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NOTES OF THE WEEK . WORLD AFFAIRS. By M. M. Cosmoi . OUR GENERATION By Edward Moore . DRAMA: Bartholomew Fair. By John Francis Hope . EINSTEIN’S DILEMMA. By Francis Sedlak . READERS AND WRITERS. By Herbert Read . PSYCHO-ANALYSIS. By J. A. RI. Alcock .
MUSIC. By H. R. . VIEWS AND REVIEWS : The Answer to Malthus-II. By A. E. R. REVIEWS : Mr. Dimock. The Challenge. The Story of the Durham Miners (1662-1921) . LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from Norman MacMunn, Thomas K. Justice . PASTICHE. By L’Hibou . PRESS CUTTINGS a seat at the Clearing House, would have been received with any less blank a negative than he was when asking for a pool.’’ This is rather like suggesting that, apart from the question of which one is more likely to get, it does not make any earthly difference whether one asks for a worn-out razor, or for a complete shaving set of the best quality. But is there really any comparison, even in regard to the respective chances of success? The pool actually antagonised the consumers. Many of the most fairminded of them ignorantly thought that it would inevitably entail a subsidy out of taxation. They suspected in it, too, a plot to bring in nationalisation by a side-wind ; and nationalisation, they had rightly decided, did not suit their book. The employers were inevitably dead against it to a man. But the Credit Bank (in conjunction, of course, with the Just Price) would have offered to the consumer real rare and refreshing fruit. Many again of the shrewdest of the employers would have thought that, in view of the precarious position of the industry, they had better accept a scheme that promised them a position of security. Altogther the Government would have been subjected to an enormous mass of pressure on the miners’ side; and no question of Government control could have been raised. Even Mr. Lloyd George;s ingenuity could hardly have so refused the demand as to be able to tell the nation, “This is your case.” We know, too, for a fact, that at one stage of the dispute there was in high influential circles a readiness to examine the Credit proposals such as never even began to be manifested towards the pool. Even if the immediate attack had failed, the ground would have been well prepared for a sustained campaign of a singularly hopeful character. At any rate, it rested (as we have before pointed out) with the miners themselves to start the bank, and herewith their own pool. Once in full swing such a bank would have a claim, impossible to be permanently ignored, to take part in issuing fresh capital for the industry. As for the Clearing House, if it wished to refuse to recognise the bank, its only course would be to challenge a particular cheque. Suppose it rejected a Miners: Bank cheque for the miners could easily demonstrate that their credit was good for so many times as much by threatening to stop the mines for a single day. The ineffectiveness of the strike weapon for forcing people to do somethingis not here in question; such action would not be “striking for” anything whatever. It would merely demonstrate the fact of what the miners’ credit was
NOTES
OF
THE
WEEK.
THE mining “settlement” will mean a deluge of profitsharing propaganda. A certain Mr. Owen Greening has already rushed into the columns of the “Times.” He is much concerned as to “some necessary improvements” in the scheme. He is troubled by “the absence of any provision for enabling intelligent miners to acquire the position of part-ownership. ” “Thrifty and enterprising workers” ought to become shareholders “by accumulations of their profit-bonuses. ” We are left speechless before the task of characterising the mentality of anyone who can write that sort of thing at this time of day. The expedient of skimming off the cream of Labour to form a praetorian guard for capitalism is too barefaced. Happily the miners’ vote on the ballot, though it failed to find a defensible last ditch, has shown how little disposed they are to listen to overtures of this type. And what does the offer even to the favoured few really amount to? Even these have no chance of getting on terms with the general run of even the smaller share-holders. We quite agree as to the desirability of the miners’ “acquiring the position of part-ownership. ” But we insist that they must do this corporately. And they cannot do it by buying shares with money saved from wages, even when augmented by the very modest profit-bonuses. The only method by which this can be done on a sufficient scale to give Labour a satisfactory stake in the industry is by the workers starting their own bank, and putting up their share of all fresh issues of capital, creating this on the strength of their real credit, just as capitalist banks do on the strength of their financial credit. There is no ground on which this right can fairly be denied them. The position is hopeless if Labour is only to be conceded a capitalshare equal to the amount it has actually collected in cash, when no such limitation is imposed upon the financial rings. Mr. Greening also reasonably desires “a share of the profits for the consumers.” Once more, the most satisfactory way to secure this is to establish a Just Price, standing to costs in a scientific ratio, and to call in the total real-credit of the nation to indemnify the producers. *** The “Guild Socialist” (late the “Guildsman”) wonders“whether Mr. Hodges, if he had gone to the owners and the Government demanding, in the name of the Miners’ Federation, a Miners’ Credit Bank with
worth. The “game” of “business” has certain rules, and many of the most level-headed business men themselves would be the first to protest against the Clearing House breaking these by assuming a purely arbitrary power of dishonouring cheques without due cause shown. *** Mr. J. H. Thomas, in view of the approaching N. U. R. Conference, has hurriedly published a "great speech” made two months earlier at Derby. Our opinion of Mr. Thomas is well known. But unfortunately he and his kind are always being attacked by the “extremists” on the wrong grounds. He had no great difficulty in justifying himself in regard to “Black Friday. ” That a Triple Alliance strike at that moment would have resulted in a great victory is not demonstrably false, but it is an exceedingly reckless hypothesis. Unless that extreme hypothesis just happened to be true, it was not the calling-off of the strike that was a disaster-but the strike itself, had it come off, that would have been the worst disaster of all. In any case, the refusal of the Miners’ Executive to explore an important new offer made it impossible for their allies to take any other course than they did. Our feeling is one of regret that Mr. Thomas’s “extremist” assailants have done so much to appreciate the stock of so weak-kneed a leader. Mr. Hodges, too, has been criticising his critics. He attempted no serious justification of his conduct in visiting Chequers. He went there with no sanction from his Executive ; the proceedings were wropt in a conspiratorial mystery; no minutes apparently were taken, and certainly no report of what took place was published. We wonder how often Mr. Hodges, in the political flights of which he is so fond, has denounced “secret diplomacy. ” We might reckon it to him for righteousness that he contended from the first (in private) that the pool was bad ground to fight on, but holding this (as he now congratulates himself) all along, he was as loud as anyone, officially, in insisting on “the pool, the whole pool, and nothing but the pool.” Then, when the men have been led into balloting for holding out for this to the bitter end, behind their backs he-goes to Chequers ! We suppose, from the way in which he has lately been “dressing to the right,” he must now be reckoned among the “sane” Labour leaders, of whom the Senior Partner is Mr. Clynes. The latter recently expressed his views at length in the “Times,” just below those of Sir Robert Hadfield. We could detect no particular difference between the industrial magnate and the Labour member. And the Labour movement is divided between the “sane” men and the “extremists.” Between them they very effectively do the work of the financial oligarchy for nothing. *** The sorest need of the movement is for leaders who will be statesmen, and not seek the applause of the Press for being “statesmanlike.” They must understand wherein lies the essence of “Capitalism”; they must have firmly grasped some fundamentally antiplutocratic categories by which to criticise all suggestions from right or left. They must have a thoroughly constructive, not destructive, outlook ; and they must have a sure tact for the policy which (while truly “radical") will enlist the maximum of support, and rouse the smallest body of antagonists. Where Labour has so far gone wrong is in treating the economic grievance as a workers’, and not as a consumers’, grievance. For this Karl Marx lies under a heavy indictment. The consequence of the misleading slant which he gave to the movement is a (very largely justifiable) resentment on the pant of the whole middle class. Suppose Labour had demanded the lowering of prices, not the raising of wages; the middle classes would then soon have hailed it as a deliverer. Some time ago the miners, tired of the weary game of chasing their own tail, did
declare for a policy of “breaking out of the circle” by tackling prices. But the leaders of Labour as a whole soon put an end to that. The refreshing trickle of the water of a new life for the movement sank into the desert sands of one of the usual official “inquiries,” and disappeared. There is reason enough to fear that sinister influences, emanating from financial quarters, played their part in this business. But it is not too late for Labour to recognise the truth, that it is the consumer, quite apart from what, if any, work he does, and not solely (or even specially) the worker, who is “exploited” through the instrument of prices by the present controllers of credit. That is not to deny that there is a special workers’ grievance. There is, but it is a spiritual, not an economic, grievance (though its root cause is economic). It lies in the denial of selfdetermination ; in the treating of the workers as instruments of production. We hold that the common phrase “wage-slavery” is a true description of the present system. Our complaint against the modified Collectivism of the National Guilds League is that it would not au fond abolish this slavery. But secure “dividends for all”-the objective of the “justice for the consumer”policy-and evidently no one can be brought under any kind of slavery, wage or otherwise. Further, the constantly “encroaching control” by the workers over the financing of their own industry would give them a constantly increasing voice in determining the methods of its administration. *** We have hoped against hope that the railwaymen would learn from the miners’ defeat, and arm themselves with a really constructive policy in view of the approaching decontrol. The proposed grouping of the railways would have formed a most natural basis for a scheme drawn up on the Social Credit lines. But the opportunity has once more been lost. The N.U.R. Conferencehas reaffirmed the discredited and hopeless policy of nationalisation. Mr. Thomas himself admits that it is not practical politics, and will not be until some quite indefinite future. Our proposals, on the other hand, are practical politics now. The whole Labour forces again are combining in formulating a highly elaborate scheme for nationalising the wool industry. We note that, “It would be necessary to set up a Ministry of Wool and Wool Textiles.” We should have thought that even the Labour Party would not have chosen this of all times to propose to inflict on the longsuffering citizen yet another “Ministry. ” Further, 75 per cent. of the output of some branches of the wool textile trade is sold abroad. Naturally, the “Times” remarks on the absence from the scheme of any reference to “marketing the finished article.” The export trade is the rock on which ail nationalisation proposals seem to split. A social control through credit would leave all the ordinary operations of the industry as free as now from State interference. Obviously, the Labour scheme for woollens would rouse the maximum of opposition all along the line. On the other hand, the conditions of the trade are precisely such that a considerable number of the employers would inevitably hail with joy the alternative which we suggest. Nationalisation could only be carried out, in the highly improbable event of Labour coming into power with a clear majority of its own. And supposing that accomplished, it would be found to be simply irrelevant to the real problems at issue. To get the industry working smoothly for the social good, it would still be necessary to adopt the new policy in regard to credit. And if this had been done in the first instance, all the clumsy paraphernalia of nationalisation would have proved unnecessary. *** Our lively contemporary, the “New Witness,” has given the place of prominence in a recent issue to an article by Mr. Joseph Clayton, advocating crude Socialism
as the only alternative to capitalism. He talks in the usual way about the iniquities of “the capitalist” (left quite undefined), and makes no attempt at definitely locating the nigger in the wood-pile. He assumes naively that “the capitalist” makes his profit out of the unpaid labour of the wage-earner. That crude analysis of the situation naturally leads to collective ownership and all the rest of it as the presumable remedy. We quite agree with Mr. Clayton that the alternative to capitalism is “the co-operative commonwealth’’ ; but there might be various forms of this besides crude Socialism. We admire the impartiality of the “New Witness” in giving such prominence to an article fundamentally opposed to its own most cherished convictions. But we are at a loss to understand why our contemporary has never alluded to the only definite, constructive policy, so far advanced by anyone, for realising and still more for subsequently stabilising, the social ideal which it shares with us-a distributive State. *** The directors of the Linggi Plantations and of the Malacca Plantations, two companies which are among the largest producers of rubber, have decided on further restrictions of output. These will affect about twosevenths of the plantations of the Linggi company, and a quarter of those of the Malacca. Some of the smaller companies have also taken drastic measures of the same kind. It is cynically stated that this policy is to be pursued ‘‘until something nearer an equilibrium is establishedbetween supply and demand.” The real demand is almost insatiable. There is not a cyclist who would not indulge in new tyres far more often if he could afford them, or who does not long for tyres with as much rubber on them as could be procured thirty years ago. But this withholding of supplies is an indispensable incident in the recognised commercial system,whereby all issues of credit are recovered by the financiers through prices in return for the smallest possible delivery of goods. It would be absurd to denounce individuals for doing what has to be done, if the system is to be carried on. But what hypocrisy to complain of “restriction of output” on the part of Labour! Wholesale ca’canny and sabotage on the part of both Capital and Labour are necessary conditions of such a system being made to work at all. The ultimate resort, to avert its complete breakdown, is the gigantic sabotage of war. *** The Press has been full for some time past of reassuring articles anticipating an early revival of trade. With the depletion of stocks and the consequent beginning of a fall in prices, there will of course soon be an increasing call for goods and an upward wave of production. Already indeed the bank rate has been somewhat lowered, and the period of extreme restriction of credit is temporarily at an end. But there is a dexterous suggestion, in all this Press propaganda, that we may hope for a steady progress, year after year, until real prosperity dawns for our whole people. “Hard work and good will” is the slogan that rings in our ears; given these, it is suggested, all will yet be well. We hope that our people are not so blind or forgetful as to be unaware that continuous advance towards prosperity is a thing impossible under the existing system. They have only to cast their glance back to the years before the war to see that trade crises are not rare interruptions of, a normally steady flow of production, due only to some quite exceptional causes. They are a regularly recurring incident at quite short intervals. The excessively (as things are) efficient productivemachine begins to over-run in no time, if it is given its head, and has to be slowed down. Nor is that the worst. The period of good trade is necessarily one of the inflation of credit. Hence prices must necessarily be rising. A glut of goods, or a glut of money; unemployment or high prices; the system has only that
choice to offer to the ordinary man. The glut of goods is of no use to him, because he has not money in his pocket to buy them. And when he has the money, it is of little use to him, because his purchasing power is swamped by the rising flood of purchasing power all round him.
World Affairs.
WE have arrived at the abysmal deadlock of potentiality and indefiniteness in our long quest, our unprejudiced quest. Humanity Universal and the cosmogony of its order and self-synthesis is our desire and quest. We have come to the deadlock of the foundational dissolution and indifferentiation of the supernal quest of our duty. To the nadir of our study and to infinite closeness to despair and to being lost, the thread of our problem has brought us. Of the reader we ask attention and benevolence here. Very infinite has our problem become, and daring is needed to speak the dire, indefinable truth of our conviction. It is impossible for pan-human conscience to abstain from confession in this hour, and from incurring the infinite danger of chimera and self-delusion. We have embarked upon high seas, however, and it is our honour and our purpose that demand holy and aeonian heroism of confession and proclamation. It is impossible not to speak. Verihood is simple and inconceivable, and the more invincible it is the more omnipotential and indefinite it is. Obvious is verihood. Upon the soul depends verihood. The Race and Providence are the primordial truth. Humanity Universal is verihood. Human spirit must be verihood. Upon the soul of humanity the verihood depends. There must be Man between the Providence of the Creator and the destiny that are Logos and the universe. Indefiniteness is the end, but is the beginning also. Life and humanity are indefiniteness. Responsibility is indefiniteness. The Race is free to-day. Humanity is ripe to-day for an infinite deed. This deed is Humanity’s collective awareness. Humanity is existent in this aeon and must guide the earth and her creation. To the Eternal the species must bow collectively and for the first time in its collectiveness. To the Human Race in its entirety and to him who is the Universal Man every son of the species should bow in spirit and in will in this AEon of turning-point and crisis. *** We have arrived at the zenith of our review of the human chaos to-day as well as at the nadir of omnipotentiality utter mystery and dissolution. From the and zenith we can see the immanence of UNIVERSAL HUMANITY in the race, its everlasting immanence in the Species; from the nadir we can only realise the imperative of our despair and anguish, the imperative of the infinite need of our pain. The deadlock and the nadir of our quest is this : that nothing can be known of this real and only problem; knowledge and science do not help us here; for Humanity is an ideal and a reality of the supra-logical realm of values. From God only and through the immanent gnosis of His revelation in human love our guidance can come. If there be a scientific and mathematical key to the organisation of souls and nations and classes, this key can only be an instrument of modality, an instrument and tool, not the purpose and mystery. From love universal and from humility and love our guidance can come. Out of the
deadlock of our helplessness Providence and the Holy Eternal can lead us. From our prostration and confusion our own love for the Eternal and for His divinity can redeem us. From the ineffable deed of our freedom and human infinity liberation and ascent can come. From our own loving and obedient Deed of Man the new motion and ascent can come. We must believe in the Creator and in the holiness and glory of His purpose. We must believe in His Eternal Son also, in Man. We must proclaim humanity. The imperative of our own sovereign and decisive freedom is to give existence to embodiment. That there should be Creator and omnipotence is the demand of our own Logoic abyss. The Divine shall exist by our own will and with our own permission. HOLY SPIRIT is living Indefiniteness. The Holy Spirit of Indefiniteness is the divinityand life of both the Father of Infinity and of the human race. Pleroma is Indefiniteness proper and life proper. Pleroma is the unity of the divine threefoldness. God is. The indefinite Life is. Mankind is one. Human race is. *** Indulgence and long breath we ask from the reader. To the preachers of death, however, and to the creators of death, to speakers of lies and to abusers of sacredness, we do not apologise. The perplexities of our investigations are very great, while only human are our powers. Human though they are, our direction is supra-human, and pan-human is the desire of our helplessness. Humanity must exist. It is imperative that the race should become conscious of its pan-organism and omnipotence. Our own nadir of impotent need and the zenith of our omniscient gnosis are difficult to polarise and co-ordinate. Human cause, however, is one cause. Human problems and mysteries, however, are one single perplexity and one single indefiniteness. With the help of the Eternal and of the divine threefoldness, the axis of the historic cosmogony, the axis of the Sophian organisation of mankind, can be established. Humanity and its universal Providence are greater than Aryandom, than Europa, than the empire Albion. It is the SPECIES that is able to consecrate every continent and every empire. To Adam Kadmon even Aryandom must be subordinated, To Man and his Imperium even the Western hemisphere must be subordinated. Aryandom and the white humanity is only one of the world-organs of the Species. It is the organism of the world and the evolution of the AEons that is the calling of the species to-day, both in the Eastern and the Western hemispheres. VIRAD PURUSHA, the Anthropos, ADAM KADMON, the Kingdom, has arrived at a turning-point in its cosmic evolution. This point and whirl is the meeting of the cosmic evolutionary line of the soma of mankind with the historic, self-creative elan of the psyche of humanity. Out of the crisis and tension of the present constellation of Man a new and deific constellation of the Superman must needs arise. From the present woefuland chaotic Indefiniteness a new Indefiniteness needs to arise on the globe of the Species, the glory and elasticity of Redemption. The new and divine indefiniteness is the Pleroma to be, the organic, harmonised life. One is the terrible indefiniteness and chaos of our AEon. One single thing is the crisis of our AEon. From one single Deed, from a universal Act, not from movements and actions, human cosmogony can start. This Deed can come out of the Absolute and from personality alone. The Absolute and the Ego are one mystery. Freedom is the modality of men, and Divinity is the valuation of men. The law of the future must needs be the freedom and supra-humanness of this very hour. Divine Providence is with Man, and Destinyis not stronger than both the Creator and the Son of God, the valuer and the chooser and the thinker. M. M. COSMOI.
Our Generation.
A SENTENCEwhich appeared in the “Nation” the other week is so representative not only of it but of the nation itself that one whose task is to point out the obvious falls upon it almost with exultation. After fulminating like everyone else-for it has become everyone’s employment, and indeed it is so easy that anyone can do it--against the vices of the ruling class, the goes on to say : “But it is clear that the “Nation” world has not been left bare of all direction for its path. The religious man has only got to be religious; the teacher to teach ; the philosopher to philosophise ; even the trader to insist on free trading with all the world, for this society of ours to become once more quite a healthy organ of the reasonable activities of man. ” There, with its inexhaustible, its fatuous, its almost convincing optimism, the spirit of English compromisespeaks, after the trump of doom has sounded, once again. We have crawled out of the graveyard of the old world into a new world which is cold, grey, monstrousm a new world which is still half chaos, and as we crouch shivering in our half-opened and draughty tombs we hear with astonishment the old voice of compromisedroning : “The religious man has only got to be religious ; the teacher to teach.’’ Not even yet are we entitled to ask, apparently, in what sense the religiousman is to be religious, what the teacher is to teach, and what end is to be served by the philosophising of the philosopher. Now why should the “Nation” ignore questions so obvious and so fundamental as these? Because by its temper, by its lack of spirit, in which it is typical of the English people, it does not want any issue to be fought out to its end, its solution; because it prefers compromise not merely to war, but to victory ; because it not only regards half a loaf as better than a loaf, but desires to have even it halfbaked. One has only to look for a moment at the picture drawn by the “Nation” to see its falsity. It implies in every phrase that the religious man by being religious, the teacher by teaching, the philosopher by philosophising, ‘‘even the trader” by free-trading, are carrying out peaceful tasks, each with consequences only to its doer, each demarcated more ideally than even a Fabian, gloating over a Fabian State, could imagine. One cannot waste ink in characterising such blindness. Everyone knows that when the religiousman is really religious his power is felt in every sphere of life; he comes into conflict with the teacher, the philosopher, the trader and the others, for his task is conflict; all labour, spiritual or material, is conflict. To wish it otherwise is spiritually vulgar, is to prefer the comfort of repression to victory, to expression, to the peace which passeth understanding. When we regard religious men, teachers and philosophers, in their dealings among themselves, we see that even there the principle of war is just as ineluctable. Religion is not only a war, but a war with itself. Philosophers, the representatives of reason, the principle which is always set up against conflict as its antithesis, carry on constant war not only against the unconscious universe, but amongst themselves ; and progress in philosophy is the record of the battles between opposing philosophical systems. To avert one’s eyes from this eternal battle, not to recognise its greatness, but, on the contrary, to prefer that it should not be so, and then to pretend that it is not so, is not only spiritually plebeian, it is the greatest human misfortune that can befall a man or a people. It makes their conception of existence so small and so amiable that some release must be found from it in pessimism, decadence, "Ireland,” even the Grand Guignol. Men who cannot or will not see greatness in the spectacle of life, must, for the good of their souls, create evil for themselves ;
unless,that is to say, they are content to deceive themselves to eternity. What may come of a religious man’s becoming religious was indicated the other week by Mr. Lloyd George when he advised the Churches to keep their fingers off politics. ”Talk about temperance, but not about Ireland,” he admonished them, and his advicereminds us that there may be more yet than we have been able to find in the creed of the "Nation.” If it is the only duty of the philosopher to philosophise, may it not be that of the Government to govern, and therefore to govern Ireland ? The assumption behind these principles of old-fashioned and new-fashioned Liberalism is mysterious, but it is not difficult to see through it. Mr. Lloyd George’s position-and Mr. Lloyd George is notoriously a man of religion-appears to be this : that there are certain activities which should be according to religion, but certain others with which religion should have nothing whatever to do. His very geography is theological ; it is not truly religious that religion should as much as think about Ireland, for example. The conclusion is simple : God sees all things, but if He looks at us when we are doing things He does not like, then we are sorry, but it is not our fault, He should look the other way. The idea that even a religious man is a man is one which has not yet become current in England. Yet the notion that religion must be a thing with a relation to everything in the universe, even to Ireland, or to nothing at all, is quite an easy notion to grasp. The “Saturday Review” has found time recently to become lyrical about---of all things-Oxford. “We need have no fear,” it is reassuring to he told, "Oxford stand the test. Napoleon once said that ‘there will is one who is wiser than any of us, and that is tout le monde.’ Similarly we might say of Oxford that there is one who is wiser than any don, even than any undergraduate and that is Oxford.” Oxford, which inspired Matthew Arnold with a sort of bashful calf-love, Oxford, “whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.” Oxford, “the home of lost causes,’’ most of which deserved to be lost; Oxford, this damaged, battered, shamelessly romantic and old spinster, is still with some of the power and glamour of age about her, even after the war has killed romance for three years. What is it of which Oxford will stand the test? The abolition of compulsory Greek and the admission of women ! After this will education be considered by the upper classes a thing unconvincingly romantic, but really convincingly casual? This is, among journals at any rate, a really serious question. Oxford is to be blamed for one definite thing : she adds to the superstitions which Englishmen have by right of birth one of her own, the superstition of Oxford. It is said that in France at the present time there is a wonderful renaissance of interest in Nietzsche, signalised by M. Chas. Andler’s book on Nietzsche’s life and thought. Considering how bitter sentiment among intellectuals in France has been towards Germany, one may read more than usual significance into this, and see in the fact of Nietzsche’s recognition in the country in Europe by accident most hostile to him the presage of his approaching recognition by all Europe as modern Europe’s most significant spiritual event. Never yet has Nietzsche been taken seriously (in the best sense) ; never yet have the questions he raised been listened to except for the beauty of the accents in which he uttered them. He has been regarded not as a discoverer but as an adventurer. Perhaps one is even now optimistic in hoping that at last Nietzsche has found listeners with more than ears among the writers, artists and men of action of Europe. But if he has, it is a sign cIearer than any of the most everyday portents which we see continually that a new era is about to begin. EDWARD MOORE.
Drama.
by John Francis Hope. I WENT to see the Phoenix revival of “Bartholomew Fair” with some misgiving, in spite of Mr. Monague Summers’ assurance that “it is indeed a supreme effort of Jonson’s titanic genius, a masterpiece where the richest humour and most brilliant realism combine with immortal satire that is yet very applicable and sufficiently needed as a corrective amongst ourselves to-day.” The trouble that I always have in reading Jonson is that his ‘(efforts” are so obvious; as Shaw once put it : “Effort defeats itself; the thing that is done well is done easily. ” Jonson’s immortal mind apparently only worked with titanic effort to provoke the guffaw; his humour in “Bartholomew Fair” is a ramping, stamping, back-slapping humour that is itself as rustic as the things it laughs at. He has his “Hee, hee” strangulando even over the lack of sanitaryconveniences for ladies at the Fair-and the man who would descend to the “Please teacher, may I leave the room?” sort of joke was fortunately “rare” Ben Jonson. I have only heard it used in a nigger minstrel entertainment, a fact which indicates the type of mind to which Ben Jonson appealed. His immortal satire of the Puritans was nothing but the very obvious revelation that a man may use casuistry to justify the satisfaction of his stomach with a gorge of roast pork, and afterwards satisfy his conscience by denouncing all those who ate roast pork without his godly motives. Like most Titans, Jonson only saw the difference between extremes; there were rogues and there were fools, and to bring roguery and folly together was Jonson’s idea of a joke. He asked us to believe incredible things-for example, that Justice Overdoo would suppose that the cutpurse was an honest young man. But the dullest man could not for long sit in a court without developing some knowledge of human nature; Justice Overdoo might be a fool, but not such a fool as to suppose that the first young man with a nice face he saw in Bartholomew Fair was necessarily an honest one. Jonson, like most men who joke with difficulty, was so afraid that the audience might not see his jokes that he outraged probability to make his point obvious to the meanest understanding-and hang into the ribs went his fist as he roared out that the justice was mistaking a thief for an honest man. One would like to think that nowhere, outside Bartholomew Fair, would such a thing pass for humour; but James I and Charles II (him, even !) apparently loved the play, while Pepys, the old fool, said: “The more I see it, the more I love the wit of He made better jokes himself. it.” One could have wished that, in the interests of realism as well as of music, Mr. Allan Wade had revived the actual street cries of the sellers. I learn from a book by Mr. Walter Bell, “More About Unknown London, ” that Sir Frederick Bridge has discovered all of them in the British Museum in the works of Orlando Gibbons, Weelkes and Deering, Gibbon. giving the most complete list. The Fair scenes were very tame, and the hobby-horse man’s toys were too obviously modern-especially the horse. The players, with a few exceptions, were all at sea; Jonsonian humour did not easily inspire the modern actor. But when it did, we got the Gargantuan pig-woman of Mr. Roy Byford, a gross, sweating, blasphemous travesty of the female form divine. When one remembers how Falstaff made fun of his own fatness,
one can only regret the ‘(realism” that deprived Mr. Roy Byford of a similar chance to make merry in the part. Only one really good-humoured thing was permitted to him, and that was when he tried to rise but could not detach himself from the grip of his armchair; for the rest, he swilled, and swore, and sweated quite in the Jonsonian manner. It was not his fault that the part was not so funny to us as it was to Jonson; what interpretation could do, Mr. Roy By-ford did, and we saw Ursula as Ben Jonson intended. Mr. Ben Field, as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, was another one who got the hang of Jonson’s intention. The monotony of which some critics complained is in the part; Jonson composed it according to a formula, and repeated it like a Wagnerian leit-motif. A man who has to use phrases always developing emphasis in the same way is, as “A. B. W.” said, “very tiresome, exceeding tiresome, very exceeding tiresome”and the disputation with the puppets was the most tiresome of all. But had Mr. Ben Field played it otherwise, Jonson’s crude satire of the Puritans would not have been obvious. The only touch of human nature permitted to him was his quite ungodly delight when he discovered that the stocks were unfastened-but Jonson wanted us to throw bricks at these people, and Mr. Ben Field made me feel like that. Mr. Ernest Thesiger, as the Squire Cokes, would have deserved well of Charles II, with whom the character was a particular favourite; but it seemed a shame to waste such ability on such a childish effort at satire of the country gentleman. Squire Cokes was not only an ass, he was a silly ass, in these days we should call him feeble-minded; and a really expert thief would have disdained to take his money. His manservant, HumphreyWaspe, excellently played by Mr. Stanley Lathbury, came agreeably nearer to a reasonable conception of human nature, odd though it was; one did sympathise with his attempts to make his master behave intelligently, and he was the only character in the play in whom I took any human interest. Among the women, Miss Margaret Yarde’s performance of the sentimental Dame Purecraft deserves first notice. Miss Yarde, curiously enough, plays Jonson more satisfactorily than she does Shakespeare ; her performance in “Volpone” and now in “Bartholomew Fair” reveal the fact that she is better suited to intellectual travesty than to the direct expression of the gross emotions of Dame Quickly. The fact reveals the intellectual rather than the emotional actress ; she plays what she understands, not what she feels or sympathises with, and where simulation is demanded, as in Jonson, she is mistress. Miss Helena Millais is so beautiful that I was shocked to see her cast for Dame Overdoo; the coarse debauchery of her scene at the fair, the rough-and-tumble fight, the drunken scene at the puppet-show, would have been coarsely amusing if the part had been played by a man. I am not particularly squeamish, but I hate to see beauty besotted; and Miss Millais did not spare herself in the attempt to do justice to Jonson’s conception. I could hear his “spirit” guffawing at every humiliation that Dame Overdoo suffered-while I writhed at this degradation to the level of Cynicus’ “The Transit of Venus.” There were many other characters who added to the tedium of the performance, most notably a madman constructed, like so many of Jonson’s characters, according to a formula. Mr. Edwin Greenwood did his best, but I dreaded his entrance with the cry: “Where’s your warrant?” after the third time. I do not find it easy to laugh at insanity, and Jonson has nothing funny to say about it; and altogether, I prefer the humanity of Shakespeare to the humour of Jonson. The Phoenix production has confirmed me in my opinion that I do not want to see “Bartholomew Fair” played.
Einstein’s
Dilemma.
IT belatedly comes to my knowledge that a paper or society, I don’t know whether English or American, offered a prize for a concise and lucid explanation of Einstein’s theory of Relativity. I did not know of this competition; I did not enter the lists; but Einstein’s present visit to England-not to mention Lord Haldane’srecently published book on the reign of Relaivityinduces me to say now what I would have said then. “Let us assume that the simple law of the constancy of the velocity of light c (in vacuum) is justifiably believed by the child at school. Who would imagine that this simple law has plunged the conscientiously thoughtful physicist into the greatest intellectual difficulty ?” I quote this passage from the translation, by Robert W. Lawson, D.Sc., of Einstein’s own popular exposition of his theory (p. 17) with a view to showing that the intellectual difficulty in question is simply a case of intellectual hypochondria; that it does not call for solution, but simply for a summary dismissal. In order to show that his difficulty is genuine, Einstein refers the velocity of light to a railway carriage moving with a uniform velocity v, as against its original reference to the embankment, and expects us to agree with him that the resulting velocity of light w = c---v (supposing that both the light-stimulus and the carriage move in the same direction), comes into conflict with the principle of relativity as set forth in a previous section, p. 12. There he bids us to “imagine a raven flying through the air in such a manner that its motion, as observed from the embankment, is uniform and in a straight line. If we were to observe the flying raven from the moving railway carriage, we should find that the motion of the raven would be one of different velocity [italics are mine] and direction, but that it would still be uniform and in a straight line. Expressed in an abstract manner we may say : If a mass m is moving uniformly in a straight line with respect to a co-ordinate system K, then it will also be moving uniformly and in a straight line relative to a second co-ordinate system K1, provided that the latter is executing a uniform translatory motion with respect to K. . . . We advance a step further in our generalisation when we express the tenet thus : If, relative to K, K1 is a uniformly moving co-ordinate system devoid of rotation, then natural phenomena run their course with respect to K1 according to exactly the same general laws as with respect to K. This statement is called the principle of relativity (in the restricted sense).” Let us notice that in the original case of the flying raven, the changed velocity of its motion, as observed from the moving railway carriage, is considered as a matter of course and that the principle of relativity All that is presented as consistent with this change. matters is only that the motion of the raven "would still be uniform and in a straight line.” When, however, the light-stimulus is substituted for the flying raven, then the change in the observed velocity suddenly “comes into conflict with the principle of relativity set forth in Section V. For, like every other general law of nature, the law of the transmission of light in vacuo must, according to the principle of relativity, be the same for the railway carriage as reference -body as when the rails are the body of references. But, from our above consideration, this would appear to be impossible. If every ray of light is propagated relative to the embankment with the velocity c, then for this reason it would appear that another law of propagation of light must necessarily hold with respect to the carriage-a result contradictory to the principle of relativity ” (pp. 18-19.) In so far as there is here a dilemma, it consists solely, so far as a thoughtful reader of Einstein’s book is concerned, in the why and how Einstein can possibly remain unaware of the looseness characteristic of the
way in which he tries to spring upon us a dilemma, in view of which there presumably “appears to be nothing else for it than to abandon either the principle of relativity or the simple law of the propagation of light in vacuo. Those readers who have carefully are almost [sic !] followed the preceding discussion sure to expect that we should retain the principle of relativity, which appeals so convincingly to the intellect because it is so natural and simple. The law of propagation of light in vacuo would then have to be replaced by a more complicated law conformable to the principle of relativity. The development of theoretical physics shows, however, that we cannot pursue this course. The epoch-making theoretical investigations of H. A. Lorentz on the electrodynamical and optical phenomena connected with moving bodies show that experience in this domain leads conclusively to a theory of electro-magnetic phenomena, of which the law of constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo is a necessary consequence. Prominent theoretical physicists were therefore more inclined to reject the principle of relativity, in spite of the fact that no empirical data had been found which were contradictory to this principle. “At this juncture the theory of relativity entered the arena. As a result of an analysis of the physical conceptions of time and space, it became evident that in reality there is not the least incompatibility between the principle of relativity and the law of propagation of light, and that by systematically holding fast to both these laws a logically rigid theory could be arrived at. This theory has been called the special theory of relativity to distinguish it from the extended theory” (pp. 19, 20). What, however, becomes of this theory, whether special or general, if the dilemma originally calling for its formulation is simply a quixotic wind-mill? Since in that case the theory remains en l’air (in spite of the so much vaunted partial confirmation of its consequences by observational astronomy, seeing that isolated facts may be found in agreement with a whole number of theories, none of which need be harmonious with the full insight into the nature of things), we must rivet our attention more closely on the problematic dilemma in question. The reason why Einstein discovers a dilemma, where the ordinary common sense, and for that matter even the fully self-conscious thinker, finds no trace of it, must be sought in a temporarily over-mastering sway of an empty abstraction over his mind-to a kind of fixed idea making him insensible to the dictates of sound common sense and pure Reason alike. Once, on wishing to offer a chair to a visitor, I found it burdened with books; hence I put myself to the trouble of removing the books to another chairinstead of straightway offering the empty chair itself. Again, it will be remembered that after having cut a hole in the door for his dog, Newton proceeded to cut a smaller hole for the cat. Under the sway of a fixed idea, difficulties of the most fanciful kind are apt to arise on and block the mental horizon. The thoughtful reader of Einstein’s book fails to understand why the change in the calculated velocity of light should conflict with the principle of relativity, because he remains aware that this principle is supposedly an abstract version of the analogous case with the flying raven, where the change in the observed velocity is of no consequence whatever. To look for a dilemma is to him like looking for a needle in a haystack; in fact, like looking for something which is not there at all. But it would seem that once he had formulated his general version of the principle of relativity, Einstein promptly utterly forgets what has been granted under the head of the flying raven; and whilst, on the one hand, still under the impression that he continued in touch with actual experience, remains, on the other hand, unaware that his subse-
quent interpretation of the import of the principle of relativity has already implied a shifting of the ground -in short, that he has substituted an empty abstraction for what is originally meant to be based on a matter of observed fact. So comes it that he suddenly springs on us the assumption that the observed velocity of light should remain unaffected by a change in the body of reference, because the principle of relativity means henceforth that natural phenomena must run their course according to exactly the same general laws whether the body of reference is stationary or moving, and the exactness is pari passu interpreted as negative of the observed change of velocity in the motion of the flying raven in reference to the moving railway carriage. Of course, that there is properly no question of the velocity of light as such, but only a case of its comparison and combination with other velocities, is ignored. The distinction between Being-in-itself and Being-for-other or Constitution is simply dropped as so much rubbish. Einstein feels superior to such restriction. He finds no need of AEther; hence, there is no AEther. The fact that, when estimated in reference to the moving carriage, the observed velocity of light is diminished by the space covered by the carriage in the same time, carries with him a change in the law of propagation of light. Are we then to assume that the hypothetical ray of light should, after the first second, be still the distance c in front of the point reached by the carriage after the first second? But since in that case the fight-stimulus would have to cover the distance c and v, the law of propagation of light would be equally changed. Is it not plain that Einstein’s dilemma has, indeed, arisen under the sway of his fixed idea as expressed in his version of the principle of relativity? And does it not further follow that the immaculately conceived problem amounts then simply to this : If a light-stimulus advances in accordance with the law x = c t, what becomes of x and t when changing over from one body of reference to another? In that case we have of course x1 = c t1; and the evaluation of x1 and t1 becomes an exercise for schoolboys according to Lorentz’s transformation formulae. Mathematics does not trouble about the soundness or absurdity of the problems submitted to its laws, but unlocks even nonexisting mysteries ! In this case it acts as midwife to the Einstein’s theory of relativity. When we reflect upon the consequences of this theory, such as the negation of what Einstein, with: the characteristic irresponsibility of an empty raisonneur, does not hesitate in proscribing as “the two unjustifiable hypotheses of classical mechanics,” i.e., the necessity of fixed standards €or the purpose of measuring time or space intervals, it is brought home to us that, as a matter of fact, Einstein is taking the very term Relativity in vain. For, surely, Relativity not merely a matter of purely quantitative, is but also of qualitative relationship. In so far, however, as time and space enter Einstein’s argument, not from the standpoint of their full idea, as expounded in the system of pure thought, but only from quantitative considerations, time is degraded to the rank of a fourth dimension or simply brought into line with space to the exclusion of the qualitative distinction between them. So comes it that the theorem of the addition of velocities is proclaimed to be invalid and standards of measure are made dependent upon the condition of motion of the body of reference, i.e., are made dependent upon what is irrelevant to the standpoint they represent in a well-balanced as well as the ordinary mind. The hollowness of Einstein’s version of Relativity may broadly be said to consist in this, that Motion is treated as admitting of being referred to-Motion again. But, then, to quote from my own recently published book, “Pure Thought and the Riddle of the
Universe” (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 18s.) : “Whether we speak of rest or of movement, we refer to the Relation between Matter and Movement. . . . . Just as the state of rest is qualified by a reference to Movement, so this latter is qualified by a reference to the state of rest. The two states of a body are, indeed, distinguishable only in the sense of the In-itself and Constitution : either is in itself what the other is, whilst yet at the same time remaining only externally related to it. Everything may be at rest or in a state of motion, but only so that the one state admits of taking the place of the other” (p. 152). In insisting on referring Motion to its own self alone, Einstein’s relativity is purely self-negative and hence converted into a mere abstraction of no objective significance. And this erasure of its true meaning comes to the front only more forcibly when an attempt is made to legitimise the denial of positions held in “classical mechanics” on the ground of facts observed in electrodynamics. Why, even a navvy knows that he cannot plunge his arm into the solid ground just because he can do so into water. The true meaning of Relativity insists on distinctiveness between the conditions under which natural laws have validity, yet, behold, Einstein aims at generalising a law having only a strictly defined application. Instead of a vindication of Relativity, there is in his case, in the case of the theoretical science, a strained striving after absolute Monism-in the name of Relativity ! Surely, we do not wish to pit ourselves against the results of admirably patient research from mere amourpropre. The analytical genius of men of science has its place and so far commands our respect. But, in the interest of mental sanity, we must draw attention to the conceptional nebulosity resulting from a misapplication of categories beyond their legitimate spheres. An attempt to interpret the higher in terms of the lower, or vice versa, must end in confusion, because what in the higher goes beyond the import of the lower is then degraded into something hypothetical in the image of the lower and this invented existence comes, in turn, to be raised into the true Being of the lower, so that the latter’s legitimate features (say, according “to classical mechanics”) are effaced or defaced with the final result that both the lower and the higher are converted into mere pegs for metaphysical absurdities having neither rational nor empirical justification. FRANCIS SEDLAK.
The dream is a cupful of death which gives us-without the ennui of disenchantment, without the ravages of alcohol, and without the chagrin of leaving the world before having solved its enigma-the most entire of pleasures, the unmixed sweetness of not existing. *** This is the mood of a relaxed brain, a taedium vitae. The influent world of the senses becomes the only reality ; the understanding of the world is of no concern. This defect is pitifully apparent in another confession : Never have literary works seemed so beautiful to me as when at a theatre, or in reading, because of lack of habit or lacking a complete knowledge of the language, I lost the meaning of many phrases. This threw about them a light veil of somewhat silvery shadow, making a poetry more purely musical, more ethereal. It is no wonder that 11/11..Pound finds it expedient to cover this achillean heel with a footnote. Dust for sparrows, indeed ! *** The general practitioner of these columns (who, I may say, has only reculed pour mieux sauter) has often urged us to cultivate the notebook habit, but I for one make a very poor show after several years of effort. My mind floresces often enough, but I cannot evolve the simple reflex action of annotating the thing on the spot (bright ideas come to me at such incongruous moments). The only success I do achieve is a nailing down of other people’s ideas that strike me as particularly relevant to some course of thought of my own. My notebooks thus become unconscious anthologies. This is by the way, and I only introduce one confession so that I can more easily make another: namely, that one of my extracts, framed in many inky lines, is from Remy de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style” -a book that a wise Republic would translate and distributefreely to all men engaged in the public administration of letters (I say this despite de Gourmont’s many sins). The sentence I have extracted reads : Il n’y a pas telle ou telle sorte d’art; il n’y a pas d’un cote la science et de l’autre la litterature; il y a des cerveaux qui fonctionment bien et des cerveaux qui fonctionment mal. And that sentence is a text I recommend to all critics. *** It is, of course, merely a descriptive criticism : it does not define the method of exercising the activity. Indeed Remy de Gourmont, though one is aware of a scientific reserve, errs precisely in presenting a merely descriptive front. It is a manner that illuminates but does not explain. It is strategically false because it does not maintain its lines of communication. I can perhaps make my meaning clear by reference to no less a person than Descartes, who is the most readable of philosophers (just as he is the least scholastic of them). The cartesian method, as you know, rejects the syllogism in favour of a logic of intuition, meaning by intuition “not the fluctuating testimony of the senses, nor the misleading judgment that proceeds from the blundering constructions of the imagination, but the conception which an unclouded and attentive mind gives us so readily and distinctly that we are wholly freed from doubt about that which we understand. ” Perfect criticism to my mind proceeds in a similar manner. The statements made about a book or a poem should be so simple and so clear that no sane man can deny them. But though the analogy with cartesian philosophy ends there, the method of literary criticism proceeds a stage further, for criticism implies judgment. I here transfer my affections to the intuitionist in ethics, and I would say that the clear concepts to which you reduce your statements about literature must in their turn be submitted to the instinctive valuation of “the moral law within you.” It is this final stage in critical method that is so alien and distasteful to the modern mind. There lives a deep-seated repression which must be unravelled before our aesthetic values can emerge.
Readers and Writers.
MR. EZRAPOUND has been translating for the “Dial’’ a series of aphorisms by the late Remy de Gourmont. I have read them month by month and it strikes me that serial publication is the best thing that can happen to aphorisms, for to sit down solemnly with a bookful of them is worse than tedious : one’s mind is subjected to a long succession of explosive little thoughts which end by cancelling one another’s effect. I should suspect an age that became enamoured of the aphorism: it shows a lack of the capacity to develop or to follow a continuous reasoning. Luckily we know that in the case of Remy de Gourmont the wait of reasoning power is not a fault: he is in fact one of the most scientific and intelligent critics ever born. No : if we must condemn him (and I think we must) it is because his brain was partial. He used his critical intelligence in the service of a creed that was beyond his criticism since it was a dogma grafted, as it were, into his very physical constitution. Remy de Gourmont was forced in the greenhouse of the Symbolist movement, and he could not reason further than l’art pour l’art. As I hope he is the last, so I believe he is the best of the prophets of that false aesthetic The very last aphorism in this series-perhaps the last line he wrote-is a sufficient epithet :
I might mention here with some relevancy the Notebooksof Anton Tchekhov, recently published by the Hogarth Press. I have always found Tchekhov tedious and never more so than in this MS. inedite. I realise that there is subtlety : it is the general characteristic of all Tchekhov’s work. But it is a quality largely lost in translation, and in any case a quality I am inclined to suspect: it is so often merely a disguised guess-a vagueness that hides a real want of clear thought (and the blunt statement of it). But there was a bedrock of seriousness and sensibility in Tchekhov’s life, and when not particularly subtle his art is often admirable. Gorky, in the reminiscences of Tchekhov published in this same volume, brings this fact into its right emphasis. He has given a general description of the people who live in Tchekhov’s books -their grey mass, their melancholy saturation-and says : In front of that dreary, grey crowd of helpless people there passed a great, wise and observant man; he looked at all these dreary inhabitants of his country; and, with a sad smile, with a tone of gentle but deep reproach, with anguish in his face and in his heart, in a beautiful and sincere voice, he said to them : “You live badly, my friends. It is shameful to live like that.” That is the attitude of a real artist. As he says elsewhere in the Notebooks, “man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.” Such a faith was the animating impulse of Tchekhov’s life, Where then does he fail? It is a big question not to be entered upon now, but briefly I think it is that though he could tell you what a feeble man is like, he was utterly unable to describe a strong one. HERBERT READ.
Psycho-Analysis.*
As the preface to this book says, of the making of psycho-analytic books there is no end; and there are several introductory books on the subject that deal in a competent manner with this or that psycho-analytic theory. But here the author, Mr. Andre Tridon, an American, has with much ambition tried “to sum up in a concise form the views of the greatest American and foreign analysts,” in a fashion and style for which we cannot congratulate him. While, he says, he has the deepest respect for Freud, he holds “that no analysis would he complete which did not take into account the researches of the Zurich school and of the Individual Psychologists (Adlerians). ” Now it is only possible to sum up views that are entirely subversive the one of the other by presenting them each in rotationto the reader, with an entire disinterestedness. What Mr. Tridon has actually done has been to paint us a most painfully crude picture of the quainter side of the Freudian theories, interlarded with rather disparaging interjections of. Adler says this, Jung says that. Let us try to disentangle the substance of his views. He gives what he calls a short history of psycho-analytic research that need not detain us, and plunges forthwith into a definition of the unconscious as Urges, three in number, the nutrition urge, the sex urge, the safety urge. His only difference from Freud is that he postulates an egotistical as well as a sexual libido; and with this conception of the unconscious as his foundation he essays a complete survey of all human activities, all in the compass of some two hundred and fifty odd pages. But in the first place, why should we fash ourselves with urges when we already have that excellent term instinct, with Jung’s definition thereof as “a teleological impulse towards a highly complicated action, ” which is, in essence, to be and to perpetuate being? * “Psycho-Analysis.” Paul. 10s. 6d.) By Andre Tridon. (Kegan
When we have said that, we have said all that it is necessary to say about instinctual libido. Mr. Tridon and his urges are an unnecessary encumbrance upon the psycho-analytic field; nor does he serve any good purpose by stating that the unconscious contains solely instinct when it actually possesses an intuitional function well. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Tridon as is working all the time with a pathetic belief in that monstrosity of science, the “cave man.” As his style also is that of our rather less well-arranged popular “histories,” this book of his is only negatively of value as a reductio ad absurdum of the cave man theory for such as still need such a reduction. However, let us pick a few examples from his book. “Modern society,” he says, “is, generally speaking, established upon a belief in masculine superiority. That belief may have had its origin in the infantile observations as to the physical differences between sexes.” The intrepidity of these “scientists” is marvellous ! “Folklore, religious legends, epics . . . . all voicing man’s desire for power, self-gratification and security from death.” That is how the “first” religions were “established” ; “compensating man for his shortcomings." I was saying a short while ago that the Freudians ran great danger of seeing their theories reduced to the ridiculous; but I must say I did not quite expect to find so Freudian a writer as Mr. Tridon performing that feat in such an oracular manner. “The first song originated when the first combination of sighs, groans or shouts was repeated after being found pleasing, or when the emission of some sound accompanying some physical motion was found to add a certain pleasure to that motion.” In the beginning was the motion, I suppose? Mr. Tridon should know that Harmsworth, Sir Ray Lankester and Mr. H. G. Wells have already brought this sort of guff to the highest state of efficiency. For the matter of that his own country has suffered under Jack London. “The hallucination known as ‘Revelation.’ ” I am lost in wonder at the vision displayed by Mr. Tridon. Before the reader accuses me of having wasted his time, let me point out that the chaotic blether I have been quoting is a demonstration of the inadequacy of the notion that there exists only instinct in the unconscious. Mr. Tridon has Propounded his theories in phrases that need only quotation to sound as hollow as any drum. In the negative sense he has rendered a most valuable service to psychology, for there is no one who could read through his book without automaticallysaying that his theory of urges is not quite the final dictum of psychology. A great deal is talked to-day about the scientific exploration of psychology. Indeed, at the close of his work Mr. Tridon says that what he calls the “new ethics” must be based upon “scientific” reasoning. Well, let us suggest to him that it is not really so very scientific to deny the intuition by which we actually live. Science is knowledge, knowledge is awareness; that is all. If we and are unaware of the fact that man does not live by bread alone, we are unfit to be psychologists. If we are aware of that fact and see fit to deny it in that fit of perversity that is to-day called science, we are, to put it mildIy, taking up a false attitude. Mr. Tridon can have whichever cap fits him best. He will find no “new ethics,” however, under either of them. They are the headgear of Dryasdust. Well, who else could have spoken of the “hallucination known as ‘Revelation'"? So there is a definite value to be found in this book, after all. And the value is that here is a complete reductio ad absurdum of both the Freudian and Adlerian theories as universally applicable to the entire field of human activities. There is no need to controvert these theories any longer. We need only quote Mr. Tridon. There remains then that third theory of Jung’s which Mr. Tridon only employs when he finds it fitting in with his urges. And the value of Jung’s
theory-omitting for the moment his re-orientation of the Freudian conception of the dream-is that it admits the presence of intuitional activities. A correspondent jumped down my throat a few weeks ago for having said that Freud est Jung inversus. I was not overcarefulat the actual moment of writing that; but it is nevertheless somewhere near the truth to say that what these two theories stand for; namely, instinct on the one hand, and on the other hand, intuition, are opposites. Why else does the “Mahabharata” speak of rishis “with their vital seed drawn up,” i.e., transmuted? Instinct is the theosophist’s “astral envelope,” while intuition is buddhi, which, in one aspect at any rate, is the ability to experience the world aesthetically to feel affect without desire. Mr. Tridon’s urges would not of course permit of such action. Yet, on the other hand, it is possible to suggest to him that such action might be the norm. J. A. M. ALCOCK.
Views
and Reviews.
Music.
OPERA INTIME. MR. ROSING AND HIS COMPANY AT THE AEOLIAN HALL. Mr. Rosing’s interesting venture at the AEolian Hall raised some points which we think should not be ignored in future undertakings of the same kind. It is unfortunately rare to find good acting and good singing combined, but it was on this occasion made clear to us that a big stage and a chorus help to cover or attenuate many lapses on the part of the principal artists. Ungainly movements and mechanical gestures thin off into space on a big stage, but on a small one they seem to concentrate, to resolve themselves at last into visible entities, until each singer becomes merged, as a personality, in his-or her-own movement. Another point is, that the chorus provides a solid mass of vocal colour which compensates for certain monotonies in the soloists. When that colour is removed (as it was at the AEolian Hall) it is obvious that the soloists must rise to unaccustomed heights to restore the balance. Mr. Rosing himself rises to any and every height under any sort of circumstance, but if, as we hope he will do, he repeats his experiment, we hope also that he will get a higher general level of performance, both dramatic and vocal. The possibilities were present in nearly every case, but not the achievement. THE BRITISHNATIONAL OPERA COMPANY. We were unfortunately prevented from being present at the meeting of the directors of the British National Opera Company, held at Covent Garden Theatre on June 29, but we are glad to give some details of this most important scheme. Alone amongst the great capitals of Europe, London has no permanent grand (opera; even the smallest grand-ducal towns of Germany once put her to shame in this respect. Some years ago the genius and enthusiasm of a private citizen created the splendid organisation known as the “Sir Thomas Beecham Opera Co., Ltd.,” which, although it was unable to make a permanent home in London, yet seemed to be a permanent institution in England. The calamity which put a temporary stop to its work is regarded by all music-lovers as a national disgrace. The conductors, artists, musical staff and chorus of the company have now allied themselves with the Beecham Symphony Orchestra ; they have formed themselves into the British National Opera Co., Ltd., and will run the organisation on co-operative lines. The control of the organisation will be vested in a board of directors, elected by ballot. Its constitution is as follows : Four representatives from the stage-Miss Agnes Nicholls, Mr. Norman Allin, Mr. Walter Hyde, and Mr. Robert Radford; three from the orchestra-Mr. Thomas Busby (managing director), Mr. Horace Halstead, and Mr. Van der Meerschen; one from the musical staff-Mr. Percy Pitt. We wish the venture every passible success. H. R.
THE ANSWER TO MALTHUS.-II. IT is clear that our problem is not the same as that which perplexed Malthus. He was confronted with a rising birth-rate, we are confronted with a declining birth-rate. What perplexed him was fertility, but we are perplexed by sterility. It is admitted on all hands that, as Dr. Stevenson put it in a paper read before the Royal Statistical Society, “in the deficient fertility of the classes which, having achieved most success in life, are presumably best endowed with the qualifications for its achievement, we see that we have to face a new and formidable fact.” It is not “new,” although it is formidable; every great civilisation of the past has faced the fact, but has failed to understand it. The Malthusian theory still obsesses everybody who writes on the subject, and it is assumed by all, from the Registrar-General downwards, that sterility is deliberately induced by the use of contraceptives. It is admitted, as Mr. Walter Layton said in a quotation given in the previous article, that “the point is not capable of statistical proof,” but none the less, he declared that “there is little doubt that the decline in the birth-rate is in the main due to an intentional restriction of the family.” But there is considerable doubt: one cannot explain, for example, the seasonal fluctuations of the birth-rate by this theory of voluntary restriction. “Under Francis I,” says Mr. Pell, “French families averaged seven children ; under Louis IV, five ; in 1789, four; in 1890, three; and by 1914, the average had declined to about two.”* This historical decline of fertility is also not explicable by the theory of voluntary restriction. Besides, there is the fact of complete sterility which even Dr. Whetham, who alleges intentional restriction in the cases of small families, admits is due to natural causes. But why should we assume that complete sterility is due to natural causes, but that a low degree of fertility in the same classes of people is due to voluntary restriction? There is no evidence of it; “the point is not capable of statistical proof,” and curiously enough, the statistics that have been collected do not support the assumption. Three inquiries were made by the National Birth-rate Commission,Lady WiIloughby de Broke, and the Fabian Society, putting the direct question whether measures were taken to limit families and asking for particulars. The result was that “only about one-third appear to have been taking real Contraceptive measures ; while in the case of two inquiries out of three the number of children per family was actually smaller in those families which were unlimited than in those where it was claimed that contraceptive measures were taken. ” In spite of these facts, though, the National Birth-rate Commission declared that there was no evidence of a decline in fertility due to natural causes, and that the unexpected divergence “could do doubt be explained in many ways.” As it did not explain the peculiar fact that the unlimited families were actually smaller than the limited in even one way, there is still very considerable doubt. We have to remember, as Mr. Pell says, that “those classes the members of which combine a comfortable income with a considerable degree of intellectual activity have invariably a very small average family, and a very large proportion of completely childless “* The Law of Births and Deaths” : Being a Study of the Variation in the Degree of Animal Fertility under the Influence of the Environment. By Charles Edward Pell. (Fisher Unwin. 12s. 6d. net.)
couples. Thus the average number of children among the English intellectuals is about 1.5, and the proportion of childless marriages among any selected body of them will usually work out at from 25 to 33 per cent. Taking a list of twenty-eight of the leading members of the Eugenics Society, I found that the average size of their families was 2.33, and that 25 per cent. of the marriages were childless. The Eugenics Society is composed of able people who believe that it is desirable to secure the largest possible proportion of children from the ablest sections of the community, and that the present position in which the least capable are reproducing most rapidly is likely to he disastrous to the efficiency of the race in the long run. It is not at all likely that they would publicly expound such beliefs, and yet take measures to limit their own families, seeing that they are themselves among the abler sections of the community. Here again the number of completely sterile marriages provides the best test, and by far the most probable explanation is that the vast proportion of such marriages among them is due to the same causes which have produced a similar result among the staff of Cambridge University. The proportion is greater than among the nobility, and illustrates the fact that intellectual activity seems to be more potent in reducing fertility than social position. It may be added that the families do not consist almost exclusively of one or two children, as we should expect on the contraceptive theory, but of sterile marriages, with ones, twos, threes, fours and fives, scattered in just the random fashion we should expect from a natural law. A still more instructive case is that of the members of the National Birth-rate Commission. Here is a body of people who sincerely believe that unless some means are found of grappling successfully with the birth-rate problem we run the gravest risk of ultimate disaster. So strongly do they feel on this point that they give their services gratis for a considerable time in order to investigate the problem. Yet I find that the average number of children per family among them is only 1.75, and that sixteen out of the forty-one whom I was able to look up are childless!" But there is no need to multiply instances; the fact is admitted that, as Dr. Saleeby puis it, “the nation of the future is receiving the fewest children from, for instance, married army and naval officers, clergymen and ministers, barristers, physicians, authors, Civil Service clerks, and persons of independent means. The numbers are certainly far too few to replace the parents.” And lest anyone should retort, as Dr. Saleeby himself retorted, that we are not concerned with births, but with survivals, let it be stated here and now that, as Dr. Saleeby quotes, Dr. Stevenson has proved that “the ‘lower’ classes have not only the highest total fertility but the highest ‘effective fertility.’ ” It is true that Dr. Saleeby, like everyone else, accuses the “upper” classes of “practicing racesuicide in the most rapid, drastic, effective, and novel fashion” (but think of the Roman Empire!); the fact remains that poverty and fertility are obviously allied, and that both the Malthusian law, and the deductions drawn from it, are wrong. Population does not "invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence” ; on the contrary, it apparently decreases in proportion to the abundance of the means of subsistence. Mr. Pell has examined the problem of the variation of the degree of fertility in the vegetable, animal, and human kingdom, has tracked it down even to unicellular organisms; and has shown a correlation between fertility and environmental conditions which cannot be gainsaid, although subsequent research may develop it into greater precision. The Malthusian heresy has been a blunder from the beginning, and, like most blunders, it has acted as a blinker on subsequent inquirers. Mr. Pell has the merit of looking at the problem with open eyes. A. E. R.
Reviews.
Mr. Dimock. By Mrs. Denis O’Suilivan. (The Bodley Head. 8s. 6d. net.) Mrs. Denis O’Sullivan gushes very agreeably about love, and in the course of some three hundred and sixty pages implicates several nationalities and countries, with occasional quotations from their languages. Perhaps it is fitting that the small nationalities should pass from political to emotional fiction ; and Belgium and Serbia and Ireland become the staple of conversation of characters in a novel. Everybody in this story, we think, is in love, or has been in love, or is going to be in love; even Mr. Dimock, the villain, seems to be genuinely in love every time he commits matrimony, with or without the ceremony. He was a versatile lover; he wanted a woman in every phase, and the profits from ‘‘Bovo” enabled him usually to satisfy his wants. We do not quite see why the woman with four husbands should reprove him at the end, except on the ground of barrenness, for his amorous activities cannot be traced in the statistics of births; but we suppose that reproof is the woman’s way of feeling superior. Mrs. O’ Sullivan gushes her way into hospitality, tells us all about a teaparty given to the villagers, takes us to a hostel for refugee Belgians, to a nunnery, to Holland, to America, and generally behaves like a cicerone to international love. The Challenge. By Seaward Beddow. (The Bloomsbury Press. 2s. 6d.) The facts that Mr. George Lansbury has written a preface to this play in four acts, and that “performances are being given in the Little Theatre attached to the author’s church in Leicester,” indicate that its appeal is not primarily to the literary and dramatic public, but to the Labour world. It presents a Congregational minister with Labour sympathies ‘confronted with a challenge from his own committee ; his public activities on behalf of Labour have become a scandal to them and their party, and they ask him to desist with a strong hint of “other action” if he refuses. Being a clergyman he, of course, draws analogies between his own situation and that of Christ (although, so far as we remember, Christ was not a Congregational or any sort of clergyman; He held no living, and had no obligation towards any Church), and finally decides that he must speak the truth as he feels it, and so resigns. For those who like-that sort of thing, that is the thing they would like; and the Labour movement provides a place of refuge for local preachers, parsons without livings, and embryo Government servants. It is a queer way of getting the Church to support the workers, and the Rev. Thomas Dow seems to have no policy. The Story of the Durham Miners (1662-1921). By Sidney Webb. (The Labour Publishing Co., Ltd. Cloth, 5s. Paper, 2s. 6d.) The present appearancc of this little history makes it seem topical in intention, until it is remembered that there has been scarcely a month since 1918 (one might almost say, since 1912) when the miners’ case was not more or less before the public. It is useful in recalling the scandalous condition of a century ago, before the miners took the initiative. Lord Durham’s lecture to his employees in 1834 has a familiar ring: “ These men [the delegates] know, or ought to know, that the rate of wages depends on the price which is given by the public for the article worked. Now the price of coals is very low, so much so that little or no profitis made by the coalowner.” In 1834 low prices had to bear the blame for low wages; to-day high wages are denounced as the cause of high prices. Mr. Webb, of course, blames private ownership for both evils, and trusts to nationalisation as a cure for both; and from this paint of view his book cannot be recommended to the public in search of a remedy.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
“THE CHILD’S PATH TO FREEDOM.” Sir,-May I point out that your reviewer has made several rather unfortunate mistakes about my book ? In the first place he clearly did not read it in the light of its three divisions : “Anticipation,” a theoretical and propagandist introduction ; “Realisation,” a practical description of application in a pictorial form; and “The Call of the Future.” He can hardly blame me for not having made the first part fulfil the functions of the second. I hardly know whether he means to suggest that I am following in the steps of Mr. Caldwell Cook-for whose work, let me say en passant, I have a profound respect. In point of fact and no doubt to my disadvantage, I knew nothing of Mr. Cook’s work-this was back in 1912until I had worked out my own educational ideas. Neither is there now any close parallel between the work of Tiptree Hall where the children work without a master and without a timetable, and where the whole of the learning is on auto-educative lines, and the work of those, however enlightened, who have to conform to the administrative framework of a school. Perhaps we would agree that Mr. Caldwell Cook’s work is more likely to influence contemporary practice for that very reason than mine-but ought THE NEW AGE to be the first to cast a stone at revolutionary practice ? NORMAN MACMUNN. *** should be glad if all those interested in the Sir,-I Douglas-NEW AGE Scheme of Credit-Reform in Portsmouth would communicate with me. THOMAS K. JUSTICE. 34, Dunbar Road, Portsmouth .
PRESS CUTTINGS.
A report on the light castings trade by a sectional committee of the Sub-Committee on Building Materials appointed by the Standing Committee on Prices and Trusts states that the profits and trading margins are not unreasonable, but criticise the “monopolistic control” of the National Light Castings Association as being so open to abuse as to make it a menace to the community. . . . . The industry is that branch of the ironfounding industry which specialises in the production of iron castings used in house building, such as grates, stoves, mantels, registers, rainwater pipes, baths, etc. The National Light Castings Association is a trade combinationwhich covers 95 per cent. of the British output of light castings, while the Builders’ Merchants’ Central Committee represents almost the whole distributing trade. The former fixes the prices below which the castings manufactured by its members should not be sold in this country, and the latter issue to the great majority of builders’ merchants instructions as to the minimum prices at which light castings should be sold “over the counter” from stock. By a pooling arrangement the association penalises any member who increases his output, and rewards any member who reduces his output relative to the rest. The Committee regard this arrangement as tending to restrict total output, to stereotype the lay-out of the industry, and to retard the improvement of efficiency. They consider it to be contrary to the public interest.-“Times.” WHAT IS A “ JUST PRICE ” ? A QUESTION FOR CHRISTIAN PEOPLE. Has justice anything to say about such matters as wages and prices ? Christians, strangely enough, can be found who deny this and insist that such things must be left to be settled by the blind working of economic forces. However, the old Hebrew prophets did not think so; nor did the Christian Church in its great days in the Middle Ages, when (whatever its faults) it was a power in Europe. The Church in those days had a great deal to say about economic and industrial concerns. And its ruling idea was that of a “Just Price.” It was insistently taught that, in all buying and selling, a fair equivalent for what was taken must be givenneither more nor less. Though only rough and unscientific methods of fixing the “just price” could then be used, the enforcing of the principle does seem to have had considerable results on the welfare of society. But the time has now come for big and bold new departures. In mediaeval industry fixed capital was a small item : there was no elaborate, permanent plant. To-day the standing machinery of production becomes continually more intricate and expensive. Who pays for this? and how? The cost of it is smuggled into prices and piled on to the final consumer of the goods turned out. In paying €or your domestic coal or your clothes or your bicycle, you are paying not only for what you personally get and use but for an addition to the nation’s permanent facilities for producing wealth-an addition which increases the real credit of the nation as a whole. By all the principles of the Christian Church, you should pay only the equivalent of what you get. The nation as a whole should credit the producers with the value of their contribution to its real credit. As it is, it is arithmetically certain that the total payments going out to the consumer (wages, salaries, dividends) cannot equal the total price of the output. Hence our magnificently efficient productive machine must be continually overrunning its possible market. Hence, Unemployment. The true ratio of a “just price” to the total costs is now known. The necessary credit-adjustments would be a simple matter, if society made up its mind to control credit in the interests of all. Do you believe in carrying out Christian principles in these matters? Do you wish to apply scientifically, to present-day conditions, the Church’s teaching on the “just price,” and so solve the Social Problem? If so, read THE NEW AGE or make further inquiries from THE NEW AGE Office, 38, Cursitor Street. REV. N. E. EGERTON SWANN.
Pastiche.
IN PRAISE AND PRAYER. God made the World, He made it Good: He made it in Six days. Oh, all ye Peoples praise the Lord, Praise Him in all His Ways. He gave to Man the boon of life; Oh, let us give Him thanks. He gave him Skill and industry, And then He gave him Banks. He made the earth to bring forth fruit, For Christian and for Jew. But who Creates inflated Costs? The devil echoes “Who”? The vampire-men who finance War-That suavely spoken fewWho credits them to Credit us? The devil echoes “Who” ? What of the teeming Warehouses, With Clothes and food replete, Which none can sell and none can buy And none may wear or eat? Who are those mighty Holding the world Who say “The ass, let The devil answers Creditors supine, him eat grass”? “Mine.”
God made the world, He made it good, For which His name be praised. May He reward them suitably By whom the Bank Rate’s raised. Then praise the Lord all heaven and earth, For Sun, for Stars, for Skies, For Banks and High Financiers, But most of all for EYES! L’HIBOU.
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