect, and one of such advantage to national greatness and glory? One would rather expectthat the destruction of an ancient form of government would lead to turmoil and decay: revolutions commonly have that effect. This revolution led, on the contrary, to an unbroken progress of the sort I have described. The masses may have grown more dependent and sordid, the rich more powerful and even immune, but of the external signs of growth in all that of which patriotic men are proud there can be nodoubt. With all the strength of a growing thing, the England of the seventeenth century, with the House of Commons in command, broke through obstacle after obstacle, surmounted difficulty after difficulty, proceeded from limit to further limit until it stood out in the middle nineteenth century the strongest State in Europe. And why? Essentially because the oligarchy which had thus seated itself firmly in the saddle after the destruction ofmonarchy was growing (through the national sentiment and through the new religion upon which that sentiment reposed) into an aristocracy. That is the point. That is the whole understanding of modern English history. As an ultimate result of the Reformation, the kings were broken and replaced by a governing class. But that governing class was not a mere clique -not a minority seizing power. Men have never toleratedsuch usurpations. They have never allowed a few to rule them without moral sanction. It would be an odious rule. The new governing class supplanting the kings of England nearly three hundred years agobecame a sacramental thing. It was worshipped. It sought to deserve worship. What had come in the place of monarchy was an Aristocratic State, a State governed by an Oligarchy indeed, but an Oligarchy which received the permanent and carefully preserved respect of its fellow-citizens. Under such a rule did Modern England arise: the idea of the “gentleman” arose, and with it the only England Englishmen now know. But why is an aristocracy so strong? Why, while it lasts, does it have such prodigious effects upon the State? Why, when it fails, does it fail for ever, and despair of discovering remedies for its failure? These are the next questions we have to answer, and with the answer to them we shall discover how grave is the crisis through which we are passing to-day, in which at last, after long warning, the aristocratic quality of the English State is failing, and with it the House of Commons. Modern Art and the Public. By B. Windeler. Written history may be regarded as a literary vitoraph of successive kicks administered from time to time by creative artists to the stablised existence of publics and things as they found them. The kicks themselves, expressions of more violent and deeper eruptions -- the power to erupt, as the destructive force of a modern field-piece, obtaining from serried negation, psychological restriction or wad of inertia on explosive little cap -- burst as lava-flow over surrounding pages, and surface in their glow reflections of the vital energies that gave them birth. Indeed, without these eruptions history would cease. A chronicle of static existence slowly dying of inanition would unfold itself that even the glasses of Mr. Wells would fail to popularise. That we have advanced, then, let us at once admit, we owe as much to the Neanderthalic gentleman who first decided that a cave was, after all, preferable to a tree; as we do to his modern-day prototype who decides that he will, if duly persuaded, and it is not too wet, emerge from his cave for, say, eight hours a day. It is not, of course, contended that these creative vital little personalities were wielders of paint-brush alone; or that they even appeared on the respective “halls” of their period; But their performances marked them as holding a startling divergence from the ritual of their time. They had something to say and found means of expression. Their mediums, murder and reolt, executed with a primitive and highly energised conception oftreatment, they flung in the face of the world -- delicious abandon -- affiche for more serious masterpieces, insuring a consideration, at least, if not an acceptance of their tenets by a lethargic public. These statesmen or assassins of the past then -- the distinction depends, after all, on belief in or abhorrence of policy -- these machinists of hitherto unknown and untried concepts, were confronted with an indifference as surprising as it was marked. A gentleman hunted his hounds across the field of Naseby. The modern equivalent finds expression in our fashionable boredom. And, it is indeed, now as then, only where the individual himself feels the prick, and this generally in the pocket, of an application of the policies thus advanced that any coherent and answering quiver of recognition trickles up from the turgid, inarticulate mass. This from our history books. Of the artists themselves -- and we are not concerned here with the questionable ethics of objective -- one point, as a common and altogether satisfying denominator, stands out with peculiar insistence. A vigorous and almost fanatical belief in their view-point -- a sense of having burst from their shell, with commendable precision, in advance of contemporary ovulites. “We’re out first! The other fellows can’t even see us” -- with its attendant desire to stir up these nests, vitalise them; shake them to a more rapid, more intelligent appreciation of the new and splendid world that has opened before them. From this unconscious superiority of the discoverer appearing before a dazed and startled audience arises that antagonism -- reflex and negative current from his all too positive pole -- that counts for so much in the surfacedindifference displayed towards the creative art of to-day. A barrier, as distinctive and more subtle than sex, divides the creative and receptive organisms of modern mentality. It baulks gawkily the threshold of acceptance; and the harrier itself is embedded, as the wire round a rabbit-run, by confusing complexities of modern life. From the contemplation of these shadowy kraals arise vague and disquieting uncertainties -suspicionthat, perhaps, after all, we are rabbits ourselves! The head -- twisted,lunatic cunning -- peeps over the wall. “Come inside,” stares back from the pages of “Punch.” Inside. . . ? Outside. . . ? It is very confusing. The predilection of hound over halberd emancipates our hunting friend from these distressing uncertainties. He can bang with immense satisfaction, as one-man band, wrapped in smug and rather ornamental contentment, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” His cue is Amen. He has droned it for ages -- but this beginning. . . ? This shall be? -- More hounds! “Yoicks, I’m very busy.” His triangle is magnificent. As this statuesque and solid little figure slowly fades from our screen, his place is taken by a shaven, more angular entity. This man is very important. Contact with a developing, active world -- activity in top gear replacing with its speedier revolutions the cruder vitality of the past -- has enlarged his antennae. They wave about, apprising him delicately of innumerable complexities, poke into odd and unexpected quarters, from which they recoil, suddenly, a little startled. They should not, after all, have probed so far. A sly and rather suspicious smirk hovers about his lips, it can be transformed into broad, vacuous grin at the shortest notice, an achievement of which he is inordinately proud. Grins work overtime, drop curtain behind which he can fade into the fastnesses of his mind -- a convenientplace where no one knows what is going on, and he would feel it indiscreet to enquire. Spasms of undigested coherences contort from time to time his otherwise amiable features. The amen has ceased, giving place to a pardonable, and, if one can believe him, regrettable curiosity. There is unrest -- suspicion of things going on behind his back . . . they have been going on a long while; he has only just heard about it. It is all very mysterious. The grin mask wears thin . . . another frown. . . . He has sensed the barrier! Ha! . . . . H’m! At once there arises a shriek from hereditary booth-holders, offering fresher and more varied selection of opiates. The hound has given place to the golfball. Spheres dangle pleasantly. There are puzzles-quite safe, solution will appear in a following issue-and, certain draw, enthralling pursuit of financial will-O’-the-wisps extensively advertised by parental precedent. This appearance of money as the bon-bon de luxe in his assorted box adds a fresh note to the already existing confusion. Tangible realities require so much of his time. His attention is distracted -- seat too near orchestra throws menu into blurred, hieroglyphic. He accepts . . . faint sigh of relief . . . the dictates of He may be pardoned his headaches. waiter. Indeed, these games, this pursuit of supposed desiderata may even appear as desirable and beneficent stabiliser -- soporific, preventing what might otherwise develop, through no fault of his own-a transition from headache to hysteria. His receptive organisms are too lightly strung. Hysteria is always to be avoided. It is at this crise, where the retarding influences of nature (intellectuality as a superimposition being antagonistic to nature in its prize-beef sense) are clinging to him with an appeal at once demanding and pathetic that the creative artist: of to-day swap down from his plinth -- we have seen the dazed audience below -- and exclaims as he points to the front row of stalls: “There is no hope.” Fans wave vigorously -- there is business at emergency (The insistence of those headaches!) exits. But! . . . this is not negation. The apathy, resultant of continuous thrumming on senses of mundane affairs and the facile digestion of peptonised divertissements, presented hitherto with a child-like consistency, has received a jolt. The disclosure of new conceptions, new plans of thought, with no safety rope of preconceived opinion, no what-they-say-isms to cling to; leaves them alone -- bewildering isolation to grapple individually with these strange -things. They are called upon to exercise muscles grown lax by disuse. The effort leaves them a little breathless. The Artist s’impatiente. Ascreator of desire -- first necessity in the marketing of produce -- he is not a success; it is not, after all, “son affaire.” He is aware of this. Marketing holds His derivative processes, for him so few attractions. marching with quicker tempo, show him only the view looking back. White faces a long way off. He would be less artist were this otherwise. Will no one catch up? The stone age has passed: there is no sudden death as persuasive alternative, and, victim of the substitution of reason, in its capacity as first cousin to intellect, for which he himself has been largely responsible, he finds that it is only by methods as tedious as necessary that he can vitalise his fellows to appreciation of new, and to that extent, startling, convictions. To accept the art of the past as supreme and sole refuge. To disestablish from our minds the actualities and successions that have sprung, and are springing to-day, from these sources, is to accompany our Neanderthalic friend back to his tree-top. We do not decry the basic value of such a retreat; but we can, after all, have too many forests. This has been felt, and, with the daily acceptance on designs (we select the depictive asopposed to the sculptic art as a matter of convenience) that would have been, only a few years ago, stuffed back into dustbins had they even been purchased at all; we are better equipped to focus these contending forces. The barrier recedes. We cannot subscribe to his cry of despair. Tongues wag virulently. Factious and litigious little hosts tumble about one another in a riot of discursive energy. Pros and cons leap at us, suddenly,from pages of Press. There is no escape -- and the dust from this melee deposits, as vortical necktie, on the counters of numberless stores. The public have advanced -- we may leave them their grin -- and the artist, by approachment with public, by maintained and insistent designs on their carefully concealed little burrows, may extract his reward -sympatheticrespect as instalment of closer acceptance. Drama. By John Francis Hope. I suggested my last article that a dramatic critic in should criticise his own works; the production of “Mr. Pim Passes By” at the New Theatre makes me wish that there were some means of obtaining the opinion of the original begetter of an idea concerning an adaptation of it. The reference to Browning’s “PippaPasses” is implied in the very title of Mr. A. A. Milne’s play; and it must be admitted that Browning did not exhaust the possibilities of his idea in that poem. Like Pippa, Mr. Pim raises and resolves moral questions; but Mr. Milne’s humorous treatment of the idea does not err in the direction of subtlety. It is an obvious appeal for a laugh to convertPippa, “thelittle ragged girl,” into Mr. Garraway Pim, the oldest inhabitant of anywhere; to convert Pippa’s lyrical happiness in to Mr. Pim’s maundering confusion of memory; to change Pippa’s simplification other people’s problems into Mr. Pim’s of complication of their simple lives. The idea has not gained by its adaptation; Pippa produced her effects by what we may call, analogically, the katalytic action of her own happiness, by her mere passing at a given moment in a given mood, and without direct contact or acquaintance with the people whose critical states she resolved. But Mr. Pim blunders in with both feet, and incoherent reminiscences; and one wonders what Browning would have thought of it all. Perhaps the Spiritualists will call him up and ask him! Nor does Mr. Milne’s treatment of his adaptation of the idea strike very deep; he keeps (or rather the actors keep) us pleasantly titillated, but no more. His humour has a meagre air, a C3constitution which one hearty laugh would shatter. These gently satirical pokes at the conventionality of County people are such old friends, these questions of legal marriage (the “wife or no wife” problem of melodrama) have served their turn so often that I feel middle-aged when asked to reflect on them again. “Friendsof my youth,” I feel inclined to say, “you belong to the good, old days. You have the appearance of being artificially preserved from decay, embalmed, as it were; you serve to prompt memory, but not to inspire laughter. Dear little jokes, you ought to be in a museum.” The pig joke, for instance, of the first act is at least as old as Carlyle; Carlyle prevented praise of any genius by professing to admire the talent shown by his pig; George Marden, J.P., prevents the young lover from expressing his desire to marry Marden’s niece by showing him the pigs, and talking “pig” for a whole morning. It is as stale a joke as the “Soap, I think,” that used to express the aristocrat’s contempt for the nouveau riche. Surely the contrast between romance and reality can be expressed in some other antithesis than love among the pig-sties. But it must be admitted that, within his very obvious limits, Mr. Milne has been successful. He has preserved his mood intact, he has preserved the romantic convention, he has even, very gently, championed cause of the future against the past or even the the present. The future comes to George Marden, J.P., in the form of a young artist who is trying to find himself by painting triangular clouds, and a wife who wants to refurnish the morning room in more brilliant colours than he is used to. He vetoes the young artist’s proposal of marriage to his niece and ward on the ground of inability to support a wife by painting triangular clouds, and he vetoes the proposed re-furnishing on the plea that what was good enough for his ancestors is good enough for him. The miracle by which this man. who automatically registers “No change,” is converted to a reluctant tolerance of experiments, is effected by the passage of Mr. Pim, and the skilful use (not unlike blackmail) made by Mrs. Maiden of the effect of his revelation. At his first passage Mr. Pim tells how he had travelled on the same boat from Australia with a man whom he thought would have died years before; the name of the man, and the place from whence he came, all demonstrate that he is Mrs. Marden’s first husband. Apparently Mrs. Marden is a bigamist, a fact which does not worry either her or George Marden; what does worry George is the fact that he has been living with mother man’s wife, that in the eyes of the Law, the Church, the County, and of Heaven he has for five years been living in sin. He presumes and dreads the universal condemnation, hut most of all his conscience forbids him to accept Mrs. Marden’s solution of ignoring the fact, and being satisfied with love and happiness. He wants to do “the right thing,” and for him the issue is clear-cut, definite; right is right, and wrong- is wrong, and it is wrong to live with another man’s wife. Before they have decided what to do (beyond consulting a solicitor about a suit for nullity), Mr. Pim passes again with the information that the man had died at Marseilles, choked by a herring-bone. The fear of public exposure being removed, George’s conscience apparently goes to sleep again, and he proposes a speedy regularisation of their union at a registrar’s office. But here is Mrs. Marden’s chance to bring pressure to bear. She demands a proposal (a delightfully acted scene), and, as conditions of her acceptance, she stipulates for his consent to the marriage of the artist and the niece, and to her proposed re-furnishing. He still refuses; and in his absence Mr. Pim returns again with the information that his memory has played him false with regard to the man’s name. It was not with Jacob Tellworthy, but John Polwhittle, that he had travelled; it was Polwhittle who had choked at Marseilles,and he had never set eyes on Tellworthy, to his knowledge, in his life. Presumably, Tellworthy had died when the paper, “the “Times,’ said that he was dead”; and the Marden’s marriage was therefore quite regular. But this information is concealed from George; he returns with many “Hums” and “Hahs” to accept the young artist (“ the critics speak well of him, eh?”) as the betrothed to his niece; and while he is hanging the Futuristic curtains, Mr. Pim passes, for the last time, with the information that his name was not John, but Robert, Polwhittle. With less skilful actors, that stirring of George’s conscience would have been tragic, and the mood of the play would have been shattered. But the subtle, comedic art of Miss Irene Vanbrugh preserved the critically humorous atmosphere which made the obvious sincerity of Mr. Ben Webster’s acting of George appear slightly ridiculous. The balance of temperament and intelligence was against him; not even the presence of his Aunt Julia (ably played by Miss Ethel Griffies, whom I noticed in Mr. Nettlefold’s peculiar production of “Othello” recently) could alter the balance of values in his favour. The triumph of original over derivative values has neverbeen more delightfully expressed than in this scene; Olivia Marden so obviously spoke as “one having authority, and riot as the scribes,” that George’s invocation of his gods lacked the touch of human dignity as much as it lacked the authority of religious assurance He was so obviously sinning against life (and Miss Vanbrughsparkles with it) that one wondered why he could not see it himself. Dinah’s epigram was justified: Olivia did see a thing half an hour before it happened, and George saw it half an hour after It happened. I need not waste words on the perfection of Miss Vanbrugh’s acting; she is, of all our actresses, the most finished in technique, the most completely expressive of mood and personality. Even “expression” seems too violent a word for her subtle playing; her characters emanate from her. For once, Mr. Dion Boucicault has more to do than advise her concerning her health or her legal position, mere “feeders’” parts of which he has played too many; andhis study of Mr. Pim’s senile absurdities is delightfully true and delightfully quaint. He prattles with the artlessness of a baby, and yet with all his doddering, preserves the appeal of a gracious personality. He invites confidences, although it is equally obvious that no confidence would be safe with him. The young people were adequately played by Mr. Leslie Howard and Miss Georgette Cohan -- in the latter case, so adequately as to seem unnecessarily exuberany in this atmosphere of the quantum sufficit of perfect art. By William Atheling. TheLondon Trio (A. Goodwin, piano; Pecskai, violin; Whitehouse, ’cello), essayed (Aeolian, Jan. 6), the Schubert Grand Trio in E. flat. In the opening Allegro we had the piano wooden, but in its proper place, with the graduations of softness and loudness well considered. The Grand Trio is a fine example of the typically Schubertian, and, as rendered, was well starched and neat; music of the dress-suit and shirt-front variety. Mr. Whitehouse, temperate in his use of the ’cello; total result that the first movement neither bored nor greatly encouraged one; it suggested theatre rather than life: stage savannahs. In the second movement Whitehouse dragged at the opening; Pecskai was not up to his old form; there was also a drag from the piano, on which instrument the notes were played but insensitizecl. It was “British Official” piano playing, with jerks rat her than sinuosities; eminently not sloppy, but, with equal certainty, neither music of seraph nor siren. At times the piano part might have been managed by beating a barrel-head with a mallet; and at times it was musical. The player seemed to stop dead at the end of every bar. It is probable that bar-ends should be clearly marked, but this line of demarcation is geometric; it should have thickness; above all, it should not be a no deadstop stock-still, requiring each time a subsequent heave to “start ’er agayne.” Muriel Brunskill has no Italian and no expression; she has a large voice, but no graduation; she jumps from loud to soft. This may have been due to “nerves,” butwe doubt it. She needs three years’ training before her next public appearance, she redly knew nothing, absolutely and utterly nothing, about Gluck’s “Che faro”; but she has a voice that should repay arduous labour, really a fine voice. We hope sincerely to hear her again after a long, a really long, interval. MISCHA-LEON (Aeolian, January 10) was rich and moderate in the Gluck Recitatif and Cavatine, but with a slight sappiness where the music may be held to require a curious sort of dryness (granting the reader can conceive a species of dryness which is a virtue) for its finest interpretation. Any criticism which seeks to carry the analysis of musical qualities beyond banality must plunge into words easily ridiculable by gentlemen of ill-will. We will accept emendation of the term dryness from anyone who will find a better term for the difference between the eighteenth century “soul” of Gluck and the rather nineteenth century mode of Mischa-Leon’s interpretation. Felix Fourdrain’s “Le Papillon” is the usual and stereotype modern French; Rhene-Baton’s “Au Desert” is the almost equally stereotyped modern-French meoldramatic mode. Leon got delicacy and sweetness into Baton’s “Berceuse” without much finesse or tensity; Music. again we found a slight roundness where an edge or a sense of clean rectangles would have helped one. Albert Roussel’s “Bachelier de Salamanque” was the usual Debussy playfulness. The general and, perhaps, the sole defect of this group wasthat Mischa-Leon was singing derivative poetry set to derivative music. There was nothing definitely very bad, but nothing superlative. We were then subjected to Elgar’s setting of “Speak, Music,” arranged for quartet accompaniment by A. H. Behrend. (“Augier, crinoline, parapluie!”) Pastiche of many old melodies all undistinguished, typical Englsih hymn tunc phrases for the: setting of the line-ends, and blest”; words “hid me rest” and “bright indistinctly sung. Some relief came with the pleasant opening of “Holbrooke’s” “Anabel Lee” (Josef, Joseph, or some other member of that talented family, I cannot say). He was put down simply as “Holbrooke,” and he has -- for purposes of identification -- set Poe’s “Anabel Lee,” a poem containing considerable excess verbiage and no little sentimentality. This poem evidently addressed to the senile, for it is begins with a remark that “it was many, many years ago.” We are then told that “a maiden there lived,” “whom you may know,” ergo, q.e.d. age on part of auditor. The maiden who “there lived” in line three, patronymic Lee; arrives in fifth line sic: “And this maiden she lived.” If anybody but a man with a great international reputation had written this first stanza our literary critics would tell us that it was very badly written, and full of remplisage, of words, that is, chucked in to fill up the metric scheme, and for no other reason; and that these words in no way assist the poetic intensity or any other quality of the poem; and that this remplisage displays no mastery whatsoever on the part of its author. In fact, if Baudelaire had not translated some of Poe’s tales, and if Poe hadn’t been a tragic figure, and if the symbolistes in Paris hadn’t stewed about the matter, and if Mallarme hadn’t translated the “Raven” into one of the worst pieces of arty prose extant in the French language (refrain “Et le corbeau dit ‘JamaisPlus’”). and if, above all, the poem weren’t a piece of sentimentalism, it might hot have been set at all, or sung on January 10, 1920. Poe, let us record it to his glory, said that some of his poems were exercises built to a formula, but certain people always know more about a man’s mind and intentions than he himself does, and many “learned” and imperceptive professors and publishers’ puffers have since contradicted the author of “The House of Usher,” nu doubt to the profit ofthemselves and of publishers. Now, however well Mr. Holbrooke may have set this verbose poem, and lie has set it quite well, it is impossible that there should not be some corresponding remplisagein the music ; and the whole would, we believe, gain if the poem-scaffolding (which, as sung, bored one to death before the end of the second strophe) were canst aside-having served its turn-and if the remaining musical structure were then purged of all superfluous bits, i.e., of all notes and bars and elements which do notcontribute tp its entity as a piece of music. The little squawks in the fourth strophe might go. I believe, however, that a very presentable string quartet could be rescued from .the remains. Rut for the Holbrooke setting to Tennyson’s “Come not when I am dead,” we find very little excuse. Leon sang it badly; “not” was sung “notcht”; “sick” as “sickcht,” in the old “Shakespearian regular drama” style ofranting, but the composer had clone equally ill; there was meaningless acceleration at “upon my grave,” an over-emphasis where even the late Laureate had been at least consistent. Then the words ascended into a howl; the music into cliche phrasing. KENNEDY-FRASER recitals, March 6 and March 30(Saturdays), at 3 p.m., Aeolian Hall. Readers and Writers. With its January issue the American fortnightly “Dial” has changed its character and periodicity. It is now a literary monthly review -- with illustrations. The text is considerably varied, ranging from stories and essays to reviews; and the illustrations are mostly drawings of young and unknown men. As a literary causeur into whose saucepan another bone has been put I ought, I suppose, to be gratified by the substitution of a literary for an economic journal. The change, moreover, may be said to support my general view that America has now a literary future of much promise. I confess, however, that the disappearance of the economic articles from the “Dial” oppresses me with a sense of real loss. In particular, I wonder whether Mr. Throstein Vellen is now a disembodied ghost wandering up and down America without a magazine to clothe him. If that is the case, it is a great pity, for Mr. Vellen is an economist of the first rank. He is an original thinker whose very errors are profitable, and I shall look to find him back in the “Dial” or on the way to England. The “Dial,” otherwise, gives promise of being an interesting miscellany of interesting work. Its editor must avoid a besetting sin of contemporary editors --namely, talking too enthusiastically of Mr. Squire (there are two articles on Mr. Squire in the January issue). He must trust his own judgment and depend less upon London gossip. He may then hope to create an American literary review that will be read for its own sake in Europe as well as in America. * * * I have only just got to the autumn issue of “Art and Letters” (2s. 6d. quarterly. Edited by Frank Rutter and Osbert Sitwell). Miss Katherine Manfield’s name attracted me -- as it always would -- but only, I discovered, to the thrush’s second song. In actual fact her sketch, “The Pictures,” appeared in a slightly different form in THE NEW AGE of May 31, 1917. Mr. T. S. Eliot, as a critic of poetry, has more to say than most critics, but for sonic reason or other I find him illuminating only in flashes. It is difficult for me, at any rate, to find common ground with a critic who deplores the influence of Milton on blank verse and refers to him as the Chinese Wall. Mr. Eliot may be right in this revolutionary view of Milton. Mr. Ezra Pound, I know, holds the same view. But, at present, I have not seen enough evidence to convince me of it, and I should like to see a whole treatise on English blank verse devoted to establishing Mr. Eliot’s case. Mr. Windeler, in the same issue, has joined the school of Mr. James Joyce. He writes with a dictionary and produces sensations. * * * The “Dial” shows signs of disputing the territory hitherto exclusively occupied by the American “Little Review.” I should be sorry if the “Little Review” were to allow itself to be driven off the grass. It was a pioneer in America and it deserves a better fate than to be arrested for trespass. Its habit of publishing huge serials, however, has been one of the causes of its want of success; and another defect, undoubtedly, is the astonishing unevenness of its features, indicating a too generous catholicity on the part of its editors. To mention the “Dial” again, I note that its new editorship is single; it is no longer under an editorial hoard. It is an improvement, Cor a committee simply cannot edit. The “Little Review” remains under a triple editorship; and one against three will always win. * * * Mr. Ezra Pound comes in for it again -- as he always does. His idiosyncrasies are the enemies of his personality, and they will always, unless he can amend them, militate against both his work and his success. Mr. Pound appears to love to give his readers the impression that he is no end of a fire-eater, and that he is a charlatan of the first water, setting up to lecture better men on the virtues he himself has never cultivated. It is an absolutely incorrect picture: an exceedingly bad self-portrait: malicious caricature of a himself. A psycho-analyst would attribute it all to “compensation” other words. to an attempt on the -- in part of Mr. Pound to disguise his qualities as defects. In brief, Mr. Pound has not the courage of his virtues. “No one,” says Mr. Hartley in the “Little Review,” “admires Ezra Pound more than I do . . . but it is his celestial sneer I admire.” A sneer, celestial or mundane, is, however, the last gesture of which Mr. Pound is capable. If anything, he is too benignant, too enthusiastic, tooanxious to find excuse for admiration. But there, someone else must draw the portrait of Mr. Pound; and it will not be while he is alive. * * * Mr. Felkin’s “The Poet’s Craft” (Allen and Unwin) appears to me a somewhat superfluous work. It is much less complete than Saintsbury’s accessible “Manual of Prosody” (Macmillan. 3s. 6d.), and insufficiently original in its differences to justify publication. Mr. Felkin’s views are right; that is to say, I approve of them with only minor reservations; but they are not expressed with any unusual force or clarity. “None but the greatest poets are superior to metre, and they have souls so musical that they obey the laws instinctively or bend them to their genius.” “Nowadays we have no great poets because religion, the inspiration of the Soul of God, is so rare among modern literary men.” These sentences might be listened to with toleration in a paper read at a Literary Circle; but in a book, upon scarce paper, and produced by dear labour, they are expensive commonplaces. * * * In an excellent essay published by the Manchester Victoria University (Longmans), Professor C. PI. Herford makes a meritorious attempt tu recall attention to the influence and value of the Norse Myths upon English Poetry. William Morris, of course, was most powerfully and directly influenced by the Sagas; and of Morris Professor Herford says that “no other English poet has felt so keenly the power of the Norse myth; none has done so much to restore its terrible beauty, its heroism, its earth-shaking humour, and its heights of tragic passion and pathos, to a place in our memories and a home in our hearts.” It will not do, however, for (let me whisper it!) who reads Morris’ poetry to-day? Has he a home in our hearts? Are his Norse enthusiasms really anything to us? I am not, it will be observed, defending our generation for neglecting Morris, or for being indifferent to the Norse theogony, of which he was a prophet. Our age is one of prose; and, as somebody was saying the other day, the passion of prose is justice-reasonable and regulated justice. Terrible beauty, earth-shaking humour, tragic passion, and so on -- the stuff of epic poetry -- are relegated nowadays thepolice-court. Moreover, the Norse mythology to is not only “pagan” in the sense of being non-Christian,it is pagan in the sense of being sub- as much as pre-Christian, differing in this respect from the Indian mythology of the “Mahabharata” or the Egyptian mythology of the “Book of the Dead.” We can never, therefore, return to it without committing an act of regression; since it is a paganism of a world inferior rather than superior to the “Christian world. At the same time, since we must carry all our sheaves with us in order to enjoy the complete harvest of the human soul, it is necessary not to drop from consciousness the heroic past, albeit a past to which we may not in fact return. Let it he enshrined and enjoyed in poetry and music now it is no longer possible in life. R. H. C. Psychotherapy. Let us leave psycho-analysis for a moment, and consideranother method of psychological treatment, more popular and more. spectacular than psycho-analysis; but not, so far as we know at present, so scientific as psycho-analysis. In fact, the reader will find that we shall have to resort to psycho-analysis to elucidate psychotherapy. In England this term psychotherapy is to be understood as synonymous with the methods of treatment used by Dr. A. F. Hurst. In 1918Dr. Hurst opened a military hospital (Seale Hayne) near Newton Abbot, for the treatment of war neuroses. With hysterical cases-extroverts with the primitive will to power-he was successful in effecting a large number of rapid cures of the hysterical symptom. The methods he employed he calls himself “persuasion and re-education.” These two words are synonymous with hypnotism applied, not directly, but round the corner. Electrical appliances and other such gadgets he sensiblyabolished to a large extent; and the two things he laid down as essential to a good result in treatment were the belief of the medical officer that he could cure his patient, and the belief of the patient that he could be cured. This belief was awakened in the patient by establishing an “atmosphere of cure” in the hospital. That is to say, as soon as the patient arrived, everyone, including patients already treated, assured him that he would soon be made well. Then the persuasion and re-educationcame. If, for instance, the patient had lost his voice after gas, the inflammatory effect of gas on the vocal cords and its temporary nature were explained, and he was told to cough. He was then told that if he could cough, there was no reason why he should not speak; and he was told to cough and say “one.” This procedure was continued until the patient was actually speaking. Great stress was laid on rapidity of treatment. The cure, so to speak, must try to be as instantaneous as the shock that produced the disability. Well, such methods of treatment are undoubtedly very valuable; particularly in war-time, when a patient must. be patched up as quickly as possible. There is also a great deal of precedence for hypnotic treatment, and we even read in the “Ramayana” how Sita healed Rama’s wounds “by the volition of pure intention.” (The Dream of Ravan,* p. 11.) We must, however, note three points at once. Suggestion is not psychologically suitable even for all cases with an hysterical symptom. Some neurotics desire nothing so much as to be hypnotised. It feeds their neurosis to be persuaded and re-educated; their ego-consciousness is thereby enhanced. For illustration I will refer the reader to Jung (Analytical Psychology, pp. 240-1). That is the first point. The second is that, to obtain the best results with suggestion, the sooner it is applied after the patient’s breakdown the better. If, as is so often the case to-day, a man has spent a dreary existence of several years in our so-called “neurological” hospitals, it is not too easy to “suggest a cure” to him. And, finally, for the introverted, psychasthenic suggestion is worse than useless. After these preliminaries, let us examine Dr. Hurst’s own standpoint as evidenced in his published writings. This is to be found in the “Seale Hayne Neurological Studies,”? and notably in Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 106-110. Here we find Dr. Hurst defining hysteria as the condition in which symptoms are present which have resulted from suggestion and are curable by psycho-therapy.”Let us try and get inside this. We know what Dr. Hurst means by psychotherapy, a treatment by suggestion, which is hypnotism; and we know that this will cure some hysterics, but not those with a Publishing * The Dream of Ravan. (Theosophical Society.) * The Seale Hayne Neurological Studies. (Oxford University Press.) Annual subscription for six numbers, £1.1s. pronouncedwill to power, unless, of course, the circumstances of the treatment are such that the will to power receives more nourishment after “cure” than before Now what about the first half of Dr. Hurst’s definition? He safeguards himself from the admission that an hysterical symptom is the outcome of an abnormal psychological condition, by stating that the war has taught us that any man will develop an hysterical symptom under a sufficiently powerful suggestion. By suggestionhere he means the intense strain of unfavourable circumstance. Well, had he substituted neuroticism for hysteria, we should have found ourselves agreeing with him whole-heartedly. But hysterical symptoms? For the extrovert, yes; for the introvert, no. As functions of the human libido we all contain the same elements; but each individual varies in his breaking-point, and in his extroversion and introversion. When blown up, one man will become paralysed, another man will develop an anxiety neurosis, another will be psychologically unshattered. The individual will react according to the psychological-can I not say etheric? -- composition of his personality. When we find a man attempting to formulate an identical psychology for every being, it means that actually he is projecting his own psychology on to the world at large. Now, unless Dr. Hurst wishes to be convicted of doing this, he will have to admit that there is a psychological state that is especially liable to blossom forth into hysterical symptoms. To use his own words, this would be what he has been trying to refute, namely, a condition of “abnormal suggestibility.” But this is very loose terminology, for what is suggestibility? We must go back to psycho-analysis and consider the two types of extrovert and introvert. The introvert looks before he leaps. With his guiding principle as a refuge, he is obviously not open to suggestion. We have only to consider the extreme case of an introversion psychosis to realise this. It is labour lost to make suggestions to a dementia praecox. Hut the extrovert, who lives by emotional reaction, he is the man to respond to suggestion, and, incidentally, to work by suggestion, too. And that is the type that will develop hysterical symptoms under strain. It must be remembered, course, that extraverts and introverts are all of graded, and that is why people of apparently “normal” psychology may manifest hysterical symptoms. It is this fact, I think, that has led Dr. Hurst to maintain that there is no “abnormal” psychiological condition underlying hysteria. Now what have we learnt about psychotherapy? It is a very good method of treatment for some hysterical cases in that it removes the hysterical symptom, but not for all hysterical cases, as forms of hysteria wax fat upon suggestion. But we must remember always that to work by psychotherapy is to work in the dark, as no knowledge is gained of the patient’s psychological composition. This being so, the patient’s psychological composition remains unaltered, and there is no true guarantee that he will not relapse into his former state under the next strain that he meets., Also, if the “suggestion”that removes his symptom be not fundamentaly true -- and there is no surety in psychotherapy that it is -- it is hardly likely that he will remain under its influence for a whole lifetime. If I may obtrude a personalopinion for a moment, I would like to say, as a counsel of perfection, that no psychiatrical treatment of any sort should be undertaken without a knowledge of the patient gained from his dreams, or from his word-associations;and of these two, the dream is the surer guide, as word-associations are not difficult to falsify. When we know our patient, then we can decide on treatment accordingly. The psychology of the physician must be considered as a final thing. The extrovert will do his best work by suggestion, and the introvert by analysis. The reader can, I imagine, discover the reasonsfor this by himself. J. A. M. ALCOCK. New By Values. Edward Moore. I. It is a great fault od intellectual activity that, except of course as categories, it loses sight of time and space. Ignoring the fact that the soul changes and has changing needs, it treats problems at the present day in the same spirit as it treated them a hundred years ago. Now the most important spiritual event of modern times, long drawn out and not yet accomplished, has been the gradual disappearance of religion. About a change such as this you would have thought there could be no human doubt: it must needs have left a mark upon the soul. Yet modern thinkers have ignored it. And the explanation of this, strange as it may seem, is not startling and recondite, but, on the contrary, perfectly simple and natural. It is that thought is concerned primarily with the object of thought, and that the object of thought, unfortunately, has not been for a century now chiefly the soul. The soul being forgotten, however, modern thinkers have fallen into the error of assuming that the disappearance of religion has had an effect upon the mind only, and not upon the spirit. The task of thought, as they conceive it, is purely intellectual, critical, scientific; and this, they imply, is sufficient in itself to accomplish emancipation for mankind. Implicitly, if not consciously, they have regarded religion as nothing more than an intellectual error, by disposing of which men lose nothing, but, on the contrary, are the gainers. The truth about religion, however, so obvious that one scarcely wishes to repeat it, is that it not only gives men light, but it gives them light which heals. The task of religion has not been that merely of illumining the mind; it has been that, as well, of harmonising the spirit. How has it done this? Like so many of the things we have forgotten; in a way that appears at once simple and incomprehensible. Religion heals because it thinks not of truth alone, but as well of man’s power to apprehend it and of his relation to it; and because it thinks of these not separately, first discovering the truth and then trying to find man’s right relation to it, but simply, completely, and, as it were, in one thought. We have in modern psychology a term which expresses conveniently this completeness; we say that religion speaks not to the conscious alone, but to the unconscious as well. There, then, is the secret of its healing force. Erase religion from the life of men and you bereave them of the knowledge which harmonises to give in exchange that which merely explains, merely analyses. But religion has been waning; it is now almost extinct; and the thinkers of our day are not even aware that healing truths are necessary, that they have ever existed, or that it is advisable that they should exist. This blunder I will not call absurd or laughable, for in doing so I should be guilty of the intellectual sin itself, the sin ofmistaking for an error of the intellect what is in fact a fatality. For even the most naive intellectual fallacies, even fallacies such as rationalism, are tragic when they are seen as things not merely intellectual. They are tragic because, while appearing to satisfy the mind, they satisfy in reality only a part of it. There are two parts of the mind which must be informed by thought: the conscious and the unconscious. Ifthe conscious alone isnourished, the harmony of the mind is broken; and the unconscious, neglected, untaught, unable to co-operate with the conscious, rebels against it. And so widespread has this condition become in our time that the task of literature for the next hundred years, whether we like it or not, will be to minister to minds diseased. The world is an infirmary, as Heine exclaimed a long time is ago, and the time for complaint and indignation over; these will not hasten our cure. We must look at the disagreeable fact sensibly; and, in future, we are entitled to demand that truths shall be not merely intellectual, but actually curative. It is a question, however, whether, in our search for healing truths, we shall apply with less hope to the irreligious or to the religious. For religion nowadays speaks to the whole mind -- the conscious and the unconscious -- no more than thought does. The interpretations which are provided for it even by divines are merely intellectual interpretations; and, worst of all, they are interpretations which endeavour to “reconcile” religion with modern thought. It is not mere intellectual subtlety that is lacking in this policy, it is something far more fundamental: it is knowledge of religion. For, if the symbols of religion can be expressed clearly in intellectual or even scientific terms, where, one may ask, is the necessity for them? They are, in that case, mere idle poetic obscurantism. The language of religion, however, is in fact a language not translatable into intellectual terms. Religious symbolism, in other words, is riot arbitrary; and when religion speaks in symbol it is because what it has to say cannot be said intellectually. Modern psychologists, and Jung especially in his “Psychology of the Unconscious,” have shown how absurd are the merely rationalistic interpretations of myth. Well, the rationalistic interpretation of religion is just as absurd. After all, religion is no more than our myth, and myth no less than the religion of others. Their language is the same. It is a primitive language and at the same time, seeing that we are all primitive as well as intellectual, eternal one. We have forgotten an it: that is our tragedy; it is the glory of the new psychology that it has rediscovered it. And with it, psychology has rediscovered religion; for religion is just an art of the soul which we have forgotten. I I. When Nietzsche wrote against the concept of Being a few decades ago, he diagnosed it as the expression of a will to non-entity. In this diagnosis he displayed that astonishing psychoIogical insight, far in advance of his age, which is his chief greatness; but his conclusion, one can now assert, was erroneous, simply because he was misled by the intellectual error of his time. He treated the ideal of Being psychologically: that was a big step in advance: he should also have treated psychologically, however, the very terms in which the ideal wasexpressed. Instead of seeing it as a rigid concept, as he did, he should have seen it as a fluid symbol. For Being, or rest, is primarily a religious symbol and only secondarily a philosophical concept. The Being of philosophy, in short, is simply an intellectual interpretation, that is, misinterpretation, of the Being of religion. Alittle analysis applied to the symbol of rest is sufficient to show us that at any rate it is not an absolute thing. Rest from what? Rest from activity? But complete inaction is even more unbearable than action. The intense longing, expressed in the most exalted language, of the poets and the mystics simply could not have been for such a thing. No; what the tormented spirit longs for is the very opposite of rest from activity; it is respite from everything which thwarts activity, from the shock of outward forces which it has not grasped, from the attrition of inward energies, turned against it, which it has not understood. The ascetic mystic escapes from both by cutting himself off from them, with the aim, however, of exercising untrammelled the activity of the soul. There is shown in the clearest terms what is meant by the ideal of rest. It is nothing else than an ideal of free activity; perhaps, if we understand it logically (which it is a mistake to do), a demand to live in the void, to have actions without a resistance upon which to act, to be free altogether from consequences, to exercise untrammelled the will to power. But the problem, of course, must not be treated logically. The concept of Being was created by a desire: by an unsatisfied desire, or else it would not have required expression; by an unconscious desire, or its expression would not have been symbolical. And, also, is it permissible to assume, by a desire which is not impossible of satisfaction, seeing that its defeat is the source of such profound spiritual disease? Let lis bring it down to the earth if we can, and discover what in activity is pleasurable and what painful. We are tired by action: that is clear; but we are tired most of all by imperfect action, or, to put it in another way, by the obstacles set in the road of action. I do not mean by this that action is possible without a resistance; it is not; imperfect action, however, is action which is interfered with in encountering its resistance, which does not reach its resistance clearly, but is checked by some obstacle of the mind, by a complex, to use the language of psychology. Intelligent activity exhilarates in its execution, and only when it is accomplished leaves us tired; but imperfect activity torments us from beginning to end. Brought down to perfectly simple terms, then, the heavens of rest, the symbol of Being, are simply the language in which the unconscious expresses its yearning for free activity. And by free activity it means certainly and at the least activity in which all the faculties move in concord, without thwarting one another. Let us return once more to Nietzsche. He diagnosed the concept of Being, his readers will remember, as the production of the “ill-constituted” and the “unhappy.” And there, no doubt, he was right, for how many human beings are not “ill-constituted” and “unhappy”? His error was in concluding from this that Being was an ideal of death, an eternal holiday from the pressure of Becoming. Being is not the desire to escape from life: it is, on the contrary, the desire to escape from the diseases of life. Moreover, speaking in the language of religion, there is no antithesis between the concept of Being and that of Becoming: the one is a part of the other; and Heaven itself is a place not of rest, but of free activity. Nietzsche’s own problem, recognised by him-the need for spiritual healing was rendered, alas, insoluble by his conception -of Being. If that wasthe only remedy, then he would prefer to endure the disease! But had he seenBeing in other terms, who knows what might have been the result? The great tragedy of his life, it is possible, wasthat he saw Being as a fixed concept. Whether the desire for free activity can be satisfied in one life or in a hundred is not the present problem. Very probably it cannot. Meanwhile, however, in this present age, activity relatively free is possible. Free action, broadly speaking, is prevented by man’s misunderstanding of two things: the world outside him and the world within. For centuries he has been trying to comprehend the first; and now, in the new psychology, he is beginning to understand the second. In a matter of years free activity, activity thwarted by misunderstanding neither of the outward nor of the inward world, should for some be possible. It is towards this, indeed, that the prophetic remnant of mankind is moving. LINES of a Young Lady Mixing in Political Society). What your soul seeks your eyes will see, So pray with closed eyes a space That something of eternity May gleam for you from some dark face; Lest in the throng your love may light On something sleek orsinister -A nameless wanderer of the night, A Coalition Minister. W. M. theAlbum (For Recent Verse. (Palmer and Hayward. RUTH PITTER. First Poems. 2s. 6d. net.) The first of the poems in this collection of Miss Ruth Pitter’s first poems was also the first published in THE NEW AGE. That was in 1912, and Miss Pitter was then some fourteenth or fifteen years old. The poem is entitled “Fairy Gold,” and the opening stanza of three runs as follows: I have a brother cleped Fairy Gold, Who dwelleth not in housen nor with men, Rut in the dim wood and the forest hold; Full fair is he in form; full young, full old; Of all the wild things in the grot and glen, Of many a brown shy wood-bird am I told, Of every leaf and blade on fell and fen, I have a brother cleped Fairy Gold, Both the promise and the claim in this poem have been amply fulfilled, for in the course of the last six years “Fairy Gold” has indeed been ever-present with Miss Pitter. A subtler reader would have surmised the direction in which the genius thus revealed would be likely to travel. In this very poem there are suggestions which the subsequent work of the writer has more fully revealed; an individual vocabulary, consisting almost of an anthology of “fairy” words; a spiral or trailing rhythm like that of a vine; a simple subtlety; and a never-failing sense of style, even in the most apparently incongruous passages. But before commenting any further, let a few more extracts from the present collection be quoted. With his red beak and marble plume, Uttering his wild, his pulsant cry, The Swan into the wild did fly. Into the fiery dawn rode he, And many a burning cherubim That knoweth the face ofothe Most High, In godlike flight did gowith him. Grieve no more for the silent dead. They have fled from the earth, -Yea, have fled! Nay, never grieve more. All our crystal and golden love, What does it boot to grief or mirth? These but leaves from the autumn are, Gone far from our ken -Yea, gone far! Past, and too soon forgot; Dry thy tears and grieve thou not, Think no more upon trouble? men. They that have the Elfin heart Cannot weep; In the desert they would sleep While the lion watched apart; And when tears of mortals start Silence keep. It is not seemly the elect should weep. They have no heritage in agony. Calmly thine heart in thy still bosom keep And let importunate sorrow pass thee by. More than thy brethren have, the very Sky Is thine, with many stars and clouds embossed; Out of this wealth and all this majesty Sing to them that they be not wholly lost. But the eve falleth, quiet as death, Or as a fairy’s glance; When from her door she issueth She is allradiance. Cease thou to roam When the willow wavers with a whispered warning That on the foam of his tossed streams doth shine the silver morning. Light aspens stand above the silken grass, And send upon the twilight their wan look, More wan for the long thought of what doth pass. Then in the stream, half river and half brook, They gaze, entwining all their sister arms, And pale to read the dream within his glass. Together in the bank their feet are set, While all the air low mourneth, and chill harms Hover where the bright heads are closely met. Extracts, after all, scarcely do justice to Miss Pitter; since her gift is to produce anatmosphere rather than any sudden emotion. And this she creates by a kind of leisurely means of which herrhythms are a consonant part. The poems cannot be read quickly; but every syllable must be given its full value. Often, indeed, the rhythm depends as much upon quantity as upon syllabic length; it is, however, never lost. Regarding the subject-matter of the poems, the foregoing extracts are characteristic, and they reveal a pre-occupation, or, perhaps, a re-occupation with a fairy morality, distant and distinct from human morality. The detachment implied in it is, however, detachment in memory and not inimagination; it refers to the past rather than to the present or future. Most of the poems are memories recovered from childhood, memories of the way a child looked at and felt about the world. The Muse of poetry, however, is a Muse and not merely a daughter of Memory; and as the years pass there come into Miss Pitter’s verse more of the Muse of Contemplation than of Memory’s daughter. In the last passage above quoted, occurring in one of the later poems of the present collection, a thrill of human grief canbe experienced, as it were, through the fairy or naturalistic atmosphere. It is a sign of what may be expected in the future -- an intensification of the human element, but always upon a fairy background. The pitch of the contemplation is not, as yet, very exalted, being rarely above such subjects as grief and death and change; but it will in all probability rise. The latest poems of all, now occasionally appearing in these columns, show a gradual butcertain ascent in the direction of simple sublimity. The passage is from the purely aesthetic -which is Beauty without Love-to the divine aesthetic, which is Beauty with Love. The dangerous interspace of Sentiment, which is Love without Beauty, has been altogether avoided. Miss Pitter’s range of form is extremely varied; but her characteristics of rhythm, cadence and vocabulary remain clear through them all. In other words, she is individual. What, finally, may be noted is the tragic air cast upon all her verse. It is a mock-tragedy in a certain sense; but it redeems from mere prettiness the subjects as usually dealt with. They become lovely. PAUL SELVER. Personalities. (Allen and Unwin. 2s. 6d. net.) Though most, if not all, of the verses contained in this volume have appeared already in THE NEW AGE, their rereading in volume form takes the reader by surprise. One is surprised to discover that Mr. Selver is wittier and more clever than even his keenest admirers had imagined. Here arc arranged in their proper classes the exercises in prosody which Mr. Selver appears to have thrown off with the case of mastery rather than of practice. The most difficult forms, including even that rare form, the “Ghazal,” he simply plays with, as who should say: Pooh, there is nothing in that; give me something really difficult! And in parody he is often more skilful than his original. With it all, however, these verses are not mere verbal gymnastics; they carry ideas. The common parodist usually exhausts himself in imitating the manner of his model; he has nothing of his own left to say. But Mr. Selver preserves his own ideas even while masqueradingunder the motley of his originals. STEPHEN MAGUIRE. Views and Reviews. A PURE SCIENTIST Although is the seventh edition of this Life of this Pasteur,* it has never been my fortune to read it until now; but good books improve with age, and Pasteur’s Life is probably better appreciated now than it would have been had I first read it in 1901. It is alife singularly full of interest, singularly free from the personal distractions that drive most men of genius to the verge of insanity. It would be incorrect to say that Pasteur had one passion; he was passionately filial, passionately conjugal, passionately paternal, and passionately human. But dominating all was his passion for research, for exact experimental knowledge of facts; and just as he became the tutor of his father and sister, so his wife and children shared his interest in his work -- and I suspect that he wooed Mme. Pasteur with dissertations on the dissymmetry of crystals. I have never read of a more perfectly harmonised person than Pasteur; the resistances he encountered were all outside the home, there were no foes in his own household. The misfortunes that befell him were natural ones, the death of parents, of children, of friends; and his grief for them was free from the distracting element of self-reproach. Probably the only misfortune with which he could have reproached himself was the stroke of hemiplegia that nearly killed him in his forty-sixth year, due to the cerebral congestion caused by the almost intemperate zeal with which he prosecuted his studies. Hut he wasted no time in self-reproach even then; thirty-six hours after, when the issue of life or death was still undecided, he wanted to talk science; and one night during the week he dictated to M. Gernez a “noteon a very ingenious process for discovering in the earlier tests those [silk-worm] eggs which are predisposed to flachery.” It is usual to refer to Pasteur as a Catholic savant, but it would be truer to call him a Catholic and a savant-although M. Radot says very little of his Catholicism, and that little looks very much more like Pantheism than Catholicism. As Sir William Osler says in his introduction: “Hisown creed was beautifully expressed in his eulogy upon Littré: ‘He who proclaims the existence of the Infinite, and none can avoid it, accumulates in that affirmation more of the supernatural than is to be found in all the miracles of all the religions; for the notion of the Infinite presents that double character that it forces itself upon us and yet is incomprehensible. When this notion seizes upon our understanding, we can but kneel. . . . I see everywhere the inevitable expression of the Infinite in the world: through it the supernatural is at the bottom of every heart. The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite. As long as the mystery of the Infinite weighs on human thought, temples will be erected for the worship of the Infinite, whether God is called Brahma, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus; and on the pavement of those temples men will be seen kneeling, prostrated, annihilated in the thought of the Infinite.” I quote the passage because it is germane to a discussion that I have for long engaged in sporadically in the pages of THE NEW AGE, and for which I have been abused as “materialist.” have long argued I that the difference between science and religion is a difference of mental attitude, the difference between inquiry and worship; and, further, I have argued that inquiry into the nature of “matter” our only possible is source of knowledge of life. However ardently we may worship the Infinite, it remains for ever incomprehensible; but as the scientist sees “everywhere the * The Life of Pasteur. By René Vallery Radot. Translated from the French by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire. (Constable. 6d.net.) 10s. expression of the Infinite in the world,” we do actually know more of the incomprehensible Infinite the more we know of its manifold expression in “matter.” Pasteur, who worshipped the Infinite, demonstrated the existence and the power of the infinitesimal organism; it was his science, and not his religion, which made him a benefactor of humanity. Of the superior value as a means of knowledge of the experimental method of scientific: inquiry over that of worship, Pasteur had no shadow of doubt. His success as a scientist is primarily due to the fact that, as M. Radot says, “he did not admit the interference of religion with science anymore than that of science with religion.” What may be questions of faith to the believer are questions of fact tu the scientist; Pasteur generation, said on the subject of spontaneous for example: “Thereis here no question of religion, philosophy, atheism, materialism, or spiritualism. I might even add that they do not matter to me as a scientist. It is a question of fact; when I took it up I was as ready to be convinced by experiments that spontaneous generation exists as I am now persuaded that those who believe it are blind-folded.” Had Pasteur been an historian like Loisy, instead of a bacteriologist and chemist, and applied the same doctrine and method to the history and sacraments of his Church, he would not have been claimed as a Catholic savant. The antagonism of the two methods that we call science and religion really springs from that fundamental conversion of questions of faith into questions of fact; one can “intuit” anything one likes, but the truth can only be revealed and demonstrated. Pasteur’sgenius expressed itself in his power of devising simple but conclusive experiments, experiments that reduced dialectics to gibbering impotence in the face of facts that “winna ding.” He replied to argumentswith experiments, and the experimental method revealed its superiority as a means of knowledge. Of the value of his discoveries in fermentation, flachery, anthrax, cholera, diphtheria, rabies, and the rest, I have no need to speak. Preventive medicine owes much to him, and there is a world-wide consensus of opinion that curative medicine also, in contagious and infectious diseases, has been armed with weapons of precision by his genius. That his therapeutics were homeopathic, both in dosage and principle, does not seem to be observed by M. Radot; but the injection of an attenuated virus to produce immunity is obviously an application of the law, Similia similibus curantur -- or, in the old phrase, “a hair of the dog that bit him.” Lister, we know, revolutionised surgery by an application of Pasteur’s discoveries; and even the milkman charges us more, in the name of Pasteur, for supplying us with milk instead of disease. Ademonstrated fact has immeasurable consequences of practical utility; and Pasteur put “the science of hypothetics” in its proper place. “Hypotheses,” said, he “come into our laboratories in armfuls; they fill our registers with projected experiments, they stimulate us to research -- and that is all.” And if he worshipped the Infinite, if he worshippedgreat men, he also said: “Worship spirit the of criticism. If reduced to itself, it is not anawakener of ideas or a stimulant to great things; but without it everything is fallible; it always has the ‘last word.” For the function of criticism is, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “to see the object as in itself it really is” -and that is even more necessary in the phenomena of life than in the phenomena of literature. Pasteur approached the question of disease from his own point of view as a chemist and bacteriologist; and the brilliant success of his doctrine of specific causes and specific reactions has justified him. But I could wish that he had been a physiologist, and have devoted hisexperimental genius to the study of health. After all, Lister had demonstrated inflammation as the condition preliminary to bacterial invasion; and although disease may be a specific reaction to a specific invasion, the argument that resistance to bacterial invasion is a general vital function, and that immunity is not necessarily bound up with inoculation is not disproved. The Pastorian vaccine-therapy is not necessarily the only development of the Pastorian etiology; indeed, the very variety of diseases with the concomitant variety of inoculations makes it impossible as a system of preventive medicine. There is much to be said for the “hygienists” who declare that health confers immunity, and positively promote health by diet, ablutions, and exercises, much also to be said for the homeopathic provocation by drugs of the powers of resistance to disease. It is perhaps impossible to study the state of health directly and in such detail as disease permits; the abnormal presents the normal in detail, instead of synthesis, and physiologyand pathology go hand in hand. But if ever a genius like Pasteur arises, who can give to the study of health the same precision of definition that he gave to disease, the Millennium will be here. The bacterium will lie down with the phagocyte, comfortably ensconced in its digestive apparatus; and man, the most hospitable of God’s creatures, will not suffer from the very lavishness of his hospitality to the infinitesimal kingdom. A. E. R. Reviews. The Coming of Cuchulain. In the Gates of the North. The Triumph and Passing of Cuchulain. By Standish O’Grady. (T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd. 3s. 6d. net each.) There are versions of the Irish epic of Cuchulain -and even some very good ones -- in which the grandeur of the tales is more or less compromised to gain a cheaper merit. Quaintness or strangeness, or a new “atmosphere,” are all too highly prized by many readers; and of these qualities there is doubtless more than enough to be made from the rambling fragments, versions and perversions in which these noble tales still live among the folk of their land. Yet the amusement we gain from Irish idioms, or from meandering and inconsequence, is mere decoration upon our real appreciation. And here, as elsewhere, decoration is often detraction. Standish O’Grady’s three volumes show no trace of this inferior merit. They were the first literary revelation of the Irish saga and they are still unsurpassed. It is a great delight to have them now reprinted, in spite of such shockingly bad illustrations. There is nothing precious or aesthetic about the style of them; no fear of long or Latin words, no exploiting of the Irish turns of speech; but the writing is vigorous and vivid, the stories clear and consequent. In fact, O’Grady did something genuine in these books: he gave us a new window of vision into the great life, the life of all the heroic legends. And nothing is so good to read of as this life of the supermen. In it we see how gorgeous a drama life can be, when all action is spontaneous and single-minded, and when all moods are pure. But what, above all, makes epic great for us, is something common to all heroic legends, a strange something, deeper even than the magic of their primitive religions, something that we call Fate. It is not fatalism, in any sense of resignation to evil: more nearly it might be compared to a proud superiority to the life of the world; and, in reality, it is a very simple intuition of reality, a knowledge that all is equal in the end. The greater the splendour of a life, the bitterer the tragedy that ends it. The more beautiful, chaste and courageous a heroine may be, the more terrible her bereavement, the more desolate her suicide for love: No epic heroes live happy ever after. None of them expects it. Such a reward of long and prosperous life is offered, indeed, to Cuchulain, but on condition that he loses his honour -- that is, that he cease to be himself, and lie does not even consider the idea. So it is with all epic personalities: they enjoy their good fortune like gods, and then, when the calamity comes to them, they seem indeed overwhelmed, but not astonished. Though they fight it, it is not with our modern bitterness against heaven and earth that such a thing should be. For epic is all pervaded by an intuition as deep as any philosophy, and even more real, perhaps. But philosophy, teaching the same truth, often seems pessimistic; whilst no one can find pessimism in the stories of Rama, of Sigurd or Cuchulain. Their moral spirit is magnificent. Glorifying the battle from which nothing is gained, they give us no delusive hope of anygood without its evil. Not love nor fame nor even virtue do they offer us without just so much evil as these things are good. In this, epic divulges the worst truth there is to know in life -- while at the same time it shows us the best. For though good and evil be equal for ever, still it is better to go through the maze of life as epic heroes dot -- better to be oneself mightily, to act one’s own essence of character fully and fearlessly in the drama of the world. Only thus can that drama grow brilliant and clear and revealing. Only so can sagas he possible: only in this way can life have any glory in it. True Love. By Allan Monkhouse. (Collins. 7s. net.) This promised to be a very clever and interesting study of life in and about a Manchester newspaper office and repertory theatre -- but the war diverted the course of true love, the leading lady was discovered to be a German, and the “intellectual” journalist and playwright entered into an ideal compact with his beloved. He was to say all the good things that he really felt about the Germans, and she was to say all the good things that she could about the English. In this way, love would triumph overpatriotism -- and another repertory theatre play be written, if the author were spared. He was not spared; the Germans killed him in battle, and the English killed her by persecution, but we are assured on all hands that she was an ideal creature, as perhaps she really was. The first part of the book is a clever genre study, and the author is clever enough to avoid an abject failure in his treatment of the war; but he is obviously out of his element, and the story wanders vaguely from “John Bull” to “Mr. Britling” for incidents and treatment. Manchester Liberalism is not adequately comprehensive of such a war. Keith’s Dark Tower. By Eleanor H. Porter. (Constable. 6s. net.) Miss Eleanor Porter’s gift of sentimental optimism finds full expression in this story. Keith, the son of an artist, goes blind in his youth, and cries out against the fate that compels him to live in “a Dark Tower,” But the ministrations of a comic cook lead him to the discovery that he has a special work in the world, which takes the form of befriending blinded soldiers and helping them to useful work. To those acquainted with the work of St. Dunstan’s, the story will present no novelty; and its appeal to the sentimentality of the reader is in complete contradiction to the teaching not only of St. Dunstan’s but of the book itself. The machinery of sentimental romance, the comic servant, the “despisedlove,” the final accession to wealth and the love of a wife, all this is grotesquely unnecessary. Blindness is no new phenomenon; Homer was blind; and the history of the blind is an heroic history, of triumph over disability so complete that the affliction seems rather to have been a blessing. To descend from Milton, the poet, and Saunderson, the mathematician, to Keith Burton, with his box of sentimental tricks, is to suffer a. real declension of taste. PRESS CUTTINGS. Recently the Bradford Corporation sanctioned the appointment of a committee to inquire into the advisability of establishing a municipal bank. This committee considered yesterday a report by the city treasurer, Mr. F. Ogden Whiteley, in which he foresees no serious difficulty in the way of organisation, management, and control of a corporation bank. The existence of a corporation bank would assist him in raising loans for the corporation. He believes money raised by deposits mould provide for capital expenditure of the corporation at less rates, even after allowing for management expenses, than those now current for ordinary loans. As to a general banking charter for the corporation, serious opposition would have to be considered from banking interests, both in Parliament and subsequently if granted. There would some difficulty in working be a commercial bank established by the corporation alone if it were boycotted bythe large banking amalgamations. Bradford traders at times require large overdrafts,and arrangements with the Bank of England or otherwise would be necessary to enable the corporation to draw for any sum necessary for this purpose. It would be unfortunate if the corporation were restricted to the Bank of England, rather than being free to use the many channels open to local joint stock banks. The treasurer believes, whatever arguments there are in favour of nationalisation of railways and coal-mines apply equally to banking, which forms the foundation of the whole commercial and economic system of the country. The suggestion has been made that the Government should either nationalise banking or establish a national bank, arid empower local municipalities to set up branch banks in connection therewith. If the principle of national or municipal banking in a commercialsense were approved, it could he approached in this direction better than by individual corporations setting up independent schemes. For a municipal savings bank no capital outlay would be required beyond that needed to equip suitable banking premises, but for a commercial bank a fairly substantial amount of capital, or power to draw on the Bank of England or otherwise, would be necessary. The committee are about to visit Birmingham to obtain information concerning the municipal banking scheme in operation in that city. Bradford Corporation has a debt of about £8,000,000 about half being in short loans. The corporation believe that the maximum rate of interest should be 5 per cent., but Leeds, Sheffield, andother places are offering 5½ per cent. -“Times.” further watering of the currency upon prices there seems to be little thought, and, indeed, unless we are much mistaken, this idea of manufacturing currency as an easy expedient for proriding pleasing things is not a new one with a certain section of the Labour Party. All the same, it is rather sad, and also rather serious, and surely constitutes a reason for that educative campaign in simple economic truths for which we have so often pleaded. Wescarcely suppose that the proposals in the case of the Wigan corporation will go further than the stage of an academic discussion, but that they should have been put forward at all is in itself disquieting. -“MorningPost.” A special meeting of the Wigan County Borough Council was convened last night to consider the Labour Party’s project for financing the housing and other municipal schemes free of interest. Alderman Fletcher (Labour) had given notice to move that: “The Finance Committee be authorised to take into early consideration the question of the issue by the Corporation of currency on the security of the rates, revenues, and property of the Corporation for the purpose financing, free of of interest, those undertakings such as housing, erection of schools, and the provision of parks, baths, and playing-fields, which are of prime necessity to the lives and well-being of the people, and which are not a means of making profit; and, further, if the Finance Committee find, after careful consideration and investigation, that the scheme is feasible, provisionbe inserted in aParliamentary Bill to be promoted by this Corporation in session 1921 to obtain facilities to enable the issue by the Corporation of such currency, or, alternatively, that the Finance Committee take steps to obtain the support of other municipalities in trying to get the Government to promote legislation on the subject.” Alderman Fletcher then moved his resolution, pointing out that a more far-reaching scheme had been brought forward at Sheffield. The Wigan scheme sought the co-operation of the Government, which would provide the necessary number of virgin national currency notes at the cost of production, the Corporation being held responsible for each currency note at full twenty shillings value. The Corporation would redeem the notes by annual instalments within the prescribed period, the Government withdrawing from circulation annually the notes redeemed. Councillor Cavey (Labour) seconded. The Chairman of the Finance Committee (Conservative) declared that Russia was manufacturing currency notes as fast as possible, and the more they manufactured the less valuable they became. He moved an amendment that the Council was of opinion that within the shortest practicable time the Government should reduce the present inflated currency, restore the pound sterling to its par value, bring about a return to the gold standard and promote a sound financial policy. The amendment waslost, 17 voting for and 23against it, and the resolution was then put and carried as a substantive motion. --“Morning Post. ” At a moment when some of our leading bankers are concerned with the great expansion of credit and currencyand its effect upon prices, it is interesting to note that in some quarters of the country at all events these matters are viewed with a very light heart. We have the Wigan Town Council, for example, apparently considering with all seriousness the alluring proposition of avoiding interest on loans required for certain objects, such as the provision of parks, baths, and other public buildings, by the easy expedient of obtaining authority for the printing of currency notes. The proposal presumably conies from the Labour section of the Council, andthe idea would seem to be that the notes are to be expended in wages, materials, etc., and to be paid off in instalments by the Wigan Corporation, no interest, however, being paid on the principal. Indeed, the idea seems to be sopleasing and so simple to its authors that it is commended to the attention of other municipalities. As to the effect of this proposed