S

IR: Your own comment on Professor Perry's interesting criticism of THE NEW REPUBLIC seems so complete in its refutation of his case as hardly to require any additional annotation. But as an Englishman, at least as convinced as Professor Perry of the moral rightness of the Allied cause, perhaps my personal comment on his position may not be entirely beside the point.

It is surely clear that to believe in the rightness of a cause does not imply release from thought of the consequences to which a victory (or defeat) of that rightness may give rise. The whole point of THE NEW REPUBLIC'S attitude-at least so far as I have ventured to interpret it is to urge that it is now futile to discuss the origins of the war. On that point the judge has summed up and the jury has delivered its verdict. The real issue is the sentence; and as the whole future of the world is bound up in that issue it is immensely important to get such intelligence as we have concentrated on achieving such a settlement as will not result in any of the combatants having that feeling of "baulked disposition" of which Mr. Graham Wallas has emphasized the disastrous consequences. If to advocate this is to be pro-German one most sincerely hopes that Mr. Asquith is pro-German to the last degree.

Professor Perry writes in the conviction that it is necessary to hang any dog with a deservedly bad name. THE NEW REPUBLIC urges that measures should be taken to reform it, and has been very usefully suggesting ways and means. The latter method seems immensely less wasteful.

I do not know how far Professor Perry keeps in touch with English opinion, but I am certain that he will find in the Nation and the Manchester Guardian-by far the

Germans.

With regard to Russia, Mr. Morgan is perhaps right if he refers only to the armies that have been put into the field, but that is an altogether erroneous way of considering the question, because it overlooks the fact that Russia's reserves are several times larger than those of Germany. It may indeed be doubted whether the latter, including those who are barely physically fit, exceed one million, a number which will only last them five months. Unless some other reserves are called up before they are ready, it is questionable whether it is not a matter of weeks rather than months before the Germans will find a diminution in their numbers actually facing the foe.

With regard to British losses and resources, it should be borne in mind that the figure of 500,000 for the former includes casualties to the Indian and Colonial troops, while the figure given by Mr. Walter Long, a member of the Cabinet, of 3,000,000, as the total of the British army, does not include Indian and Colonial troops. One should add at least 750,000 to it for men from parts of the Empire outside the United Kingdom.

Mr. Morgan need not trouble himself about what British troops will do in 1917. A study of the German and Austrian casualty lists shows, after the necessary emendation has been made, that by Christmas, 1916, the German and Austrian armies, as such, will have ceased to exist.

S

McGill University, Montreal.

HAROLD J. LASKI.

Casualties in the European War

IR: Part of an article on this subject by Mr. Gerald Morgan which you published recently has been reproduced in the English press.

May I, as one who has given considerable attention to the question of the combatants' relative losses, suggest that Mr. Morgan is not quite correct in his statement that, proportionately, Russia and France are losing at much the same rate as Germany? When he says that Austria is doing so he is, if anything, under the mark, because a bigger percentage of the Austrian than of the German losses consist of prisoners who are save for the exceedingly unlikely event of their being liberated by their own armies -permanent losses, as a good number of wounded are not.

In proportion to the relative size of the two armies, the French losses should be four-sevenths, say 57 per cent of the German losses. Now, I calculate the gross German losses for the first sixteen months of the war at 4,750,000 and the gross French losses at 2,000,000, or, say, 42 per cent of the German losses. Were one to take net losses, the comparison would be slightly more favorable still to the French, as the proportion of their wounded who make a

Leeds, England.

FREDERICK G. JACKSON.

Favors Negro Segregation

IR: I have read the views of the late Booker T.

Washington on "Segregation Laws," published in a recent issue of THE NEW REPUBLIC, with a great deal of interest. It is a subject which should be discussed freely, because the negro race has certainly made great strides within the last decade, and their progress has now assumed such proportions that there must be some kind of an intelligent understanding of the negro and his needs by white people to prevent prejudices and barriers arising which will militate against the negro's realizing his higher hopes.

I must take exception, though, to some of the views as set forth by the late Mr. Washington. He says: "Personally I have little faith in the doctrine that it is necessary to segregate the whites from the blacks to prevent race mixture." Let any fair-minded citizen take a trip to the sections of New York inhabited by negroes, and after making a close study of the question, he will soon be convinced that segregation is by long odds the proper thing. Negroes who have the welfare and the progress of their race at heart know that their people wish to be left alone to work out their future growth in their own way. They do not wish to have white people intrude upon them any more than the whites wish to have the negroes invade their places.

The intelligent negro knows now that he and his race have a future, and if he is true to himself and his people he will resent any outside interference.

In the eyes of God all men are equal, but students of sociology know that there is a barrier which must forever exist between the whites and blacks, and which no time can remove. Certain laws in nature are as immutable as the seeds of time, and they cannot be changed. Silver is not gold, and while both metals can be made into beautiful creations, they must forever remain dissimilar. So is it with the white and the black races. Both have their shining lights, their great and their good men. Both have their yearning hopes, their dreams for higher and better things; but they are different, and if the future generations of both races are to be preserved to move along to their higher development there must not be any race mixture. Segregation is to my mind the best way to preserve the environments of both races. And I do not infer by this that the negro is to be made to live in dirty or unwholesome surroundings, but I do mean that he should inhabit certain sections of the cities where he can be given free scope. This can be done without enacting laws making it compulsory.

In the upper section of this city there is a colony of colored people which has grown within the past twelve years from 100 inhabitants to nearly 100,000. The negroes there are left pretty much to themselves, and it is amazing the progress they have made. They have their own enterprises in business, and they are only concerned with their own affairs. As long as the white people do not annoy them there is peace and harmony. Their one wish is to be left alone. When the negroes began settling there in that section of the city, the white residents resented it, and tried to stop the influx, but greedy property-owners kept on selling leases and property to the negroes, so that now it is purely a negro colony, and one of the largest in any of the northern cities. How much better it is that they should be there in the one locality than scattered all over the city. JOHN JAY LINDLEY.

New York City.

SIR:

What the Investor May Do

IR: Is not the answer to Nicotinus, whose letter appeared in your issue of December 11th under the heading "A Stockholder's Dilemma," that he ought not to be a stockholder? There are any number of other investments in which a man may put his surplus capital besides becoming one of the owners of a business being conducted by a corporation. Individual responsibility for wrongs and injustices can only be carried to a certain point. Beyond that it becomes sentimentalism. A super-conscientious individual might refuse to take out life insurance because some of his premiums might be used to purchase the securities of corporations in the business of which one branch might be conducted in such a manner as to work injustice to employees. It would seem to me that this is carrying individual responsibility to an absurd length.

Why should it not be possible for the conscientious Nicotinus to accept the facts as they are and to make his investments accordingly? When he buys stock of a corporation, whether it is on the advice of his trusted bankers or on the strength of his own judgment of values, he is in fact becoming a partner in the business of that corporation. The voice which he can have in the management of the corporation's business depends in part on the size of his investment as compared with the amount of stock outstanding, and in part upon his willingness to put himself to trouble.

If Nicotinus desires to lend his money, not to take a share in the responsibilities and profits of ownership, he can buy bonds, real estate, mortgages and the like which his bankers will recommend to him. A bondholder of a corporation as an individual is simply in the position of a creditor. If the corporation to which he has lent money is notoriously unfair to labor, he can sell his bonds and make some other investment, just as a conscientious believer in total abstinence might refuse to lend money to a distilleries company; but surely the creditor's personal responsibility extends only to the obvious.

I have recently heard it argued that since all of the

capital which goes into a railroad property becomes fixed capital without the possibility of change in use, it might be sounder to recognize this fact by raising all this capital through the issue of bonds. This seems to me an entirely fallacious argument, but the investor who makes no distinction between railroad bonds and railroad stock in fact permits the working out of just such an arrangement.

THE NEW REPUBLIC-if I have succeeded in correctly interpreting its broad and many-sided viewpoint-believes in a development of society which will place on the individual more and more responsibility to the community. Under this theory the citizen who neglected to exercise his right to vote would be failing to do his duty as a member of the community. Is not this equally true of the man who voluntarily becomes a partner in a corporation business and then refuses to accept the responsibilities which a right to a voice in the management of the corporation gives to him? W. E. HOOPER.

S

New York City.

For Undefined Preparedness

IR: While it is to be hoped that the people of this country will come speedily to pay more attention to questions of foreign policy than they have in the past, it seems to me that you over-rate the necessity and the practicability of their "defining" our foreign policy as a step in passing upon the question of preparedness. One element of our foreign policy, and that the essential one for this question, may be taken as determined already: the undesirability of a foreign invasion. All that the "preparedness" movement signifies is, that the present war has awakened us to certain perils of our situation of which we had previously been careless or forgetful. Now, however, that we are awake to them, we mean so far as possible to insure ourselves against them.

Indeed, it seems to me that it is the exact obverse of your position which is the true one. For until we are reasonably assured against the horrors of foreign invasion, we are not in a position of moral freedom from which to define our foreign policy. Till then we shall not be free agents, any more than China is.

S

Princeton, N. J.

EDWARD S. CORWIN.

"Open Letter" an Appeal to
Sentimentality?

IR: The contribution of Mr. John Lincoln in your issue of December 11th is an extremely interesting study. It is well to remind the public that the most acute sufferers from social maladjustment are not always the very poor. There are doubtless a vast number of individuals with fine sensibilities and intellectual equipments above the average who are deprived of gratifications, sometimes of necessities, to which a normal human being may honestly lay claim. To perceive clearly the materials out of which a lasting happiness may be built and to find them forever outside one's grasp is like death by slow torture. In such straits one must hew his way through the forest of pious myths and hampering conventions that hems him in on every side. For this reason I am sorry that Mr. Lincoln, presenting his altogether just grievance, has sought to appeal to a sentimental though obviously social morality-a morality which is at the same time a most effective weapon and the cleverest of disguises for those who desire the perpetuation of present economic arrangements.

Columbus, O.

DONALD LEIDIGH.

IT

After the Play

I

T is possible to imagine a play in which each of the characters spoke the author's mind, a play by Bernard Shaw, for example, where the dramatis personae-Bluntschli, Valentine, Julius Caesar, Andrew Undershaft, John Tanner, and so on-said nothing Shaw did not agree with. Actually Shaw never gives us a play of this kind. He gives us instead plays in which some of the characters speak for his point of view and others against it. As a contest between points of view, as a criticism of that part of life which is a point of view, the result is often immensely stimulating. As a representation of life it is rather like what a portrait gallery would be if every sitter were painted so that you could tell which side he took in the main controversy of his epoch.

In January, 1882, a few weeks after the publication of "Ghosts," Ibsen wrote a letter-I quote the translation made by John Nilsen Laurvik and Mary Morison-about its adverse critics: "They endeavor to make me responsible for the opinions which certain of the personages of my drama express. And yet there is not in the whole book a single opinion, a single utterance, which can be laid to the account of the author. I took great care to avoid this. The method, the technique of the construction in itself entirely precludes the author's appearing in the speeches. My intention was to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that he was witnessing something real. Now, nothing would more effectually prevent such an impression than the insertion of the author's private opinions in the dialogue. Do they imagine at home that I have not enough of the dramatic instinct to be aware of this?"

Since we all know that no writer is a good judge of anything he has just written, we needn't be surprised at Ibsen's exaggeration. But although many of Mrs. Alving's opinions are Ibsen's private opinions, it is true that we do not feel this identity while reading or seeing the play, and also true that the whole play has a meaning which none of the characters ever puts into words.

What Ibsen mistook for a description of the method he followed in "Ghosts" is an exact description of Hauptmann's method in "The Weavers." There is not in the play "a "a single opinion, a single utterance, which can be laid to the account of the author." And much more than this is true. "The Weavers" is not a play of opinions. It is a play of misery and pity. Although Hauptmann represents the pity which some of his weavers feel for themselves his pity for them is immeasurably larger and deeper.

II

It is hard to tell which one admires more in "The Weavers," the greatness of Hauptmann as an artist or his greatness of soul.

We know that he listened when a boy to stories of his grandfather's life as weaver in Silesia. This much we learn from the dedication of the play to his father, who told him these stories. Of course we can never know how the creative imagination worked in secret and partly in unconsciousness upon these old stories, until the result was a play which gives us pictures of brutality and grimness without becoming itself either brutal or grim, in which pity is something stronger than wistfulness without becoming either indignation or despair, in which the pity is all the greater because the beauty is so great. In no play has the creative artist so hidden the moments at which he made his decisions. In no play has he looked at man with more pitying eyes.

III

How unreasonable they were seventy years ago, these Silesian weavers, of whom Gerhart Hauptmann's grandfather was one! They know that the sentence passed upon them the moment they were born, as upon every son of Adam, was of death, yet they ask for just bread enough to keep them out of death's inevitable hands for a few years yet, or failing that for a few days. Cannot they remember that if they die now they will be dead for ever, and their long days of labor running into nights of labor will be over, and no employer will grow rich any more because they weave and starve? No, they cannot remember. They do not know. To them there is one thing more bitter than the starvation that does not quite kill the starvation that kills. All the worst-paid work of the world in all ages, in Silesia seventy years ago, and here and to-day, has been made possible by just this preference for merely keeping alive!

"In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children.' The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no blacker gulf of wretchedness; that was the ultimatum of degraded god-punished man." So, in "Past and Present," wrote Carlyle, who wrote also: "Yes, in the Ugolino Hunger-tower stern things happen; best loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's knees."

The degradation and wretchedness of the Silesian weavers stops just short of this ultimate Ugolino-horror. Not very far short. Although protests are cried here and there by one man or one woman against the shape which injustice has taken for the moment, life has always been too near starvation for united protest. But there comes a change. Starvation may draw so near that even the nearly starved will revolt. The arrival of one man more, who has left their world and returned to it with a torch, adds the missing something, and the fire starts, the rising of the weavers is on. In no other play in the world do particular miseries grow with a growth so like nature's into a common blind will. We see before our eyes that strangely moving likeness between the force of a crowd and force in inanimate nature.

IV

In the making of this lifelike and unliteral play two wishes were fulfilled: the wish to make us feel what Hauptmann felt when he listened to his father's stories, and the wish to do this without letting the first wish seem anywhere to dictate. "The Weavers" is so profoundly and imaginatively composed that the only principle of arrangement one can divine in it is the author's will to deepen our feeling act by act. Whether he has his will, at any particular performance, depends largely upon the stage director's management of crowds. At the Garden Theatre this crowd management is competent without being at all wonderful. The acting is competent without being wonderful, except in Mr. Reicher's own case.

Suppose you were looking at a figure picture, by a sound uninspired painter, and suddenly found one single figure an unmistakable Rembrandt. How would you feel? Much as I felt while watching Mr. Reicher. Such acting is not ability or knowledge or a capacity for taking infinite pains. It is genius. What imagination in the way he follows the crowd off the stage at the end of the third act. If Mr. Reicher had played the part of Hilse, the submissive Christian weaver, Hilse would have taken our imaginations captive and falsified all the values of the play. That is why Mr. Reicher gave himself a less important part.

Q. K.

The Poet at the Movies

The Art of the Moving Picture, by Vachel Lindsay. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.25 net. HIS is

T

a joyous and wonderful performance. It is not a rhapsody or diatribe about the moving picture. It is not an autobiographical chronicle. It is an argument founded on plain facts and happy interpretations, rising to mysticism, a meeting place of the people capped in cloud. Only a corn-fed poet could have written it. It talks in terms of Mary Pickford, Blanche Sweet, Henry Walthall. It places John Bunny and Sidney Drew. It introduces Cabiria, The Birth of a Nation, Who's Who in Hogg Wallow, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Your Girl and Mine, Judith of Bethulia. It is steeped in the present and the actual. But Vachel Lindsay has undertaken the fundamental brainwork necessary to an understanding of the moving picture art. He has done his heroic best to bring order out of aesthetic muddle and bewilderment. He has articulated a theory of beauty on the basis of the photoplay as we know it. Whether the theory stands or falls eventually, it is a bold and brilliant theory, really bold and really brilliant, and takes first place as an interpretation of the greatest popular aesthetic phenomenon in the world.

Mr. Lindsay is no worshipper of popular mechanics, no apostle of "a tin heaven and a tin earth." He is no demagogue. ("Our democratic dream has been a middleclass aspiration built on a bog of toil-soddened minds. The piles beneath the castle of our near-democratic arts were rotting for lack of folk-imagination.") Nor is he the kind of man who is dazzled by the plunderous profits and potentialities of photoplays. He respects the enterprise without adoring the exploitation. He respects the vulgus without adoring the vulgarity. He respects the mechanism without adoring the machine. He does not see "the redeemed United States running deftly in its jewelled sockets, ticking like a watch." He assents to America as it is, " the steamengine, the skyscraper, the steam-heat, the flying machine, the elevated railroad, the apartment house, the newspaper, the breakfast food, the weapons of the army, the weapons of the navy." But his assent carries with it no subjection. "It is only in the hands of the prophetic photoplaywright and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels become as mysterious and dazzling to the thinking spirit as the wheels of Ezekiel in the first chapter of his prophecy. One can climb into the operator's box and watch the sword-like stream of light till he is as dazzled in flesh and spirit as the moth that burns its wings in the lamp. But this is while a glittering vision and not a mere invention is being thrown upon the screen."

But it is unfair to Mr. Lindsay to suggest his glittering vision at first. He himself does not come to it until he has written out with the extremest simplicity and clarity his own conception of the moving picture art, its classification and the basis for its criticism.

The art exhibition, plus action-that is his underlying conception. "Whatever the seeming emphasis on dramatic excitement, the tendency of the best motion pictures is to evolve quite a different thing; the mood of the standard art gallery." There are three kinds of pictures-action pictures, intimate pictures, splendor pictures. "Action pictures are sculpture-in-motion, intimate pictures are paintings-in-motion, splendor pictures are architecture-in-motion." A deaf and dumb art, its limit is the limit of the picture. "But the limit of pictorial beauty cannot be reached."

The action film is based, according to Mr. Lindsay, on

the out-of-door chase. It gratifies incipient or rampant speed-mania. Its principal resource is inventiveness. It is falsely advertised as having heart-interest. "In the action picture there is no adequate means for the development of any full-grown personal passion." It provokes "the ingenuity of the audience, not their passionate sympathy." It is "impersonal and unsympathetic." But its "endless combinations of masses and flowing surfaces" appeal to the sculptor. It can represent bronze elasticity, wave-beaten granite, living ebony and silver, the majesty of dancing, galloping or fighting figures. It is this artistic element that the producer has "allowed to go wild."

The intimate film, his next classification, "has its photographic basis in the fact that any photoplay interior has a very small ground plan, and the cosiest of enclosing walls." "It is generally keyed to the hearth-stone and keeps quite close to it." Intimate and friendly, the effect of this film should be delicate. And it must first be good picture, then good motion." The pictures should "take on motion without losing their charm of low relief, or their serene composition." It should be possible to say: "This photoplay was painted by a pupil of Gilbert Stuart." Enoch Arden, as Mr. Lindsay sees it, is the most successful drama of this kind. "Melodramatic interruptions or awful smashes" add nothing to such dramas. And it is the pictorial charm, the "fine and spiritual thing that Botticelli painted in the faces of his muses and heavenly creatures," which accounts for the popular love of Mary Pickford.

To photoplays of splendor, architecture-in-motion, Mr. Lindsay gives his greatest attention. The fairy splendor of non-human objects " is fundamental in the destinies of the art." It is to be found in "furniture, trappings, and inventions in motion." People become tired of mere contraptions. But they never grow weary of imagination. Crowd splendor, patriotic splendor, religious splendor, further entice him. "While the motion picture is shallow in showing private passion, it is powerful in conveying the passion of masses of men." He illustrates from the Battle, an old Griffith biograph. He analyzes the spectacular symbolism of Cabiria. He conceives a motion picture akin to By Blue Ontario's Shore. He imagines a photoplay of Pericles, of Jeanne d' Arc, and of his own Springfield in symbolism.

Assuming with Mr. Lindsay that "the keywords of the stage are passion and character; of the photoplay, splendor and speed," and accepting the wide suggestiveness of his classifications, the question remains whether he has been sound, in the first place, to minimize pantomime, and wise in the second to force so strongly the parallelism of the photoplay to sculpture, painting and archecture. In his chapter on hieroglyphics he certainly indicates his appreciation of pictures as a means of conveying ideas. But he does not dwell sufficiently anywhere on the possibilities of pantomime, and he strains his theory of photoplays as primarily plastic art. His terminology, moreover, is open to criticism. The word action is not in the same plane as the word splendor. And a word less loose than action could be found. But these objections are not meant to be inhospitable. No one could be inhospitable to a book so vigorous and creative and fertile. It goes, to my mind, to the root of the matter. It reveals vividly where the limitations and the opportunities of the moving pictures lie. There is nothing fanciful about it. There is nothing chimerical. It states and argues its position, and opens up the hope for beauty in a form of expression that has been enormously misunderstood.

In reporting this book it is impossible to preserve its savor. It is equally impossible to indicate its pregnant opinion on the many distinctions between plays and photoplays, between photoplays and motion pictures, on the censorship, the orchestra and conversation, on the plebiscite and criticism. The book itself must be read by all who are aware that "the photoplay cuts deeper into some stratifications of society than the newspaper or the book have ever gone," and who believe that "the destiny of America from many aspects may be bound up in what the prophet-wizards among her photoplaywrights and producers mark out for her." The mystic ecstasy of this belief will not be general. There will be many, even, to halt superciliously at the very conjunction of the moving picture and art. But Mr. Lindsay need not care. He has initiated photoplay criticism. That is a big thing to have done, and he has done it, to use his own style, with Action, Intimacy and Friendliness, and Splendor.

As a Realist Sees It

F. H.

Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham. New York: George H. Doran Co. $1.50 net.

SOMETIMES in retrospect of a great book the mind

falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in this middle ground which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art. It is at once something and nothing, a dream, a happy memory, a song, a benediction. In viewing it one finds nothing to criticise or to regret. The thing sings, it has color. It has rapture. You wonder at the loving, patient care which has evolved it.

Only recently I finished reading Mr. W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage." It was with some such feeling as this that I laid it down. In recent years, and quite definitely, we have been getting on in a literary way. Despite our complaints as to the intolerance of a philistine age, many interesting things are being done. In England particularly in the last few years (though France has produced "Jean Christophe") we have had George Moore, all of him; "The New Machiavelli" of Wells, "Fortitude" by Hugh Walpole, "The Old Wives' Tale," by Arnold Bennett, "Sinister Street" by Compton Mackenzie, "The New Grub Street" by Gissing, "Joseph Stahl" by J. D. Beresford, and also such minor volumes as "The Rat Pit" by Patrick MacGill, and "Mushroom Town" by Oliver Onions. (What a name!)

In America, on the other hand, we have lagged. There have been "Predestined" by Stephen French Whitman, "Quicksand" by Hervey White, "The Story of Eva" by Will Payne, "The Turn of the Balance" by Brand Whitlock, "With the Procession" by H. B. Fuller, and "McTeague" by Frank Norris, but all of these, transcendent as are their narrative merits, are lacking somehow in that vast undercurrent of which these newer and more forceful writers seem cognizant.

Here is a novel or biography or autobiography or social ✓✓ transcript of the utmost importance. To begin with it is unmoral, as a novel of this kind must necessarily be. The hero is born with a club foot, and in consequence, and because of a temperament delicately attuned to the miseries of life, suffers all the pains, recessions, and involute self tortures which only those who have striven handicapped by what they have considered a blighting defect can under

stand. He is a youth, therefore, with an intense craving for sympathy and understanding. He must have it. The thought of his lack and the part which his disability plays in it soon becomes an obsession. He is tortured, miserable.

In pursuit of his ideal from his earliest youth he clings to both men and women in a pathetic way, a truly moving spectacle. The story begins at the home of his mother in or near London. She is dying, and among the last things she does is to feel the deformed foot of her son, with what thoughts we may well imagine. Later in the home of his uncle, William Carey, vicar of Blackstable in Kent, we find him suffering for want of sympathy and concealing his shyness and desire behind a veil of assumed indifference. By Carey and his wife he is fostered in a somewhat stern way until his schooldays at Tercenbury begin. There he is tortured by unfeeling playmates, unconscious of the agony which his deformity causes him, until he is ready to leave for a higher school, and presumably prepare himself for the ministry.

Study, and an innate opposition to the life, decide him to leave and go to Heidelberg, Germany, where apparently he remains for a year and rids himself of all his early religious beliefs. A little later he returns to England uncertain as to his career, and enters the office of a chartered accountant in London, for which privilege he pays. If anyone has ever given a better description of English clerkly life I am not aware of it. After a year he gives this up, finding himself unsuited to it, and essays art, the suggestions and enthusiasms of certain friends impelling him to it. Two years of the Latin Quarter, Paris, and the fierce discussions which rage around the newer movements in art make it clear to him that he is unsuited for that field, and with a sense of defeat he gives it up. A few months later he enters a medical school in London with a view to becoming a physician. It is here that his loneliness and his passion for sympathy drive him into a weird relationship with a waitress in an A B C restaurant in London which eventually eats up the remainder of his small fortune of twelve hundred pounds. Finally, penniless and destitute, sleeping on park benches for days, he is compelled to enter a London shop as a clerk at six shillings a week " and found." Those who place so much faith in the intellectual supremacy of the English and their right to lead the world on to Elysian fields of perfection might study the picture which he gives of underworld clerk life with profit. There is no more degrading form of wage slavery practised by any nation, civilized or uncivilized.

Two years of this and then the vicar of Blackstable dies, leaving him a competence of six hundred pounds wherewith he is able to restore himself to his medical studies. In four years more he has acquired his diploma, and is now ready to become a general practitioner. Curiously the story rises to no spired climax. To some it has apparently appealed as a drab, unrelieved narrative. To me at least it is a gorgeous weave, as interesting and valuable at the beginning as at the end. There is material in its three hundred thousand and more words for many novels and indeed several philosophies, and even a religion or stoic hope. There are a series of women, of course-drab, pathetic, enticing as the case may be-who lead him through the mazes of sentiment, sex, love, pity, passion, a wonderful series of portraits and of incidents. There are a series of men friends of a peculiarily inclusive range of intellectuality and taste, who lead him, or whom he leads, through all the intricacies of art, philosophy, criticism, humor. And lastly comes life itself, the great land and sea of people, England, Germany, France, battering, corroding, illuminating, a Goyaesque world.