AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE? By Fr. Grierson. THE NEW AGE, THURSDAY MAY 27, 1909

NEW Age A WEEKLY REVIEW OF POLITICS, LITERATURE AND ART.

No. 768] [New Series] Vol. V. No. 5] THURSDAY, MAY 27, 1909. ONE PENNY

CONTENTS. NOTES OF THE WEEK .. ... ... ... ... 89 WHITED SEPULCHRES-V. By Beatrice Tina ... ... 99 MORALITY IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. By H. L.... ... ... 91

DRAMA : “Sampson.” By N. C. ... ... ... 102 The NEW AGE ” IN THE PULPIT. By Holbein Bagman 92

VERSE. By F. S. Flint . . . . . . . ... ... ... IO1

CORRESPONDENCE : G . R. S. Taylor, Beatrice Tina, F. G. GENIUS OR SUPERMAN--II. By Karl Heckel ... ... .95 Music : “ A Summer ldyll’’ BY Herbert Hughes .*- ... 104 DEBUSSY’S Musical IMPRESSIONS-IV. Trans. Mrs. F. Liebich 94 ART : “Methods of Pictures Shows.” By G. R. S. Taylor 103 AN ANGLO-AMERICAN ALLIANCE. By Francis Grierson ... 93

BOOKS AND PERSONS. By Jacob Tonson ... ... ... 98 Gill, etc., etc. I 0 5

PAGE page

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STENDHAL AND ENGLAND. By J. M. Kennedy ... *.. 97 Howe, H. F. Rubinstein, St. John .Ervine, A. E. R. ... ... ... ... ...

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NOTES OF THE WEEK. AT the conclusion of the discussion on Mr. Pickersgill’s motion on unemployment, Mr. Shackleton, according to the “Times ” report, borne out by Hansard, “ would only say that they had had a good Labour night,, and he was proud to have been present.” Had anything very revolutionary been proposed?- Nothing more than the organisation of Labour Exchanges, “a mere piece of social machinery,” as Mr. Churchill himself de- scribed it, “ that would not directly add to the volurne of labour.” No wonder that Mr. Bernard. Shaw has described the Labour Party as “on its knees ” in the House of Commons. Such fulsome gratitude as Mr. Shackleton displayed-in which, by the way, he was only a neck ahead of Mr. Henderson-would be con- sistent with an even more prostrate posture than that of kneeling. Up, Labour men, you are not political lazzaroni, are you? Never be thankful for what you have won by force : the noblest form of political grati- tude is to use what you get to get more. * . * * * *

We are not denying that the creation of Labour Exchanges is an excellent piece of administrative work. If the Minority Report is right in its judgment that “it is now administratively possible, if it is sincerely wished to do so, to remedy most of the evils of unem- ployment,” then the establishment of Labour Ex- changes all over the country is an indispensable preliminary. But beyond regularising a certain amount of casual labour and rendering the unemployed loco- motive, Labour Exchanges alone will not do much. In the recommendations of the Minority Report, Labour Exchanges are to be accompanied not only by a system of Insurance against unemployment, but by positive economic measures such as the restriction of boy- labour, th,e reduction of railwaymen’s and tramway- men’s hours, and the putting in hand of forty millions worth of national work. Save for the first of these, we do not see any signs of the accomplishment of ’these contemporary remedies. A scheme of Compulsory Insurance against unemployment has been promised ; but no attempt has yet been made seriously to mitigate

the evils of boy-labour. In over fifty years (from 1851) boy-labour between the ages of IO and 15 has been reduced by no more than 15 per cent. The Government alone employ some 20,000 boys between the ages of IO and 19, of whom only I in 3 finds a permanent place in the Government service. W e should like to be certain that the Education Department would adopt the recommendation of Mr. Cyril Jackson’s Report and raise the school age at once to 15, in five years to 16, in ten years to 17, and so on until nobody is expected t o earn his living until he or she is 21. Human beings would then become, as they should become, more ex- pensive than machines, and matters, therefore, of equal or superior care. As it is, a sewing machine is worth more than a sempstress, and is better cared for by its employer.

***

Nor do we see any burning zeal on anybody’s part to reduce the hours of labour of railway and tramway men. Presumably the lives of the public are of less importance than the dividends of shareholders : and, curiously enough, in the public’s own esteem. We would bet a Waterman to a goosequill that the “Daily Express,” the second most unscrupulous daily paper published, could persuade its readers that the demand for the reduction of th,e hours of labour on rail and tram was no more than a device for workshies invented by Socialist agitators, to the deliberate damnation of public safety. At this moment in fact, there are positively no Board of Trade regulations for the work- ing hours of railwaymen or tramwaymen, who therefore may be, and sometimes are, called upon to work thirty hours in twenty-four. What is amazing and regret- table is that so few accidents occur. On the whole, however, if the public will not insist on good hours for its own sake, there is little hope of its insisting on good hours for the sake of miners, builders, and, labourers. But for the boot-toe of Parliamentary unionism, these trades would still be working the clock nearly round. Of all the fatuous arrangements of civilisation the collocation of overwork and unemploy- ment is the most scandalous to reason.

* * *

Of the putting in hand of a forty million scheme of national work in afforestation, canalisation, reclama- tion, and the like, we see only the ghost of a sign. The Development Fund which Mr. Lloyd George may constitute out of the snippings of departmental ex- penditure contains, as we have said before, a germ of hope ; but without a lot of Socialist sun and storm, the germ will not fructify. That overcultured person, Professor J. H. B. Masterman, who has been lecturing on “ Parliament and the People ” in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, declared the other day “that it might be taken as a fixed principle of English life that people who would not wait hardly ever got what they wanted.” But our reading of history, thank

90 THE NEW AGE MAY 27, 1909

commonsense, is different. “ Them as asks won’t get, and them as don’t ask don’t- want,” is much nearer the fixed principle of not only English life but life universal ; and the practical deduction is that one must take what one wants, without violence if possible, but with violence when necessary. And it is pretty certain that the Minority Report’s forty million scheme will have to be pushed, and pushed hard, if it is to get outside the Blue-book where it now lies buried.

* * *

Returning to the specific subject of Labour Exchan- ges and Mr. Churchill’s sympathetic speech (Mr. Churchill or his ghost has admirably caught the Fabian twang in his official utterances), we note that he pro- poses to “illustrate the trinity ” by dividing the Labour section of the Board of Trade into three, dealing respec- tively with Wages, Statistics, and Labour Exchanges. It will be remembered that the Minority Report par- ticularly recommended the creation of a Minister of Labour ; and, certainly, if anything like business is meant, and not window dressing, a Minister of Labour with a Department and an Office of his own is needed. W e shall not believe that Mr. Lloyd George’s “war on poverty ” has been seriously begun until a General in Command has been appointed. The machinery of the proposed Labour Exchanges alone will be extremely complex, with its ten divisions and two or three hundred subdivisions. Add to this the existing machinery of Wage Regulation, the proposed machinery of Insurance, and multiply them, as they will need to be multiplied, by a dozen, and i t is plain that the Board of Trade Issachar will either break down under the burden or, worse still, drop the burden altogether. The appointment of a Labour Minister, intent, as all Minis- ters are, on magnifying his office, would be the best guarantee that substantial changes in the condition of the people would be made. *. * *

The only redeeming feature of the most reactionary speech even Mr. Burns has ever delivered occured to- wards the close of his remarkable address to the chance gathering at Carshalton on the 15th. “We have realised,” he said, “almost too late, that the stream of manhood is no purer than its maternal source.” And may we add that it rises no higher? For that sentence alone we’should be sorry if Mr. Burns’s speech had not been delivered, though how he squared it with his abuse of the suffragettes, whom he called “vulgar creatures “ and “female hooligans,” we cannot pretend to say. But the giant gooseberry of Mr. Burns’s address was his contention that “if the country knew its business properly it would relegate both the Poor Law Reports and the whole of the problem to the President of the Local Government Board (Mr. Burns himself) for his immediate consideration and attention, and for practical action whenever he determined. that action should be taken.” All he demanded was carte blanche with quar- terly reports to Parliament ! W e can only suppose that Mr. Burns has lately been reading Carlyle some- what intemperately, and has concluded, after his habit, that Carlyle’s Thou-art-the-Man doctrine applied to Mr. Burns and nobody else. Can nothing short of an elec- tion tidal wave in Battersea convince Mr. Burns that if the country knew its business properly it would relegate Mr. Burns to the scrap-heap? * * *

The time is rapidly approaching when one political party or the other will have to make up its mind to carry through precisely such a tremendous Poor Law transformation as Mr. Burns considers unnecessary. Destitution is now definitely known to be, in Mr. Webb’s words, a disease like fever, to be cured and not only relieved. The question is which party will first recognise that the methods of relief alone are useless unless they are supplemented by methods of radical cure. If the Labour Party has enough grit, the task, with all the honour and glory, may fall to it. If, how- ever, owing to purblind dissensions aggravated by such a spirit of intolerance of friendly criticism a s Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald have lately shown, the Labour Party refuses to rise to the height of the great argument, then let us be sure that the moribund

but not quite dead spirit of Liberalism or Tory Demo- cracy will come out of its grave to save the nation if the nation is to be saved. This century will settle the question of England’s existence as a great nation. I t may be that the gulfs of poverty will wash us down : it may be we shall reach the Happy Isles.

* + O

The Budget resolutions are dragging through the House without much animation. The Income-tax, Death Duties and Stamp Duties were disposed of this week, and Capital has still neither fainted nor flown. Mr. Lloyd George is too ready, we think, to offer solace to the Opposition to the detriment of his own future. It is all very well to grease the wheels of the Budget, but why pretend. the chariot is going East when it is going West? Mr. Lloyd George ostentatiously described i t as a “fair ” Budget, which distributed its burdens evenly over all classes. Also, he agreed with Mr. Balfour that if the many poor were to attack the few rich disaster would follow. Wha t nonsense, unless Mr. Lloyd George meant disaster for the rich ! Nor do we want a “fair ” Budget simply. Taxing thieves IO per cent. of their plunder is not “fair ” in our sense, though thieves would fain have us believe it.

* * *

Mr. Bernard Shaw, in the “Christian Common- weaIth,” completes Mr. Wells’s lively series of sketches of Socialist leaders by a sketch of Mr. Wells. Here it is :-

Wells is a spoiled child. His life has been one long pro- motion. He was born cleverer than anybody within hail of him. You can s e e from his pleasant figure that he was never awkward or uncouth or clumsy-footed or heavy- handed, as so many quite personable men bave been when they were mere cubs. He was probably stuffed with sweets and smothered with kisses until he grew’ too big to stand it When they put him to business he broke away and began teaching other people. He won scholarships, and had hardly turned his success over under hls tongue to get the full taste of it when he tried his hand at literature, and immediately succeeded. The world that other men of genius had to struggle with, and which sometimes starved

~ them dead, came to him and licked his boots. He did what he liked; and when he did not like what he had done, he threw it aside and tried something else, unhindered, un- checked, unpunished, apparently even undisliked. In course of tim.e he took to Socialism and joined the Fabian Society, where he was received with a distinguished con- sideration never accorded by that irreverent body to any mortal before or since. H e insulted it freely and proceeded to rearrange it according to his own taste. No pen can describe his conduct during this process. Take all the sins he ascribes to his colleagues: the touchiness of Hyndman, the dogmatism of Quelch Blatchford’s preoccupation with his own methods, Grayson’s irresponsibility; add every other petulance of which a spoiled child or a successful operatic tenor is capable; multiply the total by ten ; square the result; cube it ; raise it to the millionth power and square it again ; and you will still fall short of the truth about Wells. Yet, the worse he behaved the more he was in- dulged; and the more he was i ndu lged the worse he behaved. He literally cost m e personally over a thousand pounds hard cash by wasting my time ; for it fell to my lot to undo the mischief he did daily. At last he demanded : first that the order of public meeting should be abolished and he himself made both chairman and speaker when he ad- dressed the public ; and second, that the Fabian Society should pass a vote, not merely of censure, but of contempt, on its executive committee, in order that its old leaders should be compelled to resign and leave him sole Fabian Emperor. At this point any other man would have been hurled out of the society by bodily violence with heated objurgation. Wells was humbly requested to withdraw his demand as it was not convenient just then to serve him up Sidney Webb’s head on a charger. As a reward for his condescension in complying he was elected to the executive committee nearly at the top of the poll ; and I, because I had been the spokesman of our deprecation of the vote of contempt (selected for that job because it was known that I liked him and would let him down easy), was reproached for my brutality to the society‘s darling. He repaid these acts of faith by refusing to attend committees or do any routine work whatever, and presently resigned, writing a letter for publication at the same time to explain that he had done so because we were a parcel of sweeps. I never met such a chap. I could not survive meeting such another. I pause to read over this description of him, and am dis- couraged by its tame inadequacy-its failure to grapple with the outrageous truth.

M A Y 27, 1909 THE NEW’ AGE 91 I

Morality in Public Schools. THE significance of the International Moral Congress has been generally recognised ; but there is one point to which attention has not been drawn-the propor- tionate lack of representation from our chief educational centres, the public schools.

The problem of morality is, perhaps,, keener at the public schools than at any other school, elementary or secondary. The pupils are largely drawn from the leisured classes ; their home lives are comfortable, if not luxurious. Nowhere is the force of tradition more insistent or the tyranny of conventional ideas more irresistible ; and nowhere is the problem of morality more definitely shelved.

That the present state of affairs is eminently un- desirable is the conviction that prompts these remarks.

Metchnikoff has some strong words to say on the disastrous consequences to the race and to the individual of the postponement of marriage. Hardly less disas- trous, it might be said, is the complete segregation of the sexes during the greater part of early youth. What- ever may be the dangers and difficulties of eo-education it has this important merit : that it gives boys and young men the supreme advantage of female influence a t a time when its absence only too often means callous- ness and brutality. To many a boy of hardy disposi- tion, impervious to the infliction of punishment, the fear of detection, and the appeal of religion, feminine sym- pathy is the one- humanishg and civilising influence. Where this is wanting, his sentiments, such as they are, are warped by the coldness an,d severity of his masters. The consequence is that a boy’s sentiments, which should be his greatest asset, become his greatest snare. An exceptionable boy may have noble senti- ments : a few perhaps brutal sentiments ; but the senti- ments of the many are sentimental ; and sentimentality with boys is seldom anything but sensuality.

The fact is that at the public schools we are putting our boys and young men into the atmosphere of the Socratic circle. W e a r e placing them in a position where they find the only solution of their passions and impulses lies in the perverted sentimentality of the Greeks. This state of affairs must always arise when, a s in Athens, feminine society is impossible. Between girl and boy sentiment is not an unwholesome thing ; i t is often directly beneficial. But between boy and boy it is outrageous and invariably bad. To put it plainly : the girl of an attractive age has modesty, self- respect, self-assurance : she is considerably older in dis- cretion if not in years than the boy : she can wield a potent influence for good. This the attractive small boy can never do ; nor has he any of the other quali- fications : he is ignorant, malleable, and easily deceived by a suggestion of the “thing to do.’’ Success is his object, and the road to success he learns from the first tempter who comes al,ong.

Now the picture drawn is necessarily one-sided : it is the worst, but a common worst ; and as such is not exaggerated. The truth of it cannot be denied by any- one who has caught the communicative ear of the school-boy aesthete. The extent of the evil is not recognised in anything like its real proportions either by parents and the outside world, or even by school- masters themselves. The strictest clause in the school- boy’s code of honour is secrecy ; there must be no informing or anything suggestive of espionage on pain of the most unsparing ostracism and the keenest tor- ture, physical and mental. It is a clause that over- rides all other morality : it is morality. Unscrupulous

forgery of signatures is often an open secret in a school : but a boy who exposed it would be considered a barbarian of the most unnatural type. This being SO

it is intelligible that few adults, least of all school- ‘masters, should be aware of the evil. Nor can it be denied that there are boys of a reserved and guileless disposition who are practically ignorant of the whole matter. But the bright attractive boy? Next to im- possible.

The causes are in the main threefold. The first and most important is the accepted treatment of the ques- tion at home and at school. It ensures an inevitable glamour of mystery. Parents, guardians, and school- masters adopt the line of least resistance and ignore it : sometimes they have a far-fetched justification for their obscurantism. At any rate, the boy goes to school unprepared, expecting only an entirely different life. And a different life he finds indeed. If he has no dis- crimination to determine the limits of that difference, who shall blame him? Do we not all get our morality from the ideas with which we are brought into contact ? and how can an ignorant schoolboy be expected to do better? Perhaps he has had right ideas of a sort implanted in ‘him by a schoolmaster. But do we take so kindly to ideas from China or Mexico ? for the schoolmaster is, a t present, as much of a foreigner as Chinese or Mexican.

And that is the second cause. The average peda- gogue, so far as he is trained at all, is trained to think that paradigms and the Greek Text are sufficient for salvation. At any rate, with the question of morality he has neither the training, courage, nor inclination to deal. He quite frankly ignores it ; except when some poor regenerate’s confession brings a flagrant case under his notice, resolving itself quite simply into an expulsion or a flogging, his eyes are tight shut to the seamy patches that the greatest caution on the part of the criminals cannot always eliminate. It is depressing to hear the resignation of some young master who has not forgotten his own school days, and yet feels the hopelessness of attempting anything. Schoolmasters as a class are blind to the evil : they may know it, but will not see it. The more it is seen, the more expul- sions : the more expulsions the better certainly is the school ; not because expulsion is anything but a help- less confession of impotence, but because it means that there are boys who know and let know, and masters who act on the knowledge. They rarely see how much they are responsible for the boy expelled : they will.not see that if they cannot and will not forestall the need for expulsion, they as a class need tenfold expulsion. Their cardinal vices are hasty temper and lack of sym- pathy. With every allowance made for these failings -for what failings can you not find ample allowance?- the fact remains that they do render the schoolmaster’s influence for good extraordinarily ineffectual, however implicit the obedience or strict the discipline they ensure.

The third cause, as has been set forth above, is the entire absence of intercourse with girls. Nothing will do so much to check the peculiar intensity of undesir- able impulses, impulses which, owing to the subjection of women, ensnared Greek and Roman civilisation alike, as the sense of common manhood through contact with the opposite. sex.

These three, then, are the factors in the situation : traditional obscurantism, unsympathetic masters, and the congregation of boys of all ages unmixed with girls, Briefly, on what lines will Socialism bring reform?

The first point will cease to trouble us when class respectability is dead, with its frantic drea,d of the actu- alities of life and its comfortable shelving of responsi- bility upon charitable institutions and musty peda- gogues. When truth is a crystal and the search for truth no longer crystal-gazing, error will be robbed of its strongest ally.

Secondly, if there is one thing Socialism will not tolerate it is irresponsibility in the trainers of its youth,

92 THE NEW AGE MAY 27, 1909

The Athenians condemned Socrates for perverting : So- cialism will condemn school masters for being blind to perversion. If the teacher is not blessed with an amiable character and sympathetic disposition, the one thing he should not be is a teacher. That he should lose control of his passion and act unjustly will be an offence against the State. But until we have the public schools democratised and nationalised, we can hope for none of these things.

Co-education -is a corollary of the emancipation of woman. When woman is stepping into line with man in every other sphere of life, there seems no adequate ground for separating them into nunneries during their preparation period. I t will seem a preposterous para- dox to future generations that educationists should con- sider a fitting .introduction to citizenship to consist in segregating male and female into masculine and femi- nine communities, until such time as the instincts of both shall have been sufficiently warped that each shall have come to regard the other as either a plaything or a temptation. H. L.

“ The New Age ” in the Pulpit. BEING a religious-minded man, I read THE NEW AGE regularly, and never go to church or chapel. This purity of abstention is some solace to me for the deadly sins of my week-days, when I trade as a cheap-jack, carrying from dealer to dealer a portfolio of engravings and other painful art productions I would not hang in my own house. Last Sunday, however, was wet, and my situation in a strange, hideous town of blinded shop-windows and black umbrellas and glistening roofs and pavements, did not allow me to be moral. I went forth to see what the superstitious were doing, and thus it was that I witnessed the unexpected appearance of THE NEW AGE in the pulpit.

When I entered a small dissenting edifice the preacher was giving out his text : “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, and thou Moon in the valley of Ajalon.” I report the sermon here as best I can. It began with an account of Joshua, who lived a “ lonely unaided ” life, and of the situation under his leadership of the children of Israel, “taking possession of the Promised Land by the right which is might.” And still to-day, said the preacher (the reader must forgo any more quotation marks) might is right, and the only security or safe- guard of right. When shall we see a better day in England? When the people, by wisdom and justice, are mighty enough to take possession of their inherit- ance.

These words removed from my mind the contemptu- ous objection that it was little use-talking to people of the present day about Joshua, when it would be f a r better for them to hear about Bernard Shaw, and en- abled me to listen with patience to the description which followed of the battle of Gibeon. It was a better description, I will frankly admit, than one I carry in my portfolio, “Joshua addressing the Sun and Moon ”

-one of the most popular articles of my stock in trade, and now enjoying, through my introduction, a consider- able, and not to me personally unprofitable, sale in the Potteries.

But to return to my sermon. The preacher having got through with the battle, and having explained the Sun and Moon apostrophe as poetry which dull-minded men had, turned into the prose of miracle, went off a t a tangent to Copernicus and Galileo, of whom he said he was “reminded ” by the text a n d its history in the hands of Bible commentators. An extremely artful piece of construction, this “reminded.” I could show you from my portfolio far more unprincipled feats of composition, and justified by no such “end ” a s the preacher’s

“means ” arrived at. The story of Copernicus and Galileo and the battle with the Church deserves the retelling, and would redeem any sermon from dulness. I t is a marvel to me, there being so many interesting things to: be spoken of, that sermons are as dull as we find them. Are not sermons intended to persuade us that life is worth living, and does not Galileo put a little fire into you? With these thoughts of mine marching along with the preacher, we arrived together a t the name of Kepler at one and the same moment. Kepler was plagued by the Bibliolaters, but he held on his way, and finally delivered himself of a magnificent saying (I caught it in my order-book verbatim with the short- hand I learnt for a livelihood when my boyhood was being spoilt in an office) : “Sacred was Lactantius, who denied the earth’s rotundity ; sacred was Augustine, who admitted the earth to be round but denied the Antipodes ; sacred is the liturgy of our moderns, who admit the smallness of the earth, but deny its motion. But to me more sacred than all these is Truth.”

I retain but two more heads of the discourse. The preacher wrestled with them like Hercules with his hydra, and found as many again for each one he struck off. (Can I tempt you with an impression I have of this Hero at his labour? It was hung in the Academy. For every head Hercules hews away two more join on again, and the head in the centre is immortal. He will set fire to the mortal heads with the torch in the picture, and the great stone in the background is to bury what can’t be burned. You will read the whole story in Lemprière. . .)

I retain, I say, but two more heads of this sermon, which I fear I am disjointing. The first was about Piety. Kepler was a pious man, because he was true to the light that was in him. His saying about Truth carries a claim with it, a very far-reaching claim-that the man who trusts his own thought-trusts reason as it appears to him-inquires and searches for what he is to believe--puts away it may be many beliefs sacred to other people-this man is not an impious man. He is following the light of his life, he is pious to the Maker.

The second of these heads, I remember, was THE NEW AGE itself, which may have been the immortal head. At any rate, I am puzzled to explain how it came on the shoulders, hydra anatomy and sermon anatomy being as dark to me as anything in my portfolio. There was a neck to the head in this way. The preacher praised the man who was true to himself, and as an example to clench the matter he would instance . . . . (and here, to my astonishment, I saw THE NEW AGE enter into possession of the pulpit).

A little while ago, quoth the preacher-but now no longer-there used to walk about Putney an English- man who used to be pointed out to one another by the passers-by as a remarkable man, but no one seemed to be able to give any other account of him, or retain any other impression of him than that his trousers were ridiculously short. Putney used to make a great joke of Mr. Swinburne’s trousers, but otherwise to let-him go on his way. But it happened that an Observer of men, and a Knower of men, one day cast his eye by accident upon Mr. Swinburne, in Putney-and he could notice nothing but Mr. Swinburne’s face and head. “Never,” he wrote afterwards, “never have I seen a man’s life more clearly written in his eyes and mouth and fore- head. The face of a man who had lived unchangingly with fine, austere, passionate thoughts of his own. By the heavens, it was a noble sight. I have not seen a nobler.’’

So much-added the preacher-in the eye and mind of a keen observer of men, did the truth do for Swinburne, and so much might passion for the truth do for you and me.

Sir, when I heard these words of Mr. Jacob Tonson’s -as when I read them-I was lifted out of my seat, I was exalted. And it occurs to me that there is business in this thing. Could not you and your able contributor undertake to supply suggestions for sermons, illustra- tions, and the like, for liberal-minded preachers ; and might not I, with my opportunities for travelling and interviewing, make-myself useful to you in this matter, for a small commission ? HOLBEIN BAGMAN.

MAY 27, 1909 THE NEW A G E 93

A n Anglo-American Alliance. By Francis Grierson.

Two things will force England and America into a coalition of material aims and interests--the menace of famine on one hand and the menace of the yellow races on the other. America can never hope to grapple with the yellow peril single handed, England can never hope to avoid starvation without a binding political agree- ment with ‘the great Republic. All other dangers seem insignificant compared with the laissez faire policy now in vogue in regard to this all important question. Un- less we come to a working understanding with the Government and the people .of the United States, it would not be impossible for Germany to blockade our leading ports by means of air-ships, and that before very long. In the political balance France and Spain will always be problematical. In case of war France would soon be crippled by interior dissension and revo- lution. There has never been a political agreement based on material interests alone which has stood the test of a great crisis. Nothing founded on selfish in- terests will stand the onslaughts of change and the vicissitudes of national progress or disruption, and a commercial entente without a natural psychic attraction means nothing in the hour of political and social strain. France to-day would as soon join forces with Germany as .bind her forces to any compact with Anglo-Saxon interests if the French people thought they were losing more even a little more, than they were gaining. No one who has lived long in France can be deceived into believing that the deep animosity manifest by mil- lions of the people against the old order of French patriotism may not be turned suddenly against all monarchical governments. Present-day events and por- tents point to a Socialistic President in France within a short time. By what hocus-pocus of political art can we hope to cement the two peoples in a bond of un- interrupted harmony?

Has any diplomat in thls country figured to himself the position the King would be placed in were England bound to the precepts of a revolutionary Government in France? In my opinion, France can no more escape being governed by militant rulers in the near future than she can’ help being sceptical, logical, ironical and Gallic. All political agreements with European nations are but props and crutches. Italy and Spain will fol- low the example of France as certainly as the sùn will rise to-morrow, and even a t this moment Rome is governed by a Mayor more militant than the most revo- lutionary Parisian.

There are moments when. it seems as if this attitude of indifference seems predestined doom, and that nothing can make the slightest change in our progress towards overwhelming disorder. As I see it, one of the most disquieting signs of the times is the fixed idea so many people have that Germany and Austria will never make war on England while the Germans remain as they are now, friendly in outward appearance. In the first place, there will be no casus belli in the old mean- ing of the words.

The time is gone when the great nations will go to war like school boys in a passion. There will be no passion in Germany’s next war. It will be a war of cool calculation and cold blood. Englishmen who have not lived in Berlin do not understand the Prussian. Bismarck divorced the Prussian mind from sentimen- tality. The next war will be no dress parade show, but

a simple affair of calculated famine. The manœuvres will be directed not against the head and the heart, but against the ‘stomach.

Just after’ the Franco-Prussian war some French friends of mine described the conduct of the victorious Germans during the invasion. “The Prussians,” said my friends, “fought with.. the coolness of human machines which nothing could stop. The French sol- diers fought with a passion that soon cooled, the Ger- mans wïth a cold-blooded will that was crushing ; when they made raids. on private families in search of wines and provisions they did so with perfect politeness, but with pitiless determination. But if the Prussian in 1870 was a fighting automaton with a will wound up like a clock, what would he be now after forty years of drill, and discipline far more reasoned, far more despe- rate, than any training ever conceived by the Spartans at their best or the Romans in their supremest triumphs?

The danger menacing England is not now a military but an aerial danger. The old Roman question of feeding the populace is revived once more. We a re an exception’ to almost every case presented in history. We are an island, and in our beautiful dreams of eternal prosperity, dreams which have lasted ever since the destruction of the Spanish Armada, we have been hypnotised into a state of chronic lethargy, reduced to a condition of universal languor and semi-conscious in- difference. We are like men clutching at phantoms, while avoiding realities. The phantom just now is Germany, and no one seems able to see that the gravest danger lies not in anything military near us, but in the danger created by a distance of full three thousand miles of water, the danger of not having enough to eat. How is John Bull going to maintain the prestige of his proverbial corpulency? The old opium dreams of ease and opulence have gone on for ages, until the habit has become a second nature. This was the sort of security felt by the French nobles at the breaking out of the French Revolution, when hunger began to gnaw at the vitals of the Parisian populace. But the nobles were not saved. Nonchalance and sang froid are effective in the senate, the drawing-room, on the Stock Exchange, and in Rotten Row. But a hungry mob pays no respect to what it considers a mixture of political debility and social callousness. Even virtue appears vapid in times of violence, and the wisest words from the wisest orators fall like so much rain on a people tottering on the verge of ruin.

At the first intimation of famine there would be a general rush for food. The farmer would soon cease to sell and begin to hide his provisions against the time of his own hunger ; the people of the cities would rush for bread and flour ; for the first time in England the proverb “bread is the staff of life,” would suggest something hollow and sepulchral, for the very thought of being surrounded on all sides by hostile fleets or air- ships would of itself paralyse the moral faculties of half the population of these islands. The certain know- ledge of the close proximity of battle-ships every bit as formidable as our own, looming over the western horizon, intercepting, destroying, or delaying the mer- chant steamers arriving from America., would appal the most courageous hearts. All would feel the crushing imminence of the new danger. Not a shopkeeper, not a butcher, or a baker, not a draper er a store-keeper, not a stockbroker or a banker, not a bishop in his palace or a lord in his castle, not a publican or a poli- tician, but would be made to realise the paralysing effects of impending ruin. All bombast would cease. Pride and prejudice would sink like a rotten log in the

94 THE NEW AGE

social quicksand. Nothing would remain as it was. The island known as England would appear like a ship parted from her moorings, gone from what seemed fixed and eternal. To draw an antithetical picture of what would happen to the highest and lowest social grades in such an emergency we have but to scan the doomsday pages of Jerusalem, Rome, Carthage, and, above all, to contemplate the “wonders and terrors ” of the French Revolution. In every instance doom was achieved by hunger. Even in cases where the city had been provisioned for a long stat,e of siege‘, hunger at last was the doom of all. I t is the lack of imagination that renders so many people in London, Liverpool, and the great manufacturing centres content to live on year after year in a state of chronic apathy, they, the very people who would be the first to feel the slowly accu- mulating horrors of starvation. The two classes most steeped in apathy are the millionaires and titled- rich on one hand and the irresponsible poor on the other ; the first have many things to lose, the second, nothing but their lives, to which they would cling with frenzied tenacity. The rich live in mock security, thinking it an easy affair to escape in yachts, steamers, motors, etc. An attempt would be made to cross the water by night, but the danger on the water would be greater than the danger at home, and the first thing the Govern- ment would do would be to put the people on short rations. Then all the available orators throughout the land would be set to work to talk to the people. The people ! Alas, yes ! For the people hate the pangs of hunger even more than the gouty member of Parlia- ment, so often advised by his physician to starve him- self for a week or two as a cure for his aches and dis- orders, The rich would find the first weeks of the blockade rather exciting and agreeable. But the man in the street would begin to growl on the very first day famine cast her grim shadow across his path. On him, the hungry man with a family of starving children, sermons, speeches, and reasoned editorials would pro- duce no effect. The Government would be blamed, all political parties would be blamed, and the end of famine would be a pandemonium of drunkeness , frenzy, and destruction. The Paris Commune would be repeated with this difference-the ruin wrought in London would be incalculably greater. In France the Parisian .mob caused the destruction, which was principally confined to Paris, but in England all the great seaports and manufacturing centres would come under the fury of the populace, rendered insane from drink taken from the helpless publican around whose doors would swarm the sturdy vagrants and lazy hordes vomited from every portion of the land as if the lid had been lifted from some long-hidden inferno under our very feet, suddenly, without noise or warning. In the universal fury and confusion one party would blame the, other, rage and dismay would seize on all, a chorus of curses and vituperation would arise to drown authority and urge the remnant on to national annihilation. Forty- eight hours of cumulative’ delirium and horror would wipe out a thousand years of accumulated civilisations.

(WHOLESALE & RETAIL),

J EDGE, 155, HIGH HOLBORN, LONDON W.C.

May 27, 1909

M. Debussy’s Musical Impressions. Translated by Mrs. Franz Liebich.

IV. An Open Letter to M. le Chevalier C. W. Gluck.

(From “ Gil Blas,” February 23, 1903). Sir,-Shall I write to you, or shall I summon you to

appear? My letter, very probably, would never reach you, and possibly you would decline to quit the abode of happy shades to come and have a chat with me about the future of an art in which you excelled to a degree sufficient to make you desirous of being left out of the endless discussions which are continually disturbing it. I shall, therefore, make use alternately of writing and the art of evocation, and I shall endow you with an imaginary existence which will permit greater freedom of intercourse. I hope you will pardon my want of admiration for your work ; I will not, however, forget the deference due to one so illustrious as your- self. After all, you were a court musician. Royal hands turned the pages of your manuscripts, while painted lips leaned over -you and smiled their approval. You were worried a good deal by a certain Piccini, who wrote upwards of sixty operas. Your fortitude thus bore the brunt of customary laws which ordain that quantity comes before quality, and that Italians shall always obstruct the progress of music. So completely forgotten is the above-mentioned Piccini that he has had to change his name to Puccini in order to get his works performed at the Opéra Comique. Moreover, you could not have attached much importance to those endless controversies between elegantly erudite abbés and dogmatic encyclopaedists ; they talked of music with a n incompetence which you would only find equalled in our present world. And though you might have liked to show your Independence by conducting the first part of “ Iphigenie in Aulide ” without wig and in your nightcap, it was of greater importance and more to your .advantage to please your King and your Queen. But, as it happens, your habitual intercourse with these high and mighty persons has given your music an air of almost uniform pomposity : if it has to express love it does so with majestic decency, and even grief has to execute preliminary curtsies. Whether it is more elegant to please King Louis XVI or the society of the Third Republic is a question which your “moribund ”

state prevents me from answering in the affirmative. Your art was, therefore, essentially one of pomp and circumstance ; it was not in close sympathy with the people. They watched others passing by (the fortunate . . . . the satisfied). You represented for them a

kind of wall behind which something was taking place. We have changed all that, M. le Chevalier, we claim

to be social, and we want to make our way to the hearts of the people. Things are not greatly improved thereby, neither have we any cause for greater pride ! (You cannot imagine how many difficulties there are in the way of our founding a popular opera.) In spite of its “luxurious ” side your art has had a great deal of influ- ence. on French music. One finds traces of it first of all in the work of Spontini, Lesueur, Méhul etc. . . , it contains the seeds of the Wagnerian formulas, and this is insufferable (you will understand why presently). Between ourselves, you are ill acquainted with the laws of prosody, for you turn the French language into one of accentuation, whilst it is, on the contrary, one that conveys many shades of meaning (I KNow . .. are a German).

Rameau, who helped to shape your genius, has given

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MAY 27, 1909 THE NEW AGE 95

examples in his works of refined and vigorous declama- tion, of which you might have availed yourself to some purpose. I do not want to appear ungracious, so I Will not speak now of Rameau’s powers as a musician. W e are indebted also to you for making the dramatic action predominate over the music. Is this to be admired? On the whole, I prefer Mozart to you ; he overlooks you altogether, the worthy man, and does not concern him- self with anything but music. In order to exercise this predominance you chose Greek subjects, thus affording opportunities for all the consequential nonsense which has been talked about the so-called relation between your music and Greek art. Rameau was a great deal more of a Greek than you (do not lose your temper, I will soon take leave of you). And what is more, Rameau was lyrical, and that suited us in every particu- lar ; we ought to have remained lyrical and not waited for a whole century to elapse before becoming so again.

It was through making your acquaintance that the unexpected chance befell French music of falling into the arms of Wagner. It pleases me to imagine how, without you, not only this would not have happened, but French music would not have asked its way so often from those who were chiefly interested in sending it in the wrong direction.

To conclude, you have profited by the number and the falsity of the interpretations which have been given to the word “classic ”; the invention of that dramatic ron-ron which ruins all good music is not sufficient to sanction this classifying of your name with the classics. Rameau has more serious claims to the title.

For the sake of Madame Caron we should once again regret your death, She made your Iphigenia an in- finitely purer classic figure than you had imagined. Not a gesture or an attitude but what could be described as perfect.

All the depth of feeling which you omitted to give this character was restored to it by her. Each one of her movements seemed composed of music. If you had been able to see the way she went up and sat close to the sacred tree before the sacrifice you would have wept, so much was there of supreme grief in that simple act. And when at the close of the opera you unite the loving Iphigenia to the faithful Pylades in the bonds of wedlock Madame Caron’s countenance was illuminated by such a radiant look that one lost sight of the hack- neyed conventionality of the dénouement .in order to admire the violet colour of her eyes, a favourite hue, as you know, of those who are always dreaming of Greek beauty. With the assistance of this woman your music dematerialises itself ; one can no longer label i t with a precise date, for, by a gift which makes one believe in the survival of the ancient gods, she possesses the histrionic power of drawing aside the dense veil which enshrouds the past and giving renewed life to those dead cities in which the worship of Beauty was harmoniously combined with that of a r t

M. Cassira would have pleased you with the charm of his voice, and M. Dufranc by the convincing manner in which he bellowed Orestes’ transports of rage. I did not care very much for the Scythian entertainment in the first act, which has something in it akin to the moujiks and to the sports of a brigade of stablemen. Permit me to inform you that your warlike divertisse- ments are difficult to execute, and there are no definite indications to be found in either the music or its rhythm. Rest assured that to all the rest M. Carré gave the exact setting that was needed.

Whereupon I have the honour to remain, Monsieur le Chevalier, Your very humble servant,

CLAUDE Debussy

Music in the Open Air (From “ La Revue Blanche,”

Voici venir le temps oû vibrant sur sa tige, Chaque musique militaire s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir !

May Baudelaire kindly excuse me. Why, after all, should the enlivenment of our squares and. promenades remain the sole monopoly of our regimental bands? It

-pleases me to imagine some yet unthought of fêtes more in harmony with their surroundings. Are not these bands a solace after long, weary marches and the delight of the boulevards? Military music embodies all the patriotic sentiments existing in the heart of each separate individual. It is a link between the little pastry cook and the old Monsieur, both of whom are thinking of Alsace-Lorraine, though neither of them ever men- tions the subject. Far from me the idea of depriving it of these noble prerogatives ; but I do maintain that among trees it makes a noise like an imperfect phono- graph !

Amidst foliage there should be a large orchestra assisted by the human voice. (No ! thank you, not any choral societies !) I foresee the possibility of orchestral music specially adapted for the open air, all of broad outline, of daring vocal and instrumental effects, which would revel in the free air and soar gaily over the summits of the trees. Such and such a harmonic suc- cession which might sound abnormal in a close concert hall would be estimated at its right value out of doors ; perhaps one might even find means to do away with those little hobbies connected with too exact an idea of form and tonality which are such tiresome hindrances to the progress of music. The art might gain new life and learn a fine lesson of freedom from the budding leaves ; whatever it might lose of minute charm would surely be regained in amplitude. It must be under- stood that i t is not a question of striving for “ big ” but for extended effects ; neither is it a matter for tiring the echoes by making them repeat an unreasonable amount of sounds-but rather to profit by the prolonga- tion of the unsubstantial harmonies. Then there would be a mysterious collaboration of the air, the motion of the leaves and the fragrance of the flowers with the music. And by being intimately united with these ele- ments music would seem to be a component part of each and all. Then, at last, one might decidedly determine that music and poetry are the only two arts that extend themselves in space. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that in this idea there is something to exercise the thoughts of future generations. But I am afraid that for us, poor contemporaries, music will continue to smell rather close.

June I , 1901.)

Genius or Superman ? ?

[Translated from the German of Karl Heckel by J. M. Kennedy, with the special permission of Mr. Maximiiian Harden, in whose paper, “Die Zukunft,!’ this article first appeared.]

I I , NIETZSCHE clearly points out how mankind may be uplifted. But even the question as to how these non- humanitarians will have to think about setting practic- ally to work does not offer any difficulty. ‘Their task is to found an oligarchy ,over peoples and their interests -an oligarchy, that is to s a y of higher beings, whom, however, we must not think an oligarchy i n the sense that our present political conditions wou;d give to the word.

It was already Nietzsche’s wish that the g o d Euro- pean should be distinguished for his bravery of head and heart, and he now expected of the higher man that his superior virility should urge him on to attain to the greatest possible power over things-that he should discharge his strength. In the place of the old im- perative “thou shalt,” hè bought forward a new one, the “ I must” of the super-powerful man, the creator, This instinct is not to be looked upon as blind ; there should be a motive for every action. It is nut to be

96 THE NEW A G E M A Y 27, 1909

regarded as unrestrained ; for the commander should have control over his powers. But neither is it to be thought yielding and compliant ; for the creator of new values must not be influenced by humanitarian ideals. The master virtue, the breeding virtue, is that which can overcome even pity for the sake of the far-off goal:

Even when in this way we have united a few of Nietzsche’s disconnected thoughts, it is clear that we have advanced within reach of a new manly ideal. W e forget to enquire about “happiness,” for we are quite satisfied with the conviction : a gigantic strength in man and in mankind desires to discharge itself. The quantity and powerfulness of this strength determines the value of a person. We must no t think this strength homophonous ; there are so many conflicting desires and impulses in man. W e recognise that innumerable instincts are fighting against one another, and we call the man strong who rigorously suppresses them all. On the other hand, we look upon the highest man a s the one who combines within himself the greatest ver- satility in the greatest relative strength of each quality. The man who achieves this synthesis is master of the world.

The superman is the genius who no longer suffers from any discord ; the scientist who knows no self- abandonment ; the seer who lapses into no fanaticism : a man, in other words, who, despite his keen intuition, despite his wide and high knowledge, despite his ethical goal, despite his intellectualism, remains a true, har- monised man : not heavy and dull ; but light : for every- thing that is halcyonian is thought necessary for this greatness.

No mere humanitarian age can lead to such a splendid blossoming of manliness, which can be brought about only b y a higher culture. Of course, .the rais- ing of type means first the raising of the level. But it thus follows that, above this Ievel, there is still another degree of ascension : the production of a few isolated individuals under conditions of culture in which, so to speak, -they may take root and grow up. Only when we can fully grasp the consequence of this ascension can we understand the sense in which Nietzsche pro- claimed : “ Behold, I teach you superman ! ”

If the genius stands in opposition to the non-culture of his time, and its tendencies, we can on the other hand look up to the superman in all his harmonious synthesis, controlling his spontaneity and counter- actions, as the natural product of a coming higher culture. In the superman we find individual and com- munistic powers harmoniously combined : the -commu- nistic powers of a future ruling caste. That is what is new in Nietzsche’s conception as compared with the cult of geniuses and heroes in former times. And here especially there is a point which students of Nietzsche take so little into consideration, viz., that their master did not remain an individualist.

The superman was for Nietzsche not only a “warning cry,” not only the infinite possibility of a development, or a permanent postulate ; but an ethical ideal-an ideal that hovers before us like a product of the imagination : no mere half-way house ; yet nothing that makes the aim aimless, an,d, as it were, ideally objectises the infinity of development ; but, so to speak, a theoretical picture which, a t a certain determinable stage of our culture, is thought to be practicable. Says Nietzsche explicitly : “the superman is our next step.”

Did this supreme type never exist before? Certainly, comparatively often, says Nietzsche, but it was an accident, an exception ; not something wished for. He was looked upon as terrible ; something portentous ; and people turned to the creation of the opposite type :

(‘the domestic animal, the herded animal, the sick animal man ; the Christian.” But Nietzsche was con- vinced early in life that by the application of suitable inventions and discoveries a higher type of great indi- viduals could be raised than those who had appeared hitherto solely by chance. He was not unaware of the fact that the men of to-day possessed enormous strength of moral feeling ; but his conviction became stronger and stronger that they had no end in view towards which all their strength might be directed.

Where does this goal lie? In contrast to the state- ment of Draper, the American writer, who declared that there might never .be-indeed, should never be- any more great men, Nietzsche remained faithful to his early conviction : “The goal of humanity lies in the highest specimens of man.” He went even further, and asserted that the single aim of humanity should be the production of great men. “This and nothing else ! ’’ After this, can we doubt for a single moment that he did not picture the superman as a degree of excellence readily attainable by everyone ; but rather as the highest possible summit of an imaginary picture of life? His command never runs : “ Become a superman,” but : “Contribute your share to the formation of a culture which will one day enable the superman to be be- gotten,” “ Act as if you wished the superman to be begotten out of yourself.”

If we cannot conceive that this theory would have been propounded had not Darwin’s victory over the mythological conception of the world previously taken place, this by no means shows that Nietzsche bears any relation to or was in any way influenced by Darwin ; for, in addition to Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, Copernicus and Kepler, Newton and Harvey, and the Kant-Laplace theory of the formation of the world, all took part in this victory over supernatural- ism. I t would have been Darwinism if Nietzsche had pointed out a higher stock in the expectation that .this would take the place of man. This notion was utterly foreign to him. The problem that concerned him was not what kind of a being should succeed to man in the course of ages ; he looked upon it as his life’s task to answer in a new way the question : Which type of man shall be reared? Which type of man will be more valuable, more’ amiable, more sure of himself? W e find in all his writings the varied, ever-differently ex- pressed answer to this question, and we find the exhortation to conquer weakness by strength, and to oppose a manly ideal to the effeminate morality of our age.

The transformation of the present order of things by means of a transvaluation of all values in respect to a higher ideal : this is Zarathustra’s teaching. Zara- thustra, this inmost wish of Nietzsche, may with some reason be considered as the incarnation of the super- man. Nietzsche himself explained later on : here you see the man being superseded every moment ; the con- ception of superman has become reality, everything that was once called man now lies a t an immense distance beneath him.

Nietzsche advanced beyond his age in that he did not keep his gaze fixed on low ideals, but boldly declared : “What you think great is not great enough.” He wondered why Goethe should have conceived a Euro- pean culture which should include the entire inheritance of all the humanism hitherto attained, and he deemed it his own task to raise this European ideal to a far higher level. His statement, “Man is an end,” adequately testifies that he did not believe in the possibility of a new race in the Darwinian sense ; but looked upon the creative process as completed. In spite of the efforts of Tille and others, therefore, no important conformity with Darwin will be found in Nietzsche ; whilst, on the other hand, it can probably be shown that Nietzsche, as he owes .the word superman to Goethe, carried Goethe’s concept several stages further on as soon as he perceived psychological receptivity to be a prelimi- nary to a higher breeding.

(THE END.)

MAY 27, 1909 THE NEW AGE 97

Stendhal and England.* A NUMBER of Stendhal’s admirers have for some years formed a kind of “Stendhal Club.” While the members live principally in Paris, it must not be assumed that the society is exclusive, and that the club is wrapped in mystery, which is the view held by many of Stend- hal’s English admirers, who look upon the club with a feeling of awe. If we correctly understand the spirit of the preface to the second volume of the Stendhal Club “ Soirées,” anyone who has for Stendhal “un goût vif, une sympathie comprehensive une discète ardeur ”

is entitled to consider himself a s belonging to’ it. Thanks, moreover, to the efforts of several French “ members,” principally Messieurs Striyenski, Paupe, Arbelet, and Bélugou many of Stendhal’s papers have been “exhumés ” in the Grenoble museum and pub- lished, including three complete novels, a mass of corre- spondence, and various fragmentary pieces. The two “ Soirées ” include several papers hitherto unpublished. Miss Gunnell is an Englishwoman who wrote this French work on Stendhal and England as her thesis for the University of Paris doctorat. I t pleased the authorities so well that they recommended her to pub- lish it, a recommendation for which every admirer of Stendhal has reason to feel grateful.

Before we proceed to quote from these books, how- ever, we must request some of you old-fashioned Eng- lish cri t ics to leave the room. You have your learning and abilities in. certain departments, we admit ; but for you Stendhal is an insufferable egotist, a heartless eroticist, an immoral monster, and heaven knows what not. When the first of the great modern psychologists is mentioned, your ultra-puritanical skins tremble with a quiver of anguish : the great heart of England, especi- ally a s represented by the literary critics of ‘the “Daily Telegraph ” and the “British Weekly,” must not be outraged. Lift your skirts, gentlemen, turn up your prim noses, shake your seraphic locks, and be off. As yet you have no clear conception of what psychology is. (Immortal Gods ! didn’t a reviewer in a recent number of the “Academy ” give his readers the impression that it was something the elements of which could be taught in a laboratory by the use of tuning-forks?) When Mr. Courtney writes about the Greek dramatists we are willing to listen ; but when he writes about men he does not understand, as he did about Nietzsche not so long ago, he must be restrained. Dr. Robertson Nicoll writes admirably when reviewing the works of young Scotchmen. What the “ British Weekly ” generally serves up as literary criticism, however, comes under another category. It is like cheap margarine sold as best butter-permit us, benevolent reader, to digress.

We have frequently asked ourselves how Dr. Nicoll produces what he is pleased ta call his criticism. W e have often wondered how his weighbridge works- that curious balancing machine which results in his see-saw sentences : “ But if . . . . still,” “Although . . . . yet.” Every pro is followed by a contra just like a schoolboy’s; composition. These sentences al- ways remind us of another kind of balancing. In volunteer camps-our Territorial friends will understand the allusion-we have sometimes seen the human frame endeavouring (with some dificulty) to retain its equili- brium on a pole at the end of a field. When we read Dr. Nicoll’s criticism we fancy we can see his mind performing a similar balancing trick. . . . We beg the good Doctor’s pardon for the comparison. . . . Com- parisons are indeed odorous, as Dogberry said long ago ; and we trust this one will not pain any modern

*Soirées du Stendhal Club, I, II : Documents inédits de Stendhal. Edited by Casimir. Stryienski, Paul Arbelet, et L. Bélugou. Paris: Mercure de France, 3 fr. 50 per vol. “ Stendhal et L‘Angleterre,” par Doris Gunnell, préface de M. Ad. Paupe. Paris : Bosse, 6 fr.

Dogberrys, who have time and again, in the literary columns of various papers, written themselves down -what Dogberry wanted himself to be written down as. If it does pain them, however, we recommend them to soothe their feelings by reading Dr. Nicoll’s “Songs of Rest.” We have an old-fashioned, maiden aunt who finds them very congenial-yea, inspiring.

When we consider the parlous state of English cul- ture, and note the standard of intelligence shown in the average English literary criticism, we need not be astonished that Stendhal is known here to only a few, while on the Continent the circulation of every one of his books runs into scores of thousands, and the litera- ture surrounding him steadily continues to grow. Nietzsche awards him splendid praise in the “Ecce Homo ”; but does the average English reader under- stand what Nietzsche’s praise means?

Miss Gunnell’s book is all good : let us translate bits of i t at random.

The English pedantry was his [Stendhal’s] great aversion. Finding a meeting of the Academy very dull and irksome, he beguiled the time by painting an imaginary picture of a similar ceremony at Edinburgh. “ Instead of being lively, brilliant, tolerable,” he wrote, “ the meeting would be tiring, melancholy, Puritan. The Rev. Mr. Jarvis would begin by lecturing on the religion of savage tribes. He would be followed by an Oxford professor, who would speak for two hours about the length of a foot in a certain Greek verse. Then we should have to take up a subject of practical utility-and someone would treat us to a long discourse as to the best way of cultivating green peas. After this we should have a poem on an autumn fog that overspread the cemetery in which the composer had buried the remains of his mother. The meeting would conclude: with a heated discussion as to the respective advantages of railways and

Miss Gunnell states Stendhal’s views with lucidity and accuracy, as in the following instances :-

The same causes that prevent the Englishman from being witty also prevent him from enjoying the fine arts. The first essential for their enjoyment is a passionate soul; but, in Englishmen, all passions are annihilated by the hard necessity of labour. Besides, Protestantism proscribes all passions as immoral-which simply means that an inclina- tion for the fine arts is killed at one blow. If h e has not felt the fire of passion, the man of the finest taste possible would never be able to see the fine arts except through a veil.

canals.)’

Speaking of English painters :- [The English school of painting] can lay claim to some

distinguished painters : West, Lawrence, Constable. Not that any of them is a true genius. Indeed, Reynolds is the only painter that England has produced ; Lawrence, “the .wonderful Sir Thomas Lawrence,’’ has the sole merit of being able to depict the expression in one’s eyes, and he is inferior to Ingres. Constable is better. In spite of his negligence and his lack of an ideal, he charms by the naiveté of his coIouring and the truth of his painting. “ I wish, however,’) says Stendhal, “that he would hold his mirror up to some splendid vista, and not to a cartload of hay fording the sleepy waters of a canal.” Here he at once lays his finger upon the weak spot in English taste. Both in literature and in painting it has often been reproached with its want of elevation. c

Why are the English such a sad nation? ’Our sad- ness, says Miss Gunnell, is a result of the protestant religion, excessive work, and the climate. But Pro- testantism is the main reason :

‘The climate,’) says Stendhal, boldly, “ is the same as the climate of Koenigsberg, of Berlin, of Warsaw ; and the inhabitants of these cities are far from showing their melan- choly to the same extent. Their working classes have less security than the English working classes, and drink just as little wine as they do. . . . I see only one difference: In cheerful countries the Bible is little read.”

The amusements of young Edinburgh ladies are re- ferred to with truly Stendhalian wit and humour ; but it is time for us to put these volumes reluctantly away. Some day we may have a complete English translation of Stendhal ; but at present our obtuse public does not deserve it. And before he is translated we must have critics of sufficient mental grasp to avoid measuring Continental thought by English rule of thumb.

J. M. KENNEDY.

98 THE NEW AGE M A Y 27, 1909

Books and Persons. (AN OCCASIONAL CAUSERIE.)

THE death of George Meredith removes, not the last of the Victorian novelists, but the first of the modern school. He was almost the first English novelist who-se work reflected an intelligent interest in the art which he practised ; and he was certainly the first since Scott who was really a literary man. Even Scott was more of an antiquary than a man of letters-apart from his ,work. Can one think of Dickens as a man of letters, as one who cared for books, as one whose notions on literature were worth twopence? And Thackeray’s opinions on contemporary and preceding writers con- demn him past hope of forgiveness. Thackeray was in Paris during the most productive years of French fiction, the sublime decade of Balzac, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo. And his Paris sketchbook proves that his attitude towards the marvels by which he was surrounded was the attitude of a grocer. These men wrote ; they got through their writing as quickly as they could ; and during the rest of the day they were clubmen, or hosts, or guests. Trollope, who dashed off his literary work with a watch in front of him before 8.30 of a m.orning, who hunted three days a week, dined out enormously, and gave his best hours to fight- ing Rowland Hill in the Post Office-Trollope merely carried to its logical conclusion the principle of his mightier rivals. What was the matter with all of them, after a cowardly fear of their publics, was simple brutish ignorance. George Eliot was not ignorant. Her mind was more distinguished than the minds of the great three. But she was too preoccupied by moral questions to be a first-class creative artist.. And she was a woman. A woman, at that epoch, dared not write an entirely honest novel ; nor a man either ! Between Fielding and Meredith no entirely honest novel was written by anybody in England. The fear of the public, the lust of popularity, feminine prudery, senti- mentalism, Victorian niceness-one or other of these things prevented honesty. Mind, I do not wish to belittle the Victorians quite out of existence. I can read Jane Austen for ever. The others please me less, in the following order : Dickens, Trollope, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot. Thackeray I regard as chiefly despicable, save in one or two short works ; an arrant craven and snob, with a style absurdly overpraised. Many years have passed since I could read from end to end of any book by ‘either Dickens or Thackeray. Yet I have sincerely tried.

* * * To read “ Richard .Feverel ” after, say, “ Pendennis ”

or “ Esmond,” is like eating grapes after turnips or bread-and-Crossme-and-Blackwell. What a loosening of the bonds ! What a renaissance ! Nobody since Fielding would have ventured to write the Star and Carter ‘chapter in “Richard Feverel.‘” It was the an- nouncer of a sort of dawn. But there are fearful faults in “ Richard Feverel.” The book is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of the excellent Charlotte M. Yonge. The large constructional lines of it are bad. The sepa- ration of Lucy and Richard is never explained, and cannot be explained. The whole business of Sir Julius is grotesque. And the conclusion is quite arbi- trary. It is a weak book, full of episodic power and overloaded with wit. “Diana of the Crossways ” is even worse. I am stiIl awaiting from some ardent Meredithian an explanation of Diana’s marriage that does not insult my intelligence. Nor is “One of our

Conquerors ’’ very good. I read it again recently, and was sad. In my view, “The Egoist ” and ‘‘Rhoda Fleming ” are the best of the novels, and I don’t know that I prefer one to the other. The latter ought to have been called “Dahlia Fleming,” and not “ Rhoda.” When one thinks of the rich colour, the variety, the breadth, the constant intellectual distinction, the sheer brilliant power of novels such as these,. one perceives that a Thackeray could only have succeeded in an age when all the arts were a t their lowest ebb in England, and the most middling of the middle-classes ruled with the Bible in one hand and the Riot Act in the other.

* * * Meredith was an uncompromising Radical, and-what

is singular-he remained so in his old age. He called Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s nose adventurous at a time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain’s nose had the ineffable majesty of the Queen of Spain’s leg. And the “Pall Mall ” haughtily rebuked him. A spectacle for history ! He said aloud in a ball-room that Guy de Maupassant was the greatest novelist that ever lived. To think so was not strange ; but to say it aloud ! No wonder this temperament had to wait for recognition. Well, Meredith has never had proper recognition ; and won’t have yet. To be appreciated by a handful of writers, gushed over by a little crowd of “thoughtful young women,” and kept on a shelf uncut by ten thousand persons determined to be in the movement-that is not appreciation. He has not even been appreciated as much as Thomas Hardy, though he is a less fine novel ist. I do not assert that he is a less fine writer. For his poems are as superior to the verses of Thomas Hardy as “The Mayor of Casterbridge ” is superior to “The Egoist.” (Never in English prose literature was such a seer of beauty as Thomas Hardy.) The volume of Meredith’s verse is small, but there are things i n it that one would like to have written. And it is all so fine, so acute, so alert, courageous, and immoderate.

* * * A member of the firm which has the honour of pub-

lishing Meredith’s novels was interviewed by the “Daily Mail ” on the day after his death. The gentleman interviewed gave vent to the usual insolence about our own times. ‘ (He belonged,” said the gentleman, “ t o a very different age from the modern writer-an age before the literary agent ; and with Mr. Meredith the feeling of intimacy as between author and publisher- the feeling that gave to publishing as it was its charm- was always existent.” Charm-yes, for the publisher. The secret history of the publishing of Meredith’s earlier books (long before Constable’s had ever dreamed of publishing him) is more than curious. I have heard some details of it. My only wonder is that human ingenuity did not invent literary agents forty years ago. Then the person interviewed went grandly on : “ In his manner of writing the great novelist was very different from the modern fashion. He wrote with such care that judged by modern standards he would be considered a trifle slow.” Tut-tut ! I t may interest the gentle- man interviewed to learn that no modern writer would dare to produce work a t the rate at which Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray produced i t when their prices were at their highest. The rate of pro- duction has most decidedly declined, and upon the whole novels are written with more care now than ever they were. I should doubt if any novel was written at a greater speed than the greatest realistic novel in the world, Richardson’s “ Clarissa,” which is eight or ten times the length of an average novel by Mrs. Humphry Ward. “Mademoiselle de Maupin ” -was done in six weeks. Scott’s careless dash is notorious. And both Dickens and Thackeray were in such a hurry that they would often begin to print before they had finished writing. Publishers who pride themselves on the old charming personal relations with great authors ought not to be so ignorant of literary history as the gentle- man who unpacked his heart to a sympathetic “ Daily Mail.” JAcob TONSON.

MAY 27, 1909 THE NEW A G E 99

Whited Sepulchres. By Beatrice Tina.

CHAPTER V. A GRAND BAZAAR was being held in aid of St. Paul’s. Mrs. Thomas Heck, attractively gowned in a green velvet pina- fore dress, with chemisette of white silk chiffon, had charge of the art stall. Upon the stall was a collection of fans and plaqes and cards; and two screens formed the back- ground--the whole jobbery of amateur ’rubbish being the work of the lady who was selling it. The prices were absurdly high, but many people were only too flattered to be able to possess anything done by dear, clever Mrs. Heck! Her goods were going rapidly, an,d she chinked her money bag in a prettily commercial way.

Suddenly, Mrs. Heck caught sight of a stranger in whose ways and means and person she had been interested for some weeks. H e was a real (‘tall, dark, distinguished stranger.” It was he who had bought “ The Willows.” .She had not met him personally; but his mother, whom now he was leading towards a divan, had called in response to Nan’s cards. H e was followed up by the minister’s wife, and in a moment or two Mrs. Heck saw that the lady intended to bring him to purchasing point. The two presently advanced together towards the Art stall. Mrs. Heck was minutely examining a f.an with a broken handle.

((Dear Mrs. Heck, may I introduce Mr. Raymond Cattle, one of our latest acquisitions,. you know? Mr. Cattle, Mrs. Heck is the genius of our- little gathering. Now, I will leave you to her tender mercies, and I hope ”-she shook a playful finger--“ I hope she will ruin you, positively ruin

D e l i g h t e d , ” explained the gentleman. “ Mrs. Heck, please ruin me all at once. Sell me anything on the stall, and then let me take you over to the lea-rooms for consola- tion. You are the prettiest woman in the whole bazaar.”

Mrs. Heck was certainly astounded, and she stiffened her smile. But it was bazaar-time, and tile compliment was prodigious, and Mrs. Heck was caricaturing the shop-girl. She relaxed, “IF you do not behave you shan’t buy a single thing, and anyway, I mustn’t sell the whole. stall outright- that is,” she added, innocently, (‘unless you give me every- thing back to sell over again.”

Mr. Cattle was on the point of vowing that she was only too welcome to the blessed lot, when the fair lady said : “If is all my own work, you see, and several people might-never forgive me if I have nothing for them when they come, presently.”

Mr. Cattle overcome by his narrow escape from a dreadful faux pas, immediately acted upon her suggestion, bought the stall, paid, and re-presented the goods.

(‘Now do come and have tea,” he urged. “I want you to talk to my mother. She’s awfully interested in you. Come along. ”

I t was a fair excuse, and Mrs. Heck resigned her stall to a young assistant. Mrs. Cattle decided not to move for tea, but sent the pair away by themselves; the dear old lady having most engaging faith in the safeness of her son with a married woman. I t was possible daughters-in-law whom she discouraged, having no fancy for relinquishing the reins of his household just yet.

“You’ll forgive my outrageous speech, won’t you-two lumps, please-I was absolutely charmed out of prudence by your incongruity. in this ridiculous mob. I’m afraid I should have said it to a princess. Have some of this angel cake ? “

! “ She smiled herself away.

“I shall report you to the Reverend Wales.” “ Don’t do that. He thinks I’m sinner enough, already.

Lectured me for going to Italy last Lent-more than the chap at St. Mary’s did. Been to Italy, Mrs. Heck? ”

“No ; it is one of the dreams of my life to go there.” “Come with me. No, no-I didn’t mean that. Sit still.

Mrs Heck, I wish you’d take me in hand and reform me. I need some really good woman, with spirit and that, to influence me. My mother says so herself, but somehow or other I can’t just find the girl for her. There are seeds in this bun. I hate them. Remind me of a day I spent out on the prairie, when I thought I was lost for ever. I had only a seed-cake .for twenty-three hours.”

“You have travelled a great deal ? ” “ Oh, everywhere ! Europe, Asia, Africa, ‘Merica ’Stralia ;

there’s nowhere left to go. It’s all a bore. Do YOU know, England seems the best little island, after all. For a month, I suppose. Whoever’s this coming? ”

Mrs. Fisher approached them determinedly. “ Dear Mrs. Heck,” she simpered. “ Do forgive me for interrupting you. There’s a fan I want ever so much, and it is marked three and six. Can’t you let me have it for a little less? I have only a shilling left. I’ve really spent pounds too much here, but do SO want something from your s t a l l

Mrs. Heck, alert and decorous arose “ We have finished

t ea Mr. Cattle, pray excuse me. Duty calls.” She went away with the troublesome intruder.

“Dam smart, upon my word ! ” reflected the distinguished traveller. “ Very chic and provoking. “

Mrs. Heck, inwardly burning a t being thus obliged to leave him, but fearing Mrs. Fisher’s comment, settled the question of the fan in the mean woman’s favour, the which she might do with an easy mind since Cattle’s generosity had placed her beyond anxiety as to returns. ’Then she busied herself with the re-arrangement of the goods yet un- sold. She needed some-occupation to conquer a throbbing confusion into which the flattery of the handsome man had plunged her. She felt inclined to stand about and do nothing but try to recall his words. Her thoughts leaped. “ How impertinent. . - . How .strange. . . . What eyes. . . . Beautiful voice. ‘ Won’t you reform me? ‘ H e needs a pure woman. . . . But he mustn’t think he can say what he likes to me. . . . Still, there was nothing. . . . I’d better be a little stately.” . . .

Mr. Cattle came over to the stall to bid her farewell. She arranged her eyes in. their chastest expression, and softly said: “,Grow white, Black Sheep.)’ H e responded by a n extra pressure of her hand. “ My mother is going to bring me to call on you to-morrow. YOU must commence my reform at once. Au revoir-au revoir, Mrs. Heck-you are truly an angel.”

She dressed in white the next afternoon. About four o’clock a vexatious thing happened. Unexpected visitors arrived; a maternal aunt and two cousins. Instantly Nan began to hope that Providence would detain the Cattles at home. She was conscious that Mr. Cattle might appear just a little unusual to Aunt Lizzie. However, at four-thirty sounded the ring of the front-door bell.

For his decorous behaviour during the whole succeeding hour Mrs. Tom Heck gratefully thanked and applauded Raymond Cattle. Also, she resented it. Not the faintest trace of the gay gentleman of the bazaar peeped out; not even when, at a little precious moment of handing tea, her white figure obscured him from the rest of the group-he never so much as looked at her eyes, and their pure, pro- tecting glance was wasted. H e carne and went like the most perfectly polite and uninterested stranger that ever might be.

Mrs. Heck took off her white gown and tried to persuade herself that all was exactly as she wished. But Nan-the old romantic Nan-had been born again in the bazaar tea- room, and she asserted herself, dreaming, sighing, twitching that obstinate nostril, and pursing again into fulness those lips so long trained into a tight, pale line of repression. Over and over again, Nan informed Mrs. Heck that Mr. cattle was a disconsolate but beautiful-mannered gentle- man : just as often Mrs. H. told Nan that he was a roué (cir- culation-library word) who had no real desire to be reformed at all. Finally, the composite personality of these two ladies decided to wait and see, and not to judge hastily a man whose soul was certainly in a perilous state, and who, perhaps, had thought her a little off-hand and unsympathetic.

They encountered next under circumstances which for- bade, even in Nan’s ëyes, any expression of mutual under- standing. Tom Heck, having met his client at the Broad- way, the two gentlemen had walked along together, and to such a friendly chap as Mr. Cattle proved himself, Tom Heck thought he might venture an invitation to take an informal dinner. The invitation was accepted, and once again Mrs. Heck found herself face to face with an indif- ferent resemblance to the sinner who had cast himself upon her saving grace. However, there was no possible objection. in this instance. The least familiarity would have stiffened Mrs. Heck into a pillar sf salt, and she would certainly have protested against her husband’s encouragement of such a creature to visit her home.

But Mr. Raymond Cattle had been born among the Heckites; and although a legacy, in addition to his moder- ately-large fortune as the posthumous son of his father, had lifted him rather out of bourgeois circles and into those of the globe-trotter, he had not forgotten his early impressions. He was well aware, for instance, that in com- porting himself as though Mr. and Mrs. Heck were one flesh, and that flesh Mr. Heck, he was obeying the most ineffable of all the ineffable canons. SO he took very little notice of the woman, but was exceedingly polite to the man’s wife, drawing her now and again into the conversation, which was mostly about houses and the military, in a pointed and superior manner, absolutely satisfactory to Mr. Tom Heck’s masculine mind. And Mrs. Heck submitted as though she had just finished reading St. Paul.

But on the morrow morning she met Mr. Cattle, who was crossing Crone Common on horseback. He dismounted while she was yet yards away.

“What luck” he exclaimed. “I was beginning to fear I should never see you again. I‘ve been in torment since Tuesday--that far-away, sacred Tuesday. Really, dear Mrs.

100 THE NEW AGE MAY 27, 1909

Heck, did you think it necessary to be so chilling with me at that awful afternoon tea-and yesterday? Am I so dan- gerously wicked in your pure eyes? ))

Nan grasped the facts in a moment. He had been suffer- ing from doubt of her sympathy!

“ I meant no aspersion, Mr. Cattle. I merely thought my aunt might not quite understand any appearance of friend- ship between you and myself. Still, I hope you will con- tinue your new behaviour. I t is a great surprise to find you can be serious.”

“ Oh, what a shocking insinuation ! Mrs. Heck, I’m the most serious chap in the world. I was nearly driven to the arms of his unholy majesty again because I thought you believed me below redemption. You don’t, do you? “

“ No, indeed. But, .you ‘see, people talk so” “Yes, they see evil ln innocence itself, don’t they? Now,

when may I see you again, dear Mrs. Heck. I must see you. I’ve never met anyone in my life who ever made me feel a quarter as good as you do. ’Pon my honour ! I dreamed of you last night. You came and stood with a lot of lilies in your hand and stars in your hair, like-er-who is it- Rossetti’s angel ? “

Nan swooned right back into her maiden romance. “You mean the ‘ Blessed Damozel,’ “ she cried, ecstatically. “ Oh, fancy. I never gave you credit for loving poetry.”

“Oh, really, Mrs. Heck! I’m afraid you think very meanly of me, indeed. “

“Never again,’, she vowed. “Oh, Mr.. Cattle, don’t you love a r t ? “

“Oh, rather! As a matter of fact, I’m going abroad again, after all. The galleries of Italy call me irresistibly. You really must go to Italy some time, Mrs. Heck. You would seem like one of the pictures suddenly brought to life and walking about, still an angel but also human. Beautiful ! ”

“ When do you go ? ” asked Nan, not caring to cover her disappointment.

“Would you be sorry? Really ? Then I won’t go at all. After all, there are tons of tempations when one is abroad and lonely, and these last few days have given me a glimpse of something purer, you know. Mrs. Heck, I say, won’t you happen to be in the Royal Academy to-morrow morning about eleven? This year’s pictures are something tremen- dous. There’s one takes up half a wall to itself. St, George and the Dragon, by some new chap. And he’s awfully original. Old George has got a guardsman’s uniform on. It’s rippin’. “

“ Oh, Mr. Cattle, you mustn’t ask me to do things like that. Why, half my visiting list might be there.”

“But there’s nothing surreptitious about it. You see, I go alone-you go alone-we meet-naturally ! “

Nan hesitated one instant. Then she shook her head negatively. “ I t wouldn’t do at all.”

“Well, shall you be at the ball on Friday week? “ “You mean the church deficit ball ? You know the

Bazaar. went off splendidly. We took over five hundred pounds, and it was only a scratch affair. If this ball is a success the church will be absolutely free to begin the new decorations.,’

“ Then, of course, you mean to go and support i t ? ” “ I suppose I must-though I don’t care much about balls.” “You will give me a dance, won’t you ? “

“ Oh, I scarcely ever dance. I don’t waltz very well.,’ ‘I’ll make you. I could make a stick dance-let alone an

“ I shan’t make any promises. ” “ Anyhow, you’ll be there.” “YES ; I must be there. ” “Well, I suppose I must drag myself away now. But you

“ My day is Thursday.” He made a wry face, but accepted ,the hint. “ Thank you

very much. I t is too good of you to allow me to come any- where near you. Farewell-my dear lady.” He mounted his horse. “And don‘t judge me too harshly ! Goodbye.”

Several times that day, and very, very often during thc week, Nan found herself regretting her prohibition. The daYs passed to Thursday without a sign that Mr. Cattle still existed. He was not in church at either Sunday service, and a sudden access of pedestrian energy on the part of the infatuated woman resulted in nothing more consoling than fatigue. On Thursday she attired herself with extraordinary care in the tightest blue voile, with trimmings of faint rose. All to no purpose. Mr. CattIe did not come. Her only pleasure during the whole weary afternoon was in hearing some comments upon the “sweet Cattles,” “his beautiful silver-haired mother,” “ a perfect model of a son, and so generous,” etc., etc.

Nan took off her pretty blue dress and her rosebuds in a mood of sulky resentment. Raymond Cattle seemed mysteriously neglectful of opportunity to imbibe .the atmo- sphere of puri.ty. After all, she was, perhaps, a little too pure for him. Men were gross creatures. But then there

angel. “

will let me know before Friday week? I shall call.’;

was the fact that Raymond absolutely adored art. He read such high things as the “Blessed Damozel.” He had pur- chased her whole art stall. He frequented picture galleries --was actually going to Italy just to revel in the old masters. He was a strange mixture of good and bad.

Suddenly, she wondered if he might be ill. Ill-and miserably, vainly longing for her-his guardian angel ! Strange to say, the possibility that he had been stricken down began to comfort her.

She was almost gracious to her husband when he came home to tea. But she was presently disconcerted. Tom Heck casually mentioned that he had received a letter from Mr. Cattle from Paris.

Nan blurted out : “ Has he gone for good “ She hurried on : “ What a queer person he is. I’m afraid the church won’t profit much by his riches, after all.”

“He’s coming back, all right. He wants a tennis lawn made. ,Some of our gay girls’ll be snapping him up pre- sently. Do him good to settle down, I should say.”

Mr. Heck repeated the old platitude without a shadow of intentional humour; yet his own marriage might have been supposed to have cured him of belief in the efficacy of the contract.

“By the way, I shan’t be at the ball to-morrow. I’ve got to go to Scotland.”

“ Oh. “

“ You’ll go, I suppose” ‘(If Mrs. Wales will chaperone me.” “Small doubt of that. The artistic, saintly, pious Mrs.

Heck! “

And with this sarcasm, said in the roughest and coarsest tone, Tom Heck flung himself off to his nocturnal amuse- ments.

Mrs. Heck dreaded this mood of active hatred in her partner. From experience, she knew it to be the precursor of equally brutal displays of affection. She could scarcely bear life during the hours which elapsed before his midnight return. And then followed one of the private scenes which are none the less poisonous to civilisation through being legalised, and none the less deadly to the persons who enact them, though they do not result in murder. Nan la throughout the long, dark hours, wide awake and watchful and assuredly this Christianly-wedded wife would have sym- pathised with Clytemnestra, had her literary researches ever led her to a knowledge of’ that ill-mated pagan.

Next morning the Christirln lady appeared to pour out coffee for her obnoxioushusband ; this preservationof decorum being, of course, one of th,e most ineffable of the rules. Soon, after his departure she received a telegram conveying his in- tention to stay the week-end in Scotland. She breathed deep and ran about the house like a girl again. Even the absence of the .sinner in gay Paris did not succeed in depressing her until the time came to dress for the ball. Then, indeed, her regret and disappointment misled her so far as to set her wondering what on earth she was going for at all. She did, not cease dressing, however, and after a final survey in her mirror, arrayed in the richest of pink brocades, with her golden hair piled and curled to its last possibility, on her cheeks a little guilty touch of rouge and powder, and in her blue eyes already a rehearsal expression of detachment from pleasure in such things-ready at last to step into the livery carriage-she went forth amid the compliments of the house- maids and the cook.

(To be continued.)

THE SOCIALIST MEDICAL LEAGUE request the pleasure of the company of Medical Men, Dentists, Medical and Dental Students at a Meeting

to be held in the THRONE ROOM, HOLBORN RESTAURANT

On THURSDAY, June 3rd at 4 o’clock

Dr. J. Jenkins Robb (of Bournville)

“ The Nationalization of the Medical Profession,”

(Newton Street entrance)

will open a discussion on

Chair to be taken by Dr. SALTER, L.C.C. Hon. Sec., DR. DAVIDSON, SHEPHERDS BUSH, LONDON.

Clifford’s Inn School of Journalism. Correspondence Lessons if desired.

Miss L. M. MAYHEW, Send for prospectus to Principal,

IO, CLIFFORD’S INN, E.C.

M A Y 27, 1909 THE NEW AGE 101

Verse. “ Personae of Ezra Pound. ” (Elkin Matthews. 2s. 6d. net.) “ The Well in the Wood.” By C. M. A. Peake. (Oliver,

“Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart.”- Epigraph to Personae.

MR. POUND is a poet with a distinct personality. Essentially, he is a rebel against all conventions except sanity ; there is something robustly impish and elfish about him. H e writes with fresh beauty and vigour ; and revolting against the crepuscular spirit in modern poetry, he cries :- I would shake off the lethargy of this our time, and give For shadows-shapes of power, For dreams-men. “Is it better- to dream than d o ? ”

Aye ! if we dream great deeds, strong men, Hearts hot, thoughts mighty. No ! if we dream pale flowers, Slow moving pageantry of ours that languidly Drop as o’er-ripened fruit from sallow trees . . And the songs and histories of the old Provençal poets being at his command, the bitter-sweet vision of Dante part of his emotional existence, to them he turns for the personae of his dreams. Whoever has read anything a t all of the Troubadours cannot but admire the colour and intense energy of their lives : battle and love and song succeeding each other, entered into with the same ardour and passion, the hot meridional sun beatifig itself into all. Bertram of Born-strange, wild figure of songs and war, that troubled, the peace of an English Henry. Arnaud of Marveil-son of a serf and poet, admitted to court the Countess of Beziers, banished when too im- portunate, Peire Vidal-who ran as a wolf because his lady’s name was Louve, brought back fainting, all fanged by the hounds-masochism before the man. They move in Mr. Pound’s dreams ; but whether his strengthening and’ beautifying of them with EngIish verse will give us heart, I do not know-or, rather, I fear we shall lose heart in watching them ; for, it seems, the world is in the grip of a dragon against which, so far, has appeared no effectual Saint George.

Let us once and for all acknowledge what Mr. Pound owes to Browning, his mediaeval poets, mystics and thinkers, and, perhaps, a little t o Mr. Yeats and Thomp- son ; and take his poems as poetry, without reference to sources of raw material. I think there is sufficient c‘raft and artistry, originality and imagination in “ Personae ” to warrant one in giving them high praise. Mr. Pound writes in a free form of verse that will not, I hope, lead him into the wastes. He is working towards a form that other English poets might study.

How can one quote? Coupez donc un sein B une femme belle, said Verlaine. I like in La Fraisne the well-imagined raving of Miraut de Garzelas, whose mad- ness took him to the woods :-

I have curled ’mid the boles of the ash wood, I have hidden my face where the oak Spreads his leaves over me, and the yoke Of the old ways of men have I cast aside. By the still pool of Mar-nan-0tha Have I found me a bride That was a dog-wood tree some syne. She hath called me from mine old ways, She hath hushed my rancour of council, Bidding me praise. Naught but the wind that flutters in the leaves.

This book is as tufted with beauty as the bole of an old elm tree with green shoots ; and, as I cannot quote all, I give one poem entire :-

Newbury.)

Aye ! and, No !

AND THUS IN NINEVEH. “Aye ! I am a poet, and upon my tomb Shall maidens scatter rose leaves And men myrtles, ere the night Slays day with her dark sword. “Lo ! this thing is not mine Nor thine to hinder, For the custom is full old, And here in Nineveh. have I beheld Many a singer pass and take his place In those dim halls where no man troubleth His sleep or song.

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Everyone knows that the English theatrical world is in a parlous condition. Everyone knows that, according to the point of view, the actor, or the author or the manager or the public is to blame. Mr. Arnold Bennett, in an engaging preface to his play “ Cupid and Commonsense,” dissects every issue of the question with great skill and insight.

“ There is a great deal of well-drawn character in Mr. Bennett’s play. . . . We should like to Bee the play performed often and well; it has

Morning Leader. immense life and freshness; above all is not machine-made.” --The

introduction by which Mr. Bennett prefaces his work is a discourse full “ Though neither so Interesting or so important as the play itself, the

of pointed remarks about the present state of the drama, the bad business of which all theatrical managers complain the inexhaustible

and the promise o f t he new spirit in play-writing. Mr. Bennett holds growth in the younger generations of new expectations from the theatre

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observed, interesting, and thoughtful play of four acts in plain modern of Mr. Bernard Shaw. His piece, accordingly, an ably constructed, well

treats its theme as that writer might be expected to treat it were he less prose, without any sort of smart dialogue or other theatrical ornaments,

and reads as if it would prove still more effective and enjoyable when witty and less ironical than at his best he is. , . . . The play reads well,

to be seen there than they are.”--The Scotsman. acted. The stage would be healthier if such pieces were more commonly

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And many a one hath sung his songs More craftily, more subtle-souled than I ; And many a one now cloth surpass My wave-worn beauty with his wind of flowers, Yet am I poet, and upon my tomb Shall all men scatter rose leaves Ere the night slay light With her blue sword. “ I t is not, Raama, that my song rings highest Or more sweet in tone than any, but that I Am here a poet, that doth drink of life‘ As lesser men drink wine.”

As Omar did. One must read “ Na Audiart, Praise of Ysolt,” a fine piece of work, “An Idyll for Glaucus,” to appreciate Mr. Pound’s quality. Perhaps he \was him- self among those whom he saw coursing and crying :-

‘“Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting, Bid the world’s hounds come to horn.”

The wind swept round the earth to make that last image ; it has the matinal gusto Keats heard in Keane’s delivery of

Be rising with the lark to-morrow, gentle Norfolk. I do not like the forms evan’scent, ’thout, ’cause, and

“ Quasi KALOUN ” S . .T. says “ DAEMON,”

has no right in a poem. But Miss Peake (wh.0 is the translator of “ Sword and

Blossom Songs ”) strengthens old dreams in a more practical way. She tells me that her masque, “The Well in th.e Wood,” has been written for village children to play at a small theatre in a wood at Newbury (Berks) on July 28, Besides writing the masque, she designs the dresses, stage-manages, and gets her cousins, Francis and Geoffrey Toye (musical critic of “ Vanity Fair ”) to write the music. I think this is admirable, and draw Mr. Ernest Rhys’s attention to Miss Peake’s work. In the preface to his masque, “The Quest of the Grail,” he points out how suitable the masque is for playing in a wood or garden. But I venture to say that Miss Peake’s work merits a larger audience than a country village can give. The theme is a s old as the heart of man ; the lyrics have a beautiful, familiar ring in them, though one might be re-written ; the prose, a haunting’quality, and, if I may say so, with all deference to the wise of the earth, a keener, more essential, and more stringent literary power would have made of this masque something like a masterpiece. As it is, it is most skilfully written ; the interweft of motives being exceedingly well managed. Briefly, the witch Nature in the wood, with her children, the Green Dancers, who tend the flame of Life, waits for an Earth-child to appear who will tell her the vision to be seen in the Pool that is th,e mirror of the dance of life and death, which must continue until the Vision is seen. Anon comes a beggar-maiden singing of thc Town of Heart’s Delight :-

Where, in all this weary world, Stands the Town of Heart’s Delight? Which, of all the seven seas, Splashes on her ramparts white ? Which, of all the winds that blow, Points her golden vanes this way? City of the Heart‘s Delight, Sought to-day and yesterday.

And then three Princesses come to claim the Gifts o f the sword of Conquest, the Key of Treasure, and the Mirror of Beauty ; but with these gifts they can see only their own faces in the Pool, and so the Spirits of Earth, Fire, and Water erstwhile their slaves, conquer and stupefy them. But the Beggar Maid saddens at the sight, and to wake them she accepts the Gift of the Harp of the Winds, which she had before refused, and looking into the pool she sees first the face of the Witch Mother, and then the radiance of the Vision, which she is unable to bear. So turning to the sleeping Princesses, she wakes them with th,e song of the Quest of the Town of Heart’s Delight, and they, seeing now in the Pool each her vision of the place, go forth to build the Joyful City. But the Beggar Girl and the Witch Mother know that never in this world shall it be found, and the Girl goes wandering with her music to awaken men’s sleeping hear t s and the . Mother still waits for the’ Ear-th-child, who is to see the Vision that shall end her task.

The dominant note in this masque is the Song of the Quest, but there are deeper chords and suggestions. Make what you like of it. But remember that two only of the Mother’s children could watch the actions of men, and they thereby had become a kind of Bouvard and Pécuchet. The dragon of inertia and stupidity which holds the world in its power, as surely as Andromeda of old, shall only be killed, maybe, by those, the poets, who, like Miss Peake and Mr. Pound, know the free joy in the heart of the Beggar Maid. But Mr.’ Pound has not yet given us that song. It is open to him.

F . S. FLINT.

DRAMA. “ Samson “ at the Carrick. I HAVE not read M. Bernstein’s play in the original, but as presented in the English version it seems a medley of worn-out and ignoble ideals. There is not a single character in the play fit t o be alive-in fact, they are all unutterable cads, though M. Bernstein tries to persuade us that his hero and heroine are in truth golden-hearted.

The Marquis and Marquise d’Andeline, finding them- selves at low water financially, marry their daughter to a “ self-made ” navvy, now King of the Bourse. Anne Marie martyrises herself to please her mother, but tells Brachard that she does not love him, and bargains that he shall expect nothing in return for his passion. When they have been married for some time she takes a lover-or as nearly so as no matter. Brachard discovers it through a disreputable supper- party to which Le Gorain takes Marie, apparently in order to compromise her. In revenge he ruins the man by the manipulation of Egyptian Copper Stock--an investment which he himself has advised. The accom- plishment of this entails his own ruin. Anne Marie is so overwhelmed by this proof of jealous passion that she throws herself into her husband’s arms in spite of ruin and disgrace.

The woman is, I think, the most despicable of the crew. W e a r e told that she is proud, high-bred, and that her fettered soul craves for freedom. Looking into these supposed characteristics of hers one finds that they are perfectly meaningless. Marie Brachard is nothing better than a slavish hussy, ready to knuckle down soon enough when her husband threatens to beat her. She admires him then, and when ,he further sports this great strength of his by ruining a few thousand individuals in order to revenge an outrage on his love of property, this admiration knows no bounds. She offers to stick to him, not because he is ruined, but because she cannot tear herself away from the seduc- tion of the man who has shown that he may at any moment thrash her. Her high-bred self-control col- lapses, of course. She taunts her husband for his dock-man origin, and betrays her mother to a man she is supposed to hate. As for her soul-craving for free- dom, that resolves itself easily into a desire to commit adultery the first time her husband is away for a night. Her conduct is admirable, it seems, when she runs away from Le Gorain and his supper-party. Yet, surely, no woman would care to be caressed by a lover rolling drunkenly on the floor, certainly not a daughter of the “fourth oldest family of France.’’

The golden-heartedness of Brachard is not more clear to me. Does it consist in refraining from importuning his wife with caresses after the first week? Surely not, for he had done his best to drag pleasure from th,e union, and if his sensibilities were too fine for that, what more could he do? It’s true he made money for his parents-in-law, but they were his hold on Society.

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He forgives his wife for compromising herself, or phil- andering, or whatever it was she did--but, then, he wanted her. The mean tricks he plays in order to discover her secret hardly bear out the golden-hearted- ness either--for instance, he takes advantage of having once helped a woman (Elise Vernette) out of a scrape. to force her to betray his wife.

And yet Bourchier makes him lovable, and even fine. But then, Mr. Bourchier is something of a genius--it takes as much to make Brachard tolerable. It is glorious to watch this actor, he does understand the game so well. He knows the effect on an audience of the Stock Exchange atmosphere, when the upper circle can see great high-sounding sums handled, can feel itself adventuring tremendous enterprises with the com- fortable consciousness a t the back of its brain that nothing is really going. to be lost. He manages his very effective smile so aptly that one could believe it to he a hundred smiles, though it is one smile- there is very little real variety of emotion and so much art. What a fool Anne Marie was to waste time--not to yield at once ! For her navvy is not the man to count the price risen because of a little paltry resistance -he is a clear-sighted devil.

The cast was an excellent one, though the villain- lover Mr. Charles Bryant, certainly was rather funny. The Adelphi can never have produced such. Miss Edyth Latimer gave a very clever performance as Elise, though now and again she spoilt herself by what must have been indecision as to whether her part were in- tended for the villainess--match of Mr. Bryant’s. Poor Miss Latimer, I hope that the audience appreciated how painful any artist must find it to submit to the awkward gropings after the decorous terms by which it demands that a midnight orgy shall be described. Marie Illington, the Marquise, put all the humanity she could into her impossible part, and Miss Pamela Gay- thorne played delightfully as Clothilde, Madame Brachard’s maid, though the genius of her performance was purely English. Mr. Kenneth Douglas was irre- sistibly young and cynical as Anne Marie’s brother. Miss Violet Vanbrugh is an astonishing artist in colour and form ! Nothing could have better expressed Anne Marie’s tender frailty and delicate unhappiness in the first act than the clinging white dress, with its sudden gleaming veins--tinsel, I suppose. Then, too, the cloak she wears coming from Le Gorain’s supper-party -a scarlet Pining for suggestion of vicious surround- ings, but purple over all, showing her outraged pride and high breeding victorious. The third act dress, perhaps most wonderful of all, was sombre and severe, but as she moved to her husband in tender, pleading curves, flashes of hopeful light scintillated. They were wonderful metal trimmings, I sometimes regret that Miss Vanbrugh ever risks a jar to the harmony of her art by venturing the speaking voice. N. C.

ART. On the Methods of Picture Shows. THERE is a collection of a couple of dozen or so pictures now hanging in one of the rooms at the Goupil Gallery which has set me thinking : of Mr. Henry Bishop’s art in particular, and of the habits of picture shows in general. Mr. Bishop has entitled his collection “The Colour of Tangier.” Within the limits of that subject, he has given us a very fascinating series of works ; which impress the mind in a far more vivid way than the miscellaneous odds and ends that gather themselves together on the walls of the usual exhibition. There is an organic link between each of these pictures of Tan- gier, which is most restful to the onlooker, who cannot jump all over the universe in the course of investigating the four walls of a gallery. Do not for a moment imagine that Mr. Bishop is limited in his range ; for he is not. He seems equally appreciative of the hard blue or a cold sea, and of the misty dazzlingness of the hot market p-lace. He paints morning, noon, and night with equal relish. He has all kinds of subjects on his canvases ; but with the delicate taste of the real ‘artist,

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104 THE NEW AGE MAY 27, 1909

he never attempts to put down two things a t the same time ; because he knows, as every great painter has known, that the first essential of a picture is that it shall gather all its power into the most intense display of one thought. The canvas has, only one surface, and it can deal with but one idea, if the mind of the onlooker is not to be confused. And Mr. Bishop can make so much of a single idea. For example, observe (in 12) the limitless interests he finds in the bare ground of an almost empty market-place in the blaze of the midday sun. I say it is empty ; but, in fact, the artist has filled it with the one subject of eternal interest to the painter-the sunbeams. Out of bare ground and a bare wall, and just a few almost invisible human forms, Mr. Bishop has made a picture of unending sug- gestion, which lures the mind into pure sunlight, and all the emotions which follow thereon. Of the same simple perfection is the more sombre “Market Place, Winter Evening.” . There is a delightfully healthy note of unaffectedness and want of pose about all Mr. Bishop’s art. He almost tricks one into the belief that he is merely out to expound the geography and the topography of Tangier. In .short, he conceals the machinery of his art ; he is subtle.

* Y *

Perhaps the supreme advantages of a one-man show, and, still further, the fact that the one man kept within one particular subject, was driven home by the imme- diate transition to the New English Art Club Exhibition in Suffolk Street. I suppose it would be possible, if one were in the pink of training, to go round such a collection without losing breath. There are many works of great excellence : but what a jumble they all make side by side on the same wall. It is not the special fault of the New English Art Club : it is com- mon to all these annual collections. I t is not much more sensible, when you come to think of it, than play- ing Bach and Wagner simultaneously at different ends of the same concert room. For it is impossible to pro- perly detach one picture from all the others immediately around it. The argument that oné does not look a t two pictures at the same moment, does not amount to very much ; for there are few minds so athletic that they can leap over the wide mental ditches and hedges of the ordinary exhibition wall. The result is overstrain ; and no one can learn much when one i s in a state of ‘intel- lectual panting. In short, these mixed shows give us too much for our money. W e ask for pictures, and they smother us in them. Perhaps, to tell the truth, the bulk of the pictures do not count one way or an- other. Most of them are quite sincere attempts to say what has been said numberless times already, and what very often was too obvious to need saying at all. But at the New English Art Club there are the works of a half dozen of the men who really count. . I t would be a bold person who ventured to assign Mr. A. E. John his place in the temple of future fame. He is so original in his methods. Take his big “The way down to the sea.” It is impossible to judge those weird women by any ordinary standard ; for one has never by any chance seen their like ; and if they ever\ got -in a public-place they would be surrounded by a crowd of small boys hoping that something was going to happen -it would be difficult to say exactly what ! Cet the small boys would be right ; something is going to happen. There is the note of original, unexpected thought about John. Where it leads I don’t quite know. Mr. William Nicholson’s “ Carlina ” is more easily placed. I t is a truly magnificent study of the nude, which plays Velasquez at his own game, and beats the famous National Gallery “Venus ” off the field. Mr. Orpen has just missed making a fine picture of his “The dead ptarmigan ” by forcing the flesh of the man’s face out of tone with the rest ; it jumps out of an otherwise perfect harmony. And there is also a lack of complete unity about Mr. W. Rothenstein’s fine portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Booth : or, rather, they just miss being very fine. The many caricatures by Mr. Max Beerbohm are just perfectly delightful fun and perfectly delightful art, but praise of Mr. Beer- bohm is now a commonplace.

It. is grievous to say so, but the Carfax Gallery has comparatively failed this time. For one thing, its walls are hopelessly overcrowded ; and only a limited num- ber of the pictures of Mr. Neville Lytton and Mr. C. L. Geoffroy are of importance. Mr. Geoffroy’s water- .colours of French landscapes are gentle and refined ; and his dancing studies of Isadora Duncan contain some remarkably vivid impressions of that dancer at the greatest moments of her art. Otherwise this show is unnecessary : except perhaps Mr. Lytton’s portrait of Adeline Genée G. R. S. TAYLOR.

Recent Music. A Summer Idyll. I HAVE been trying hard all the afternoon to review a couple of books on Musical Form. But I find it difficult ; for my immediate environment consists of trees and grass and wild-flowers, and in the air there is the music of running streams, the scent of lilac and hawthorn, the infernal cacophony of the birds, and a few million midges and flies. (There are also some tame horses browsing near me, and I keep thinking they are like my old college professors-the resem- blance in two instances a t least being most subtle and strange.) How can I get myself into a mood reveren- tial enough to treat this subject seriously with all these flies and things buzzing about? Here I have two books-one by Miss Margaret H. .Glyn* and the other by Mr. Clarence Lucas,+ and both of them are talking about the same thing with the same monotonous voices One book on Musical Form is surely a symptom, a very grave symptom, of an insidious disease, and two an epidemic ; and I have never quite seen the use of epi- demics. It is difficult to, see exactly. what purpose these excellent books fulfil, because if they are intended for the young student they will not do ; they are too general and are not written in a n interesting enough way ; and if they are intended for the grown-up musi- cian, I’m afraid he wou!d have too many excuses for not reading them. For my part, I believe in letting the young student who has any imaginative gifts a t all run about wild with a little text book o.f half-a-dozen pages to play with. Ponderous tomes like these are monstrous futilities, invented by people who, as. a rule, were by the gods bereft of imagination and humour the moment they began to learn their Czerny exercises.

Musical art has reached that stage of development when its theorists have become self-conscious. To-day they are just aware of the ridicule that is poured on their works, and every writer who comes along with a new text book on the old subject (“filling a long-felt want ”) is more bland and unctuous and deprecating than his predecessor. He presents you with thread- bare platitudes about evolution, about this form having been discarded for that form about the “present tran- sitional conditions of musical thought,” in the firm belief that thereby he excuses himself for writing about the relation between the tála of the East and the Irish jig. Now, the tála of the East is a subject about which, naturally, very few Western musicians know anything. I know nothing of the subject myself ; from time to time I have heard Eastern minstrels playing and sing- ing, but my memory is of strangely beautiful melodies and unfamiliar rhythms-that is all. But of Irish folk- rhythms, as it happens, I have a n intimate personal knowledge, and I have .never yet come across a book which has dealt adequately or truthfully with the subject, or a part of the subject. For most musical theorists base their theories upon what other theorists have been writing for centuries ; and so they cheerfully pass on the ancient lies from one unsuspecting gene- ration to another.

* * Y

* * * I do not insinuate that Miss Glyn or Mr. Lucas in

* “Analysis of the Evolution of Musical Form.” By

t “The Story of Musical Form.” By Clarence Lucas. Margaret H. Glyn. (Longmans. 10s. 6d. net.)

(Walter Scott. 3s 6d. net.)

MAy 27, I909 THE NEW AGE 105

these two books are handing us on any specially wicked lies, but I feel that, for the most part, their erudition is what is called in my part of the country “book-know- ledge.” I remember someone describing a man’s physiognomy as “ a maximum of face with a minimum of feature ” ; so might I truthfully describe these books as evincing a maximum of speech with a minimum of sense. Of the two books, however, the general reader, musically-inquisitive, will find Miss Glyn’s the more interesting to have for referenoe, Mr. Clarence Lucas’s being more of the kind used by schools, although, I suppose, not specially designed for that purpose. Both volumes deal with the history and development of musical form comprehensively enough, and for those who care to study that intoxicating subject, they will find ample stuff for reflection in them. Both authors will occasionally worry you with nice appropriate senti- ments--as Miss Glyn when she says, “the educational need of the day is for a truthful intellectual presentment of the growth of musical form ” ; or with howlers--as Mr. Lucas, when he delivers himself of a dictum like this : “Likewise, the earliest musician, whose name and nation are unrecorded in the dateless past, heard nothing in the forest or the sea to suggest even the most primitive rhythmical forms to him.” These inci- dental features will, however, add zest to your reading.

In -the Hampstead Town Hall a series of chamber concerts, under the direction of Desire Defauw, is announced to take place. The first date is June 5th, a Saturday afternoon, at 3.30. A programme that in- cludes the Brandenburg Concerto for string orchestra and Debussy’s Quartet in G (with Handel and Beeth- oven and M. Defauw effectively sandwiched in between) certainly looks most promising. Exactly what it promises I will not dare to prophesy ; but I have heard it is quite, good. HERBERT HUGHES.

* * *

I CORRESPONDENCE.

For the opinions expressed by correspondents,. the Editor does not

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Many letters weekly are omitted on account of their length.

I

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT. TO THE EDITOR OF “ THE NEW AGE.”

Miss Aline Parker has found two stumbling blocks in my article on Mary Wollstonecraft. First, she cannot believe it possible that any intelligent person can consider that women’s right to a Parliamentary vote is of the same certainty that twice two are four. I have no knowledge of Miss Parker’s experience of the world. Perhaps we move in different circles. Half the women I know are eminently fitted to manage the affairs of. an Empire. Half the men I know are not capable of managing the refreshment tent at a cricket match. And when I conclude that women have as much right to the franchise as men, Miss Parker tells me that I have obviously never had the opportunity of talk- ing to “intelligent people.” I will not labour the point: it really turns on rudimentary experience and commonsense ; which, as I put it before, are-not subjects for debating clubs.

Th.e second point requires more space. I asked in my article whether the Suffragist Society which placed Mary Wollstonecraft on its front page, was prepared to stand by her ideas and acts. I asked the question because I sincerely hoped that I was right in assuming that the ideals of one of the bravest and best of women were also the ideals of the women’s leaders of to-day. I take it that Miss Parker has different views, for she talks of “ the secret and in- spiring ambition . . . . to have as many illegitimate off- spring as they choose, all to be supported by the State.” The answer to this somewhat crude interpretation will, with the editor‘s permission, be given when he can spare me spate for an article on the subject. Suffice it to say here that a child is illegitimate when it is born without a public sanction ; now contained in the form of a marriage certifi- cate. In the Socialist state that certificate will be granted on infinitely more searching terms than the haphazard, un- scientific nonsense which we are now pleased to describe as “holy matrimony.” But there is one condition which a cultured and rational State will recognise to be of para- mount importance. I t will refuse to bind any man and

woman together a moment beyond their freest will. I believe, with, Mary Wollstonecraft, in free chastity. Am I to understand that Miss Parker .believes in legalised lust ?

But my own opinion, although unimportant, will be defined later on, perhaps. For the moment, the question is the views of the leaders of the suffrage movement, on this absolutely essential problem in the life of a sex whose main social function, in nine cases out of ten, is the bearing of children ;-their individual development as human beings, as, artists, as politicians, as thinkers, stands on common ground with men, and must not be confused with their special function. Now, on what terms shall women be com- pelled to perform their social service of child-bearing? On terms of free love, or on terms of legal coercion?

There is one point on which I must ask Miss Parker to be more accurate in her terms. She says that I asked the question of the “Suffragettes.” As a matter of fact, Mary Wollstonecraft’s portrait appeared in the corner of a pro- gramme for a meeting at the Albert HAll organised by the London Society for Women’s Suffrage, at which Mrs. Philip Snowden and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P., were the chief English speakers. From an article in last weeks “Labour LEader I take it that Mr. MacDonald (having been argued off the field on matters political) is anxious to turn the discussion to the marriage problem. May we take it that his first public pronouncement on that subject is to appear as the champion of Mary Wollstonecraft with her lofty ideals of free love? If he will lead the I.L.P. towards the higher morality he will have our warmest support. Anyhow, we rely on his having the courage to express his thoughts in a more valiant way than the vague generali- ties he has used so far. G. R. S. TAYLOR.

* * *

TO THE EDITOR OF “THE NEW AGE.” It is only half the truth to say that some of the leading

suffragists who hail Mary Wollstonecraft as their model would cut that free-living woman dead if they could meet her to-day in a social gathering. The other half is that Mary

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CHAS. HALLAM, Littledean House, Newnham, Glos.,

106 THE NEW A G E May 27, 1909

Wollstonecraft would cut them, We can imagine her horror at such s u p p o r t e r s and her detestation of their venal motives in demanding the vote. There are some vam- pires and humbugs among us who are the pest of the movement. Personal ambition, and especially the ambition of personally becoming women members of Parliament, drives them on, and they care nothing whether the Woman Spirit fails under their trampling feet, and the Woman Voice is shouted down by their apishly Parliamentarian oratory.

I t is made to seem by these persons as if the women’s movement were all a grab after men’s money and not a reaching for sex freedom. . ”A little more of your husband’s earnings ” is their watch-cry. Better we did not get the vote for another century than get it on such terms.

Hypocrisy and lies can only gi.ve us the vote of men’s bitterness added to the contempt they now bear us for the parasites we have been. The early success of the move- ment was due to the belief of the majority that it was a movement towards sex freedom. Women and men alike could see the need of that. The bullying puritanism, with its eye on Parliament, which advises women to “ force men to a purer life “ (Dr. Alice Salomon), may force the vote, but Society would do well to turn the soldiery on us first. That spirit-a very ancient one-shows for its result the sixty thousand loose women in London to-day. ((Mono- gamists,” arguing, like Dr. Alice Salomon, that the woman gets safer money under a life-long contract, appear fero- ciously like man-hunters. They don’t know that mono- gamy is the final gift of the beloving heavens to true lovers and not a thing to be used for the purpose of a lien on the man’s wages. There will come a battle yet between the women who merely want the vote as a means of grinding down future men because the men of the past have subjected us, and the women who would throw their weight against the vote sooner than move in such a shameless and vin- dictive evolution. BEATRICE TINA. * * *

SOCIALISM AND T H E CHRISTIANS. TO THE EDITOR OF “THE NEW AGE.”

An announcement of the demonstration organised by the Christian Socialist Fellowship on the 19th appeared in your advertisement columns, and no doubt a good part of the rather sparse- attendance at that meeting was drawn from your readers. I wonder if I shall speak for them if I attempt a few criticisms? The star of the evening was the Rev. J. Stitt Wilson, M.A., introduced as “of Canada,” who has not, I believe, been much heard in London. In the chairman’s words, he had been given room in the pro- gramme to (( spread himself out,” which he seemed quite ready to do. Perhaps I may be pardoned a description of Mr. Wilson at this moment, when pen-portraits are in favour. I think of him as the revivalist of the Socialist gospel. He lays himself out to move the multitude, and his appeal succeeds where quieter methods would faiI. I hardly like to say he is got up for effect, but try and see him for yourself-a tall, youthful figure, very broad- shouldered and slender-waisted, in a swallow-tail coat, waistcoat cut low, and a big black tie, bow-fashion ; pro- nounced features (not to get too personal), and a shock of hair (for all that, nicely parted on one side); voice resonant and appealing, equally effective in loud and soft passages; a dramatic stride about the platform, and emphatic gestures. In toto, a combination bound to impress his audience with the notion that he is (‘something remark- able.” His oratory is of the kind that hardened meeting- goers accept with some reserve. A great. redundancy of words and phrases (six used where one would serve) does not give promise that he has anything very precise to say. Perhaps he is saved from the worst excesses by a rough species of humour, which makes him now and then turn on himself with some degree of detachment. He has the prophet’s method of delivery, and all the prophet’s rightful egotism-‘‘ I say,” “ I tell you” “ I am going to threaten.” He allows for an unlimited degree of obtuseness on the part of his hearers--“Have you got that ? ” “ mean to drive it home ”--and accordingly his message is delivered with much reiteration though no one could suppose that it is at any time obscure or difficult. He relies, in fact, on the great truisms--the dispossession of the worker from the dawn of history ; the land as the one thing needful ; the principle of production for use. He tells you that he has no head for

statistics; nor for any exact knowledge, it is safe to add. His possession of Socialist ideas is evidently elementary; he makes it go far by the use of a gift for picturesque ex- pression-rich and racy (in a Colonial sort of way), if un- certain in quality.

The questions in the mind of the judicious “demon- strator ” narrow down to one. Are truisms any good for the movement? True, they are at present with most people useless through very familiarity; true, they are eternally true. “Your Heavenly Father and your Earthly Mother,’ is the essence of Mr. Wilson’s message. If in doubt, cling to your mother Suppose these simple ideas can be driven home by vigorous methods, and made to stick, will they have any dynamic force? With a profound disbelief in the methods of the religious revivalist, who, to all appearances, leaves the world as bad as he finds it, I am inclined to question whether the gospel of Socialism, in the diluted form in which it seems to be permeating the religious sects, is going to do any good. The Christian Socialist Fellow- ship stands for (‘a new rallying point ,’ among Christians, hitherto more notable for their differences than for their agreement. Representatives were present on the occasion of which I write from the Anglican, Wesleyan, Congrega- tionalist, and Presbyterian bodies. Among these, Mr. Conrad Noel and Mr. Will Reason have, each in his own way, proved their worth, and are above suspicion of ignor- ance, while the Socialist ideals of Mr. Cobden are tested daily in his settlement work. But what worth is there in the would-be bold confession of faith of Mr. Orchard, who stands for Socialism among Presbyterians; or in Mr. Rattenbury’s empty denunciation of certain exploiters and vice-mongers unspecified, which are calculated to he lp for - ward the Socialist era just in the same negligible degree as they will endanger his own perfectly secure position? A time may come when we shall have to defend Socialism from its friends, F. G. HOWE. * * *

ANTI-SUFFRAGIST PLAGIARISM. T O TEE EDITOR OF “ T H E NEW AGE.”

A serious scandal has just come to light. It appears that one of the most eloquent and inspiring of the anti-suffrage leaflets is in substance nothing more nor less than an old manifesto issued in 1838 by the Anti-Railway League against the proposed establishment of a line from London to Birmingham. This sensational fact was disclosed a short time ago by an octogenarian who, whilst devouring the brilliant contents of the aforesaid leaflet was overcome by old memories, and on opening an ancient chest filled with documents of his youth, discovered its prototype.

Below we reproduce the two documents, which should be compared point by point. Further comment on them seems unnecessary.

AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE. SOME REASONS.

Because women already have the municipal vote and are eligible for membership of most local authorities.

Because women are not capable of full citizenship, for the simple reason that they are not available for purposes of National and Imperial defence. No civilised nation would ever place its women in the firing line.

Because a11 government rests ultimately on force, to which women, owing to physical, moral, and social reasons, are not capable of coritributing.

Because the practical difficulties in the way of Woman Suffrage are insuperable. [There follows a Iengthy dis- course on possible contingencies that might arise there- under.]

Because the acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself and to all Governmental offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that, and many similar absurdities,.

Because the United Kingdom is rot an isolated State, but the administrative and governing centre of a system of Colonies and also of Dependencies, including a vast Indian Empire which we hold directly by force of arms. The effect of introducing a large female element into the Im- perial electorate would undoubtedly be to weaken the centre of power in the eyés of these dependent millions.

Because past legislation in Parliament shows that the in- terests of women are perfectly safe in the hands of men.

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M A Y 27, 1909 THE NEW AGE 107

Because anything that tends still further to divert the attention of women from the interests of the home and the care of the children would inflict the worst possible injury on the highest welfare of the nation.

(N.B.-Copies of the above leaflet, No. 24 of the series, can be obtained from the Anti-Suffrage League at the rate of 4s. per 1,000.)

AGAINST THE PROPOSED RAILWAY. SOME REASONS

Because there exist already railways from Stockton to Darlington, and from Liverpool to- Manchester.

Because railway trains are not capable of conveying people, for the simple reason that they are not available for purposes of the “ Grand National,” the “Derby,” etc. No civilised nation would ever enter a steam engine for a horse race.

Because all movement rests ultimately on intelligence, in which engines, owing to physical, moral, and social reasons are singularly lacking.

Because the practical difficulties in the way of steam loco- motion are insuperable. Suppose a cow, attracted by the unusual noise, were to venture on the line, and that his hoofs were to get entangled therein, a train approaching at the rate of. 60 miles an hour would in all probabilities knock it down, and it is doubtful whether the unfortunate beast would ever recover.

Because the establishment of a railway from London to Birmingham would logically lead to similar enterprises in all parts of the country It is scarcely possible to imagine a railway from London to’ Edinburgh, and yet the prin- ciples of the railway advocates involve that, and many similar absurdities.

Because London is not an isolated town, but the admini- strative and governing centre of the whole country. The effect of introducing this monstrous revolution would un- doubtedly be to degrade it in the eyes of every town, village, and hamlet in England.

Because past history shows that travelling has been accomplished in a most satisfactory manner by means of the stage coach.

Because anything that tends to utilise steam engines other- wise than as exhibits at Industrial exhibitions, where they are admired by country cousins, and are oiled twice a week, would inflict the worst possible injury on the highest welfare of the nation.

(N.B.-Copies of this interesting leaflet are, unfortu- nately, out of print.) H. F. RUBINSTEIN.

T H E LIMITATIONS OF ART. TO THE EDITOR OF “THE NEW AGE.”

“D. A.” does not define Good Taste. If the artist does not use expressions in his work which are likely to upset Nice Persons, although those expressions are necessary to Bis purpose, then he ceases to be an artist ; for the concern of the artist is not with life as Nice Persons would like it to be, but with life as it more or less unfortunately is. Had the artists of past ages been careful to eliminate from their writings "expressions sometimes heard in tap rooms and smoking rooms,” much valuable literature would have been eliminated altogether. Consider the effect of a regard for the feelings of Nice Persons on Fielding ! Or Shakespeare I Or the Holy Bible! “D. A.” entirely misunderstands the purpose of literature. It is not Niceness or pretty- retti- ness The presentation in literature of life as it really is, is, indeed, not the whole of literature, but it is a very im- portant part. Had Fielding written “Tom Jones ” to the satisfaction of ‘‘ D. A’s.” lady friends, he would not have been interpreting his age faithfully. Richardson was a man after ‘‘ D.A’s.” own heart; but who in his senses reads Richardson, or goes to him for a faithful portrait of the eighteenth century? Fielding is still vigorous : Richardson is dead. Mr. Eden Phillpotts, therefore, was quite right in’ writing ‘‘ Sympathy and Understanding ” as he did

* * *

ST. JOHN G. ERVINE. ***

SOCIALISM FOR THE MIDDLE CLASSES. To THE EDITOR OF “ THE NEW AGE.”

Those of us who value THE NEW AGE as the only paper in which persons of opposite views may argue about one another and things in general in an outspoken manner, have borne its political indiscretion (a mild word) with con- siderable patience; but Mr. G. R. S. Taylor’s latest article that on Wells, in last week’s issue) is about the last straw. He starts gaily off with a ridiculous non-sequitur, and ends

up with an equally absurd analogy. Writing of what he calls the political beggary of- per-

meation, he says that when he finds himself in a dark lane threatened by a highwayman, the only permeation he resorts to is that of getting a knife between the highway- man’s ribs as hastily as possible. Now, has Mr. Taylor ever found himself in that position? No, of course he

hasn’t; and there is no analogy between that situation and anything in modern life. Casting amusing similes at the head of Mr. Wells is not argument, and is not convincing. The position of those persons who believe in evolution, per- meation, and persuasive (not necessarily the reverse of passionate) propaganda, on the ground of their belief in the good sense and humanity inherent in every person--Capi- talist and Socialist alike--deserves less frivolous combating than your leading article gives it.

Socialism for Mr. Taylor should be written thus: (Socialism), whereas for Mr. Wells it is obviously thus: Socialism . . . . The day for Socialism in brackets is past and the I.L.P. knows it-so does Mr. Wells. The middle class, as voiced in THE NEW -AGE, being, as a class, new to the subject, doesn’t think so. Hence all this outcry for a definitely Socialist party all their very own- Sit‘, things are not like that nowadays. We Socialists have long ago realised, for instance, that all wealth i s Social wealth. Can we not see that all knowledge, all power, all inspiration are Social also? And can we not see that Socialism in Parliament is essentially a matter of Labour representation and Labour politics, and is not a matter of the bombard- ment of our opponents with the Fabian, or any other Socialist, “basis ” ? If .the middle class Socialist cannot see that he is a labourer equally with the navvy and the engine-driver, then the sooner he finds it out the better.

[It is not the middle-class Socialist who fails to see he is a labourer, but the labourer. See Mr. Hardie’s new pamphlet. “My Confusion of Faith.”-Ed N.A.]

A. E. R. GILL.

* * * TRADE AND THE FLAG.

TO The EDITOR OF “THE NEW AGE.” We must extend our deepest sympathy to our landed

aristocracy on the vulgarisation of their dlstinctions by the nouveaux riches. A startling instance has just come under our notice. It is well known that the flying of the Royal Standard and the Union Jack over Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament are indications that the King and his loyal counsellors are engaged on their London duties. The hoisting of flags over country mansions of great noble- men is a delicate intimation to the countryside that the families are in residence. Visiting Surrey the other day, we observed a house with a flag flying in the breeze. On enquiring from our host, we learned that its occupant was Mr. C. A. Pearson ! A closer inspection revealed that the flag bore the symbol of the Union Jack on one side, while on the reverse was printed “Pearson’s Weekly.” C. H.

* * *

WHAT THE PUBLIC NEEDS. T O THE EDITOR OF “ THE NEW AGE”

Facts. A D. MACPHERSON. OARD AND EDUCATION FOR GIRLS-Horne in B connection with Classes for Day pupils Vacancies. Healthful diet on

humanitarian prlnciples-The Misses MEssieux Oak Dene, Hayward’s Heath Sussex.

I

RENCH R I V I E R A Boarders received for winter, sunny F comfortable house. Terms moderate--Les Charmettes--Ermigate Antlbes (Alp-Mar).

H O U S I N G QUESTION SOLVED.--Wh not enter our own house ln an district at once NO DEPOSIT required Repre-

sentatives may receive deeds without further payment in case of death--Write. for particulars, J , C., 177a Longley Road, Tooting, S.W. L A R G E ROOM to let in Fabian’s house. Board optional:

vegetarian diet -23 Pandora Road, West Hampstead. P l O N I R A LIBREJO ESPERANTO, 46b Hackford Road,

Brixton, London, for Esperanto Literature. Student’s Instruction Book. set 7d. post free.

Railway CLERKS AND STATIONMASTERS should join Affiliated to English, Irish and. Scottish Trades Union Congresses. Good

their Trade Union, the Railway Clerks’ Association. Established 1897.

Benefits. Send postcard for particulars to A. G. WALKDEN, General Secretary, 337, Gray’s Inn Road London, W.C. DO ST NOW.

T H E HOME RESTAURANT, 31, Friday Street, off Queen Victoria Street, E.C., will OPEN May 11th. Pure Food Luncheons After-

noon Teas Home Made Cakes etc. Specialities--Fruit and Vegetable Salads The Home Restaurant i s a new enterprise started by ladies. Its great feature will be to provide properly balanced meals moderate in price well-cooked, and promptly served. On Leadless glaze ware will be used.

The SPIRITUALITY OF THE BIBLE PROVED BY THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.

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“ UNITARIANISM AN AFFIRMATIVE FAITH,’’ “ The "Atonement (Page Hopps), given post free.- Miss BARMBY Mount Pleasant

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108 THE NEW A G E MAY 27, 1909 ~~

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