PAGE NOTES OF THE WEEK . . 233 CURRENT CANT . . 235 FOREIGN AFFAIRS. By S. Verdad . . 236 MILITARY NOTES. By Romney . . 237 LETTERS TO A TRADE UNIONIST-I. By Rowland

Kenney . 237 WAR AND RELIGION. By Dmitri Merezhkovski . 239 THE CASE OF EGYPT. By Marmaduke Pickthall . 240 “THE MENACE OF ENGLISH JUNKERDOM.” By A

Publicist . . 241 GOBINEAU AND CHAMBERLAIN. By Dr. Oscar Levy 242

E. A. B. . . “43 IMPRESSIONS OF PARIS. By Alice Morning . . 245 AFFIRMATIONS-I. ARNOLD DOLMETSCH. By Ezra

Pound . . 246

THE HYPHENATED STATES OF AMERICA--I. By

NOTES OF THE WEEK. FROM time to time during the last four or five months the Government has relieved public anxiety by denying plausible rumours of British disasters or defeats on land and sea. In recent weeks so relatively many adverse in- cidents have become known to the public, and the Government has shown itself so weak in dealing- with the exaggerated “telegrams” sent by the correspondents of the “Daily Mail” and its litter, that official denials have lost much of their former effect. Still, it is ad- mitted that official comments are useful; ’ and the straight hitting of the Foreign Office authorities at the “Times” last week will probably not be without in- fluence on Lord Northcliffe’s latest Press weathercock. We think it all the more necessary, therefore, that some clear statement should at once be made by the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer regarding the position of our Funded Loan of £350,000,000, issued a few weeks ago at a price which enables the investor to secure a return of four per cent. Of the total sum of £350,000,000 placed, £100,000,000, had been taken up by the bankers at an earlier stage, so that the public was called upon to pro- vide £250,000,000 before the list closed at four o’clock on November 24.

***

I t was generally stated in the papers that the issue had been largely over-subscribed. Mr. Lloyd George, in a speech which was postponed two or three times until it was finally delivered on November 27, indicated, though not, it is held in the City, without some ambiguity, that the loan had been over-subscribed, thanks to “an appeal to the public and undoubtedly to the great financial in- terests as ‘well.” The City, on the other hand, declared that the loan had not really been over-subscribed; it had been barely subscribed, and no more. As a proof, City bankers have been pointing to the unofficial dealings i n loan scrip before the opening of the Stock Exchange. For a day or two it was at a premium of about one-half. Then there was a slight decline, which gradually reached about five-sixteenths under par. The fraction in either case is a small one, but it indicates nevertheless that within a few days of their purchase certain speculators made up their minds to get rid of their allotment. The

PAGE READERS AND WRITERS. By P. Selver and E. X. B. 248 MEMOIRS : X DIALOGUE. By Rudolf Presber

(translated by P. Selver) . . 250 LETTERS FROM RUSSIA. By C. E. Bechhöfer . 252

. ”53

Ananda Coomaraswamy . . 255 PASTICHE. By P. Selver, H. H., Fitzgerald Lane,

Arthur F. Thorn . . 256 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR from C. H. Norman, Per

Sona, X, A. C. Nash, Arthur Kitson, J. M., E. H. K. C., Harold Lister, Pteleon, For Rich and Poor, Millar Dunning, Upton Sinclair, An Admirer of Moses and Isaiah, Frederick, H. Evans, A. F. T., Fair-to-All, John Duncan, M. K. Hull, A Music-hall Artiste . . 258

CURRENT VERSE . T H E IDEALISTIC REACTION AGAINST SCIENCE. By

Chancellor of the Exchequer, it will be recollected, stated definitely in the House of Commons that the Stock Ex- change would be opened under such conditions that there could not be a “bear raid’’ on the new loan.

***

Another point. Great curiosity was shown as to the number of small investors in the present subscription; and Mr. Lloyd George announced their number as 100,000, as compared with 25,000 “small” subscribers to the Boer War loan. A small subscriber, however, means a man who has been able to put up not less than £100; and many of the small subscribers will have in- vested to the extent o f several hundreds. I t is calcu- lated-again we take City plus official figures-that the amount subscribed by people who could afford anything from a hundred to six or eight hundred pounds is about £50,000,000. In other words, the “great financial in- terests”-the phrase includes the English branches of one or two American Trusts, by the by-were able to find £300,000,000, as compared with the £50,000,000 found by the general public. But, if the bankers had begun by assisting the Government to the extent of £100,000,000, the Government had extended some re- turn to one very important branch of the banking busi- ness-not without incurring some suspicion of favouritism, as the case of Mr. Crisp showed. In his speech on November 27, Mr. Lloyd George also an- nounced that the total amount of bills discounted by the Bank of England on behalf of the accepting houses, on Government guarantees, was £120,000,000. “That shows that of the £350,000,000 to £500,000,000 worth of bills which were out at the time, most have been dis- posed of in the ordinary course. That is very satisfac- tory. There are £12,500,000 worth still running, not having arrived at maturity.” Mr. Lloyd George further estimated that by the end of the war there would he about £50,000,000 worth of bills in “cold storage.”

* * * If the fawning financial sycophants who gush over

the Government’s measures in the City columns of the Press tell us that the largeness of the loan subscribed for takes their breath away and leaves them petrified with awe at the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s daring,

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most assuredly the extent to which the Government was prepared to back up the accepting houses causes even our hardened selves to raise our eyebrows, closely though we know the Government will stick to its finan- cial backers. Even if we accept Mr. Lloyd George’s statement that the crash caused by the shock to credit if the Government had not supported the accepting houses as it had done would have brought about a very serious state of things in the industrial world, we must ask why he has not followed his drastic precedent to one or two more of its logical conclusions. W e are raising by loan the sum of £350,000,000 ; we have raised by extra taxa- tion the sum of £65,550,000, though from this we must deduct £550,000 for the reduction in the license duty. This does not take into account the first war credit of £100,000,000.

***

Now let us consider one or two, conclusions which arise from the admitted facts we have given. W e may take it for granted that the small investor and the trus- tee, anxious to place their money safely at a time of unparalleled stress, have already done all they will be able to do towards providing the nation with funds. W e must also realise that the financiers and big business houses, largely as they have subscribed to the present loan, will be able to subscribe as largely to the next. ‘The Government has backed up the banks ; recruiting has relieved the wage-bill; and there are many indus- tries which are working at high pressure. It must be remembered that foreign governments, as well as our own army and navy authorities, are buying largely in this country. Russia has ordered military motors to the value of more than a million sterling ; and many firms which previously manufactured touring and smaller pleasure cars are now turning out motor-omni- buses, motor-ambulances, motor-lorries, and motor gun- carriages. France, Russia, and Belgium have been ordering boots from us by the million pairs. Govern- ment orders for motors of all kinds, boots and shoes, barbed wire, fencing, hospital beds, cutlery, electrical goods, ordnance, small arms, rifles, hosiery, and woollen goods will alone keep these various trades working over- time for months to come. Dundee and the jute districts have enough orders for sacking to keep the mills busy for several weeks, and the demand is likely to grow. Clyde shipbuilders are busier than they have been for years. All Tyneside, with the exception of the mining districts, is working overtime. Even the farmers are being encouraged. W e d o not pretend that trade as a whole is normal, or anything like it ; but we must em- phasise the fact that most of our important industries are fully engaged.

***

There is no need for us to remind readers of THE NEW AGE that all this work is not being undertaken without the certainty of more than adequate profits. Army con- tractors have never been noted for their patriotism ; and there have been the customary scandals during this war. Except in those districts where a dearth of men has sent up their value, wages have been c u t down to the lowest minimum and employers are making money. Con- trast the situation of Belgium, and of the ten or twelve Departments of France still in the occupation of the enemy. From the official reports of the Germans them- selves it is evident that industry has been all but stopped, and is allowed to continue only when it is to the advantage of the invaders. Most of the coal-mines, as well as the factories for the production of hardware, lace, textiles, gloves, and the like, have been shut down and the machinery has been dismantled. A few em- ployers are struggling against the adverse conditions under the supervision of German officers. It is esti- mated that, at the very outside, only twenty-five per cent. of the Belgian working classes are at work; and the proportion in the occupied parts of France is not much larger. Millionaires in both countries have found themselves ruined in a day ; and wealthy manufacturers

and bankers have reached Dutch, Swiss, or English ter- ritory, or other parts of France, in a penniless condition. The inconvenience which we have suffered here has been the merest trifle compared with that which has been experienced in north-eastern France; and it cannot be compared a t all with the ruin and devastation which have overtaken Belgium.

* * * W e shall surely agree, when we remember all this,

that the complaints of our own wealthy people are un- worthy. Despite the fact that Mr. Lloyd George is rais- ing only £65,000,000 by extra taxation, there are already murmurs at the increases in the income-tax. Decreases in wages we have already referred to. NearIy every employer, whether affected by the war or not, has taken advantage of the situation to curtail his staff, to add to the normal hours of labour, or to reduce wages. As if the infamous National Insurance inquisition were not enough, a tax on wages, we are told, was actually considered by the Cabinet ; and, whether gossip in this instance was true or not, a tax on wages was certainly recommended by employers of labour on the plea that direct taxation was becoming too heavy. On this state- ment, which has become far too common, and is too easily believed by the average taxpayer, there is a com- ment to make. It is true that direct taxation has risen. In 1912 the revenue derived from direct taxation amounted to £82,432,000, or about 53.4 per cent. of the total tax revenue. In 1913 the amount was £83,268,000, representing a percentage of 53.81. In 1871, however, the direct taxpayer’s contribution to revenue was only 30 per cent., in 1881 it was 35.5 per cent., in 1891 it had risen to 43.5 per cent., in 1901 i t was 48.8 per cent. ; and in 1913, as we have said, it was 53.81 per cent.

***

W a r or no war, then, for nearly half a century the direct taxpayer has been bearing a greater burden of taxation every year, because profits have risen in much greater proportion than taxes, wages, and the cost of luxurious living. If we wish to know what direct taxes chiefly consist of, let the figures for 1912 supply the answer : Income Tax, £44,334,000; Estate Duties, £25,182,000; and Stamps, £9,564,000. W e might also mention the House Duty, £2,100,000. Outrageous, say the men with big incomes. Not at all, say we. When Pitt and his successors wished to finance the Napoleonic wars, which cost £831,000,000, they raised £440,000,000 by loan and as much as £391,000,000 by taxation. The Crimean war cost £67,500,000, of which Gladstone raised £32,000,000 by loan and £35,500,000 by taxation. The first eight months of the present war will cost us £339,571,000, of which amount Mr. Lloyd George proposes to raise £65,000,000 by taxation and no less than £321,571,000 by loan. As the extra taxation has to be balanced against an esti- mated deficit in normal revenue, the actual war charges raised by taxation will be only £18,250,000. Of the sum of £65,000,000 thus raised by taxation, the greatest proportion is represented by the doubling of the Income Tax, which will bring in an estimated increase of £38,750,000, and by the beer duty, which means an additional £17,600,000. The doubling of the super-tax means only another £6,000,000.

***

These figures will not dismay even the capitalist, however much he may pretend, through the medium of his pliable Press, that they will result in nothing short of his ruin. It has already been pointed out, in these columns and elsewhere, that there are, so to say, counter-figures. For years past we have been lending money to undeveloped countries-and, indeed, to de- veloped countries, too, for that matter. So conserva- tive an organ as the “Statist” estimates the total amount of our foreign investments at four thousand millions sterling, a sum bringing us in interest every year to the amount of two hundred millions. It is true

235

that we receive this amount in goods, not in cash. Or, to be more accurate still, we “clear” the transactions involving both the lending of money and the receiving of goods with the assistance of those very convenient accepting houses which were so firmly supported by the Government at the beginning of the war. In other words, our factories create a surplus every year, which enables us to invest a varying sum abroad-seldom less than two hundred millions sterling. W e do not make this particular export in the form of goods, but in the form of credit; and it was the maintenance of the credit system which the Government was so anxious about. Is it reasonable to suggest that for once we should re- frain from investing our surplus of two hundred millions or so in the ends of the earth? W e think not. Credit, it seems to us, is not an abstraction, but a tangible entity which the Chancellor of the Exchequer can seize by putting out his hand. It is only when we come to consider these figures relating to our foreign invest- ments that we are struck, as nobody can fail to be struck, with the enormous profits which have been made in this country during recent years. In the time of Pitt we had hardly any foreign investments worth talk- ing about, nor had we many at the time of the Crimean war. It is only within recent years that we have acquired such vast interests abroad.

***

The fact is, as everybody in the City knows, money- i.e., credit-is plentiful in London at present; but the financiers will not invest until they can be sure of safety and high rates of interest. They have let us make our appeal, and they have subscribed just enough. But the Government has been warned with sufficient emphasis, from what we may style semi-official financial sources, that four per cent. is not enough, and that the next war loan must be issued so as to bring in five and a half or six per cent. No doubt if a third loan were required these conscienceless sharks would demand ten per cent. In the circumstances, we submit that there is one remedy for the Government. In view of Mr. Lloyd George’s threat to appoint receivers for banks if the banks refused to lend money to small merchants and tradesmen, we assume that drastic steps have been more than once contemplated. W e recommend nothing so drastic even as that. We simply point to the fact that if credit can ‘be supported or withheld, it can also be seized. If the Government can appoint receivers for the ordinary banking establishments, it can equally well appoint receivers for the accepting houses and the great credit institutions. The Chancellor of the Exchequer can commandeer credit, with the authority of the Govern- ment and the nation behind him, as easily as any one of Lord Kitchener’s representatives can commandeer a horse. In each case there is a promise to pay. The Ger- mans in Belgium, and in their own country, too, have not hesitated to seize what they wanted. If we were in an equally dire extremity we should not hesitate, either; and credit is as seizable as copper.

* * * I t may be urged that there is no such extremity upon

us. We reply that the extremity was upon us when the financiers withheld their money-money which the nation had allowed them to accumulate-from the war loan which represented the nation’s need. In spite of the rocket-rise of profits between 1860-70 and 1914, our trading classes are greedy for more and ever more money. W e have heard a few patriotic financiers say that they would willingly see their income-tax and super-tax quintupled for the period of the war ; and there again is a suggestion for the Treasury. W e have no compunction in stripping the super-wealthy of a few thousands a year. But we are concerned to see that no financier shall take advantage of the nation’s need to keep his purse in his pocket while he arranges extor- tionate rates of interest with a Treasury which is both roo lenient and none too well instructed in these matters.

Current Cant. “Romance of modern warfare.”--“ Daily Mail.”

“The arrogance of culture.”-VISCOUNT HARBERTON.

“Death is the explanation of Life.”-“Daily Express.”

“Every man must be a fighter.”-SIDNEY DARK.

‘‘Socialism and the War.”-H. G. WELLS.

“Mr. H. G. Wells has been very prolific.”-“Daily Citizen.”

“Cant is more venerable than truth.”-DORA MARSDEN.

“How I made my sweetheart enlist.”-“ Mary Bull.”

“Hopeful news for the New Year.”-“ Globe.”

“There is not the slightest doubt that the Kaiser is the one man who made the War.”-JAMES DOUGLAS. . “The Stars in their courses have been fighting on the

side of the Allies.”-“ Star.”

“The War has brought back to us the brotherhood we

“Efficiency is the hope of democracy. Efficiency means greater production with less effort and at less cost.”-LOUIS D. BRANDEIS.

had forgotten.”-PROFESOR GILBERT MURRAY.

“The national crisis has given birth to a new spirit of civic patriotism.”-REGINALD MCKENNA.

“Greece and Rome have passed away, but England will endure. She has been true to her thousand years of heroes. She has used nobly the power that came into her hands.”-ARTHUR MEE, in “My Magazine.”

“If we use the restoration of Peace to lapse into ease and licence, we shall betray all the better purposes awakened during the time of stress.”-“Times.”

“We have been in the past a careless and casual nation, a nation of slackers : let us make a resolve for the New Year to have done for ever with our random, easy-going, happy-go-lucky ways.”-“Weekly Dispatch.”

“The practical point is that to meet huge public ex- penditure there must be private economy. In the wealthy classes especially the lesson has already been learnt.”- “ Daily Graphic.”

“The compensations of war are at least as great as its horrors and miseries, and they are of a kind that har- monise with and illustrate much that is fundamental in the Christian ideal.”-“ Daily Mail.”

“A year of consecration. Christmas tip for the Derby. Santa Claus in khaki. Will Sir James Barrie’s prophecy be fulfilled? Which village is the bravest? Max Pem- berton describes the week’s fighting. There is only one cure for stomach and bowel indigestion. Heavenly Father, keep us in the beautiful spirit of the season of peace and goodwill. Do you suffer from wind ? A chat to the children.”--“ Weekly Dispatch.”

“The man who has done more than any other Britisher alive to see that Britain’s heritage was not sold to Ger- many for a few paltry political pence was Lord North- cliffe. He worked with vigour and inspiration.”- “Daily Mail.”

“O Lord, keep us day by day. . . . Why pay rent?” -“British weekly.”

“Selfridge’s seems to have become as characteristic of London as St. Paul’s. . . . The place somehow strikes a new note in the progress of the City.”--SELFRIDGE, in the “Pall Mall Gazette.”

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F o r e i g n A f f a i r s , By S. Verdad.

IT is remarkable enough that all the Socialists of the world have not yet been able to propose a satisfactory settlement of the war. The “Times” of January I quotes from the “Labour Leader” specimens of three or four messages sent by well-known German Socialists as New Year greetings; but, although they all refer to the war, they say nothing practical about it. Herr Herman Müller hopes that, “despite the interruption which the intercourse between the Socialist brother- parties has had to suffer, International Socialism will, after this war, develop a greater effectiveness and thus secure to the world a really lasting peace.” This, mind you, when the Italian Socialists have been holding scores of meetings all over Italy to demand official in- tervention by force of arms on behalf of the Allies, so that the lost Italian provinces may be recovered; when Mr. Crooks has led the singing of “God Save,” etc., in the House of Commons, and M. Gustave Hervé has gone to the front !-not to speak of the bellicose spirit of the German Socialists and Social Democrats.

. ***

Dr. Karl Liebknecht-who voted the war credits in the Reichstag and, with his followers, supported the Government all through the initial stages of the war- says : “It is painful for me to write these lines at a time when our radiant hope of previous days, the Socialist International, lies smashed on the ground with a thou- sand expectations ; when even many Socialists in the belligerent countries-for Germany is not an exception -have in this most rapacious of all wars of robbery willingly put on the yoke of the chariot of Imperialism just when the evils of capitalism were becoming more apparent than ever.” The good doctor overlooks the fact that his fellow-countrymen-Socialists, Junkers and otherwise-regard this war as a holy war--“der heilige Krieg” is a frequent reference in German papers of all shades of opinion. Further, a11 the Germans, whether engaged on land or on sea, have fought with a striking courage that springs from fanaticism. “Kul- tur” is an idea and has a meaning for these people; let there be no doubt about that. Race-feeling is always the strongest feeling of a people; religious feeling perhaps comes next. But when we find the two to- gether, as we find them in the ranks of the greater part of the German army, we must recognise that we are faced with something particularly formidable. The emotions aroused by the struggle between capital and labour are quite subsidiary and are relatively powerless. That is not a matter of argument, but a matter of fact. For proof we need only point to the behaviour of the most embittered Labour leaders and Socialists in Ger- many, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, England, Holland, and Belgium since the war broke out. Even Mr. Keir Hardie himself wrote to the papers not long ago to explain that, though he objected to the war, he would on no account interfere with recruiting.

***

Rosa Luxemburg writes : “Already, after a few months of war, the jingo intoxication which animated the working classes of Germany is passing away, and, although they have been deserted by their leaders in this great, historic hour, their sense is returning, and every day the number of workers who blush with shame and anger at the thought of what is going on to-day grows.” Even when we make allowance for the feminine rhetoric of the last sentence-for German workmen blush at nothing-we must hold that Rosa Luxemburg has not proved her argument merely by stating it. As we know from the reports of neutral observers, there is no lack of recruits for the German army from the working classes; there are no signs of a revolution among them ; and they still respect the Kaiser and the military authorities of the country. “Vorwärts” has been in trouble with the Censor two

or three times, but not for revolutionary criticism. Again, poor as the German Socialist leaders are, it is not altogether fair to them to blame them for “desert- ing” a cause which they never supported. Bebel always made it clear that his party would fight if Ger- many were menaced ; and the German Press was easily able, by suppressing or distorting facts, to make it appear that the Fatherland was menaced by Russia. German workmen, like British workmen, choose their own leaders. This is not the only feature common to both, for both are and have always been Imperialistic in spirit and in action.

* * * I mentioned in THE NEW AGE a fortnight ago that

International Socialism always came to grief because there was a discrepancy between the utterances and the actions of its leaders-because their views did not corre- spond with realities. The messages to the “Labour Leader” are full of such empty phrases as I quoted in the issue of December 24 from French sources. M. Jean Grave, let me recall, wrote in “La Bataille Syndical- iste” an appeal to the German people concluding with the words : “Help us to pave the way for the great international federation of peoples which can alone re- pair the ruin wrought by hatred and ignorance.” And now we have Franz Mehring saying : “The day is not far distant when a return to peace and to the unshaken principles of the International will be demanded by the German working class.” They ask for bread and they will get cold steel. The “Herald” and various French Socialist organs continue to insist on the need of an International High Court.

***

The proposal is not worth serious discussion ; but one item in it is. Who is going to guarantee the in- tegrity of an International High Court? Obviously, no nation could. An International Court at The Hague would become as liable to influence from outside sources as the Supreme Court in the United States. I do not mean this to be taken as the only argument against the scheme, because there are others much weightier ; but the point is one which is frequently overlooked by the advocates of international this and that’s.

* * * One more comment on the proposal for the founding

of a European Federation. If one man in modern times knew more about federation than another, that man was Bismarck; for he federated the German Empire. Yet he had little confidence even in a complete federa- tion of what might legitimately have been regarded as Germanic territory. “One must never forget,” he said, “that the greater the empire the more difficult it is to maintain, and the more easy to crumble away. For this reason we did not infringe on Austrian territory in 1866.” And again :

The German provinces of Austria, except the Tyrol and Salzkammergut, both of which are blindly Catholic and Hapsburg, may experience a strong gravitation to- wards us; but I assure you, were Upper and Lower Austria to be offered me to-morrow, I should refuse them. They are too far off-there are Bohemia, Austrian Silesia, and Moravia, with three-fifths of a Slav population, be- tween us. If those provinces of German Austria were where Bohemia, etc., are, i f Prague and Vienna could change places, I do not say no. . . . Bohemia, Silesia, etc., would prove a second Poland to us. We should have to learn how to manage the Czechs, whereas Austria has some experience in that task, though I admit it has been very bad experience. We don’t want Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, or any other part of Austria-let her get strong and be our ally, voilà tout.

***

If Bismarck, with his marvellous powers of states- manship, was sceptical of his ability to federate Ger- manic territory, I do not think that the combined efforts of various groups of Continental Socialists will lead to a federation of Europe--and Bismarck, re- member, referred to federation by peaceful means. Bis- marck had unlimited skill and power. The “interna- tionalists” have not even the power of a wrong idea.

237

Military Notes. B y Romney.

NOTHING has been more remarkable than the success under the test of war of the great military reforms associated with the name of Haldane. I say “associ- ated with” rather than “originated by,” because it is not to be supposed that the part of that most able Minister extended further than a general selection from and direction of the schemes of others, and, of course, the acceptance of responsibility for the results. The working of a modern bureaucracy- is so impersonal in character and so dependent on the unnumbered and un- noticed contributions of subordinates that the average man may be pardoned for supposing that the part of the chief is that of a mere figurehead-until one day he arrives himself at the position of chief, and finds him- self called upon to CHOOSE-to make up his mind, per- haps at short notice, between two apparently equally desirable but irreconcilable courses, which is the great burden of men in power. H e will then discover that the men who prepared the rival programmes for his con- sideration-who have shown themselves so far superior to himself in knowledge of the facts, in industry, in power of expression-who, as he must instinctively feel, speak slightingly behind his back of this ignoramus, this outsider thrust into office over the heads of them, the men who do the work, who would gladly relieve him of nine-tenths of his job and perform it in all proba- bility better than he could himself, show no anxiety to relieve him of this one-tenth which is greater than all the rest-this taking of responsibility for a definite and final choice. The glib advisers who a moment before were all agog with importunate suggestions, will stand aside in silence and reluctance. Their attitude will be suddenly cold and formal. “That,” they will say, “is for you to decide, Sir.” He will then learn how painful a job it sometimes is to be a “figurehead.”

I t is therefore justly that we associate the reforms of 1907 with the name of Haldane, although the idea originated in other brains than his. On the success of the Territorial organisation it is unnecessary to dilate. It has provided us immediately o n the outbreak of war with a quarter of a million men, of whom several divisions were a t once found worthy to relieve the Regular garrisons in Malta, Egypt, and India. It has already contributed many units ta the Expeditionary Force, and is contributing more. By the vitality of its traditions it has been able to reattract so many of its past members to the colours that most regiments found themselves duplicated with a Reserve battalion within a month of the outbreak of war. As I have had the pleasure of remarking already, the many vicious critics of the Territorials must now be feeling that they have made asses of themselves.

* * *

* * * The County Associations, which were founded to

clothe and equip the Territorial Force in time of peace, have continued their functions with success. They have successfully performed a mass of work with which the W a r Office could never have coped. There are but two things against them. The first is that, by competing against the W a r Office as purchasers in the open market, they have often helped to run up the price. The second is that those who regard the purity of our administration as of paramount importance would be happier to see the list of their members free from the names of certain contractors who are at the same time in the enjoyment of contracts from the associations upon which they are sitting.

***

The National Reserve has been used for two pur- poses. Firstly, it has supplied large numbers of N.C.O’s. and men to “Kitchener’s Army. ” Secondly it has, by organising those ex-soldiers who are too old or too infirm for active service, supplied a force to undertake such duties as the guarding of railways, etc.,

which were formerly occupying troops fit for more active work. * * *

The Special Reserve has fulfilled its role in replacing casualties in the Expeditionary Force. There is nothing to show that it has fulfilled this duty better than the old Militia, which would have volunteered for active service with the same alacrity as the Territorials; but the liability to foreign service being part of the con- ditions of enlistment in the Special Reserve-in the Militia it was not so-the W a r Office was able to count with certainty upon it, whereas in the case of Militia a great deal would have depended upon the popularity of the war, the economic circumstances of the moment, and so forth. Such uncertainty adds enormously to the anxieties and difficulties of a staff on the eve of war. Whether the removal of this anxiety can be held to have compensated for the loss of tradition and moral involved by the abolition of the “Constitutional Force” it is hard to say. * * *

All these reforms were merely adaptations of older and already existing bodies to new conditions. More of a novelty has been the Officers Training Corps. There are, and always will be, hundreds of men who have not the time or the money to take a commission in the Regular or Auxiliary Forces, but who are quite willing to serve in such corps as the “Inns of Court” or the “Artists” with a view to grounding themselves in the duties of an officer. I t is no exaggeration to say that the officers who have come to the Regular and Terri- torial Armies from these Training Corps are the cream of those who have recently enlisted ; and it is worth while to consider whether in future commissions in a t any rate the Territorial Army should be restricted to those who have done some service in the O.T.C. When a man has passed a year or two there he has discovered, or had it discovered for him, whether he has any apti- tude for soldiering or not. At present this discovery is frequently made at the expense of a regiment.

Letters to a Trade Unionist--I. DEAR SIR,--It is so long since you and I had our last drink together as workmates that I am really somewhat doubtful as to the best manner in which to approach you. You will, of course, have noticed that already. I know you must have raised an enquiring eyebrow, or dropped an apprehensive eyelid, at the opening of this letter. Dear Sir is an expression to which neither you nor I had once ever expected to attain. When we were working for old Parrot-beak on those slum cottages he was throwing up in that dirty little Lancashire colliery town near Wigan, we were “Chummy” to each other; when we were on the barrow-run on that big waterworks job in the West Riding (you remember?) it was “Matey”; another time i t was simply Slen and Flannel, and so on. But times have changed so much since then-or we have changed. We are more formal and cautious. W e are no longer so reckless as we were. W e don’t throw our tools through the office window for fun these days, or threaten to chuck the boss in the lime-hole, or begin dreaming about a new track as soon as we’ve settled ourselves with good grub and got flushed with beer and full of beans after a spell of roughing it. W e don’t consider it necessary to call each other bloody tailors or sextons if we’ve so far for- gotten ourselves as to stick at one job for over a dozen weeks. The road, although it pulls most damnably when spring comes round, has lost much of its old appeal. No, we no longer do those old, mad and, alternately, delightful and cursed things ; and we dream quite other, though perhaps madder, if duller, dreams.

You have settIed down in Manchester, or Birming- ham, or some equally unsightly hell-hole. You are a member of a Trade Union and, I hear, you act as com- mittee-man in some society or other, a society formed, I gather, for the purpose of keeping boys and girls on

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the strict path of total abstinence and general rectitude, and which also cultivates lowly, and therefore perfectly legitimate, ambitions. (Excuse these smiles, for I quite understand.) For my part, I also am a Trade Union- ist, and have a few foolish interests which serve to waste many good hours in this babel of a city where I work as a casual labourer in the trade of column filling for newspaper proprietors, W e are each thus facing a queerer and a worse world than the one we fought together; and, naturally, we must feel a little strange with each other. In short, we are now respect- able people with domestic ties and responsibilities, and the privilege of putting an X to the name of some scamp or fool a t election time; consequently it is diffi- cult to attain to a natural familiarity. And so I ignore your old names of Flannel, and Fencer, and Clock, and that more favoured name which I must not write for fear of the police. Neither can I call you by your christened name because, so far as I remember, I never knew it, and for these reasons I have fallen back on the old form of Dear Sir.

The above is a rather long-winded sort of an open- ing to a letter, I know, but it has been very neces- sary to me because I am, in a way, groping for a grip of you. For we are almost in the position of fighters, and you’ve been under different training since last we had a twirl-and I’ve been under no training at all-so I want to get the hang and the set of you. I want to work my way carefully and cautiously into your methods of thought, your mode of defence, your favour- ite line of attack. Also, I want to get back the spirit of candour and bluntness that characterised our old world. That deliberate, calm, unswerving loyalty to certain ideals which made us call a liar a liar, and which made us tell a man he was talking rot if we be- lieved he was talking rot. Because, you see, I have certain ideas that I want you to consider. I have a desire to argue with you ; to “tell you off,” perhaps ; to state a certain case which you have probably never heard about, much less considered ; and I shall do it all the better if I can get you roused into your old lively temper. That means fight, of course. I know your pig-headedness too well to imagine that I can ram my views down your throat as we used to ram pills down the throats of sick horses. You will boggle and sniff and, probably, when you begin to feel the points, snarl; but, if once I can get you on the track, you will at last get a grip of the matter and do things, of that I am confident. And you will not get on the track until you have been kicked or hauled out of the rut into which you have slipped’, so I am now about to start on the job. Oh, yes, we shall have a glorious old up-and-down muzz before we’ve finished, but I hope to down-and-out you so completely that, when we come to shake hands at the end, you will be as enthusiastic about the business as ever you were about anything in your life.

Now, suppose we start with the war, not with the question of the rights or wrongs of the war-that we will leave outside the discussion-but with one or two phases of the war. Let us consider, for instance, your position in war time. Supposing that you have felt the blood in your head and been thrilled with the thought of drums and guns; supposing that the old love for the adventure path has flamed up in you, and you have been tempted to volunteer, what has held you back? I know well enough what has kept you away from the camps, pulled they never so hardly ; it was a knowledge that the nation could not be trusted to deal honestly by you. Is it not so? Didn’t you realise at once that the State, although it was quite ready to call upon you to be a patriot and defend “your” coun- try, was not ready to shoulder those responsibilities which you and I and thousands of other men have im- posed upon ourselves. Of course, you did. You may not have put your feelings into words, but they were definite enough. Why, some of us who fill the columns of the daily and weekly Press

of this country, those of us who still value our intellectual freedom and honour, have. scarcely done anything since the war started but hammer away at the Government, demanding that it shall raise the pay of soldiers and the amount of allowances for soldiers’ dependents. W e hammered so much, in- deed (and all the time felt humiliated and shamed that your apathy and weakness should make it necessary) that a Committe was appointed to consider the matter. Think of that ! Can you imagine how proud we are of our success? A Committee appointed to consider the needs of our mates who have gone to fight, and their wives and children. And the Committee is still laboriously considering, and is likely to continue for a long time yet. That is what ,Governments appoint Committees for so far as you are concerned, to con- sider you, and to quiet our clamour. And really, you are well worth it-apparently the Government thinks you are worth very little more.

That, however, is only one of many points. You are a worker, and therefore a potential fighter in time of strife, and it is quite natural that, accepting the State, as you do, you should be asked to defend the State. But have you noticed anything else? Have you pictured the grins on the faces of the manipulators of the State machinery when they have considered you who did not enlist and leave your wife and family to their mercy? You have not? Well, let me assure you that the grins were there. These manipulators first appealed to you as a free-born Briton. They got you singing about Britons who will never be slaves. They like you to cherish such illusions, so long as all the realities make for their power and comfort. I t was better to enlist as many men as possible by pretending that those men were going to fight for their freedom ; but when all the men, or nearly all the men, who could be got by that method had been raked in, then came the baring of fists and the snapping of State teeth. The officials a t the War Office knew, if you did not, that they had an instrument of compulsion which could not fail if rightly applied. They knew that you are abso- lutely in the power of another class, a class that has the ordering of your destinies almost as completely as the captain of a battleship has the ordering of the destinies of the company of the ship he commands. Nay, it is possible that your controllers may use you in viler ways than any naval officer could or would dream of using his men. The State servants, having cast their nets and got a good haul by merely singing to you sprats, turned to the mackerels and suggested that the mackerels should drive another shoal of sprats along. In other words, your employers were asked to line you up and hand you over. Proof? Of course I shall give the proof. Here it is in the form of an advertisement sent round to the newspapers a few days ago. It is headed “THE WAR : FOUR QUESTIONS TO EMPLOYERS,” and the questions are these :-

I . As an employer have you seen that every fit man under your control has been given every opportunity of enlisting?

2. Have you encouraged your men to enlist by offer- ing to keep their positions open?

3. Have you offered to help them in any other way if they will serve their country?

4. Have you any men still in your employ who ought to enlist?

Those questions are followed by a short paragraph, thus : “Our present prosperity is largely due to the men already in the field, but to maintain it and to end the War we must have more men. Your country will appreciate the help you give. More men are wanted to-day. What can you do?”

I think that is enough for the moment. Just ponder over that advertisement for a bit, preferably late at night as you drink your last gill and smoke your last pipe before going to bed, and next week we will have another conk. Yours,

ROWLAND KENNEY.

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War and Religion. By Dmitri. Merezhkovski.

(Author of ‘‘Christ and Anfichrist,” etc,)

IF one wakes at night and suddenly remembers, “War!” a terror rises in the soul. May one fight, how can war be justified, what sense is there in war-how- ever we may answer these questions the terror remains a terror.

Cannibalism long ago seemed natural. Men ate human flesh without considering whether they should eat i t ; afterwards they ceased, but also without consideration, simply because the taste of human flesh disgusted them. And to him who now would attempt to taste it, there would happen the same as to Don Juan’s companions who, dying of hunger after the shipwreck, killed a man and ate him. In Byron’s words, they “went raging mad.”

W a r till now has seemed natural to men, and they fight, without considering whether they should fight ; they will cease, also without consideration, when war disgusts them. And this is beginning already. For Leonardo da Vinci calls war “most brutal madness,” and Tolstoi has told the truth about war as no one else ever has. What is in a few great men is in many little men : a Russian soldier wounded an Austrian with the bayonet, afterwards took him on his shoulders and carried him a long time, tended him, and when he died went mad through pity and terror.

Our outcry against “German atrocities” is similar to a commotion among cannibals that human flesh was actually being eaten underdone ! No, better simply eat without commotion; the worse it is, the better-the sooner will war be disgusting. A man, while he remains a man, already cannot fight; he must become an animal. I t is said that in modern warfare the horses bite each other; the men infect the animals with their own brutality.

To shut the eyes and turn away the head and depart from this horror, such is the first movement of a man who understands what war is. But there is nowhere to go ; willy-nilly we all take part in the war, all, slayer and slain, eater and eaten, in this Thyestean feast. One man alone cannot escape from the war ; all are to blame and must do penance. To go apart, to be squeamish, to wash one’s hands of the war ; this is perhaps a greater crime than to take part in it with all the others.

St. Kasyan and St. Nicholas came to God in heaven. Where have you been, St. Kasyan, asked God.

I have been on earth ; I happened to pass a peasant whose load was sunk in the mud ; he asked me to help him to pull it out, but I did not wish to soil my heavenly garments.

Well, and you, St. Nicholas, where have you got so dirty ?

I was on the earth ; I went along the same road and helped the peasant to pull out his load.

Listen, Kasyan, then said God. Because you did not help the peasant, services will be held for you only once every three years, but for you, St. Nicholas, be- cause you helped the peasant to pull out his load, there will be services twice a year.

The load of humanity has sunk in mire and blood. W e must not pass by, retaining the cleanliness of our heavenly garments. Let us lift out the load and soil ourselves with mire and blood.

That there is also something good in war, everyone sees a t once. The world is so arranged that at the price of great evil great good is bought. Unintentionally the Devil serves God, but man must choose all the same between God and the Devil.

One of the “benefits” of war is realisation of the people. We always believed in the people ; now we do not merely believe, but we both see and know. What is surprising in war is not that the people are generous and

brave, but that in spite of all attempts to make them animals they remain human, the image and likeness of God. The ore was covered by the earth, obscured with the rust of centuries. But the sword struck it, and the cleft glows.

Cold, gold is the heart of the people ! More astonishing is the knowledge that until now

we contemptuously called the true Europe the “lower classes.” Surely this war is the end of the old order of ‘‘lower classes,” and the commencement of a new un- known. To be just, there is grandeur in this end. If the beginning of “lower class” Europe in the great revolution was splendid, so, too, its end in the great war is splendid.

“Gold, gold is the heart of the lower classes!” The end of the lower classes is the end of individual-

ism ; the false anti-religious affirmation of the person- ality. “Now it is one of two things : either to go to the war or to go to myself,” said to me one of the last Russian individualists.

That is, of course, self-deception; in yourself you will not depart from the war, because the war is not only outside us but also within us. I t is precisely now, in this war without names, without leaders, without heroes, without personalities, that more than ever can be felt the littleness of one and the greatness of all.

Here is the truth, but there is also falsehood or danger of falsehood. W a r is the eclipse of personality not only false, but real. From Byron to Ibsen, from Dostoievsky to Nietzsche, lower-class individualism did not answer the religious question of personality, but put it as it had never been put before. The answer to this question-that is what awaits Europe, not from the war, but from what will be, or can be, after the war.

And what awaits Russia? For Russia there can be two ways out. One is slavery-the victory of brutal nationalism and

militarism, which would be more awful than any defeat. Nearly all that is said and done now is in this direction ; nearly all the blood that flows is water for this mill. But if it be so, must one still desire victory? Is not the internal worse than the external enemy? But one can- not desire not to win. If victory cannot be won with- out an alliance with the internal enemy, the alliance must be made. At the same time we must realise the danger of what is being done.

The other way out is liberty. W e all hope that the people are going into the war although again uncon- sciously or half-consciously, for some truth, and that this truth will be the “freedom” of Russia. The Russian Intelligentsia is the consciousness of Russia. At this moment less than ever must it disown its own spirit.

W h o does not believe now in all he desires, sometimes with mad and criminal ease? Belief is cheap, but doubt is costly. Doubt-consciousness-an aerial recon- naissance over the enemy’s camp ! Let us not be afraid of doubt ; let us not fire upon our own aviators.

“War against war,” “war for peace,” these are empty words, worse than empty-false, while there re- joices nationalism in its animal form. W e see it in our enemies, let us see it in ourselves.

The end of war is the end of nationalism. War is the limit of violence. Christianity dues not deny violence but surmounts it, and it expires. The religious antimony of violence, the antimony of war-“one can- not but still must” fight; “one cannot but still must” kill-is not soluble in logic. The problem of the Russian consciousness, of the Russian Intelligentsia, is con- tained herein-how to transfer the question o f war from the rational to the religious plane, where this antimony dissolves into, “one cannot and therefore must not.”

If this war is a “war of all the world,” then its end is peace, the “peace of all the world.’’

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”

The world wished to give its own peace, without Christ, and this is what it gave. Let not this lesson go for nothing.

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The peace of all the world, final peace, is final liberty. T o explain to the people the liberating religious mean- ing, not of the war (war has no religious meaning) but of what can or will be after the war, is the task for the Russian intelligence.

Till the thunder rumbles, the peasant does not cross himself ! The thunder of war has rumbled and the people have crossed themselves. Let us also cross our- selves. The people will not hear us nor follow us until we do.

Religion-a “private affair. ” Whither this leads, this affirmation of a false religious personality, of re- ligious individualism, we see with our eyes in the awful fate of Germany. Let not this lesson also g o for nothing. No, religion is not a private but a communal affair, the most communal, the most public of all human affairs.

What Christianity is, what Christ is, how the be- ginning of the religious community is to be-until we answer this question, we cannot answer the question what will the war do for Russia?

The Case of Egypt. THE anomaly of the British position in Egypt had long troubled English politicians, who are inherently unable to perceive that an anomalous position may, after all, be a strong one. Egypt was a Turkish province which had won autonomy under a governor or satrap whose office had become hereditary. A satrap of Egypt, the Khedive Ismaîl went bankrupt. France and England, as his principal creditors, thereupon took charge of the finance of Egypt. Ismaîl proved. recalcitrant to this dual control. France and England made the Porte de- pose him and place his son Muhammad Tewfik on the throne. Two years later came the Arabist rebellion, when the Khedive Tewfik would have been turned out of Egypt but for the support of England, whose financial interests in Egypt were bound up with his dynasty. France, though her financial interests in Egypt were as great as ours, refused to go to war with the Egyptian nationalists. England reconquered Egypt for the Khedi- vial house, and remained in Egypt afterwards, with an army of occupation, ostensibly as mere adviser to the Egyptian Government, but in reality as sovereign ruler of the country. The purely temporary nature of the occupation has been often and with great solemnity de- clared by British statesmen. But no importance what- soever has been given to the declaration except by the most guileless of Egyptian nationalists; because, for one thing, it was quite indefinite, the time suggested for the evacuation of Egypt being that when the Egyp- tians should be ready for self-government in England’s estimation; and because, from the day when the first sand was moved for the Suez Canal, Disraeli, England’s greatest foreign statesman, had decided that England must thenceforward seek control of Egypt. It was per- fectly well known that England would remain in Egypt as long as she remained a Power ; and her keeping up the fiction that she was a mere adviser was regarded by onlookers as astute diplomacy. Still, though Egypt prospered and was well content, the anomalous regime had certainly its disadvantages for those entrusted with the task of ruling Egypt as it were by stealth. Particu- larly did it annoy the red-tape bureaucrat at home in England, who began to talk of “regularising our posi- tion in Egypt.” Now there were two ways of simplify- ing that regime : by throwing off the Turkish suzerainty or by suppressing the Khedivial throne. I, for one, have always advocated the latter expedient, if any change had absolutely to be made ; because the suzerainty was popular in Egypt, while the Khedivial throne was not, and because the Khedive Abbâs II and his entourage

were of no use to Egypt or to us. Also, the preservation of the suzerainty appeared essential to the prosecution of Disraeli’s policy of influencing the whole Muslim world through Turkey. There were obvious difficulties in the way of an understanding with the Sultan Abdul Hamid, but when the Young Turks came to power with love for all things British it was otherwise. But by then our unknown rulers had made over England’s Turkish interests to Russia, as we now perceive. Discarding the more noble policy of civilisation, England now aimed at mere possession of some parts of Turkey. The Turkish Empire, already divided up on paper, began to be divided up in fact. Soon after the outbreak of the Balkan W a r a friend of mine who is a member of Par- liament informed me that a group of members who concern themselves officiously with foreign affairs were saying that it was the moment to annex Egypt. I exclaimed that that would be dishonourable. My friend smiled down on me.

“The men I’m speaking of,’’ he said, “have never even heard of such a thing as honour ! I tell them that, if they annex Egypt, they will have a serious Nationalist movement instead of a ridiculous one.’’

But England was content to wait for her allotted share of Turkey until the Young Turks could be posed as her aggressors. She meant to take Egypt and much more eventually, and would not help the Turks a t all. The immense advantage which her hold on Egypt gave her for influencing Turkish counsels was forgone. She would not use it in the matter of the Capitulations, when she might easily have secured Turkish ‘neutrality and her treating Egypt, a neutral State, as a belligerent, while the Turks still doubted which side to embrace, was not, to say the least of it, conciliatory. At the same time, to pave the way for what was coming, the German dream of taking Egypt was forged by British statesmen into a definite Turkish project of invasion.

History will record the treatment which the Young Turks, with their English sympathies and. English notions, got from England. Instead of a rapproche- ment between Egypt and the Porte resulting from the revolution, as the East expected, the British Foreign Office ordained a close alliance with the Khedive ; which plunged the country back into corruption. Abbâs II had no love for England, but he hated the Young Turks. His scheme was to get rid of the Otto- man suzerainty by England’s help and after that, by the help of all the Arabs who would fall to England when the Turkish Empire was divided, to get rid of us and found an Arab Empire. He managed to indoctrin- ate our statesmen with his views without their know- ledge. The present scheme of government for Egypt is, in essentials, his. His sympathies were all with England at the outbreak of the war. The predicament which lost him the throne was none of his seeking. Indeed, his case is quite pathetic. A number of people --I myself among them-had been dinning into the Young Turks the danger to the Turkish Empire which was involved in the Khedive’s intrigues throughout the Arab provinces. A few weeks before the outbreak of the European war, H.H. was shot and very nearly killed by one of his own loving subjects, an Egyptian student, in Constantinople. In consequence of that attempt upon his life it happened that he was lying ill in Turkey when the war broke out. The Young Turks then, remembering the warning which they had received, kept him practically a prisoner. Worse still, the German embassy got hold of him, and wrested from him statements, even documents, which cut him off from every chance of England’s favour. Thus it. happened that the greatest schemer in the East, the founder in great measure of our present Oriental policy, was cheated of the fruit of all his labours, and con- demned to see a comparatively stupid, therefore unde- serving relative, proclaimed Sultan of Egypt. Why Sultan? one is tempted to inquire. The answer to that question makes another article.

MARMADUKE PICKTHALL.

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“The Menace of English Junkerdom. ”

IN the “sober talk about the war” with which Mr. Ger- nard §haw recently entertained the town he made a reference to ‘‘English Junkers,” but in what he had to say there was, curiously enough, no reference to the fact that at least some German Socialists do honestly be- lieve that English politics in their internal realities as apart from their external forms are, in fact, more Junker-ridden than the German ; and still less did Mr. Shaw give any comparison of English and German politics which, in the German opinion aforesaid, sup- ports this view. Such a comparison I heard made on the morrow of the declaration of war by an educated Prussian turned Socialist (nothing less!) who had spent some years at an English university. He made it in reply to the usual English contention that Germany stood for Nietzscheanism, the philosophy of Power, and that her defeat would involve the definite defeat of European reaction. As against this view my Socialist Prussian submitted a case which, in so far as it may help us to understand certain German feeling on this matter-and later on when the time comes to deal with it it will be necessary to understand it in some degree- may be worth a little consideration. He put i t in about these terms :-

“This fight of the democratic elements of Europe against the philosophy of power was, before the war, going on all over Europe. It was an uphill fight, but had been steadily gaining ground in Germany, and los- ing ground in England. In Germany Junkerdom was a threatened institution, in obvious danger; in England it was not threatened at all, but successfully masked be- hind the form of freedom. In England, Parliamentary government had become a brilliant sham, an entertain- ing historical masquerade of political processes and methods that once represented a means of checking power, but by an acute transformation have since come to mean a method of preserving power in the hands of a small clique. A landless peasantry, an endowed and established church, the open sale of the seats of its senate, the growth of the caucus, the stiffening of the methods of the party system, the secrecy of its funds, the shaving down of the privileges of the private member, the poli- tical inefficiency of Labour representation, the increase of power in the Executive, the creation of a Cabinet within the Cabinet acting in secret, all diplomatic work confined to one small social class, the growth of the power of a plutocratically owned press within the hands of two or three individuals, had practically placed the government of England, especially in such issues as war and peace, within the absolute control of ten or fifteen men. In the things that matter, the power of this little Junta-a form of control, a power frightfully difficult to fight because so elusive, much more difficult to grapple with than the definite and public position of the bureaucracy of Germany-was far in excess of that of the Junker party in Germany which for some years had been fighting a losing battle, retaining those rights which appealed most to its militarist sense of dignity : the right to push ladies off the pavement and cut open the heads of unarmed cripples. Rut it was so obviously threatened an institution (which English Junkerdom obviously was not), that for twenty years the Prussian had been steadily yielding very nearly all the points in the policy of the party that opposed him. The Social Democratic Party had got so much farther with its pro- gramme than had the corresponding party in Eng- land, that the latter’s most daring social experiments were but clumsy imitations of it. The swaggering, but not very rich nor powerful Junkerdom had become cordially detested by the proletariat of the whole of the Empire and in all the southern half of it by the bour- geoisie, the intellectuals and the aristocracy as well. Its position was definitely threatened and it could not much longer have resisted political developments that would

have clipped its more dangerous claws. It had shown neither the shrewdness nor the duplicity which enabled English Junkerdom so to transform all the machinery of democracy-Parliament, the universities, the endowed schools, the Church, the ‘free’ (but plutocratic) Press- as to make that machinery but a means of entrenching its position of real domination and control. This, in- deed, has been the story from the time that the English country gentleman of the eighteenth century-true type o f the Junker, though he more than any other ‘ made England what it is’-created somehow by his Parlia- mentary rhetoric the general impression that he was dying on the altar of popular liberties and giving his life for the defence of the nation’s freedom when, as a matter of mere fact, he was in reality busily engaged by his Enclosure Acts in robbing the English peasantry of their land and so of their real freedom. During this same period, or a little later, the Prussian Junker, with no democratic oratory at all, was engaged in turning serfs into peasant proprietors; so that to-day in Ger- many, in oppressed and autocratic Prussia even, most of the peasantry own their land ; while in Britain, after so many brilliant victories €or political freedom, the peasant has lost his land. In Germany the universities and higher education, the ministry of the Church are for all alike, rich and poor ; in England the ‘public’ schools, the universities-both established for the poor -have been annexed for the exclusive use of the rich; and even the ministry of the national church is the pre- serve of the Junker class and its protégés. In fact, the English State is the absolute possession of a class: all that it really accords to those outside the Junker pale is t o choose between two parties in that class. Beside such real efficiency in the maintenance of auto- cracy, as all this shows, I a m obliged to admit that the Prussian Junker is a simpleton, a country bumpkin. H e should come to England to learn his business. H e knows nothing of that astute manipulation of the lower orders which obtains the plaudits of the very men it robs. All that this country-bumpkin of Prussia can do is to flourish his sword and retain some semblance of authority by retaining the military type of organisation ; for this purpose he works the danger of Russian abso- lutism for al! it is worth with the democratic elements, and the danger of British politico-economic domination with the middle ,classes, and as the result has enabled the English Junker to use the German danger for a similar political end in England, i t comes about that the democracies of the two countries, instead of fighting to- gether the common enemy of which they are the victims, are in every sense playing the game of that common enemy by fighting one another.

“You don’t believe that the English upper, or upper- middle or middle-middle classes have devised a plot to deprive the population of its property and of any real control in the government and destinies of his country? Neither do I ; but it is what has happened. I don’t sup- pose there was a deliberate plot on the part of the mili- tarist either in England or in Germany to use the war as a means of strengthening one form of society as against a rival form. None of us knows perhaps the real nature of the motives he is obeying. We can no more trace all the operations of mind which produce a given result in conduct and opinion than we can follow with our eye the passage of a rifle bullet to its mark. Our instinct often tells us that our actions are in tune with our fundamental beliefs when we are quite unable to explain the harmony, just as the child or the un- lettered gypsy or negro can detect a false note or rhythm in a song without knowing that such things as time, or crotchets and quavers exist. Do you suppose the publi- can, who is almost certain to be a flamboyant jingo, or the shoemaker a burning Radical, could explain the connection between beer and patriotism or shoe-leather and republicanism? Yet there are quite definite reasons for that connection or it would not work out in 99 per cent. o f cases. You remember the ‘Punch’ butler who, in order properly to provide for his master’s clergymen

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guests, wanted to know their ecclesiastical colouring, because ‘the ’igh they drinks more wine, and the low they eats more victuals’ ? That butler showed a highly developed gift for generalisation_. I t was so correct that you could almost write the history of the Reforma- tion in its terms. But he could not have given you a single reason for it or explained it in any way.

“Neither can English Junkerdom explain the connec- tion between belief in armaments and disbelief in Par- liamentary government, or the connection between the protection of privilege at home and the prosecution of aggression abroad ; or what a liking for the House of Lords has got to do with a dislike of foreigners, or why a man who feels sympathy for the poor should feel an antipathy to jingoes. Yet the Junker, English and German alike, knows perfectly well that these ap- parently disconnected things are very intimately related, as he knows that war and international mistrust are the natural buttresses of reaction and privilege. Neither the English nor the Prussian militarist has concocted any plot against the democracy. Both have followed a very sound instinct which leads them to fight democracy by the same means. And whatever happens, whichever side wins, Junkerdom will come out on top.”

My Prussian was quite honest. One wonders whether there is anything in his case. “Pour copie conforme,” as the French journalists say. A PUBLICIST.

Gobineau and Chamberlain. By Dr. Oscar Levy.

THE ancient saying, “Habent sua fata libelli,” ought to be translated, “Books sometimes have the fate of being libelled,” This is, at least, what has happened to my Essay on Gobineau, which met with the fatality of being severely misunderstood by your literary critic, “R. H. C.” It is a fatality, no doubt, not to succeed in conveying your meaning to such a witty and intel- ligent man (for what will the others be like, if even he misunderstands?), a fatality, however, compensated for by the consideration that it is a blessing nowadays even to be misunderstood, for there is a worse alterna- tive in our age, which is to be ignored.

“R. H. C.” charges me with intellectual sympathy for the Germans, because I am an admirer of Gobineau, who was introduced into this country under my spon- sorship and who now turns out to be the man “who brought Germany the bee she has got in her bonnet.” Now there is certainly some truth in this, but, as one might say, a truth greatly exaggerated. It is quite true, for instance, that Gobineau had the habit of extolling the Germanic conqueror tribes of the Middle Ages at the expense of his decadent French contemporaries, much as our own Chestertons and Bellocs have the habit of contrasting the brilliant Church of the Middle Ages against the dull Nonconformity of to-day. Gobineau liked the gay, youthful, aristocratic, though somewhat barbarian, splendour of, say, the Merovingian Courts, which, by the way, such a gifted Englishman as George Gissing likewise preferred to the industrial and Social- istic gloominess of latter-day civilisation. This is all that Gobineau did, but this slight and perfectly justi- fied predilection was sufficient to cause one of the greatest calamities in literary history. Gobineau fell into the hands of the German professors, into the hands of those mandarins of culture, who have to provide

patriotism” for the budding youth of Germany. The ideas of race and eugenics were then just started in Europe, and the professors were looking out for some- one who stood for the Teutonic variety of the European rabble. They hit upon Gobineau. They translated his books. They wrote books on his books. They skil- fully exploited his ‘‘Germanic” tendencies and applied them with more enthusiasm than justice from the mediæval German to the citizen of the modern Empire. Gobineau, that racy, witty, sprightly nobleman, was thus commandeered by the German patriots, not one of whom had the decency or intelligence to blush

“

over the theft. “Patriots don’t steal,’? as Robespierre once said to Fouché, “for everything belongs to them.”

I need hardly say, and--pace “R. H. C.”--I have made it quite clear in my Introduction, that Gobineau had nothing to do with these academic, and therefore unconscious, thieves and swindlers. “ I t is a terrible thing,” says Goethe, “if a great man falls into the hands of little disciples,’’ and if these disciples happen to be learned professors the calamity borders upon tragedy €or “un sot savant est plus sot qu’un autre.” Nothing stands in the way of these intellectual aviators who, sailing in their metaphysical flying-machines, soar high above the sordid reality of the plainest facts. No protest from below penetrates into their aerial heights, and no denial of Gobineau could protect him from the love of the Germans. Gobineau, who liked the Ger- mans of the Middle Ages, the Franks, the Langobards, the Merovingians, disliked modern Germany, the out- come of that (to him, the pagan) detestable Protestant Revolution ; he despised German metaphysics and Ger- man materialism, which are likewise children of the Reformation, and he loathed German democracy and German Socialism, which are no less the ugly offspring of “evangelical” freedom. He protested against this in all his books, but without success. A woman bent upon love will love even a stockbroker, and a Teuton bent upon “patriotism” will embrace even a Gobineau.

“R. H. C.’’ is therefore mistaken in calling Gobineau “the intellectual advance guard of Prussianism,” for a man must never be judged by his disciples. Christ’s teaching was probably quite different from that of St. Paul, and between Gobineau and the modern German there yawns a still greater abyss. This abyss, however, has been adroitly bridged over by a very gifted writer, an Englishman living in Germany, a scholar and artist, who has made Gobineau palatable to the modern German Imperialist. The scholar’s name is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and his art consists in the art of compromise. The professors, you see, are, on the whole, clumsy and honest fellows and not quite versed in that valuable art which nowadays is necessary for success in literature as elsewhere. Mr. Chamberlain possesses it in a high degree, and thus he wrote a book, “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” which compromises between Gobineau and modern Germany and likewise bridges over another gulf that seems almost unbridgeable-that of Chris- tianity and Aristocracy (Race). Over this bridge (a very bridge of sighs for anyone with an intellectual conscience) has passed the whole of Germany-princes, professors, priests, and populace-into the happy hunting-ground of dreamland and mysticism. Once landed there, they immediately felt relieved, for they had satisfied their conscience, which eternally re- proaches them with their materialism ; they had dead- ened its pricks by copious draughts out of a good old English whisky bottle.

I t was the great success of Chamberlain’s book which, besides personal conversations with my country- men, enabled me to diagnose the soul of modern Ger- many, which permitted me to lift the veil from the future, which encouraged me, as “R. H. C.” kindly expresses it, “to predict war as the only means of settling the difference, not of opinion, but of feeling, between Germany and the rest of the world.” It was Chamberlain, not Gobineau, not even Gobineau mis-. understood, who put “the bee into the German bonnet” and which put me into such a rage about my com- patriots and their ready acceptance of nonsense that I jumped into prophecy and began to tell the world what might be expected from and for the modern Teuton.

“Chamberlain’s Foundations,” I wrote in my introduc- tion to Gobineau’s “Renaissance,” pp. 47-49, had a wonderful success. All the leaders of thought, from the German Emperor down to the humblest schoolmaster, were overflowing with delight. The German Emperor had a copy of the book sent to every school, and all the school- masters of the Fatherland were busy-with the additional help of the cane-in impressing upon the minds and bodies of the German youths their heroic descent. What

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they had long suspected, but did not dare to think, was now proved beyond all doubt; they were a noble, a pure race. Just as Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme was astonished and delighted when he was told by someone that he spoke “prose,” the bourgeois allemand was per- haps less astonished but even more charmed that he was himself “poetry” and “culture,” that his very blood was heroic and holy, that he was a member of a race, as a matter of fact, of the noblest race on earth. And out of this race, so Chamberlain had assured him i n his book, there would “blossom out a future and harmonious cul- ture such as the world had never seen before, a culture incomparably more beautiful than any of which history has to tell, a culture in which men would really be better and happier than they are at present!” God was in His Heaven, all was right with the world, the triumph of the Teuton assured for ever. Standing upright in his trium- phal car, with flashing eyes and quivering nostrils, this grandson of Arminius, captain no more of barbarian hordes but of industry and “culture,” was driven up the Capitoline Hill to receive an enormous, well-deserved laurel wreath for his square, capacious, cultured head. Only one little important figure was missing in this noisy procession. In order to check the hubris of the victorious conqueror, in order to restrain that pride which invari- ably comes before the fall, the Romans never forgot to employ a slave, who was seen standing next to the hero upon the quadriga and heard to whisper into his ear from time to time the warning, “Remember that thou, too, art mortal.” This slave was wanting; but, instead of the slave, a herd of slavish and time-serving authors and critics assured the pure-blooded captain on the triumphal car that Chamberlain’s book was the last word on the subject, and that in this gifted Englishman the Teuton Achilles had at last found a heaven-inspired Homer who could do justice to his character and noble achievements in past, present and future.

I have quoted at length in order to prove to “R. H. C.” that to be on the side of Gobineau does not necessarily mean to be on the side of Chamberlain and the modern Germans. For once---l am glad to say--I have the pleasure of swimming with the stream and of sharing the prevailing opinion of the hour; but even here this rare pleasure is disturbed for me by the fact that my objections against Germany have other causes than those of the great British public. Even here I have to plough my lonely furrow, for I am a member of that extinct political species, of which only a few petrified specimens have survived-the species “Tory” -and I can only loathe as such where a Modernist venerates, and I can only venerate where a Modernist loathes. Modern Europe objects to the militarism of Germany, which is the lesser evil of this country, which even is a necessary evil nowadays and which at least cultivates virtues of the second order : obedience, effici- ency, and self-sacrifice ; while I , as a Tory, object to Germany’s democracy and her democratic materialism and romanticism, which cultivate no virtues whatever and only lead to uncleanliness in thought and i n action. It is this uncleanliness, this mysticism of German thought, that has plunged Europe into war ; but, even if it did, and even if no good European could wish for the victory of the mystic over Europe, German militar- ism has succeeded in performing a great deed. I t silenced all the women, who during this war gladly renounced their claims to equality ; it disturbed all the “Idealists,” who before this time were woefully at ease in Zion ; it woke up that most comfort-loving British nation, which is so difficult to rouse ; it has shaken all the other nations of Europe out of their humanitarian and socialistic, Christian and “progressive” dreams, dreams which can only lead to the degeneracy of the human species.

The ball is set rolling, and, though it may stop for a time, it will go on rolling for generations. It is idle to think that this war will end war: it will, on the contrary, only start a new Napoleonic Era of Wars. The gamble for the mastership of Europe has begun and it will not end until that mastership has been reached and Europe has become one and united.

I would consequently advise our children and grand- children to be born with the thickest possible skins and skulls.

The Hyphenated States of America.

I. IT is customary to excuse the roughness and the incon- gruities of American life by insisting that the country is “new,” and to emphasise the compensatory factors of energy, resourcefulness and enterprise to be found in a “young” community. European critics usually succeed in being caught on the horns of the dilemma thus presented. They either damn everything as being crude, or-as is more usual of late-they prostrate themselves, with abject praise and apology, before the mechanical gods of Business. I t would help us more if we were allowed to glimpse some fundamental facts, instead of being regaled with complaints about ice- water, or cheap enthusiasms over sky-scrapers and colossal industries. The plea of youth, for example, loses much of its force, and takes on a new significance, when we find that there exists a permanent check upon development, which threatens to stunt the growth of the infant nation. The United States are filled with undigested chunks of nationality, and unless the pro- cess of assimilation can be accelerated, it is difficult to see how a true nation is to arise from this soil. This problem has, of course, been raised by a few sociolo- gists, but their remarks have received but little atten- tion from the majority of their countrymen. As for foreigners, they have naturally no means of knowing how serious the question is, for their informants are not concerned with anything more substantial than travellers’ gossip.

Normally, this absence of homogeneity does not obtrude itself upon the attention of a public solely con- cerned with the making of money. The colonies of Italians, Russians, Germans and other Europeans exist apart, serving the impressionistic journalist with copy, the profiteers with cheap labour, or the police with legitimate and illegitimate revenue. The average citizen is quite content to reflect upon the superiority and advantages of the Republic which shelters and employs the benighted emigrants from Europe. H e does not realise his indebtedness to our system of wagery, and considers the unlimited field for exploita- tion thus presented to him as the result of his own philanthropy. His officials at the various ports of entry sift the misery and retain for American con- sumption only what promises to be good wage-earning material. Uncle Sam, as he delights to call himself, continues to see his country as a haven of refuge for the oppressed and needy, thanks to that capacity for romantic self-deception which enables him to believe he has achieved democracy. Encouraged by his news- papers, historians and statesmen, who cling desperately to the generalisations of eighteenth century philosophy, he rejoices in the thought that all men are equal, and that his laws recognise this interesting fiction, that he has swept away all the pomps and servility of monarchi- cal countries, and conferred the benefits of liberty, equality and fraternity upon the dupes of European aristocracy and absolutism.

Such is the American citizen, as he views his newly arrived brothers in the bright light of the symbolical Statue of Liberty. He is undisturbed by the spectacle of continuous immigration and unmoved by its failure to put his theories into practice. Years of familiarity with the negro problem have somewhat dulled the edge of his sensitiveness to the clash of theory and fact. The shock experienced by the foreigner on seeing Italians classed with coloured men as an inferior race is not sensed by the Americans. They have had no difficulty in swallowing the gnat of negro segregation, and then the camel of more extensive race differentia- tion. Racial parvenus, like their social equivalents, are naturally most insistent upon distinctions. But the “good European” may be pardoned a natural move-

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ment o f indignation when he finds some fine, sensitive Italian face looking up at him from a gang of negroes digging up the street. One sees these faces often, beautiful traces of a great race and an old culture ; they are invariably bent over the lowest work, that is, work which has been stigmatised and degraded unnecessarily by the “democratic” critics of European servility. The tragedy and irony of the situation are heightened by a reference to the faces of those who dominate this hier- arch.;. The thin, hard mouths and cold, sharp features en the one hand, and the huge, bull-necked, double- chinned, overfed creatures on the other, who represent the majority of any crowd of men, are, to the European sense, insult added to injury. It is positively revolting that a country where the physical and physiognomic levels are so debased should despise as inferiors the inhabitants of Southern Europe. When the plutocracy travels, it professes to appreciate the beauties of Italy or Greece; at home it is blind.

The artificial degradation of manual labour is one of the most ingenious devices of an essentially anti-demo- cratic community. At the same time it is a g rea t i n - pediment to the process of national digestion. Once certain work is reduced in status no American will undertake it ; consequently it falls to the coloured people and the “Dagos.” The latter being ignorant of the trap, poor, and probably without education, take what- ever work they can get, only to find that they have thereby become, as i t were, a subject race. Nobody will pretend that the cleaning of boots is a particularly. elevating occupation, but the American horror of it is farcical. If one may judge by the preponderance of un- brushed boots, those democrats who are unable to afford twopence-halfpenny or fivepence-according a s the boots are black or brown-daily, for a “shine,” prefer to be slovenly to polishing their own boots. This is the most familiar instance of this typically American snobbishness where manual work is concerned. Italians, Slavs and Greeks who come to the United States should be warned that their race condemns them to such occupations as are deemed unworthy of free-born citizens. In Jamaica a white man may be the servant sf one who is coloured ; an ignorant white is expected to defer to a cultured black. In the States the most illiterate, uncouth American, whose appearance would debar him from the average club in England, is privi- leged to despise and insult any “nigger” or “Dago.”

The profiteers, of course, have no objection to raise against this method o f preserving unassimilated elements. The stigma attaching to manual labour, having kept the Americans out of certain employments, Consequently reduces the rate of wages paid to those who do the work despised. Low status and low wages are complementary. In the States, however, there is

a nuance not generally found elsewhere. Instead of low status resulting from low wages, low wages are the result of low status. In other words the predisposition against certain forms of work is the fruit, not of economic, but o f social ideas. This is obviously very poor ground upon which to build an industrial de- mocracy. The capitalists, needless to say, are not at all distressed at the prospect. How could they be, seeing that they are equally indifferent to the welfare of the nation which should be developing- with their help? In many cases they are aggravating precisely those conditions which militate against the end in question. Englishmen, by birth or descent: have been practically driven from the coal mines, and their successors are, of course, the so-called “inferior races.” Rockefeller found that Greeks would be a good investment in Colorado, and imported them accordingly. Knowing little English they were, less likely t o be contaminated by Socialist propaganda ; being “Dagos” they would be paid at the inferior rate suitable to their nationality. As is still evident in Colorado since the last massacre, the idea did not work out so well after all. Socialism has an occasional tendency to override the respectable

American conviction as to the inferiority of Southern Europeans.

Nevertheless, this system of importing unfortunates whose ignorance of English makes them an easy prey, flourishes, and even where its specific aim has been thwarted, its danger from the national point of view remains. The danger consists i n the segregation in- volved. W e know that wherever there is immigration foreign colonies exist, but in the States their existence is based upon something more than the mere desire of men to live with their compatriots. As a result of the stigmatisation of many common employments certain work has become the sole opening for certain races. It follows, then, that these people are of necessity .obliged to herd together. Cut off by industrial ostracisation from the general social life of the community, having little use for the language of the country, they inevit- ably form a society apart and feel in no way identified with the national existence of the country in which they reside. When, in addition, their gregariousness and isolation are intensified by their being drafted’ off to mining camps, the chances of their being assimilated are extremely remote. In the cities the Italian labourer or bootblack may eventually find an opportunity of being fused with the national life, but where he is thrown entirely upon the society of his fellows he will die an alien. Indeed, it is not uncommon for immi- grants to spend their lives in the States without learning to speak the language of the country.

I t is hardly necessary to state that there is no desire to suggest that Italians have never been allowed to occupy positions of trust or importance in the ‘United States. They have certainly risen frequently above the “Dago” lev-el, hut the fact remains that the races so designated are heavily handicapped. The essential point is that there is a constant stream of human material flowing into the States which does not mix freely or rapidly enough with the current of national existence. In time it might be absorbed, but the absorption is so slow that coagulation is inevitable. The stagnant waters breed the scum of crime and dis- content which are already a menace to stability. More- over, even when these unassimilated elements appear to have mingled with the stream, it is soon found that they are only being carried along on the surface of the waters : they are not absorbed. This becomes evident whenever the waters are disturbed by some great crisis. Then the heterogeneous bodies are swirled about until they coalesce with their own elements massed in the stagnant places. Thus, in the present war this un- digested material within the politic body has made itself felt in a manner which not even the most com- placent citizen can ignore. The theory of an American nation has been badly shaken, for it is evident that the United States is mainly a congeries of races whose real allegiance is to their respective nations in Europe. The main stock is pro-English, as one might expect from an ex-colony, while the remainder of the ‘population is grouped according to the diplomatic programme of the countries from which it is drawn.

President Wilson at once recognised the significance of these divergencies, and, with touching confidence, appealed to all true Americans to remain neutral. Those who would not do so he dubbed “hyphenated Americans,” and denounced most bitterly. Unfortun- ately, for the reasons previously outlined, it is difficult to ascertain what is precisely a simple American. Ger- man-Americans, Gaelic-Americans, Italian-Americans, yes, but what is an American, where is he to be found? As far as one can see this title is reserved to the pro- English majority, but President Wilson would like them to be discreet enough to restrain their sympathies. Some succeed, either from a wish to substantiate the President’s illusion, or because more money is t o be made by trading equally with the Allies and the Ger- mans. The majority fail because they are surrounded by the intensely chauvinistic offshoots of the various parent stem in Europe. E. A. B.

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Impressions of Paris. THE other night I saw my friend, who is dead. I cannot account for it. I was not thinking about her. Sud- denly, we were gazing at each other. She, lovely, lovely as I ever saw her, was in a beautiful place, where she seemed neither to sit nor stand nor walk, though she moved much-but just t o be. I said, “You were an old thing to go and die.”

“I’m not dead,” she replied. A strip of blue space separated us, only a step, but

“What do you do there?” I asked her. “Much the same sort of thing. Only more what I

“Shall you come back?” “No; we can’t come back.” “Will you come and see me a g a i n ? ” “Yes. Very often. You ! I a m amused to see you

doing lots of the things you used to scold me for. And I used to listen!”

W e laughed very much, and she went away, and I went to sleep, thinking of all the questions I had not asked ! Until now, I have had a horror of returning to England, afraid to realise that she had gone. I shall never feel like that any more.

neither of us dreamed of crossing it.

wanted. What we do here is real.”

The war has come home to Montparnasse this week. Mesa has been killed. You don’t know him. He was the large, bearded Spaniard, a writer, who used to go to the balls as Bacchus and a Sultan, and anything that such a presence could carry off like nobody else. H e engaged in a French regiment, and now he is dead. The last time I saw him was at the Lilas, where he came into our company, and then se fiché’d un peu de moi because I stuttered over the French. That wasn’t his fault, but his ignorance. I sympathised with him and smiled adieu. He was quite a darling, and the balls will be simply rubbish without him.

But look at the Boulevard ! There is the war all the time. Military drivers on half the vehicles ; soldiers coming in and going back ; ambulances and strings of fresh cavalry horses. A troop of “blues” not yet bap- tised under fire swings along, and, on the opposite pavement, a troop not even qualified for the young blue, keeps, not time, but just an envious little in the rear with eyes over the road. I saw a thing very pathetic- two cripples helping each other along. I ran after them through the dusk, and we had a word. Two fractures in the leg one, and the other-you couldn’t say what he had; he laughed it off.

Soldiers wounded go through Paris with scarcely a penny to their name. I t is disgraceful, isn’t it? I saw all that once before during a war. It never does to be shy of offering something. Where does one suppose they are going to acquire wealth--on the field? From the Government ? From their families? Their families are all worse of€ than before the war began. A rumour is going round that a regiment composed of eight hundred German women is in the trenches. Come, then, Barbarism, I felt inclined to say, like an own babe we’ll take thee to our breast. But then I remembered how my grandmother told m e that the black “savages” in passing to and fro her house to battle left her un- molested. They wouldn’t condescend to kill a woman ; and their women never fought. The action of the Ger- man women cannot be pure barbarism. It is certainly just German æsthetic decadence. The whole world for long before the war was corrupted by this German de- cadence. Here we have the last mad spasm of energy. But whatever are our men going to do? W e women cannot advise them deliberately t o kill these creatures; the suggestion would re-act €or centuries on the whole lot of us. All the same they will have to be killed if they come under fire. Let us pray for a merciful mitrail- leuse to blot them out in five minutes. The psychology of a female who deliberately sets out to shed blood is something too humanly inimical for investigation. The

world has been but very rarely troubled by this pheno- menon, which implies a shrinking of Nature from her task to support the soul of mankind. When Woman, the natural conserver, kills, her action symbolises the annihilation of the race. W e do not know, certainly, whether the race is about to be destroyed, but we do not feel that it is. The appearance of this regiment of German women is no more than the shadow of a destiny overhanging Germany. The Servians, also,. permitted a corps of slaying women, and in the fate of that nation will not likely be found much to envy; notwithstanding that the position was believed by the women themselves to be one of defence and not of attack. The quality of reserve, which is intellectual, will not distinguish the Servians. But rarely from this nation a man of ideas !

No, n o ; a woman must never destroy anything. In a moment of rage she will destroy things, but such acts done in a rage have very little psychic consequence whatever the physical effects may be. From this imaginative reasoning, I regard the Pankhursts, who attempted to turn women towards deliberate destroy- ing, as sinister characters.

By way of being very joyful on Christmas Eve, I gave a mad party. It wasn’t meant to be mad, but it went; because half the people turned out to hate the other half and so everybody had to strive like anything to make things go. We strove and strove. W e played and sang to each other, we improvised, we dashed out and fetched guitars, we danced, we offered each other all the cakes and drinks we had had our own eyes on. And at last things went. And then Sylvia came in with apologies and that perennially green hat and we lowered the lights while she recited De Musset’s “Nuit de mai.”

And I wept nearly. Rut what a poem ! They don’t write like that now. They don’t believe in the Muses, these modern poets. And that is to say that they are not poets a t all, and know nothing of eternal and uni- versal beauty.

Think’st thou that I am like the autumn wind That breathed up the tears on a tomb, Making no more of woe than of the dew?

To hear the muse speak like this, one must have been lost upon the mountains, or have lived in lyre-builded Thebes.

This morning is adorable with a soit, hopeful rain falling. I am so very happy in this draughty studio as to be able to see and adore the morning-. The space of sky in front is wide, and I look out across those red roofs that were tiled before Paris had gone under to Berlin. The journals here frequently fill up a patriotic corner with some horrible example of Berlin architec- ture. But, really, one smiles with the profoundest irony. For wherever Paris can lay its commercial hands on some low-built house or street of houses to pull them down and build sky-scrapers-Paris is doing just this! It has done it for years. At every eye-turn you see some colossal blank wall Prussianising over beautiful houses, shutting out all light and sun. There must he also thousands of flats in Paris the tenants of which never get a direct ray of light indoors-and those not cheap flats, but madly expensive. Mad, really, is no exaggerated word to employ of people who, un- obliged, submit to live so like underground creatures. Well, there are thousands of such Parisians. And their city for spirit-feeding air is the most gifted one in. all the world that I have ever been in, and I have been. in many. Mad! On the Boulevard Montparnasse, where the sun rises at one end and sets at the other, what sun gets through between rising and setting is due to the few low roofs that are left between the sky- scrapers. Here and there an obstinate Frenchman re- fuses to sell his home-house and garden to the builders, and there across his house pours through the glorious sunlight. All the rest is in day-long shadow.

Around my studio tower three of these monstrous, walls, and except for the war, where I now adore the sky there would be standing blocks of flats like those that are up, where people can all but shake hands across, the lower flats, of course, being in perpetual shade. But

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for a city that boasts a -prison like La Santé, the wickedest building probably in the whole world, an in- fernal fortress of a prison, fit for guarding Minotaurs, perhaps, but not human beings-for the people of this city to rebuke the Prussian architecture is an imper- tinence stark and insensate. Whoever designed La Santé might have designed hell, and this design was accepted by the people of Paris whose fathers razed the Bastille to the last stone ! Some day, perhaps, some poet will lead the Parisians against La Santé, but they will need to borrow the cannon of the “Huns” to make ingress to those devil-conjectured walls.

Certainly, it is not entirely bad that the French should be ridiculing these “magnificent specimens of the heavy German style.” What is entirely bad is that they will certainly complete the Germanisation of Paris. Well, I am glad to have seen it even still somewhat French. E would like to be an infant at the present day, so that my student time might be passed at the new Louvain- which God send they do not build in too much hurry. At least, the world may fairly reckon on finding no Berlin designs in the new Belgian town. They tell me that Florence has no sky-scrapers. I don’t believe it altogether ; but if it should turn out to be true, my ob- jections to taking an insulting passport from anyone will have to be reconsidered.

ALICE MORNING.

Affirmations. By Ezra Pound.

I. Arnold Dolmetsch.

“I HAVE seen the God Pan.” “Nonsense.” I have seen the God Pan and it was in this manner : I heard a bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself. Then I heard a different music, hollow and laughing. Then I looked up and saw two eyes like the eyes of a wood-creature peering at me over a brown tube of wood. Then someone said : Yes, once I was playing a fiddle in the forest and I walked into a wasp’s nest.

Comparing these things with what I can read of the earliest and best authenticated appearances of Pan, I can but conclude that they relate to similar occurrences. I t is true that I found myself later in a room covered with pictures of what we now call ancient instruments, and that when I picked up the brown tube of wood I found that it had ivory rings upon it. And no proper -reed has ivory rings on it, by nature. Also, they told me it was a ((recorder,” whatever that is.

However, our only measure of truth is our own per- ception of truth. The undeniable tradition of meta- morphoses teaches us that things do not remain always the same. They become other things by swift and un- analysable process. I t was only when men began to mistrust the myths and to tell nasty lies about the Gods for a moral purpose that these matters became hope- lessly confused. When some nasty Semite or Parsee or Syrian began to use myths for social propaganda, when the myth was degraded into an allegory or a fable, that was the beginning of the end. And the Gods no longer walked in men’s gardens. The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into (‘nonsense,” that is to say, when some very vivid and un-deniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiving that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he “turned into a tree,” he made a myth-a work of art that is-an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words.

That story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotion in others, until there arose a cult, a com- pany of people who could understand each other’s non- sense about the gods.

As I say, these things were afterwards incorporated for the condemnable “good of the State,” and what was once a species of truth became only lies and propaganda. And they told horrid tales to little boys in order to make them be good ; or to the ignorant populace in order to preserve the empire ; and religion came to an end and civic science began to be studied. Plato said that artists ought to be kept out of the ideal republic, and the artists swore by their gods that nothing would drag them into it. That is the history of “civilisation,” or philology or Kultur.

When any man is able, by a pattern of notes or by an arrangement of planes or colours, to throw us back into the age of truth, a certain few of us-no, I am wrong, everyone who has ever been cast back into. the age of truth for one instant-gives honour to the spell which has worked, to the witch-work or the art-work, or to whatever you like to call it. Therefore I say, and stick to it, I saw and heard the God Pan; sh.ortly afterwards I saw and heard Mr. Dolmetsch. Mr. Dolmetsch was talking volubly, and he said something very like what I have said and very different; of music, music when music commanded some 240 (or some such number of) players, and could only be performed in one or two capitals ! Pepys writes, that in the Fire of London, when the people were escaping by boat on the Thames, there was scarcely a boat in which you would not see them taking a pair of virginals as among their dearest possessions.

The older journalists tell me it is “cold mutton,” that Mr. Dolmetsch was heard of fifteen years ago. That is a tendency that I have before remarked in a civilisa- tion which rests upon journalism, and which has only .a sporadic care for the arts. Everyone in London over forty “has heard of” Mr. DoImetsch, his instruments, etc. The generation under thirty may have heard of him, but you cannot be sure of it. His topical interest is over. I have heard of Mr. Dolmetsch for fifteen years, because I am a crank and am interested in such matters. Mr. Dolmetsch has always been in France or America, of somewhere I wasn’t when he was. Also, I have seen broken-down spinets in swank drawing- rooms, I have heard harpsichords played in Parisian concerts, and they sounded like the scratching of multi- tudinous hens, and I did not wonder that pianos had superseded them. Also, I have known good musicians and have favoured divers sorts of music. And I have supposed that clavichords were things you might own if you were a millionaire ; and that virginals went with citherns and citoles in the poems of the late D. G. Rossetti.

So I had two sets of adventure. First, I perceived a sound which is undoubtedly derived from the Gods, and then I found myself in a reconstructed century-in a century of music, back before Mozart or Purcell, listen- ing to clear music, to tones clear as brown amber And this music came indifferently out of the harpsichord or the clavichord or out of virginals or out of odd-shaped viols, or whatever they may be. There were two small girls playing upon them with an exquisite precision: with a precision quite unlike anything I have ever heard from a London orchestra. Then someone said in a tone of authority : “It is nonsense to teach people scales. It is rubbish to make them play this (tum, tum, tum, tum tum). They must begin to play music. Three years playing scales, that is what they tell you. How can they ever be musicians?”

I t reduces itself to about this. Once people played music. It was gracious, exquisite music, and it was played on instruments which gave out the players’ exact mood and personality. “ I t is beautiful even if you play it wrong.” The clavichord has the beauty of three or four lutes played together. It has more than that, but no matter. You have your fingers always en

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rapport with the strings; it is not one dab and then either another dab or else nothing, as with the piano; the music is always lying on your own finger-tips. This music was not theatrical. You played it yourself as you read a book of precision. A few people played it together. It was not an interruption but a concentra- tion.

Now, on the other hand, I remember a healthy concert pianist complaining that you couldn’t “really give” a big piano concert unless you had the endurance of an ox; and that “women couldn’t, of course” ; and that gradually the person with long hands was being eliminated from the pianistic world, and that only people with little, short fa t fingers could come up to the techni- cal requirements. Whether this is so or not we have come to the pianola, which is very like professional playing. And one or two people are going in for sheer pianola. They have the right spirit. They cut their rolls for the pianola itself, and make it play as if with two dozen fingers when necessary. That is better art than making a pianola imitate the music of two hands of five fingers each. But still something is lacking.

Oriental music is under debate. W e say w e “can’t hear it.’’ Impressionism has reduced us to such a dough-like state of receptivity that we have ceased to like concentration. No, it has not; but it has set a fashion of passivity that has held since the romantic movement. The old music went with the old instru- ments. That was natural. It is proper to play piano music on pianos. But in the end you find that it is no use, and that nothing less than a full orchestra is of any use.

That is the whole flaw of impressionist or emotional” music as opposed to pattern music. I t

is like a drug; you must have more drug, and more noise each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self--is no use, its effect is con- stantly weaker and weaker. I do not mean that Bach is not emotional, but the early music starts with the mystery of pattern; if you like, with the vortex of pattern; with something which is, first of all, music, and which is capable of being, after that, many things. What I call emotional, or impressionist music, starts with being emotion or impression and then becomes only approximately music. It is, that is to say, something in the terms of something else. If it produces an effect, if from sounding as music it moves at all, it can only recede into the original emotion or impression. Pro- gramme music is merely a weaker, more flabby and de- scriptive sort of impressionist music, needing, perhaps, a guide and explanation.

Mr. Dolmetsch was, let us say, enamoured of ancient music. He found it misunderstood. He saw a beauty so great and so various that he stopped composing. He found that the beauty was untranslatable with modern instruments ; he has repaired and has entirely remade “ancient instruments.” The comfort is that he has done this not for a few rich faddists, as one had been led to suppose. He makes his virginals and clavi- chords for the price of a bad, of a very bad piano. You can have a virginal for £25 if you order it when he is making a dozen; and you can have a clavichord for a few pounds more, even if he isn’t making more than one.

Because my interest in these things is not topical, H do not look upon this article as advertisement writing. Mr. Dolmetsch was a topic some years ago, but you are not au courant, and you do not much care for music unless you know that a certain sort of very beautiful music is no longer impossible. It is not necessary to wait for a great legacy, or to inhabit a capital city in order to hear magical voices, in order to hear perfect music which does not depend upon your ability to approximate to the pianola or upon great physical strength. Of the clavichord, one can only say, very inexactly, that it is to the piano what the violin is to the bass viol.

“

As I believe that a certain movement in painting is capable of revitalising the instinct of design and creat- ing a real interest in the art of painting as opposed to a tolerance of inoffensively pretty similarities of quite pretty ladies and “The Tate,” the abysmal “Tate”

generally, so I believe that a return, an awakening to the possibilities, not necessarily of “Old” music, but of pattern music played upon ancient instruments, is, per- haps, able to make music again a part of life, not merely a part of theatricals. ‘The musician, the performing- musician as opposed to the composer, might again be an interesting person, an artist, not merely a sort of manual saltimbanque or a stage hypnotist. It is, per- haps, a question of whether you want music, or whether you want to see an obsessed personality trying to “dominate” an audience.

I have said little that can be called technical criticism. I have perhaps implied it. There is precision in the making of ancient instruments. Men still make pass- able violins ; I do not see why the art of beautiful-keyed instruments need be regarded as utterly lost. There has been precision in Mr. Dolmetsch’s study of ancient texts and notation; he has routed out many errors. He has even, with certain help, unravelled the precision of ancient dancing. He has found a complete notation which might not interest us were it not that this very dancing forces one to a greater precision with the old music. One finds, for instance, that certain tunes called dance tunes must be played double the time at which they are modernly taken.

One art interprets the other. It would almost touch upon theatricals, which I am trying to avoid, if I should say that one steps into a past era when one sees all the other Dolmetsches dancing quaint, ancient steps of Sixteenth Century dancing. One feels that the dance would g o on even if there were no audience. That is where real drama begins, and where we leave what I have called, with odium, “theatricals.” It is a dance, danced for the dance’s sake, to a display. I t is music that exists for the sake of being music, not for the sake of, as they say, producing an impression.

Of course there are other musicians working with this same ideal. I take Mr. Dolmetsch as perhaps a unique figure, as perhaps the one man who knows most definitely whither he is going, and why, and who has given most time to old music.

They tell me “everyone knows Dolmetsch who knows of old music, but not many people know of it.” Is that sheer nonsense, or what is the fragment of truth or rumour upon which it is based? W h y is it that the fine things always seem to go on in a corner? Is it a judgment on democracy? Is it that-what has once been the pleasure of the many, of the pre-Cromwellian many, has been permanently swept out of life? Musical England? A wild man comes into my room and talks of piles of turquoises in a boat, a sort of shop-house- boat east of Cashmere. His talk is full of the colour of the Orient. Then I find he is living over an old- clothes shop in Bow. “And there they seem to play all sorts of instruments.”

Is there a popular instinct for anything different from what my ex-landlord calls “the four-hour-touch?” Is it that the aristocracy, which ought to set the fashion, is too weakened and too unreal to perform the due functions of “the aristocracy’’ ? Is it that nature can, in fact, only produce a certain number of vortices? That the quattrocento shines out because the vortices of power coincided with the vortices of creative in- telligence? And that when these vortices do not coin- cide we have an age of “art in strange corners ” and great dullness among the quite rich? Is it that real democracy can only exist under feudal conditions, when no man fears to recognise creative skill in his neigh- bour; of are we, as one likes to suppose, on the brink of another really great awakening, when the creative or a r t vortices shall be strong enough, when the people who care will be well enough organised to set the fine fashion, to impose it, to make the great age?

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Readers and Writers. BY virtue of his name the critic should be, in the first place, a judge. Actually, of course, he ought, as often as not, to act as counsel for the prosecution or defence as well. I mention these obvious facts because our many self-styled critics have come to regard them as an amusing superstition, which exists only to be ignored. So regularly do they ignore it that, far from being even judges, they are now little more than glori- fied toastmasters. You will observe that the word “criticism” itself is passing out of their vocabularies. We are beginning to hear of “appreciations,” and occasionally, for all the world like so many paper- hangers or gasfitters, they label their verdicts “esti- mates.” Let me hasten to add that there is little difference between the two. Examine the document in either case and you will find it is an illuminated address presented to an industrious clerk on his retirement from business. * * *

To balance these “appreciations” we can do with a few more “depreciations” (which, by the way, does not mean detractions). M. Emile Faguet’s essay on Balzac is a classic exercise in this form, and I therefore wel- come its appearance in English, translated by Mr. Wilfrid Thorley (Messrs. Constable, 6s. net). “Balzac’s works,” says M. Faguet in an excellent chapter on “His Art and its Make-up,” “are like an edition anno- tated by a blundering, vulgar, and garrulous critic who has had the hardihood to insert his notes in the text, and the critic is in this case no other than Balzac him- self. ” Balzac comes off better in the chapter on “His Characters,” which, if anything, is even more interest- ing than the one before. But it is when writing on Balzac’s taste (“He is vulgar, for instance, whenever he tries to be witty, for he had no wit whatever”) and on Balzac’s style (“When he speaks on his own ac- count . . . i t is difficult to say how bad he is. He talks like a mischievous wag bent on aping the romantic. . . . Mis metaphors are bewildering. . . . He makes most enigmatic distinctions between the meanings of words. . . . The very meaning of words often escapes him, and makes him utter unheard-of things”) that M. Faguet passes the most severe sentences. I am in- clined to think that M. Faguet sometimes says rather more than he would have done if he were not so obviously having a few sly digs at M. Ferdinand Brunetière.

* * * M. Faguet argues further that Balzac erred as a

writer by failing to keep his romantic and realistic elements apart. The point is interesting. I remember reading an essay on Balzac by Dr. Max Nordau, in which Balzac was declared to be no realist a t all, but a romanticist pure and simple. Dr. Nordau urged that the manner of Balzac’s life precluded him from the experiences apparently necessary to a realist. W e may dismiss this theory with the same smile that served us as we laid “Degeneration” aside.

* * * But M. Faguet’s argument is worth closer considera-

tion, especially as he bases upon it his comparison of Balzac and Flaubert. He elaborates this in his volume on Flaubert, which is issued in English by the same publishers at the same price. Flaubert, he says, “filtered” Balzac. Flaubert also contained both romantic and realistic elements, but he was careful not to mingle the two currents. “Salammbo” and “The Temptation of St. Anthony” were the products of his romanticism, while his realism was reserved for such a work as “Madame Bovary.” It is clear, however, that M. Faguet intends this only as an approximation to the actual facts of the case, for in his study of Flau- bert he devotes a whole chapter to an investigation of the romantic traits in Flaubert’s realistic works, and vice versa.

M. Faguet has, I believe, been rebuked as a pedantic critic. His views are certainly academic, to say the least of it. He gives it quite plainly as his opinion that Flaubert, as artist and writer, was incomparably Balzac’s superior. There is no need to discuss this, beyond stating that it is essentially the judgment of a man of letters. And this is only another way of saying what M. Faguet himself says : “The influence of Flau- bert has been exclusively literary, for, indeed, the author was incapable of general ideas. . . .” Gut if his opinions betray the sympathies of a savant, he does not let them weigh down his manner of imparting them. H e is, especially in dealing with Balzac, lively and amusing. What a contrast to solemn Stefan Zweig on Verhaeren !

***

“ I t seems to me that the German’s special forte is original work in those fields where some other remark- able mind has already prepared the way. In other words, he possesses, in a superlative degree, the art of becoming original by imitation.” I could find no better text than this if I wished to preach about German cul- ture. The quotation, by the way, is from Lichtenberg, and is as true and as current now as the other observa- tions of that shrewd and criminally neglected thinker. The a r t of becoming original by imitation ! No phrase could sum u p more admirably the lack of initiative in German art. Give him models and the German imitates them with often excellent results. Thus, the history of modern German literature is largely a history of foreign influences. Ibsen i n drama; Zola, Flaubert, and the Scandinavians and Russians in the novel: Ver- laine, Whitman and Verhaeren in poetry-these are the main literary preceptors of modern Germany. You will see that the ground covered by these types is fairly wide, and it is therefore natural that the same should be true of their imitators. For my own part I acknow- ledge the variety of the recent German authors. They have not studied their models in vain. Yes, there is good literature in Germany, but how little good German. literature!

***

The very fact, however, that German authors have come under such various influences, implies something which is to their credit. They have read widely and assimilated their reading. And this implies yet a further fact, to which I have previously drawn attention in these notes : General European literature is far more accessible in Germany than-well, in England, €or in- stance. That is a German achievement which (and this again I have already pointed out) should at once be emulated. It is, in fact, one of the conditions €or the promised capture of German trade. There are in- dications that the thing is being done in a quiet and un- obtrusive manner. Such series as the “Home Uni- versity Library,” €or example, hear a striking re- semblance to the ”Sammlung Göschen” or Teubner’s similar collection. I t would be perhaps unpatriotic to insist too much on the likeness, but it is there for all that. The “Sammlung Göschen,” however, runs to more than 700 volumes (at less than a shilling each), and varies in its subjects from Hieroglyphics to Pharma- ceutical Chemistry, from the Integral Calculus to Roman Law. Again, Reclam’s famous “Universal bibliothek,” in spite of defects, remains an example of the manner in which the Germans reduce knowledge to a system. Reclam’s library has been successfully imitated by other nations who certainly could not be suspected of prejudice in favour o f German institutions. Thus the Poles have a good series based on Reclam, and the Czechs have an even better one. Some years ago, the late Professor Morley started CasseIl’s National Library, avowedly in imitation of the “Universal biblio- thek.” It has not developed as its founder had hoped. Publishers, with their usual perversity, would no doubt put the blame for this on the readers, but I am con- vinced that England contains enough intelligent readers (but only just enough) to support a cheap series of this sort. I have in mind small volumes (50-100 pages) from

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threepence to sixpence, the contents to be mainly trans- lations of hitherto inaccessible works or parts of works such as I mentioned last October. Shall we ever get them ? P. SELVER.

***

AMERICAN NOTES. LAST month I was unable to define the political attitude of “The New Republic.” In the interval I have satis- fied myself that it expresses more or less the point of view of the Progressive party. The resemblance be- tween “The New Republic” and “The New Statesman” has already been referred to; I need, therefore, only add that Progressivism is the American equivalent of Fabianism in order to complete the journalistic picture. But all values are relative, and in justice to Mr. Lipp- mann and his colleagues, I should state that the Pro- gressive is in the United States to-day what the Fabian was in England some ten or fifteen years ago.

***

I t seems to be Miss Rebecca West’s special function to supply current cant from London to N e w York. So far, her contributions to “The New Republic” have been remarkable instances of this business of carrying coals to Newcastle. In a recent number, she writes of Mr. Shaw’s “diverted genius,” the result of a visit to some Fabian shrine, where her hero lectured on the duty of endowing every citizen a t birth with a fixed in- come. The spectacle of Shaw concerning himself with economics outrages the literary soul of Miss West. She finds the gathering unworthy of the speaker, and laments the absorption of the dramatist by the Fabian Society. “Surely he would have written more of that poetic drama which is his real medium,” she asks, had he not succumbed to the wiles of the Webbs. The astonishment of Mr. Shaw on learning that he has written poetic drama will be surpassed only by the in- dignation of those who, like my friend “R. H. C.,” have preserved a sense of values sufficient to enable them to differentiate between Shavianism and literature.

* * * Miss West has so effectively demonstrated her mis-

understanding of Shaw that it is hardly worth while asking her what she thinks his work would be, without his economic basis-such as it is. Shaw minus Fabian- ism = o is, I think, the formula. It is more im- portant to note that, in attempting to praise, this critic merely succeeds in displaying her incapacity to under- stand the subject. For what else can we call this suggestion that literature and economics are incom- patible? If Miss West were not involved in the “Blast”-ed muddle of vorticism she might learn that one’s conception of society (economics) must be defined before one can produce a criticism of life (literature). Her confessed desire to eliminate ideas from literature explains much that we have suspected of Miss West and her friends. They are of the class which professes to see the eclipse of A. E., the poet, in George Russell the Co-operator. But Miss West has evidently never heard of A. E., as witness the following : “An Irishman of the English Pale, such as Mr. Shaw, is born without a nationality or a religion.” If this means anything, it implies that the Irish Protestant is neither English nor Irish. Away, ye atheistic sans-patrie, Standish O’Grady, Douglas Hyde, George Russell and W. B. Yeats !

***

I t is admitted outside Harmsworthian circles, that the war has not yet produced any English poetry. With the exception of A. E.’s “Gods of War ,” I have not seen any verse on the subject which approximates to litera- ture. Need I say that the United States have not succeeded where we have failed? The Chicago maga- zine “Poetry” offered a prize of $100 for the best peace poem “based on the present European situation” ; seven hundred and thirty-eight poems were received, but none of those printed is cheap at $100. Mow expensive some might have been at the price may be judged from Mr. Richard Aldington’s “War Yawp,” which begins :

America ! England’s cheeky kid brother, Who bloodily assaulted your august elder At Bunker Hill and similar places. . . .

Thirteen poems were published, and their quality is such as to make me wonder ( I ) What the other 725 were like; ( 2 ) How any human being could read them and remain sane; (3) By what standard the prize poem was selected from those published. The lady who secured the $100 for “The Metal Checks” has no claim to distinction beyond the fact that her poem is unlike the others, in that it is cast in dramatic form. The conception of Death as the Counter who receives from the Bearer-the World-the metal disks for the identification of soldiers slain in battle, is worked out in a manner obviously de- rived from Yeats’s “Countess Kathleen.” Something more than the banality of Miss Louise Driscoll’s thought, and expression is needed to save such a situation. As indicating the presence of the Masefield-Abercrombie microbe “The Camp Follower,” by Mr. MaxwelI Bodenheim is instructive. W a s ever death befouled by such images as : About us were soldier-hordes of scarlet women, stupidly., Smilingly giving up their bodies To a putrid-lipped, chuckling lover-Death ! Brothels and white slavery are added to give LIS an adequate idea of the poet’s mental furniture. * * *

I t is a relief to turn to Mr. Joseph Campbell’s con- tribution, “Whence Comes the Stranger.” “R. M. C.” has sharply criticised the Irish poets, both in these columns and elsewhere, but he will agree with me, I am sure, that they are at least free from the vulgarity and coarseness of mind of which the lines just quoted are typical. I prefer those imaginary “leprechauns,” the symbol of his wrath, to the turds, murderers and prostitutes of our popular poets. Like several of his contemporaries in Ireland, Mr. Campbell can dispense with the leprechauns, as on this occasion, where he ha5 written with a certain dignity and care which contras.: with the qualities of his competitors. * * *

Someone writes to “Poetry” protesting against the absurd criticism of “Challenge,” which recently appeared there. Mr. Untermeyer was accused of utter- ing “claptrap,” of being “conventional” (vide the un- conventional Mr. Bodenheim above mentioned !] and of using “worn and tawdry” phrases. The originality of the reviewer’s style is apparent ! As his champion point out, Mr. Untermeyer can afford to dispense with most of what passes for original in “Poetry.” The lines I have quoted from time to time are fair specimens of what is meant. My own theory is that Mr. Unter- meyer has committed the offence of being independent of the Image and the Vortex ; he has written for “The Masses,” for the ‘‘Poetry Journal”-the rival of “Poetry”-and, worst of all, for THE NEW AGE.

***

As a tribute a t once to the literary snobbishness of this country, and to the ignorant superficiality of what English reviewers imagine criticism, Mr. Richard Garnett’s article in the December “Atlantic Monthly” may be recommended. Mr. Garnett makes ‘‘Some Re- marks on American and English Fiction,” which re- veal him either as utterly contemptuous of his public or quite unequipped for his task. That his article should be accepted is proof of the subservience of the American editor when confronted with an English “name,” though even then, T doubt if Mr. Garnett is the per- sonage the “Atlantic” would have us believe. Most of the article is made up of quotations from the excessively commonplace views Mr. Garnett has expressed from time to time of the excessively unimportant American novelists whose work he has had to review. His thesis is the perfectly safe one, that American fiction is lacking in artistic quality and literary merit. But when he sets out to enumerate our wealth of superior novelists it is evident that he does not k n o w wherein the relative strength and weakness of English and American fiction consist. E. A. B.

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Memoirs : A Dialogue. (Translated from t h e German by P. SELVER)

By Rudolf Presber.

THE VENERABLE OLD MAN. THE Y O U N G MAN. T H E venerable old man is sitting in a room that is filled with memories and the smell of fennel-tea. On the walls there are numerous portraits of bearded and clean-shaven gentlemen, from whose expression it is evident that they desire recognition. For they are all famous. Amongst them are portraits of beautiful and less beautiful women, dressed in extremely remote fashions, which to-day cause the spectator t o feel un- well. Nearly all the ladies exhibit that-pensive smile which women affect when their portraits are being painted and they can think of nothing more to say to the artist at the fifteenth sitting. Their eyes have mostly received a touch of importance and conscious- ness of their worth. For they, too, are famous, the reason being that they, at some time or other, made one of the gentlemen around them happy or unhappy, or first happy, then unhappy-never vice versa. Though the pieces of furniture in the room do not match one another, it is obvious on the face of it that each one has a past. A future, in a somewhat less degree. Very curious things stand and lie on tables and brackets : a huge chunk of rock with an inscription in ink, “Lodi, March 3, 1878”; a piece of charred wood devoid of painting, carving, or any other decoration; it is labelled, “St. Privat? August IO, ’85”; an old pear- shaped mandoline with not a single string left, but dis- playing the inscription, “Spring Days in Provence, April, ’83”; a clumsy lump of earth precariously held together by silver wire arid bearing a tell-tale ticket, “From Virgil’s Grave, October 15, ’74” ; and many other such things. The venerable old man has his chair close to the fireplace. The room is still heated, although the finest spring weather prevails out of doors. The venerable old man, whose soul glows with love for the South, has a fire kept alight winter and summer, partly because he is cold, partly so t h a t he can abuse the northern summer. Over his very thin legs, around which a pair of check trousers flap to and fro, he has placed a quilt, patched together from a hundred shreds of coloured silk. And each shred bears a motto from his works, sewn on with gold lettering. This laborious piece of work has been performed by lady admirers. Before him, on a Swedish peasant’s chair, sits the young man. Gustav Wasa is supposed to have been sitting on this chair when he first saw Katharina Sten- bock. I t is possible, but it does not alter the fact that the chair is very hard and uncomfortable. The young man does not notice that, or not until later on. He is too taken up with the joy of being allowed to talk to the venerable old man, and with the desire not to miss anything that the venerable old man may have to say to him. The connection between the young man and the venerable old man arises, first of all, from the venera- tion of the former for the latter, and then the circum- stance that a great uncle of the young man-on his mother’s side-was once in the same class at school with the venerable old man for six months. Then one of them failed to get his remove ; which of the two can no longer be ascertained. The conversation between the venerable old man and the young man has wriggled its way beyond the first formalities and polite nothings. The worthy old man has already confused the young man’s great-uncle with a horse-dealer in Tilsit and a jerry-builder in Thuringia. Then the question of iden- tity has been settled, whereupon i t turns out that the venerable old man, with his phenomenal memory, can still recall that the young man’s great-uncle had lost his left molar and was very fond of hard-boiled eggs- qualities which his grand-nephew can neither corrobo- rate nor dispute, seeing that the great-uncle has lived for twenty years a t Black Hills, in South Dakota, and in his scanty correspondence has never touched on his

molar or hard-boiled eggs. Finally, with a beating heart, the young man has given a bold turn to the con- versation, and it continues to the following effect :-

The Young Man : I have read your memoirs that you lately published.

The Venerable Old Man spits attentively into the green spittoon near his chair.

The Young Man : I t is a splendid book ! Nowhere, I consider, can the truth about the world and mankind be fathomed so well a s in the memoirs of great men.

The Venerable Old Man : Have you also read the passage where I speak about my canary?

The Young Man : Oh, splendid, splendid ! And how, at the same time, you conjure the whole magni- ficence of the Canary Islands ! How the ditty of the winsome little songster in your solitude arouses your memories of the lofty craters of Teneriffe, the leafy avenues of the vineyards, the flowery splendour of eternal spring . . .

The Venerable Old Man : Y e s . After soberly settling accounts with my old bug-bear Lämmermann in the previous chapter, I needed something of that sort. By the way, you saw my little friend just now, while you were waiting in the sitting-room?

The Young Man : Y e s - t h a t is, I fancied . . . or perhaps I am mistaken. I fancied it was a bullfinch.

The Venerable Old Man : Quite right. A bullfinch. A female, by the way; the continual sing-song of the male disturbs me in my work and makes me nervous. A female bird is less troublesome and eats no more. You see, I made a canary of it-goodness me ! green or yellow is all alike, because I wanted to talk about the islands. . . .

The Young Man : I understand. You spent some t i m e a t T e n e r i f f e - -

The Venerable Old Man : Not exactly at Teneriffe. W e once had a short stay at Fuerteventura. Only a few hours. I saw little of it, as I was thoroughly sea- sick. Everything looked green to me then, for days a t a time ; not merely the islands, which actually are green. In the memoirs I let Teneriffe serve its turn. It’s all pretty much the same thing. And Teneriffe is more interesting to the public.

The Young Man : Yes, that is so. Hm. Certainly. Pardon me, I find this a little confusing now. Was it not on this journey that you met the famous Italian lyric poet, Sacranotte ?

The Venerable Old Man : Quite right; he was specu- lating heavily in olive oil at the time, and had some business to transact on the islands.

The Young Man : What glorious, unforgettable hours they must have been that you spent with him on the voyage through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the blue billows of the Mediterranean.

The Venerable Old Man : Well, you know, I had to d o a bit of retouching there. Readers want to see two men such as Sacranotte and myself in a strong light, don’t they? Strictly between ourselves, the fellow was unbearable. He had lost a lot of money through a bad olive harvest ; of course, that was hard luck, but seeing that he was a partner in a very flourishing cheese export business in Palermo . . .

The Young Man : Cheese? I thought it was flowers. In your memoirs it says-

The Venerable Old Man : Oh, yes ; I just altered that a little. Magnolias, orange blossoms, and all that-it sounds better in connection with a lyric poet than cacio di latte di capra.

The Young Man : “Cacio”--what is that? The Venerable Old Man : Cacio di latte di Capra---

goats’ cheese. Good heavens ! man cannot live by lyric poetry alone-not even in Palermo. I’m not blaming the man for his goats’ cheese. Rut, humanly speaking, he was an unbearable nuisance. And such a scanty concern for clean linen. You’ve got no idea hou7 long one collar would last him, not to speak of other things. And to make matters worse, he had long hair which kept on making his coat greasy. And never in my life have I seen a waistcoat with fewer buttons !

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The Young Man : That is all very unpleasant. But those delightful conversations at night, on the deck- chairs, when the sky, golden with stars, bulged above the silently gliding ship-how splendidly you have suc- ceeded in depicting it-that brilliant exchange of thought about the gods of the Greeks and the influence of the constellations on the soul of the creative artist- all that must have been ample compensation for such trivialities on the surface.

The Venerable Old Man : Oh yes, i t would have. You know, young man, when we review our lives we learn to look at things rather as they should have been than as they were. When our good friend Sacranotte died a few years back-he had overloaded his stomach with unripe fig-S--I took his books down again, and there really are some fine things in them. Well then, you see, I took quite a different view of our voyage together. I was no longer sea-sick the whole time, and he wore a clean collar, rid his mouth of the tooth- pick, which I’ll be bound he was using in his dying moments, stopped scratching his touzled head continu- ally, and began a conversation which bore some sort of resemblance to what he wrote at his best.

The Young Man : Of course, he sent you all his books ?

The Venerable Old Man : No, I had to buy them. There’s only one thing he ever sent me-a price-list of the goats’ cheese factory, of which he was a partner. After all, those are little human whims, which are no concern of the public. Why if, for example, I were to have told the truth about the domestic affairs of the great Max Joseph Grünhardt, whose mystic dramas are all the rage with his fanatical admirers-

The Young Man : Oh, isn’t it true, then, what you say about this flawlessly harmonious nature in the delightful chapter, “As guest in a German household” ?

The Old Man : Gracious ! yes, the woman was very fond of him, and all that. Too much so, perhaps. But she was so shockingly jealous. If he wrote a play with an amiable woman in it she would ask at once : Who is the model? For she was firmly convinced of one thing-it couldn’t be done without a model.

The Young Man : But you say expressly in your memoirs : In all the female characters which Max Joseph Grünhardt ever created, he always raised up a monument to the one who fashioned for him that unique and truly German domesticity, from which his genius, as from a stainless fountain, ever quaffed fresh power and joyfulness for labour.

The Venerable Old Man : Well, yes. You must con- sider that the lady is still living. She worried poor old Grünhardt into his grave long ago. W e must have some consideration for those who are still alive. Am I to come forward now and say : It was this woman’s fault that Grünhardt kept on repeating the same female character to imbecility? Shall I tell people that this stupid creature made the most horrible scenes, when the poor fellow wrote a verse in a little girl’s album or on her fan, if there happened to be anything about love, or even about youth, in i t? Am I to expose her and let the world know that when I told poor Grünhardt how the wife of a well-known author had run away with a painter, he said with a deep sigh : Y e s , it’s always the others who have the luck?

The Young Man: He meant- The Venerable Old Man : His colleague, not the

painter, you can believe me. The Young Man : How sad, how sad ! Well, his boy

must have made him very happy, at any rate. In your book he can be fairly seen romping through the rooms and filling the delightful little house, tucked away in the garden, with merriment and all sorts of pranks.

The Venerable Old Man : Hm, pranks-yes. I cer- tainly did put that in, for, after all, the child couldn’t help it; but there was a certain spitefulness in those pranks. He did for everything, pulled flowers out by the roots, carved the furniture about with his pocket- knife, cut holes in the screens, drove nails into the cushions. To be honest about it, he wasn’t quite all

there. He couldn’t look anybody straight in the face. That may have been because he squinted badly-

The Young Man : What ! he squinted too? But you spoke of a lovely child.

The Venerable Old Man : Don’t I tell you the mother is still alive? Of course, no good ever came of the fellow. He’s a joiner’s apprentice or something of that kind now, I believe.

The Young Man : When you talk like that it becomes difficult to realise that it was in that very house you met the tender Mechthildis, who passes through all your works like a fragrant dream with an expression of suffering in her pale and charming face, and who, as you so beautifully put it, “seemed already a denizen of a land above the ‘clouds from which she had only been dispatched to adorn a poet’s springtide with the flowers of another world,” and who then closed the magic depths of her eyes in Davos.

The Venerable Old Man : After what I have said- and that must, of course, remain between ourselves- it is obvious that I never met this young woman there. My word, poor old Grünhardt’s vigorous spouse would soon have been on our tracks. As a matter of fact, she mas a governess in my cousin’s house. A somewhat superior sort of nursemaid, with a good figure and only a slight impediment in her speech. It was on her account that I had a falling out with the family.

The Young Man : I thought it was because of politi- cal differences ?

The Venerable Old Man : Good heavens, yes. That was another sore point between us. My cousin was a town councillor who had to mind his P’s and Q’S, and I always thought him a desperate ass. That’s why I laid special stress on his depth of spirit in the Memoirs.

The Young Man : Yes, it is easy to infer that he was possessed of spirit.

The Venerable Old Man : Lots of spirit. In fact he wanted to give Mechthildis-that is, her real name was Julchen Milchmichel-the sack. That’s what caused all the row. We then simply cleared off together.

The Young Man : And you were with her in Davos? The Venerable Old Man : I in Davos? Never. Oh,

you mean because of that? No, no, she was never in Davos, either.

The Young Man : Well, where did she die then? The Venerable Old Man : Die ! Not a bit o f it. She’s

alive. She married a provision dealer at Koburg, and was a grandmother long ago. In my Memoirs I let her die. That’s an unimportant little bit of touching up. For, after all, she’s finished with, as far as I’m concerned. Whether a girl dies, or whether she marries a provision dealer at Koburg, you will admit that it’s merely a matter of degree.

The Young Man : But the poignant. poem that you wrote on her death, and that is reprinted in the memoirs ?

The Venerable Old Man : It was actually produced in those days when she married the provision dealer.

The Young Man : Can she ever have heard anything about it?

The Venerable Old Man : Certainly. In fact I had to correspond with her about it, because I could not precisely recollect whether the mole that I was fond of was on her right or left shoulder. I’m always very exact in such matters. All the pleasure I took in the poem would have been downright spoilt if there had been any possibility of a mistake about it. In fact, my young friend, I can tell you only this : Everybody who wishes to do anything big must train himself in two things- serious observation and truthfulness. Goethe said : “The first and last thing that is demanded of genius is love of truth.” He was right, as always. Start a diary, my young friend, and record every significant thing that cornes your way. And do not consider a too frivolous thing as insignificant. And when you arrive at the years in which the trials of vanity, of pleasure, and of arrogance are behind you, and your lonely heart gently illumined and still warmed a little by the evening

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sunshine of fame smilingly reviews all that you have experienced, then you will reflect that your life’s con- fession may be a star and a guiding rod perhaps to thousands who are still wandering in the struggle. Then you do as I have done, you write your memoirs. Write them with love for the thing that was, with re- spect for the thing that is, and above all, with truth- fulness !

The Young Man : My sincere thanks, revered master. I will preserve your teachings, and in fact every word that comes from you, in the shrine of my heart. And should I ever forget their kindly lesson, every female bullfinch and every piece of goats’ cheese would exhort me to remember how memoirs are written !

Letters From Russia. By C. E, Bechhöfer.

THERE is a river called the Fountain flowing through the heart of Petrograd, and my window overlooks the bridge formed by the Nevski Prospect. I see all the sights, by land and ice. Every morning people open up a barge just below, and catch fish in it. As it is usually ice-bound, I am reminded of the .miraculous draught. Over the bridge goes everything that the heart can desire; and the appearance this morning of hundreds o f sleighs has driven me at last to write my letter. Until to-day the clerk of the weather had been fiddling dis- mally on two strings-a degree below zero and a de- gree above zero. Slushy thaws and slippery frosts alternated. But at last the ice is set firm on the streets (I suppose he wore the other string out), and the little sleighs are dashing along as smooth as arm-chairs.

A company of military motor-cyclists has just passed by, off to the war, all wearing the waterproof wool- lined uniform that distinguishes Russian equipment. Think of our poor fellows, in their absorbent great- coats and those absurd hats that keep neither the sun from the eyes nor the cold from the ears ! They are not so barbaric in Russia.

There is half an established notion in England that a town in which snow lies continuously must be semi- barbaric. But unswept snow is the only barbarism to be seen here. Perhaps the Tartar element, of which we hear so much, may be obvious in the south; at Petro- grad it is quite hidden away. The people who pass here for barbarians are certain correspondents, the Poles and the Jews. Regarding the last, however, I never knew a town where their bad elements were less in evidence. As for their virtues, I have received till now the greatest hospitality from Jews, have heard the only brilliant common-sense from a Jew, and, but for the sad news that he is very ill, I should have met Ostro- gorsky, who is a Jew. Of Poles I have met but a few, but I fancy I saw a type in the Polish Café. A man entered in a fine showy overcoat, which he doffed with an air. His clothes underneath were almost in rags. H e took off an excellent pair of gloves and showed the filthiest-kept hands I have ever seen. You may imagine the contrast between his public and private self ; I spoke to a Russian of it, who said, “That man is all Poland!”

To be a stranger in a strange land-a little piece of curiosity entirely surrounded by expenses-is almost t o forget the war. In five years or less all the world will be as I now find myself, and will picture the war no more vividly than the night before last’s dream. Besides, thanks to the post, my usual English source of news is the “Daily Mail,” and one does not read the “Daily Mail” for true news, but only in despair of it. When I read the “Daily Mail” and the “Times” and observe their pitiful attempts to be taken as representative of the English people, I remember what I heard here recently.

A week or two ago, an Englishman, the “Daily Mail” correspondent in Petrograd, was entering the ballet when he met my friend, who remarked to him that “Don Quixote” was to be presented. “Founded on the

story by Alexander Dumas, I suppose,” said Lord Northcliffe’s representative. “You mean Cervantes,” said my friend, who is punctiliously veracious. “Pos- sibly,” replied the correspondent; “perhaps I am con- fusing it with something similar by Dumas!” That is culture, not kultur.

‘The other night I went to a swarry. Ali the world artistic was there, all at least that is left in Petrograd. England was represented by the president of the Three Arts Club, as I am told he was, who, being introduced as an English poet, recited, “I am running away from the battlefield. A sudden thought came into my head: last night. . . . You are my friend’s wife, so I am running away. Because, because, I LOVE YOU!” Being encored, he obliged with the story of a music-hall artist, “h Fallen Star.” Luckily, nobody understood a word. he said, so no harm was done. I asked him how he got along in Russia ; did he speak Russian? “No,” he replied, “but I speak French.” In his place, I should. say I spoke a little French.

These show the sort of impression of England all the world artistic of Petrograd is likely to get. But, on the whole, I do not think it much matters what all the world artistic thinks about anything. Witch-ridden as they are everywhere to-day, heartless and vain, such young artists are not the heart of their country. I have heard from afar that there is a Renaissance in Russia. That I have not met it in twenty days is not remarkable ; it would be almost useless for me to meet it before I can speak perfect Russian. I must, there- fore, confine myself for the present to the body and soul of Russia.

I have only one new question to ask about the war-- how will the Christians get on at Bethlehem? You see, the Turkish Government has always had to station two soldiers with fixed bayonets beside the Holy Manger in the little Bethlehem church, to keep the various Christian sects from murdering one another. Now that the soldiers are mobilised, what, I ask, will the Christians do? Ah ! you reply, and touch my trembling ears. God will fight for us against the heathen ! Providence, she will provide ! (By the way, I heard of an old lady who remarked that there was One Above who would se:: that even Providence did not g o too far!)

I cannot speak of Christianity without mentioning Merezhkowsky, with whom I had a long talk the other evening. He has the reputation of a mystic of depth unplumbable; nevertheless, he assured me at the end that I entirely understood his philosophy; and so I do understand it. To a student of Indian philosophies, nothing new comes out of Europe. Secure as an authorised expounder of Merezhkowsky’s mysticism, I can declare, more plainly than he has ever done, that his wish is to see established a new Christian Society, which, t o be effective, must be as complete as the Catholic Church, but without its darkness; as spirited as paganism, but without its brutality, and, above all, it must be Christian, of Christ. How may one know the true Christ, I asked? He answered, “By careful study of the testaments and traditions, by seeking out the Christ in oneself, and by prayer.” In a word, by adoration. To him not only is Christ historical, but His resurrection was an actual occurrence. I may as well point out that Merezhkowsky is a Bhakti. That is the name by which in India goes the sect that worships its god with love. I remember my young Brahmin friend on the Holy Hill-the one who cracked cocoanuts so well; he told me that his religious ideal was to stand, when his days on earth were over, with folded hands in the presence of Lord Krishna. And as sure as Krishna is Christ, the Bhaktis are Bacchantes. They adore their god ; all that is beautiful in the world they love as the gift of the god. Behold, if you please, the mystic- ism of Merezhkowski!

In his novel, “Julian the Apostate,” an old, and very, very wise philosopher, Iamblichus, says to Julian : “Believe me-Will, Action, Effort are only enfeebled and deflected contemplations of God-so long a s Rea-.

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son shines and illumines our souls, we remain im- prisoned in ourselves and see not God.” This teaching seems to Julian most wonderful, no less than the mag- num arcanum. The most extravagant Hindu Bhaktis, as a result, adore Krishna to such an extent of unreason that they dress as women, declare themselves Krishna’s concubines, and dance improperly in his temples. Merezhkowsky has not abandoned the proprieties, ex- cept to hang a crucifix in his study, which makes a tremendous effect on his visitors. I think I have fully .declared his philosophy-his unplumbable mysticism--- need I say that he has never read the Mahabharata or the Ramayana? I wager I could find a thousand mystic Merezhkowskies in a month in India ; but still he is a lively write;-. As for the petticoats, he assured me that the Theosophical Society in Russia was composed of

women, hysterical and eager for miracles” ! We discussed the spirit in which future social pro-

gress would be made. In England, said I , by the spirit of comradeship. “In Russia,” said Merezhkowsky, “by Christ. H e is to be our banner!” I did not like the image.

I saw much of the Guild spirit and no Christ at all in the very first encounter I had with the Russian people. I was waiting for my trunk at the station, and a porter waited also with my hand-lug-gage. Suddenly he looked at the clock and rushed outside ,in alarm. He carne back with another long-bearded porter. They looked each other in the eyes, smiled, embraced. With an exquisite gesture the first porter handed me over to the other as the communal victim, and hurried off.

But I must break off-for I see a certain young man coming over the bridge, my Russian teacher, no less than a general’s son. I have barely, time to mention an astounding discovery I have made. The letter “H” is a German spy ! W e all know how much a t home he is in the German language, never at a loss, never out of place, always quite in the swim ; and do we not know, from conversations with our own people, how H keeps sneaking out of his proper place and turning up in the most unexpected and disconcerted manner? In France he is always looking on and listening, unobserved. And then, in Greece, he disguises himself as a capital “e” ; on my honour he does ! I was young and inno- cent when I learned that, just as before the war the Harmsworthies never knew all about the German poultry-breeding and soup-serving spies. But now that I am old and a man and it is war time, I have found H out. He is masquerading in Russia as an “n” ! Worse than that he has brought a lot of confederates with him ; there is the letter CH, and the letter KH, and the letter ZH, and the Ietter SH, and, worst of all, there is the letter SHCH. This last, say the text-books, is as in “fresh cheese.” Will somebody please send me a microscope? The German author of the standard Russian grammar announces that the retention of a certain mute final letter costs Russia four million roubles yearly. ( I hope the Censor will pass this.) I rejoice to think that, when I know Russian properly, I shall be able to work out how much the country pays for the upkeep of German H and his relations. German, by the way, is forbidden to-day in Petrograd. There are notices in all the shops, and the women who pester you in the streets to buy little flags for the benefit of the Red Cross funds, have just one joke--“No German spoken and no German money taken.” Whether this i s the request or the order of the police, nobody is sure. W e discuss the point heatedly, in German. “Let u s talk a little German,” said a friend of mine, “nowadays it is so delightfully exotic.” A s for H, never again ! Never again ! W e won’t ‘ave it, now’ere and no’ow ! But my teacher knocks.

Just one local detail, which I had almost forgot t o .mention. Baedeker is, I know, an alien enemy, and I do not want to steal his trade. This, however, must be said; one dines at four in the afternoon-roast sucking- pig and sour cream is a favourite dish-and the demi- monde is out already to meet you.

“

Current Verse. Satires of Circumstance. By Thomas Hardy.

The old man mad about verses determinedly pub- lishes, and either knows not or cares not what anyone thinks. The gravity of his offence is that he probably compares his work with that of many of the young men and says to himself, “There, mine’s no worse than that!” Pray, Lord, not to outlive our vanity, saith the Preacher . . . but because he was wise he published nothing more after his best book.

YOU and I. By Harriet Munroe. (Macmillan. 5s. 6d.

The publisher’s note on the cover has appropriated all the convenient clichés. Miss Munroe has a sure judgment, real knowledge of literary values, gives, with grace, lyrical expression to her thoughts, has definite ideas, amazing variety in theme, movement and stir in her lines, a s well as these other qualities which have ever distinguished her writing.

The happy vagueness of the. conclusion to this poem perhaps leaves some little thing for the critic to say. ‘There is, we find, a quality of the advertisement writer in the first horror called “The Hotel.” Never before, perhaps, have these luring catalogues of our Turkish Room, French Room, English Room, telephone girls, our waiters in black swallow-tails and white aprons, passing here and there with trays of bottles and glasses.

The white-tiled, immaculate kitchen . . . spiced and flavoured dishes. concluded with God as supreme attraction; God inside of the souls of “the business men in trim and spotless suits, who walk in and out” and so on, very much ad nauseum.

(Macmillan. 4s. 6d. net.)

net.)

Ho-ho to the night-

Mer skirts are fringed with light. . . . The spangled night that would the noon outstare.

One seems to have seen it all before, but better done. Miss Munroe, however, like ourselves, meddles with Scripture.

They went down to the sea in ships, In ships they went down to the sea.

Now, which really were the better of these renderings? The first has tradition behind it-but what a rollick in the second ! The new mission for old salts appears to be “To find the perfect way.” If Miss Munroe could put away pretension and other qualities of vulgarity which distinguish her writings, she might be sooner perceived as having written a few good lines. The first of her “Love Songs” is altogether charming. The rest of the volume is not worth anyone’s time to read.

A Peck Q’ Maut. By P. B. Chalmers. (Maunsel.

A graceful little poem “An Old House” opens this volume, deliberately medley volume. Except for fatal facility, Mr. Chalmers might have been a poet.

Lord God of Battles. A War Anthology. (Cope

This will ever remain one of the mysteries of human psychology-that bad and utterly wickedly bad verse- writers so often elect, by way of accompaniment, to borrow the golden trumpet of some poet in certainty of drawing condemnation on their own tin whistle.

3s. 6d. net.)

and Fenwick. IS.)

O God of Battles ! steel my soldiers’ hearts; Possess them not with fear; take from them now The sense of reckoning, if the opposéd numbers Pluck their hearts from them. (Shakespeare.)

Thou careless, awake! Thou peacemaker, fight ! Stand, England, for honour, And God guard the Right !

(Robert Bridges.) It is simply a yelp.

Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war, Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb ; The Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands,

254

And casts them out upon the darkened earth! Prepare, Prepare ! (Blake.)

Who carries the gun A lad from over the Tweed. Then let him go, for well we know He comes of a soldier breed.

(Conan Doyle.) A music-hall song.

The glories of our blood and State Are shadows, not substantial things.

(Shirley.) There’s cannon out in Luxemburg

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, And guns in all Lorraine. (H. D. Smith.)

Arose from out the azure main. (Thomson.)

YOU ’boasted the Day, you toasted the Day, And now the Day has come.

(Henry Chappell.) The only modern specimens with poetical dignity are Mr. Kipling’s well-known hymn and the lines on “The Farm Hand” by Miss Althea Gyles.

Poems on Life. Selected by R. M. Leonard. (Oxford University Press. 7d. net.)

An admirable anthology in good print. Fighting Lines. By Harold Begbie. (Constable. IS.)

W e beg to acknowledge politely the receipt of this work.

For Belgium. By Wilfred Blair. (Blackwell, Oxford.

The verses to M. Maeterlinck rise above the rest of the volume, which, moreover, is of better tone than most of the verse elicited by the war.

Poetry. A Magazine of Verse. (Monroe, Chicago.

An issue devoted to verses on the war, including a prize-poem won by Miss Driscoll. I t is a facile piece of doggerel, a dialogue between Death and the World. The World brings Death a sack of the discs for the identification of soldiers :

Here is a sack, a gunny sack, A heavy sack I bring;

Here is toll of many a soul- But not the soul of a King.

IS.)

15 cents.)

Something might have been made of the fantasy, but the style actual is simply bad. Most of the contributors obviously determine to write better than they ever may ; Mr. Richard Aldington tries to write worse than he may. His “War Yawp” beginning “America ! Eng- land’s cheeky kid brother,” ends in something very like a poetical sigh. Why be pretentious?

The Convolvulus. By Allen Norton. (Claire Marie,

A comedy, mentioning everything modern, but con- cluding-“Dear me ! It’s five-fifteen, and they’re beat- ing their wives in London now.” This Yankee jest is a trifle worn. War Harvest. By Arthur Sabin. (Temple Sheen

Another blow struck for Old England. Mr. Sabin avenges our woes but concludes with Peace on Earth. The “barbarian horde” rhymes with sword and the Hun assonantly thunders.

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. By Amy Lowell.

Oh dear, dear, dear ! “In the first place I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created, beauty.’’ One who will teach, however, will do: it in a prose preface rather than simply or silently exist.

New York. $1.25.)

Press. 6d.)

(Macmillan. 5s. 6d.)

I walked as though some opiate Had stung and dulled my brain, a state Acute and slumbrous. It grew late.

Wonderful is the power of memory. “Dull opiate” is said, however, once and for all. We do not claim to have cut every page of this volume, but went quite far enough without finding a poem.

New Beginnings. By Douglas Cole. (Blackwell,.

The “Occasional Diary” includes several lyrics of the quality that a man, who-is not a great poet, may achieve once in his lifetime, but no more. Sentiment, and even the memory of sentiment, calls winged words together. Mr. Cole has found some of these words. He is less happy, not a t all happy, in the semi-didactic, Browning- esque verses which he addresses to his past. He seems to feel himself not quite a poet here and cautiously drops into honest doggerel just when the Icarian wings tempt him to take a rash flight.

The Country’s Call. Selected by G. B. and M. Sar-

This anthology is doubtless the cheapest in England. Needless to say the printing is good.

Children of Love. By Harold Munroe. (The Poetry

More of fantasy than sf fancy in the early verses; more of things that never were real than of things heard or remembered and idealised ; and nothing of creative imagination. The little tale of the children, Jesus and Cupid, adds nothing to our interest in either deity; there is a certain sincere melancholy in the rhythm, how- ever, which suggests that Mr. Munroe himself was in- terested. In inartistic contrast follow detailed descrip- tions of London life-all the disgust of an inveterate town-dweller grumbling forth into measure and rhyme of sorts. The verses on “Carrion’’ are over curious; no one ever stood over a soldier’s corpse and watched it in that note-book fashion. “Appointment” is simply a piece of mean vivisection. “Youth in Arms” is better. The nearest approach to poetry in the book is ‘“The Departure,” though the defiance of God is an almost hopeless theme. Mr. Munroe is so undeniably in love with poetry that it is a wonder how seldom he “finds” himself. Probably he is what we call a “nature-poet,” too far out of touch with Nature. All this eye for de- tail which he possesses ought perhaps to be occupied in the fields.

Oxford Poetry. (Blackwell, Oxford. IS.) Who, after reading this volume of clear, disciplined

verse, would believe that we have but just come out of one of the most fretful, confused, exotic, sadic periods of English literature? One does not know what to select for praise where almost all is good. Gone are the old bombast, anarchy and reek of things disastrous and invited. Come are modesty, judgment and sentiment. But one fume of the past arises when a lady poet loves someone so dreadfully that she shrieks God ! if she might press his life out in one burning, fierce caress ! This kind of thing is now gravely declared passe‘. Here is the new form :

Oxford. 2s. 6d.)

gant. (Macmillan. d . )

Bookshop. 6d. net.)

You shall not be of those sad folk That harsh winds drive from pole to pole, Cold and bare as the wandering smoke; For when you are dead, I will make you a cloak Of my love and my dreams to cover your soul.

That is by Mr. T. W. Earp, whose “Anthony Heywood’” is a fine ballad of a vagabond. But we are being drawn into particular criticism, and all we wish to do is to recommend readers to order the book at once. To criti- cise would involve quotation half as long as THE NEW AGE. Aetas and Iagen. By H. R. Barbor. (Cornish, Birm-

Mr. Barbor’s preface, short as i t is, is sufficient t o prejudice any critic. We do not want to know what a poet thinks of his own work or how he came to do it. A man must be amazingly developed or mature who makes a preface. “The artist should tell of real people faithfully.” Mr. Barbor prattles, and you might shut the book if you were not obliged t o read it.

The Dialogue is very well done, and may be actable; but of course the work is simply a dialogue and not a play, as it is called, at all. The idea is the eternal

ingham. IS.)

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struggle between youth and age. In the most naturally good manner Mr. Barbor makes a youth and an old man his characters. The speech is simple, vigorous and very often ‘poetical. The idea has been well moulded into its form. Too many compounds suggest a pitfall for Mr. Barbor if he does not take care; compounds almost always indicate a certain laziness of thought which hides under appearance of double-energy. I t is a spirited little piece of work. Whether by design or no, the lotus atmosphere, which comes for a while to everyone after the first exercise of youthful courage, is suggested in the wording of the final speech.

The Idealistic Reaction Against Science. *

A CONFLICT of Rationalism and Idealism was in the be- ginning, is now, and ever shall be. I t is not, however, Professor Aliotta’s purpose to cover the whole ground historically but to describe and criticise the special re- action of the latter part of the nineteenth century-a re- action from the special Intellectualism of ‘‘Modern Science.” This reaction against knowledge took two directions : that of the Pragmatists (including Nietzsche), who are all for action, and that of the In- tuitionists, who claim that Love and Beauty (Religion and Art) are fuller revelations of Reality (the innermost being of things, Life, Energy, God) than is attainable in any way by Intellection. Thus Ravaisson claims that

Beauty, and more especially beauty in its most divine and perfect form, contains the secret of the world” † ; and Baldwin, that in æsthetic contemplation the “con- sciousness has its completest and most direct and final apprehension of what reality is and means”‡; just as Hindu theory defines Rasa (aesthetic emotion) as analogous or identical with the emotion of Atman- intuition. In just the same way the mystics of all ages (to whom, however, Professor Aliotta makes no reference) proclaim that through Love alone (the identity of subject and object) is attained the immediate revelation of Reality : this is the gift of Eternal Life offered by the Saviours.

The æstheticians and mystics are on sure ground in claiming that Beauty and Love are modes of our con- sciousness fully competent to our final and full illumi- nation. But they have sometimes erred (just as the Rationalists err in claiming exclusive validity for knowledge) in claiming exclusive validity for the aesthetic or mystic experience with which they are alone familiar.

Professor Aliotta very effectively replies for Science against such over-depreciation by the Intuitionists. H e says that such depreciation could only be well founded if science be arbitrarily defined as the empirical analysis of the registrateable ; but that in fact science is much more than this. ’The concept is something more than a mere summary of perceptions ; it is not an abridged ex- perience, but an idealised experience, and its fruitfulness lies in its ideal character. Professor Aliotta has a mov- ing passage, which may be said t o prove from internal evidence that science has that spiritual meaning that he claims for her :-

The whole complex structure of the mechanical world is but a vast framework erected by the mind of man in order to raise experience to the unity of reason, and to understand among the few scattered and fragmentary in- dications afforded us by nature that Living Thought which finds expression there, as in our own innermost mind, Science, by emphasising the rational unity which gathers together the phenomena of ’the universe into one vast organ- ism, teaches us to understand them truly, since the word “understand” neither has nor can have any other mean-

* “The Idealistic Reaction Against Science.” By Pro- fessor Aliotta; translated by Agnes McCaskill. (Mac- millan. London, 1914. 12s. 6d.)

† “La Philosophie en France dans le 19 Siècle,” p. 322. ‡ “Thought and Things,” preface.

“

ing than to draw out the intelligible meaning of things, and to discover in the unconscious actions of natural beings those same principles which constitute the sub- stance of our reason. Scientific knowledge teaches us to hear the inmost soul of things vibrating in unison with our own souls, and it is just this which enables us to understand them and to absorb into our own Ego the revelation of their true being. Knowledge is not the pas- sive reflection of things, a sort of photograph of them, but the active elevation of the object to the life of the subject.

It is commonly said that the man of science studies Nature in order to wrest her secrets from her; it would, perhaps, be equally true to say that the silent voice of things, speaking to us through experience, asks of our mind the revelation of the end to which their unconscious activity tends. Obscure being would fain rise to the light of thought, and the soul of the man of science who listens to that voice is not the Ego of the solitary egoist who seeks his own intellectual pleasure, but rather the heroic soul which knows the virtue of sacrifice, and which, filled with yearning love for these lowly beings, strives to im- part to them a spark of the flame which burns so brightly within itself.

We would add that we believe that the ecstasy of the scientific discoverer (not he that “discovers” a new species or a new mountain, but who perceives intuitively after long communion with nature, whether i n the laboratory or abroad, some general relation, some unity of purpose or of character) is co-equal and identical with that of the Lover and the Artist, in moments of identity or of aesthetic contemplation.

Professor Aliotta, however, develops his theory as a definite attack upon idealism, and a defence of theism. “There is no such thing,” he says, “as an unknowable reality.” But here, we think, he is in fact speaking only of the Saguna Brahman, who is indeed knowable conceptually. His arguments against the existence of a Nirguna Brahman are of little weight. He adduces two considerations against idealism. If the universe is a purely subjective construction, if plurality is an illusion, then it should be possible practically to eliminate the duality of subject and object; in other words, that which we have created we ought still to be able to mould at will ; yet (as Aliotta points out, and everyone knows from personal experience) the world is not mere “plastic matter which will yield to our every whim” : “the object is not an amorphous flux of sensations which can be segmented and ordered as we please, but is the centre of a system of reactions which . . . may sometimes play us false and despatch us into the other world.” In other words, we do not always have our own way. This is very plausible ; but the argument for plurality falls to the ground if we begin to consider what is meant by “whim” and “way.” For if we assume Idealism, and regard the seeming plurality of the universe as a contraction and identification into variety (the motif of which we need not discuss), then i t is only too obvious that the separate creature wills of the myriad monads thus created cannot satisfy their every whim, for they are but fragments of the greater Will (Energy, Force, God), by which the universe is created and sustained. I t does not follow that this entity has not the power to recreate and mould at will its own creation; nor does it follow that the creature-will, the “whim” and “way” that are almost powerless as such, may not be raised to Omnipotence. “Whoso hath not escaped from will, no will hath he.’’ Nature resists our will only in pro- portion to, our lack of faith ; “in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains.” Nature is continually plastic to the will of saints and avatars ; and to our will, in proportion as our will is His.

Professor Aliotta raises a second objection to Ideal- ism in the phrase the inaccessibility of other Egos :-

These consciousnesses (he says) defy all attempts a t direct penetration, and remain incommunicable in their intimacy; we can only reconstruct the subjective life of others by the help of outward signs, whereas . . . from the idealistic point of view, which denies the sub- stantiality of the Ego and the plurality of various sub- jects . . . the various consciousnesses . . . should pene-

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trate one another as do different moments of the same spiritual life, and it should be possible for me to read the mind and past or” another as I do my own. Every obstacle to the intimate communion and fusion of minds should vanish, and one mind be visible t o another without any intervening- veil of secret thought and feeling.

Here also we reply that the objection falls to the ground as contrary to experience ; for nothing is more constantly announced by lovers throughout the world than the fact of the mutual fusion and transparency of minds, in perfect sympathy; while the inner mind of the whole universe lies open to the mind cf Saint and Artist, who sees all things in himself and himself in all. That this should be so is not contrary to the order of Nature, but simply the perfection of an experience that must in some degree have come to everyone; and this experience is our strongest evidence of Unity (which would, indeed, be disproved were it shown absolutely that the subjective life o f others cannot be known ex- cept through outward signs).

Thus either argument against the Nirguna Brahman is countered by our own experience. This docs nor , however, imply that Professor Aliotta’s argument for the Saguna Brahman (Ishvara) is invalid. This argu- ment is briefly as follows :-

The rationality which science postulates in nature leads us to Divine Consciousness as its necessary epistemologi- cal development, because . . . a norm which is not H norm for any consciousness is a logical absurdity. He who believes in the objective value of his science must then also believe in God : if an Absolute Thought does not exist, nature cannot be rational, and if there is no rationality in things, the reconstruction which we make of them with the categories and principles of our mind is an arbitrary projection of no value whatsoever. He who doubts the existence of God must doubt the objective value of his cognition. . . . The scientific man who sets himself to understand nature manifests his faith in the rationality G-F the world by the very act of turning to her in the yearning of his soul, and works all unknowingly for t h e glory of God, even though he may call himself a materialist.

The mention of faith recalls the definition of Saint Paul : Faith is the substance of things hoped f o r , t h e evidence of things not seen. And so understood, is not religious faith identical alike with Art, defined as the imitation o f things as they ought to be and with Science, defined as by Professor Aliotta in a passage already quoted? W e are prepared to maintain that all these are equally means of apprehension of the Saguna Brahman, and only part company with Professor Aliotta in believing that beyond this Person and including Him is the Undivided. ANANDA COOMARASWAMY.

A BALLADE O F LLOYD-ON SUBURBS. Hampstead has sober and sequestered lanes,

Wherein you are entreated not to spit. O home of mortals with immortal brains

Who pen the direst trash that e’er was writ. At Notting Dale, the noses that they hit

Are many, for they love a good old brawl : But these enticements matter not R bit-

The Jerry Builder thriveth in them all. Camberwell’s much like Hades, when it rains ;

Putney i n summer swarms with ardent swains; The lads of Clapham have a lively wit.

And I am told (I cannot vouch for it) The togs they wear at Hendon never fit.

Yet mark, though much the gods will not permit- Babies of Fulham have the shrillest squall.

The Jerry Builder thriveth in them all. The scriveners of Brixton spare no pains

To raise the status of the shilling pit. At Barking- there is strife about the drains.

Tenants of Peckham often have to quit, (Hence their devotion to the midnight flit)

Poplar is gay with many a cockle-stall. Still, to whatever bower you shift your k i t -

The Jerry Builder thriveth in them all. ENVOI.

Hear, THORN, the tragic burthen of my skit.

Though Shepherd’s Bush and Tooting foster grit- Though Balham and its glories never pall,

The Jerry Builder thriveth in them all. P. SELVER.

Pastiche. WELL ?

Sir,--Why did the penny stamp ? Because the three- penny bit. Ho! ho !

That side-splitting joke belonged to the period of the Bore War. We all hated Bores then. And no wonder, when the pro-bores fired off witticisms like that at US.

I had a friend who loved these jokes. Johnny Garrulous, we used to call him. His real name was Ramsbotham. His mother was the once famous but now almost forgotten epigrammist.

He came one day to the office full to bursting with the above wonderful discovery. Why did the penny stamp? he spluttered, holding himself together lest he should explode prematurely. Don’t any of you fellows know? Why, because, ho ! ho ! becau-- ho ! ho ! ho ! because the threepenny. piece ! Ho ! ho ! ho ! ho ! . . . (repeating decimal, please.)

And we laughed, too. All of us, that i s , except McAngus, who is a Scotchman. McAngus explained to Garry carefully and at length where he had missed the point.

“Bah!’’ said Garry, in disgust, “I hate you word- splitting philolo-quists; you’d ruin any joke ; you’d spoil the Ten Commandments even.” And w e laughed again- all except McAngus, who is a Presbyterian.

But that was fourteen years ago. I hadn’t seen old Garry €or nearly a decade, until he

suddenly turned up at my office a day or two ago. (Please note the difference between the office, and m y

office. Many changes take place in fourteen years. Old Garry is older, but not much wiser, I fear. H e is a pro- German now, and when I tried to give an evasive answer to his invitation to dinner, he told me that it was not German to the subject.)

He burst through the swing-door without being an- nounced : “How are you, old chap ? Haven’t seen you for years. I say, have you heard the latest? What is the difference between fiteing like gentlemen, and wrighting like c a d s ? ”

(He explained the humour of spelling to me). “Don’t you know? Why, in the one case, the enemy lays round, and, in the other case, he sleeps sound. S e e ? ” Ho ! ho ! ho! ho! etcetera.

And as luck would have it, who should come in at that very moment but McAngus. Coincidence ? No, not at all. Mac is my principal clerk. Has been for years.

And, of course, he insisted on explaining to Garry, with great care, how he had once more missed the point, the correct answer being that in one case you lay about your enemy soundly, and, in the other case, you lie about your enemy roundly.

But Garry didn’t like it. He went off in quite a huff. And I’m afraid he won’t come to see me again. And I don’t know whether I ought to be grateful to McAngus or not.

What do you think ? H. N.

GOD AND MAN. I dreamed I was God, I mean really God, Not the Deity worshipped by folk, Not he who let the Titanic go down Because he was powerless to save, Or who launched an iceberg against the ship To give human pride a check. Neither devil nor idol was I, But almighty and fatherly. I shook not the Earth out of thoughtless might, Repeating Messina’s tale, As a giant who stirred in his sleep And smothered ants unawares. I left no hero to starve and freeze, As again men swore by Scott; I suffered not mortals to roast alive Beneath their wrecked juggernauts. So swift was my arm to help, I caught up airmen at need, While the sea could gather no toll, Nor that river called after a saint, Which boasts of his namesake’s grave.

The weather itself acknowledged my rule, And favoured both cricket and crops, Or if rain was better by day than night, I prevented picnics betimes, And ignored ingratitude. I guided folk through malignant germs

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To an agile and sweet old age, So that doctors went penniless For depending on others’ woes. The papers became too dull to sell, So orderly life had grown, While journalists doing their best Were dubbed worse than perjurers. On the contrary, novelists thrived, Describing the good old days When tragedies stirred the heart. There was common complaint that souls were starved For want of the gambler’s joy- The thrill of the splendid chance- That certain commercial gain Was a vulgar substitute.

But deprivations much worse were those Of wretches addicted to vice, Both drunkard and prostitute. They wrung my heart with their baffled looks, Then sank on their knees in prayer To the force that balked their desires. I argued against my divinity That the good was too far ahead, That the torture exceeded the gain, Till, sighing with human relief, I relaxed my restraining hand. The ecstasies of their stinted flesh So excited my fatherhood That I shed great thunder tears As hot as their fevered limbs. An outcry was raised by sober old maids That the moral order had failed, So to make them understand How all were sinners or none, I raged as far as Malay, And destroyed the tea supply.

The moment they felt my will was slack, The nations all fought like dogs, Whom the leash had curbed to no end But to madden beyond control. All lips foamed white with their righteous cause, And bandied my name about. So curious I grew that I stood aloof, And feigned to be deaf as Baal, For in truth it puzzled me sore To distinguish just from unjust, If the conqueror were not he. From the first I noticed a shameful thing, Which drove me further aloft- That the beaten called on me most! Their penalties served to increase their shrieks, Which surely must melt my heart, Though I braced it with stone and steel! But I sang the unknown heroic deed, Whose reward was a happy death, Nor cherished the frantic cry for help Like a child’s petitioning. The brutal pleased me more than the weak, For wretched in spirit were they, Who drew not strength from their wrongs, Till one man counted as three.

My passion left me resigned delight In a catastrophic world- In the clashing of part with part To gain a grand consciousness. Must we worship still in our helplessness An eternal savagery, While we strive to give it aim, And lend it divinity? Must we even plunge into wilful strife To know whose is the right to live? Till men are as like as peas in a pod, Politeness must keep within bounds. Till meteorologists err no more, So long shall the clouds remain An outstanding battlement, Where Deity dwells aloof. But Providence hovers above the church When lightnings descend perforce To illumine Franklin’s face ; God lives in the magic messages Which flash from the stricken ship ; And more than all in the daily fact That Life is a gallant game.

FITZGERALD LANE.

THE NATIONAL CRISIS. MASTER MINDS OF LEADING PUBLIC MEN.

What Sir Thomas Booseier Thinks. There can be no doubt that the nation is involved in

a very serious commercial warfare for the trade of Ger- many. But citizens of my native town need not despair of our entrance into quarrel with the Nietzschean Hun. Be of good cheer. . . . If the Russian army cannot manage to reach Paris in, say, five days, it would seem a pity. . . . What Sir James Parasitie Thinks.

I can hear the chorus of some popular song ringing in my ears as I lie in my bed every night. For many days I wondered where I could possibly have heard it . . . then I did remember : it was one late night (before the street lamps were extinguished). A brave young soldier was walking home from his barracks. . . . I can hear the song even now. . . . There is no doubt that a blanket is very acceptable on a cold night on the trenches. . . . The Allies should make a counter move on the East; at least, I should imagine that such a counter-move would very materially help the right wing in its circular sweep. . . . That song again . . . la, la, te, ta-la, la, la, ra-te, ta. . . . What Sir Sidenk Garspinn Thinks.

The seizure of Perrink-how many Londoners have ever heard of this little but extremely popular resort, where one can obtain the very choicest of cigars and rare fruit? . . . It seems to me that the Allies should concentrate on Perrink, for, i f the Huns managed to land even a mere handful of men, brave little Perrink would be no more. I dare not think about it. . . . Lord Kitchener can do a great deal to stay the finger of a horrible and unneces- sary fate from overtaking brave little, charming little Perrink. . . When I think. . . . What Lord Swindellz Thinks.

The end of the war should not be delayed much past, let us say, January. . . . I can conceive no more disas- trous culmination to a great and glorious war. . . . With the enemy on the run, and with the rival’s booming trade in our hands, national ardour at its intensest, and with our great population enjoying its usual-nay, more than usual-let us say an abnormal prosperity . . . profit- sharing galore . . . National Insurance at its zenith . . . who among us shall say that the greatest war the world has ever seen ,has been in vain? . . . For myself, I be- lieve that a direct change of military tactics is essential at the present crisis . . . the Russians are very good fellows . . . I remember. . . . What Mr. Boredom Sifzedzk Thinks.

Think for a moment. Do not run away with the idea that soldiers like fighting. If the truth be told, they are much happier a t home in the great financial houses, tak- ing a very keen delight in the enormous organisation of their various firms’ headquarters. . . . How romantic is trade, how saturated with good-will and joy of life! Pay a visit to my great house-once seen, never forgotten. . . . What are the Russians doing in Austria? As I read my daily paper I am struck by the really extraordinary position of the Gerkins. . . . It seems to me that the Allies . . . why not. . . . What Sir Joseph Lyzonke Thinks.

(Please put this sentence in big letters.) How can one give in to undue pessimism beats me all ends up. Is not business as is usual? (Big letters, please.) As I was saying only yesterday, here we have a ninety-nine to one chance. I wouldn’t miss it for nothink. So all cheer up at once. No moping in this great City . . . brave John Bull! Let every man do his duty and send one of my splendid Easter puddings to the front . . . the war will not be over before Easter. . . . Let the brave Belgians move a little quicker. Why don’t they? It is so sure that the Germans are too close to the sea, and our sailors do not seem to realise this. . . . Lord Kitchener is doing his very best. . . . What Lady Doodlzk Thinks.

What can we women d o ? my husband says . . . so I sit here in the autumn half-light sewing. . . . I often think strange thoughts as I sit here with my sewing. . . . I wish I had been born a man, then would I be not sitting here with my sewing, but I would be doing my duty on the field of the battle . . . . As I sit sewing, I think strange thoughts. . . . I seem to see the Russians moving along a little faster, and I also think I see the Allies pressing back upon the Prussian Huns. . . . It is very dull here in the autumn half-light. . . . I would rather be in Paris. General French is doing a good work. . . .

We shall win.

ARTHUR F. THORN.

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. “THE WAR OF IDEAS.”

Sir,-I am a little astonished that the editorial writer, with all his faith in the cause of Britain, has not dealt with Mr. Bonar Law’s letter, in which he promised the assistance of the Opposition on August 2 in any measures which the Government might take in support of France and Russia against Germany. There is not a word there about Belgium, or the Treaty of 1839; that was the

sentimental pretext by which the British people were to be deluded, at the expense of Belgium. It is not surprising to read in the “Morning Post” that the high moral tone taken by Britain’s writers and statesmen has caused a revulsion of feeling against Britain. H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Chesterton, Blatchford and Co., will create a combination against the Allies sooner or later ; the littérateur

turned politician is always a disastrous failure. The following sentence from a most instructive article

in the current “Saturday Review” on “The Sober Truth about the War,” I commend to the attention of S. Verdad and “Romney” : “Roughly, it may be said that Germany has secured a definite win in Belgium and a draw in France and in the Eastern theatre of war €or the time being.’’ C. H. NORMAN. * * *

THE PRESS. Sir,-I applaud with all my heart your “Notes of the

Week,” of December 24. The Press is, in truth, degrading and soiling the nation, and making i t ridiculous. One feels, when reading the papers, something like a panto- mime super, with a sensitive imagination, might feel when dressed in a hideous mask and exhibited to the laughter of the public, or as a Jew disguised in a gaberdine.

One hopes that the more sensible portion of mankind will realise that it is not us that they see, but only a ridi- culous counterfeit, the stage property of our oppressors. But, alas ! Man, in the lump, in spite of his name, is, like your correspondent, “Canadian X,” an unthinking animal. And we, on our part, ought in justice to the German nation, to remember that they are also dressed out in Press properties, and that we don’t see them any more than they see us.

And I think it should be explained to “Canadian X” that it is not really panic among the people that our Press Government fears. That is only its pretence. It really fears lest the fury of the people should be stirred. It dreads the Geni-spirit of hoi polloi, and will do anything

to keep it corked up in the bottle. A sudden accession of heat might explode it. That explains the persistent

call for conscription. They wish to use it as a cord to bind the Geni before he can shake himself free. That is also the meaning of the irritating restrictions on the Volunteer movement.

The Press fears the people-and hates them. PER SONA.

***

“BRITONS”-“BRITISH” NATIONALS. Sir,-Yesterday, no less than the “Post,” the “Times,”

and the latter’s tailings, reiterated the tale that German casualties number, or have numbered, “ a t least two millions.”

To-night, again, the “Evening News” implicitly states that “Germans have lust 600,ooo men in the last seven weeks.” This is the boast of England’s most respectable moulders of English public opinion.

Germans, we are told, have lost 3 per cent. of their population, yet still have 5 per cent. in the field. These papers

could not, and do not, claim that we have inflicted this loss. Nor can, or do, they claim that Germans are cowards, or have lacked intelligent foresight and organi- sation and patriotism. German nationals number about 68,000,000. We have here (above) accounted for 8 per cent., or roughly 5,500,ooo. British nationals number about 61,000,000, of whom, perhaps, I per cent. are in the field, and less than one-seventh of one per cent. have be- come casualties.

My purpose is to state true values, relative values. I have accepted the crude figures of the above English authorities and have then shown the percentage as be- tween the two principal nations. It seems that our “little bit” has been a very little bit. It follows that the French, of whom we common people know nothing, must have lost in casualties certainly not less than a million men. That is, their losses are certainly ten times larger than ours. Either these deductions are approximately

But if we accept this lie, where does it lead us?

correct, or military training and organisation are demonstrably a disadvantage. The little Belgian nation,

with a population practically the same as our own young Canadian State, has probably lost in casualties more than the whole British nation, whose stake, in turn, is an Em- pire covering a fourth of the peoples and territory of the globe. Are we doing our bit? Indeed, are we doing- are we permitted to do-our best, or what we should and could do? In my opinion, and notwithstanding the financial advisers of our politicians and our Press, we are not. These tell us “we are getting all the men we want.” But even now, at this crisis, are the hands of our

political masters clean of everything but actual national interests? Considering our stake, considering the

responsibilities that we have assumed and which we insist must remain ours, should we have two million troops in Europe, facing Germany’s four or five millions, next spring? Supposing we had this two millions, and another million in the five States and in the dependencies of India and Egypt, even then this would represent less than 5 per cent. of our national population, as against Germany’s present tax of 8 per cent., and probable recruitment then of IO per cent. Your readers, being intelligent patriots, should know whether we should, or could, or will, have this host.

As a matter of fact, we practically are rejecting hundreds of thousands of recruits. Thirty thousand Canadians are encamped in this country. On a 5 per cent. basis, 400,000 would be Canada’s contribution, for State, national, and imperial defence, i f English Authority could imagine the historic fact of British racial and national expansion.

“There is no one I know personally in the Canadian contingent,” writes a French-Canadian in Quebec, “but we hear that they have been ill-treated in England at Salisbury Plain. Of course, there were quite a number of ‘bad lots’ among them, but also there were many good boys of nice families who could not get a commission and had to enlist as privates.”

On the same day that I received the above (this week) I chanced to lunch with three senior Canadian officers in London. Their natural native enthusiasm had gone. They were men, not boys, experienced, and keen. All they asked was to be sent to do their bit; not as a Division,

but separately as regimental units and among other British troops at the front. They did not complain; but clearly, as after Africa, they will have something to say of English military methods, after the war. “X.”

* * * THE ATROCITIES.

Sir,-My attention has been called to the correspondence in your journal over the alleged atrocities committed by the Germans. In his letter published in your issue November 12, Mr.

Kitson repeated the incidents related to him by an ex- Naval captain regarding certain matters of which he was an eye-witness.

I wish to say that I was present at the interview mentioned and I heard the said captain make the statements

as reported by Mr. Kitson. This gentleman narrated his visit to Belgium, and told

us of the evidences of the atrocities which had been committed. He stated that he had seen the bodies of young

children that had been bayonetted to death. He also stated that these atrocities had been brought

home to him, more particularly since the arrival of his nephew, an officer in the Hussars, who had been wounded, and had fallen into the hands of the Germans, who had destroyed his eyesight, and cut his wrists, so that he could not use his fingers.

The interview took place at a lunch given by Mr. Kitson at the George Hotel, Stamford, about the end of

September. I merely wish to corroborate the truth of the report

made by Mr. Kitson. The statements were made in the presence of myself, Mr. Kitson, and a third person.

A. C . NASH. * * * Sir.,-Absence in the North of Scotland prevented my

receiving THE NEW AGE, and only to-day have I been able to read the further correspondence regarding the alleged atrocities committed by the Germans, in your last three issues.

My attention has been called particularly to your “Notes of the Week” (December IO), in which you say : “Our readers will not be surprised to learn that ‘no such person’ as the ‘authority’ recently privately given us for the German atrocity story by our correspondent, Mr.

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Arthur Kitson, ‘can be traced’ by either the War Office or the Admiralty.”

I do not know what efforts you have made to ascertain the existence of the person whose name I gave you.

Evidently, however, the incident has now developed into one of personal veracity.

From the tone of your remarks, doubt evidently exists as to whether my statement as published in my letter was a bona fide report of the statement made to me, or whether i t has been hatched in my own imagination.

This is rather a serious insinuation, and I have, therefore, written to-day to the Admiralty Department for the

information which you have evidently not been able to obtain. I have also written to the ex-naval captain

himself asking his permission either to give full names and dates referred to, or to write direct to THE NEW AGE a n d corroborate my statement. If he fails to do one or the other, I will authorise you t o publish his name and address in full.

I have not taken the trouble hitherto to attempt to verify the statement made to me by this gentleman, but I intend to do so now, since the whole matter has been challenged. I cannot believe that an English gentleman who professes an acquaintance with Lord Kitchener and the President of the French Republic would deliberately invent a story such as the one related to me in the presence of two other persons.

So far as the main question is concerned, this single instance is of no particular account. If the Germans have not committed atrocities, then the Psalmist is about

correct when he says, “All men are Liars,” but i t will take a great deal more than the ravings of your correspondents -like Herr Fenwick-to convince the public of this fact. There is nothing that one can say in reply to such letters as those which have been written by this violent pro- German correspondent. I accomplished what I set out to do, namely, to show that the man who signed himself “Fairplay” was not the impartial person that he wished people to believe, and, consequently, his complaint as to the one-sidedness of the Press was not justified-in his case, at least.

I have no intention whatever of challenging Herr Fenwick to a contest in which he has chosen the one weapon

in the use of which he is undoubtedly a pastmaster- namely, M U D !

Let me assure Mr. E. Wake Cook that Fenwick’s mud has not only failed to “penetrate my vitals,” it was not even sufficiently adhesive to soil my clothes. A residence of nearly twenty years in the States served to familiarise me with the peculiar type to which he belongs.

ARTHUR KITSON. [It should be plain to our correspondent that we

"insinuated” nothing against his veracity-or, for the matter of that, against the veracity of his informant either. Our “insinuation” was one of ordinary easy credulity. We are glad, however, to know that he now proposes to make the inquiries that should have been made before he

published his story.-ED. N. A.] * * *

Sir,--It may be worth while to call your attention to a curious police report in the “Times” of December 18. A young Belgian woman, who had been in Antwerp during the siege and arrived in England utterly destitute, was charged with attempting to commit suicide, the immediate occasion being an unhappy love affair with a Belgian

officer. The Godalming magistrates, we read, discharged the prisoner, “believing she had undergone

enough suffering.” This seems to be a remarkable if inadvertent admission

or implication that the ordinary purpose of our penal system, as understood by our police courts, is to inflict suffering: actually to inflict suffering rather than to reform the unhappy delinquent. While I am writing to you, let me say how glad I am

to see that Rowland Kenney, with his usual good sense, has been writing to you to protest against “atrocity- mongering,” and particularly against the vileness of our British Press. I’m sure if only Fleet Street were fighting the Kaiser we might all pray for a German victory. Words fail me to express my loathing of the bundle of penny and halfpenny rags which befoul English nobility with their mean little mafficks, forged “letters from the front,” lying head-lines, lying pictures, lying posters : and, crowning impudence, their disingenuous protests against the Censorship.

If only the military authorities would suppress the whole buck-basket and publish the official news in the “London Gazette,” we might face neutral nations with greater dignity. J. M.

ARROGANCE AND CULTURE. Sir,-There is much truth in “Fairplay’s” letter in

your issue of December 31. On all sides is Germany being denounced by us, not only for the folly of those who control and have inspired the direction of that country’s immediate destinies, but practically for

everything she has done. We are asked to believe that her thinkers and her artists are worthless, we are urged to “capture” her trade and industries; because she has been daring enough to wish to become a world-State, she is to be crushed utterly that Britain may become a greater world-State! Is the arrogance on one side only? Surely it is obvious that the future will not be to the world-State, but to the world-nation, to the nation with that intensity of inner life and that

intelligence which can control its various elements not only for its own healthy development, but for its right rela- tions with other nations. Each has its own contribu- tion to make to the world’s welfare, to the true culture of humanity, and it is folly for a large section of the Press and many public speakers to ask us to imagine that one nation can be and do everything at the same time, and do it well; in developing its own particular resources, however, no nation need be absolutely blind to other nations’ activities.

It has been the penalty of our insularity that we have so distrusted contact with the thought of Europe, have by our own suspicion aroused suspicion in others, thinking that all manifestations of some spirit we have not understood are dangerous to us. To take examples, we can name outstanding European writers and artists who have been either totally neglected here or, i f studied, have been studied superficially. It may be said that we are only just beginning to read Dostoieffsky and therefore have not yet begun to understand his greatness ; the penetration and ecstasy of Nietzsche how gladly we pass, after scanning his books, now that we can label him “the philosopher who caused the war”; Strindberg we dismiss because he is a woman-hater, and D’Annunzio because he is a woman-lover; the Swiss, Hodler, a force in contemporary painting we have not troubled about, and the Southern Slav sculptor Mestrovic

is only just being spoken of here and there. We are still very uneasy about Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, we have not understood the intensity of the force (the cosmic consciousness) inspiring their efforts, the force which finds further expression in the paintings and writings of Kandinsky, for in our British Post- Impressionism is hardly any inner fire, is only too often a posturing in borrowed clothes : “Significant form” is all very well, but it should be significant of something worth expressing; have we really troubled to examine the poetry of Marinetti and its purpose before laughing at i t ? Have we any right indeed with our out-of-date criticism to pass judgment at all on composers like Schönberg and Stravinsky ?

There have been, of course, a few discerning ones and here and there a critic has protested at the general

attitude of hostility to everything that seems different from what we have been used to, but stronger and more

frequent protests are necessary to rouse us to a proper sense of our responsibilities and opportunities, for now our values and our habits of mind are being changed, if slowly, and any movement should be taken advantage of in case the patient falls to sleep again, Small things, perhaps, but we may be glad that the conservative Royal Academy is giving us a more representative exhibition of modern British art than has ever been seen in Burlington

House before; that the New English Art Club’s present exhibition has so good a war picture as Mr. Sickert’s “The Soldiers of King Albert the Ready,” from which all irritating mannerism is absent; and we may he glad that amid the welter of war “literature” Romain Rolland’s “Above the Battlefield” has been published by “The Heretics”; his words to the leaders of the nations should be taken to heart, “was it not your duty to attempt-you have never attempted it in sincerity-to settle amicably the questions which divided you-the

problem of peoples annexed against their will, the equitable division of productive labour and the riches of the world? Must the stronger for ever darken the others with the shadow of his pride, and the others for ever unite to

dissipate i t ? Is there no end to this bloody and puerile sport, in which the partners change about from century to century-no end, until the whole of humanity is

exhausted thereby?” and only by a scrupulous honesty of purpose in all our actions now may we look forward to that time which I,. Cecil Jane in his courageously optimistic “The Nations at War” sees for the future, when “International sympathy will increase at the expense of

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international jealousy. Mankind will realise its common civilisation more fully; it will appreciate better the divergent

merits of different races. Energy which has been expended upon the perfection of engines of destruction will be diverted into more beneficial paths. All nations, united in a common brotherhood, will be enabled to labour, each in its own sphere, for the general advancement of mankind.” E. H. R. C. * * *

DEMOCRACY IN DOUBT. Sir,-The point we are too apt to overlook is that

Government on a democratic basis is not such a formidable business as the workers imagine. The essential

thing is to try to forget the existing régime; that is, not to forget that government, as at present constituted, is a precariously make-shift, hand-to-mouth affair. The worker has a traditional standard of value, quality, and if he adheres to that in his rule of life and thought he will see that many things are plain which otherwise would appear to be obscure. It is to quantity as a ruling factor in production that we Europeans owe the aimlessness of our civilisation.

The most striking character in a possessing class, a t all times, and in all ages, is its cowardice. It is the trading class which has stone-walled any attempt a t a home-grown philosophy, and because of this negative opposition has relegated philosophy to the stolid Teuton, both at home and abroad. Instead of philosophy propounding the gospel of Freedom as the religion of the new age, it has degenerated into a sloppy, half mystical, muddy-minded Christianity. Naturally enough, the traders think they think, though such thinking is but the rattle of their machinery. The real they can understand. Is i t not bounded on the one hand by Herbert Spencer’s Unknown, and on the other by Darwin’s ever-green Survival of the Fittest And does not this mean progress-motor-cars, telephones, and siege- guns? Ideas, when they do glimpse them, irritate them. The ideal maddens them : it would interfere with production.

As Nietzsche says, we are a sick people. In other words, it is to the continued w a y of the system we owe it that we have become a nation of Doubting Thomases. The war may bring new values in place of the many old ones it has destroyed, but at least this much is certain, the huckstering classes have excelled themselves. For what they have suffered in anticipation they have repaid themselves a hundredfold in Judas’ own coin. Once It was an outcry against Machiavelli, one of the kindliest and most honourable men that ever lived; now, the bag- men are shouting at Nietzsche, the shy and retiring. They forget in their frenzy that, as Stendhal pointed out, “les fripons qu’il a démesqués prétendent que c’est lui qui est un monstre.” And this monstre, Nietzsche, cry all our slavering nonconformists, recking little that their

interpretation of the man proclaims them as rank to heaven! Your true

pessimist is the man who has never suffered a single misfortune. His consolation is that he might. Not the man who just makes ends meet is i t who cries out. All, all is vanity, was uttered by a surfeited but never by a sick man. Let democracy at least not fail in anticipation. For that, I take it, is the psychological explanation of our industrial Hamlets’ hesitation.

The common sense of the matter is that not only is government by traditional rather than specious values not a difficulty, but that a return to a more simplified state of life will automatically put an end to many of our troubles, the more so in that these are none of our seeking. The great return to sanity will put an end to the policing of one half of the people by the other half. In fact, the crowning irony of the system is its cult of setting a thief to catch a thief, thus creating into a caste, as it were, an infernal crew of body-snatchers. The Fabians, the C.O.S., and expert witnesses. Let us not forget, either, that the downfall of Napoleon brought very substantial gains to the black-coats. If that be again the result accruing from the downfall of Prussianism, then this will be a bloody war to no purpose.

If only the Germans were not so damnably obedient, or our lot so hellishly patient! it is not that democracy fears responsibility-democracy at work means all

responsibility and no thanks--as M. Faguet says, rather is it that the system has brought about such a cleavage between the “two nations” that the people cannot see law,

much less sane order, for legislation. Not that government has become “occult,” but that government stinks

is the offence. The body of a nation is honourable, and will readily sacrifice itself at need; but of dishonour it can have no idea. This has been the weak point in all

These lugubrious gabies must be unmasked.

civilisations. Not the people but the politicians and the pimps it is who become corrupt and drag down all with them. To say, therefore, as M. Faguet says (vide “A. E. R.”), that “France is a nation of Pontius Pilates washing their hands of responsibility and leaving the direction of their destinies to chance and the sport of

circumstance” would imply that the people do, as a body, realise that they are being fooled all the time. Which is absurd.

The voice of the people is the voice of God, and in so far as we are a nation acting as d unit we might justly say that this war is of a biological character. In essence, it is a protest by the plebs and the aristocracy against the tyranny set up by the middle and merchant classes. These last have never understood the English people, and, consequently, they stand in panic-fear of them, and do their utmost to fetter them by all the legislative means at their command. There is no such unsocial distrust of the people by the aristocracy; and from time immemorial the two have worked side by side, but particularly so in war. The damnable detachment of the trading element of necessity lends itself to an inconsequence in word and deed utterly foreign to the nature of the English peoples, which is trustful and generous to an extreme that is mistaken for weakness by the cosmopolitan crew of “sports” who control the economic factor.

The people have an age-long fear of a tyranny, and, now that we cannot get “ten thousand in the market- place,” they are opposing the attempt to enslave them by the only means left to them; that is (in times of peace) by a form of spiritual ju-jitsu. We are now at t h e cross- roads of Progress and Life, and history will rightly

proclaim us a decadent people i f we allow the great Choice to be taken from us. If the merchant princes were blessed with vision they would see in the war a means whereby in compounding with the forces of revolution they would be enabled to save their skins whole. But to do that they must render, unconditionally, unto Casar the things that are Cesar’s. HAROLD LISTER.

(Moreover, Paris is not France.)

***

NATIONALIST SCOTTISH NOTES. Sir,--”If the Government has completely suppressed

journalistic sedition in Ireland, it should immediately turn its attention to an outbreak of the same character in Scotland and put a muzzle on that mature but as yet ‘unlicked cub’ of the family of Mar, the Honourable Stuart Ruavaidh Erskine. ‘Rory,’ as he is familiarly called behind his back in Celtic circles, to which he has for years contributed Gaelic literature, is, so far as we know, the only articulate rebel now in Scotland, and as such, no time should be lost in exhibiting him in the pillory for the edification of his countrymen and a salutary warning that treason, whether expressed in English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, or Scottish Gaelic, is not to be

tolerated by the people of Great Britain.” The quotation is from a special article in the “Glasgow

Evening News,” a contemptible strawberry-coloured rag, edited by one of the most despicable cuckoo-Celts (neither flesh, fowl nor good salt-herring), that illegitimate breed of the Ossian cult-Mr. Niel Munro. To hell with him and his bawbee paper ! And as to the attack on Erskine (who has contributed a statement of his political attitude to your columns in a brilliantly written paper on “Saxon and Celt,” and who is one of the sincerest and most far- seeing intellectuals North of the Tweed, and a great

personal enemy of mine), I may adapt the words of a recent correspondent, taking Mr. Hood to task for his childish skit on William Watson’s war-verse, and dismiss the subject by saying that to readers of THE NEW AGE quota- tion without remark is amply sufficient. We know all about these ha’penny rag sedition-squeals which are just the bastard offspring of spy-scares and lineally descended from that Malice which is the step-son of the great god Funk. The cowardice of the attack on Mr. Erskine,

carefully calculated as it is, to enlist the baser passions associated with patriotism, has that purely damnable character

which is the deplorable peculiarity of much of our latter- day journalism, in Scotland almost as much as in

England; but as the article goes on to say, “It is true that Mr. Erskine’s treasonable attacks on this country, hopes for her downfall, and glorification of the most fiendish mechanism of the German enemy, attract little attention in Scotland, where his quarterly Gaelic magazine, ‘The Voice of the Year,’ is read by a few hundred people at the most.’’ Then the editor of the “Guth na Bliadhua” (Voice of the Year) has received a free advertisement which should attract to his periodical all decent minds in Scotland.

I, at least, although I have no use for the review in question (for quite other reasons as shall appear) have

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sent in my subscription for it. (It may at least come in useful as showing me what my own enemies are up to- a point so far unthought of).

Continuing, the writer justifies his attack, despite the small Scottish circulation of Erskine’s paper by saying “but the Germans, who are profound students of the Gaelic language---!” Mein Gott! One learns more every day of the amazing versatilities of that

wonderful people. Enough ? Englishers are naturally at war with profound students of anything. Profundity is

profoundly un-British. But the writer errs when he says that Erskine is the one

literary renegade yet discovered in Scotland. Or perhaps he does not look upon me as literary, or has not perhaps come into contact with my propaganda, which is Lowland Scottish in the same way as Erskine’s is Highland Scottish.

Nationalisms will, I imagine-and hope-be very much in the

air then, and he may be horrified to hear that instead of a contentedly-Anglicised Scottish whole, not only is Erskine preaching in the North the re-adoption of the. kilt, the revival of the Gaelic language, the constitution of a Gaelic Scottish Parliament, and a disassociation from arrogant England and her Imperial schemes, but that I am sending the fiery cross through the old Debateable Land of the Raiders and the Reivers, pointing (as our Border

streams point) to England as the eternal enemy, and awaiting the inevitable day when the heart of the

Borderer bestirs :-

But he may hear about it after the war.

“Bestirs and knows the need and how To carry on the timeless feud That so the heart of Borderland Remain for ever unsubdued.”

Not only so : but Mr. Munro seems to be ignorant of the -propaganda, still as pertinacious as ever, of the Jacobite Legitimists. But of a l l t hese things he will learn and hear more in post-bellum days, but by that time his chameleon

convictions may be showing quite a different political colour. It is comforting, however, even to a Lowlander to whom all things savouring of the “teughter” {Scots Highlander) are anathema, that chameleons, capable of changing to suit any pure colour upon which they may be placed, are apt to burst on tartan. “Wha daur meddle wi’ me?” But I have exhausted my space. More anon of the issue between Scottish Lowland and Highland ideals, and I must also postpone some notes, which, I think, may be of interest, on Guild Socialism from the point of view of a Lowland Scot. Suffice it here to say that my

observations are mainly to be along the lines of “hereditary craftsmanship’’ or “blood-aptitudes,” developed by A. M. Ludovici in his NEW AGE articles on “Indian Art,” and which amount, not only to a reactionary note against the present industrial system, but also to a very pertinent” criticism, I think, from a “human” point of view of the “Guildsmen’s” schemes. PTELEON.

***

WOMEN’S EMERGENCY CORPS. Sir,-I have read Miss Falk’s letter in your issue of

December 24. On what date was the Women’s Emergency Corps licensed, as she states? My information is that the licence has only now been

applied for and cannot in any case be granted before the end of January !

Why is it necessary to collect funds from the public to do commercial work and for inexperienced titled and wealthy women to give their time and untrained energies in trying to place secretaries, governesses, domestic servants, etc., depriving the established agencies of their regular business, and creating unemployment and actual want and distress in their lives?

There are at present a large number of vacancies on the books of good agents which cannot be filled at all for lack of applicants, proving there is no necessity to collect charitable funds to do this work either now or a t ‘any time, nor to seek for free laudatory half columns in the daily papers in order to upset that part of the labour world which the war has only affected in a very minor degree.

There are fewer domestic workers out of employment since last August as compared with other years, and the unfilled vacancies are more numerous in pro- portion.

Regarding their methods there are known instances of persons applying to this said corps for employment, and where they were ladies of refinement they were sent on from one committee to another and offered general

servants’ and charwomen’s work. Is there any business-like checked account being kept of all the money given for this uncalled-for meddling, either by the subscribers or the public authorities; is i t audited by a paid chartered

accountant? To those who have the misfortune to seek work their most cruel and inquisitive questions are thrust on all who are poor, though that poverty may be of a transient character, and the inquisitor may be young and the victim old enough to be her mother, but their presence in the Corps gives them, they consider, a position to attempt the methods of the Inquisition. If the war ends io-morrow to what purpose is all this? Will the experi- enced capable agents be allowed to resume their livelihood

if anything is left to them? Tailors cannot get hands, and the Labour Bureau can

quite well cope with trade fluctuations, and if August was a slack month and September also, it is so for all seasonal trade each year.

No : let the Emergency Corps cease their needless interference and the authorities awaken to the sense of their

own responsibility. It is hardly just to demand monetary prices for licences of the regular agents, and then when their autumn season is all upset, as this has been, for the sake of sentiment close their eyes to a17 that is going on and not prosecute these women as they would any other (untitled) person placing servants or clerks. It is nothing short of sweating the business, and the agents are fools to put up with it. FOR RICH AND POOR.

* * * WOMEN AND WAR.

Sir,--I would like to suggest that when at last the feminists have won their economic and political freedom, it will then be time for all the forces of intelligence and virtue to come against them and bring these queer half- thinking beings to their senses. It becomes ever more clear that beyond that very small circle, the feminine mind, women cannot pierce, and in a universe containing such infinitudes of time and space, their short-sightedness is apt to become disastrous.

No better example will ever be afforded the world than the characteristics of the feminist movement itself, and the attitude women generally have taken towards this war -terrible enough in all conscience. But, theoretically, and too often, too, practically, women are adding the most distasteful and discordant note of all. Listen where you will and you will hear the unreasoned, the unqualified scream-“run no risks, crush them, crush them, though you sink your own souls in hell.” Nor do they stop to consider the intrusion they make on the free will, the most sacred right of those who would offer themselves for sacrifice-to say nothing of the revolting poison that lurks at the back of Eve’s unmellowed exhortation and bribe.

And the feminists speak of courage and the courage they themselves have shown, but i t has in truth been the courage of the “animal” at bay, the primal element of womanhood in danger, a good case, no doubt, but not in this nineteenth century, a noble case.

There is a guardianship, the object of whose care has not yet been sighted by womankind.

MILLAR DUNNING. ***

T H E POETRY OF GEORGE STERLING. Sir,-There is a poet in the woods alongside our bungalow, hewing at a chestnut-tree; and I open some copies of

THE NEW AGE, and in one of them find your readers speculating as to whether or not he can be a “Victorian, and searching for him in reference tomes in the British Museum! No, you have many poets, but this one is ours. It will be a trial, I know, to some of your critics to learn that the maker of these marvellous melodies is an American, born on commonplace Long Island, locality of potato-farms and summer-hotels; and that he has never been abroad to acquire any refinement. I notice another of your correspondents, taking part in the discussion of the mystery, complaining how hard it is to find out about the real writers in America. Might I, without seeming to be nasty, suggest that a part of the difficulty comes from the ill-reception you give to those who try to tell you about them? I recall years ago some letters from Michael Williams, telling that we had some writers here- George Sterling being in the list. I remember also that your critics and readers were severe upon Mr. Williams for his presumption.

Sterling is something over forty, and has published four small volumes, which I think may be called the most distinguished that we have to send abroad. His work possesses the qualities of the greatest poetry ; sublimity of thought, intensity of emotion, enchanting melody, and severe and reverent workmanship. He is especially

sensitive to the sensuous elements of life; for instance, no painter glories more in the magic of colour. But he has

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also a stern sense of the dignity of his art, and of the value of his gift ; so that the lures of nature have not proven a snare to his feet. There is almost nothing of the note of decadence in his work. As it happens, his reputation in this country (which, considering the supreme nature of his gift, is astonishingly high) began with one poem which hardly does him justice. I refer to the “Wine of Wizardry,” which might better have been entitled the “Wizardry of Wine”-for it is a kind of half sublime and half grotesque elaboration of the ecstasies which lure poets into the Kingdom of Alcoholia. What is most representative of Sterling’s work is his thrilling sense of the infinite-of the starry spaces, and the equally vast spaces within the soul of man. “The Testimony of the Suns” was the title of his first book; and “Beyond the Breakers” is his last. He loves the sea with a passion- ate and almost mystical love; but he loves i t from the shore-as one who does not go to sea, and for whom therefore it is one of the symbols of our human limitations. “The Muse of the Incommunicable” is the title of one of his greatest sonnets; and I might mention that he is a master of the sonnet-form. He has written some sonnets on the war, which he might send you if you asked him for them; we have had all the best of the English poetry cabled over here, and there has been nothing so fiercely passionate and at the same time so coldly masterful.

There is another aspect of his work, his sense of what is vital and of his own time. He is not saying what other poets have taught him to say. He is an ardent Socialist, but has only written upon current events when he has found himself able to make great literature out of them. Last spring he was one of those who walked up and down before the offices of the Standard Oil Company, and caused America’s leading philanthropist to run like a whipped cur. This behaviour on the part of a great poet was a cause of dismay to our literati, who have drawn a charitable curtain over it. I suspect, however, that there have been worse things known about some of the poets whom we, nevertheless, manage to read.

George Sterling’s poetry is published by A. M. Robertson, of San Francisco, California. I will suggest to this

publisher that he send the books to THE New AGE, hoing that the editor will put them into the hands of some

critic who is willing to admit the possibility that great literature might be produced in America.

UPTON SINCLAIR. * * *

T H E JEWS. Sir,-The seed of Abraham, according to Dr. Levy, are

like undecorticated cotton seed, partly digestible in the stomach of the Aryan cow, but mostly not, And Dr. Levy urges his compatriots to remain in the husk on purpose that they should not be digested. Well, it may be good for the seed-it doubtless increases its chance of propagation-but i t certainly is not so for the cow.

It surely is the business of us Gentiles to see that the seed is flayed, and the chaff cast out. To praise the Jews for successfylly

insinuating themselves as usurers when honest trades were closed to them is like praising anyone for succeeding as a pimp or procurer when nobody will

employ him for any other purpose. It is like praising a man for being a parasitic pandar, ministering to and encouraging the vices of his host. Whatever may be the Jew’s own morals, he certainly persistently undermines the morals of the race he lives upon.

And Dr. Levy tells us that he does it with the conscious intention of eventually climbing on his hosts’

shoulders and dominating the world. His is the habit of the New Zealand rata that climbs the trunk of the pine tree and encircles it, gradually squeezing i t to death as itself swells and gets stronger.

There is, I believe, only one way to check the Jews and make them truly serve the welfare of the race they wish to live with-and that is, not to permit them to accumulate

wealth. AN ADMIRER OF MOSES AND ISAIAH.

It imposes an unnecessary strain upon her.

* * * DANIELIZING.

Sir,-My belief in Mr. H. Caldwell Cook’s practical wisdom and knowledge received a shock in his last letter. Surely “offen” is too dreadfully Cockney and ugly to be endured. “Aw-fen” is almost worse, unless the “aw” is very short.

Why should the ‘‘oft” it is derived from be ignored? For myself I prefer to say “awf-ten” with the aw very short; the t is of great accentual value, and to me is far

more euphonious, has a better flavour than the patois-ish “offen” or “awfen.” I shall stick to “awf-ten.”

Where is the difficulty with purpose? If I say, “I purpose doing so-and-so,” I feel compelled to say

"purpose,” both fully pronounced but with a slight stress on “pose.” If I say, “I did so-and-so on purpose,” I feel equally compelled to say “pur-pus,” not “puss,” as that implies pussy the cat. The two words are essentially different in meaning and use, and should be kept quite distinct.

What a shock it would be to some of us i f we had to submit for half an hour to his boys and their hammer !

FREDERICK H. EVANS. * * *

MORE MODERN THEATRE. Sir,-There is an exclusiveness even in the personality

of the Stage-door. The most loathsome “super” or “walking-on” person attempts to appear dignified as he walks past the sad-faced queues which line up in the passage that leads to the stage entrance.

There is a barren and repulsive atmosphere which chills enthusiasm. To hear a child laugh within the precincts of the theatre makes one shudder. A solid smugness, almost non-human in its intensity, makes itself felt from the rise of the curtain to its fall.

Night after night we pass into the vitiated climate until our emotions either collapse into the general death, or scream inwardly with pain. But to utter one critical word in the hearing of any member of the company earning over one guinea a week would involve a visit to the

manager-producer’s sanatorium and a fortnight’s notice. A German spy could not gain for himself such hatred

as does the small salaried actor or actress in the West- end theatre who dares to criticise the management. Our silence is self-preservative, for the only effective method of obtaining work is by mental “crawling” and hat- touching. In the struggle for existence upon the stage, intensified out or‘ all decent proportion by competition with wealthy amateurs, abject servility is the only key to the situation. If you are an ambitious small-part or “walking-on” person, flatter all those members of the company- who are earning more than yourself; this is your only chance.

The exclusiveness ; the smuggery; the vacuous deftness of triumphant mediocrity-the snob-genius in possession contains collectively something more diabolical even than the Selfridge touch. There is no spontaneous enthusiasm in the theatre. The play, bad as it usually is (Mr. Hope has touched the spot every time), is not the centre of gravitation ; nor is the “acting” of the “stars.” Some- thing pervades the theatre which is the antithesis of dramatic atmosphere. It exudes from the initial lack of histrionic genius in the most powerful members of the company. Mediocre personalities have been pushed up into the important positions and from their mechanical and spiritless performances is sent forth the chill air which freezes both art and joy out of the theatre. These individuals have no conception of the meaning or purpose of Drama. The possibilities of the theatre have never occurred to them. The Producer, their Deity, haunts their consciousnesses hour by hour, night after night throughout the four acts. He flits about scowling in the wings, a monstrosity who never smiles.

We troop up the stairs. The trivial chaft of an old actor who has suffered and starved so continuously in the provinces that a perch in the West-end almost paralyses him with fresh ambitions, is nobly endured by those of us whose hearts are bitter beyond his imagination. Too well we know the final disillusion that awaits him, who would speed the certain hour of his bewildered exist into the gutter. He is quite sure that he has at last got his old feet firmly planted in a West-end theatre, and that he is a fixture. The end of the “run” draws near; the next production is in hand. Week by week passes, he is not now quite so confident and hangs about upon the stage longer than necessary hoping to catch the stage-manager’s eye. . . . We hear that new people are being engaged for vacancies in the new play. The old man is not one of those re-engaged, nor are any of us. The distinction between those in the theatre who are re-engaged and those who are not is now added to the distinction already existing between “small-part people,” “good part people,” and “stars.” The atmosphere grows colder and colder, penetrating even into the dressing- room. In a wild moment I blasphemed the management, an indiscretion which caused the old actor to raise his

eyebrows and mutter something about “dangerous young men.” The philosophy of the old fool had been busy justifying the management. He has never been able to forget the fact that the head of the firm was a millionaire.

We let him talk.

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The honour he felt in being permitted to enter the theatre of a millionaire, even for a few weeks, compensated for his disillusion and disappointment in not being kept on as a permanent man. He will hang about on the last night in order to shake hands with the manager-producer; he will tip the stage-door keeper, and toddle out into the long passage with as much dignity as possible. A. F. T.

***

PATRIOTISM AND MUSIC. Si:-,-I expect your article under the above heading was

intended as a closure to the discussion on Mr. Holbrooke’s articles. I would, however, like to point out that the real evil is not the non-appreciation of British music as Music, but the fact that economics demand that gate- money shall rule. The public distrusts, and rightly, British music; they won’t pay to risk an almost certain disappointment. Elgar, it is true, is British and draws (or did) ; but he was entirely made by Novello’s booming ; they made him the fashion, and he was accepted without deep inquiry because he “sounded” so well, and we were so really desirous of believing that a British musical genius had arrived at last.

I expect Jaeger, of Novello’s, who was mainly responsible for the booming, has long-since regretted it, now he

has had a larger experience “on the other side”; he was deaf to all argument here.

British music rarely convinces one; there i s no continuity in i t ; no essential necessitous relation of one part

to another; there is no compelling genius in i t ; Melos, divine Melos, seems dead, that is why they profess to despise mere tune; it is all vastly clever, and that’s the end of it. One of the best of them, Delius, never carries you further than the first twenty bars or so; you think something is really going to happen, i t seems so full of atmosphere and apparent meaning ; then, somehow, it thins down, peters out, and you forget all about it for ever after.

You may safely trust the British public to recognise the real genius when he arrives, when he has something really to say and says it strongly and beautifully. Noisy Holbrooke’s stuff is never endurable a second time. I had to endure, not long since, his setting of Edgar Poe’s poem, “Annabel Lee.’: It is absolutely wrong in conception

and meaning from the first bar to the last; and yet he played the pianoforte accompaniment himself, and so accepted the rendering as good enough. Any composer who could hear that after he had written it, and be

contented to have it published and sung is hopeless and need not be attended to further, nor any notice taken of his faulty journalese.

Josef is doing more serious harm to the cause of British music than all else together, and he should be suppressed somehow or other.

Get our Guild Socialism at work, make the arts free from the taint of earning a living at them, and then music (as all other Art) will only be made because it must, and will get its due hearing. Perhaps, then, a sort of clearing house will be possible where composers can hear their things played over and over again, and so learn their auditory value as against their (apparent) paper value.

But all this divine freedom in progress is impossible while we slave under damnable profiteering ; gate-money rules us, programmes get to a stultifying level, stealing even the masterpieces-except the divine Mozart, of whom we never get enough. FAIR-TO- ALL.

* * * TQUASSOUW AND KNONMQUAIHA.

Sir,--As a prelude to his extract from this Hottentot story, “R. H. C.” presumes that the comic tale might be a parody of some work of an eighteenth century “Blast” school. Although the Hottentot story can serve as a skit upon those jabberers who made loud noise lately, that is before the war started, i t must be denied, even though “R. H. C.’s” presumption was not serious, that any such purpose could be served in the eighteenth century. Why! Last Thursday’s Futurists would have a historical basis, and, furthermore, that wonderful century would lose some credit. This vigorous parody was written at a time when there was a fashion in the magazines for Eastern stories degenerated from Voltaire’s “Zadig,” and, I think, the relation of the love of Tquassouw and Knonmquaiha came to prick the Asiatic rigmaroles which set European

sentiments in Eastern make-up. This tale has the turn of a European love romance, and it would be such were the trappings not so cannibalistic and the finale so comic. This tale ridicules the false, pretty tinting of savage life, an affectation which Chateaubriand artistically finished years afterwards in his “Atala, etc.,” where we find scalp- hunting red-skins of exquisite grace and delicate sentiments.

No, there were no English Futurists in the eighteenth century, but I don’t suppose “R. H. C.” ever thought there were. Soon after the appearance of this Hottentot story, “Impressionism” was seen in English literature, and it was in the hands of a man of genius, Sterne; but all that is on the other side of the universe to our modern Post-Impressionists and Futurists.

By the way, the “Connoisseur” was edited by Colman and Thornton, and the writer of the tale was the Earl of Cork. This paper is in Chalmers’ collection of British Essayists. JOHN DUNCAN. * * *

A UNIFORM DECIMAL SYSTEM. Sir,-The new British Pharmacopœia in force from

January I requires the use of the metric system. Does this mean that the war has at last awakened the Government to the urgent need for this reform, and do they mean

to introduce it piecemeal? In the past, Parliament has several times rejected Bills to introduce the metric system and decimal coinage, and there have been numerous Select Committees and Royal Commissions on the subject, all so far to no purpose.

As THE NEW AGE so rightly remarked last week, i f we are to capture German trade something more is necessary than “to clear the seas and send out our commercial travellers.” This is one of the necessary other things. Most Continental countries have adopted the decimal system-Belgium and Switzerland had to change, therefore, why not England ? Canada adopted decimal coinage in 1858, Newfoundland in 1863, Ceylon in 1872, Egypt in 1885. England lags behind her dependencies.

The arguments for decimal and metric systems are, of course, three :-The simple tables of weights and

measures, the accurate correspondence between the units of weight, length surface, dry and liquid measure, and the easy decimal system of notation. The first four rules of arithmetic only are required for the understanding of the Decimal System. Long hours of our youth are wasted at school struggling with British mathematics, time that could be spent in the study of foreign languages. If the systems were adopted in their entirety they would cause general dislocation and disturbance of accounts, but the war has now accustomed us to changes, and no doubt ways could be found of effecting this reform by degrees. Land surveyors would have to change their measurements,

engines, dynamos, and tools, even screw-threads would have to be altered, but machinery is always being scrapped in any case. Government offices would be able to do without numbers of their clerks, chiefly women. Our present stupid system requires an adequate supply of cheap labour to carry out calculations and keep books, and unfortunately the Government is able to get this labour from women, who are cheap and highly efficient. There are, for instance, Savings Bank interests, National Insurance contributions, and more recently, the Army and Navy allowances. On all these duties hundreds of women are employed as clerks, who should be practising housewifely arts. Is their admirable decimal system one of the reasons why the French nation is superior in most of the artistic crafts?

Mr. Lloyd George should have effected this reform be- fore he introduced National Insurance; let him see to it before he touches the Land.

At present public opinion totally ignores the subject. There is a Decimal Association, but who ever hears of i t? Now that every sick fad and humbug of the day has ceased from troubling, perhaps public opinion will turn its attention to things that matter. Napoleon III, speaking at the close of L’Exposition Industrielle, November 15, 1855, used these words :

“At the present period of civilisation, the successes of armies, however brilliant they may be, are only

temporary, and it is public opinion that always gains the last victory.” M. K. HULL.

***

BUSINESS AS USUAL. Sir,-Your contributor, Mr. I. J. C. Brown, in his ex-

cellent article on the middle-classes, wanders off the map when he speaks about the theatre and music-hall professions.

I should like to inform him that at several theatres the lowest salaries have been cut down lower “on account of the War.” At the London Hippodrome, for instance, salaries of thirty shillings have been cut down to one pound a week-Two “shows” a day! Salaries for the Christmas week were 16s. 4d., two “shows” at IS. 8d. being deducted on account of the birth of our Lord. I may mention that the Hippodrome is doing as good, i f not better, business than hitherto. Prices of some of the seats being raised. A MUSIC-HALL ARTISTE.

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