Two Sections Section I
‘ol. CVI. No. 2753 NEW YORK, THURSDAY, AP RIL 1918 TEN CENTS
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The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
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The Nation
Vol. CVI
NEW YORK, THURSDAY, APRIL 4,
1918 No. 2753
The Week
ITH the last day of March and the tenth day of the
great battle in Picardy the German advance plainly reached its farthest west. As late as Friday there was as yet no assurance that the plugging tactics of the Germans, following upon the first rush, would not carry them through to Amiens. By the first day of this week it had become evi- dent that a balance of forces was established. German pres- sure against Amiens was directed along two sides of a tri- angle of which Amiens was the apex and along the middle perpendicular. But on the northern face of the triangle at Albert the enemy advance was stopped after the first five days of combat at a point about sixteen miles from Amiens. On the southern face of the triangle the German onset was checked on Saturday to the west of Montdidier. On the same day the Franco-British forces began their counter- attacks in the middle sector where the Germans had pene- trated to within ten miles of Amiens. The slackening of the German effort is also revealed in the number of prisoners reported from Berlin. For the first four days Berlin claimed 45,000 prisoners. For the next four days the claim was 25,000 prisoners. For the ensuing four days up to last Mon- day the claim was only 5,000 prisoners, from which must be subtracted prisoners taken by the Allies. With the failure of the Germans along the Montdidier-Noyon front and Gen- eral Foch’s assertion of last Monday that he can guarantee the safety of Amiens, the first phase of the battle may be regarded as drawing to a close.
POIGNANT detail of the British retirement is the de-
struction of what had been accomplished in the way of reconstruction in the recovered area. The Quakers and others had cheered French families that had lost their homes by providing them with simple houses in which to begin life over. There was something inspiring in the picture of re- construction during the continuance of hostilities. It typi- fied the unconquerable spirit of a nation and of the race. It was taking hold of the future. Now all is in ruins again. Destruction must do its perfect work. Yet no one will sup- pose the spirit of the rebuilders crushed even by this new calamity. They will seize the first opportunity, or half-op- portunity, to begin again. And the world will have a sharper sense of the meaning of such a war and a deeper determina- tion to make this one the last of its kind.
NE timid voice was raised in the Reichstag on behalf
of the Armenians; a diffident member inquired as to the fate of the Armenians now falling into Turkish hands throughout the reconquered districts of Asia Minor. Amidst glorious debate on world politics, during the course of which Europe was remapped nearer to the Prussian military heart’s desire, one representative of the German people heard the anguished sound of women’s wailing and children’s cries and the groans of tortured old men. It matters not that a “Gov- ernment reporter” at once stifled all discussion with hypo- critical assurance that Turkey “would not make the Arme-
nian population responsible for the excesses of individuals.” The time must come when that timid query will swell into an indignant chorus, loud enough to shake in their seats rulers who are permitting Armenia’s remaining 800,000 to be slaughtered in cold blood.
HILE much more momentous eve: are taking place Allenby His present northeast- In the
first place, to cut the Hedjaz railway on the eastern boundary
on the western front, General continues his slow but sure progress in Palestine. ward advance from Jerusalem has had two objects.
of the country and so isolate Turkish forces operating fur-
ther south at Medina. This he has already accomplished, by the taking of Amman on the Hedjaz railway itself. Medina, the last holy Mohammedan city in Ottoman hands, ought to surrender shortly. Allenby’s second object advancing
northward along the Jordan, to threaten the flank of the Turkish-Syrian army now facing him from Jerusalem to
the sea. He has already arrived at Es-Salt, thirty-five miles northeast of Jerusalem. it is probable that he will, by this flanking movement, force a of Palestine
}
entailed by
If he proceeds much further north
retirement of the enemy beyond the boundaries By such strategy he will have avoided the losses a frontal attack on strongly intrenched Turkish positions. The gradual clearing of Syria now be Allenby, and the steady advance up the Euphrates illus trated by the British victory on that river reported last week, must eventually, if it continues as at present, lead to a junction of the two armies in the north at Aleppo. The result would be an immense strengthening of the British position.
ing accomplished by
N the New York Times of Monday there appears a care
ful letter by Judge B. Russell, of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, courteously criticising the editorial article on the seizure of the Dutch ships, in our issue of March 21, for its failure to deal with the question of international law involved. It is perhaps sufficient to point out in reply that our comment, which was written in full recognition of the principle of international law in question, was devoted spe cifically to the psychological, and if we may still use the word in international affairs, the moral, results involved. We questioned, not the legality of the seizure, but the effects of the action on neutral opinion, notably in Holland, and con sequently on our moral prestige at the peace As to that, let the official reply of the Dutch Go which appears in the same issue of the Tim:
conference. vernment, with Judge Russell's letter, speak for us:
The Netherla: ds Government deems it its dut
pecially in
serious times such as the present, to speak with « plete candor It voices the sentiments of the entire Dutch nat vhich es in the seizure an act of violence which it will opp: with all the energy of its conviction and its wounded national feeling The American Government has always app d to right and justice, has always come forward as the champion of smal] nations. That it now coéperates in an act dia tri ly opposed to those principles is a proceeding which can find 1 counter ight in the manifestations of friendship or assurances of
lenient application of the wrong committed
386 The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
L
HE long deadlock between Japan and the United States
upon the shipping question was two-edged, preventing Japan’s full development of her yards for want of steel plates, and our use of Japanese-built ships in the submarine zone. Twenty steamers, aggregating 100,000 tons, are not much to obtain of a country which has well over 2,000,000 tons, and is building by the hundred thousand tons where before the war it built by the ten thousand; but it is hoped by fur- ther negotiations to obtain 200,000 added tons. The War Trade Board, announcing the conclusion of the new agree- ment, commends the disposition of Japan to regard “the fur- nishing of tonnage for Allied war needs in the light of a patriotic contribution to Allied war purposes,” and in this disposition rests its confidence of getting more vessels. All of them are large, modern, and fast, just the ships needed in the Atlantic. Step by step the shipping resources and the shipbuilding resources of the whole world are being brought into play against the submarine menace. The Ger- man Admiralty undertook an enormous task when it set out to sink the best part of Great Britain’s twenty million gross tons of mercantile marine; and it now finds itself trying to cope with all but a small fraction of the whole world’s ship-
ping.
NOTHER dark conspiracy of the Washington Adminis-
tration has been foiled. The plot to “lynch” General Leonard Wood was detected last week by some of our most eminent newspaper sleuths. They at once saw through the plan to get rid of General Wood by sending him before the examining board in order that his physical fitness for com- mand might be determined. It would be found, of course, that he had an ingrowing nail, or something of the kind, whereupon the President would gleefully order him to be re- tired. It is something of a come-down from these roman- tics to read that after all General Wood was merely called upon to do what is required of all other officers, that he passed his examination with flying colors, and has already been assigned toa command. But it will be only a short time before the Commander-in-Chief is caught by the detectives of the press in another attempt to impair the efficiency of the army.
PTHERE is such a thing as telling the disagreeable truth
I and there is such a thing as unmanly whining. Under the guise of doing the former, Republican Senators have been doing far too much of the latter. And a long and dismal whine has come from Oyster Bay, of all places on earth. Now, it would be easy to show that these revellers in gloom are wrong about many of their facts. They certainly are in the matter of ships, as Chairman Hurley’s careful statistical statement was showing at the very time the ululations were coming from the Capitol. And the whole question of our troops being in France without sufficient heavy guns and aeroplanes of American manufacture turns upon the policy of acceding to the urgent request of the French Government that the men be sent and the needed equipment be supplied in France. But even granting the truth of every charge made by Senator Lodge and Senator Poindexter and Colonel Roosevelt, what good purpose can be served by emitting help- less moans? The implication of these gentlemen is, of course, that they were the only men wise before the event, and that if their advice had been taken, or, better, they had been elected to office to do the work, all would have been perfectly
done. Concede this, if they will have it so. Admit that the Administration has bungled and blundered. But is this a time for groanings that cannot be uttered? Can a man be called either wise or public-spirited who chooses the moment when the country is tense with anxiety to weep and wail over America’s mistakes? If Uncle Sam could say a word in the ear of these ostentatious whiners, we think it would be: “This is not an hour for crying over spilt milk. Buckle down to the work that has to be done, put a cheerful courage on, and, anyhow, leave off caterwauling.”
CCORDING to Washington, the country is threatened
with a huge surplus of potatoes, and everybody is being asked to substitute them for bread and meat as much as possible. Buckle made an ungracious reflection upon the po- tato when he held it accountable for Ireland’s backward state. You can get more food out of its cultivation with less work than out of almost any other plant grown in temperate zones. In the present war that is exactly what all the na- tions involved need. The potato has supported Germans even more effectually than Engiishmen during the past three years. Now comes our turn to discover that we can send wheat to our allies and eat potatoes, which might spoil in transit. Habit is a tyrant hard to conquer. We must very largely substitute for the habit of breaking bread that of breaking the jacket of a well-baked potato. The Food Ad- ministration is doing its share in keeping tab on market conditions and letting the public know its duty in the prem- ises. With more potatoes, and, on account of abolition of meatless days, more meat available, we again show our will- ingness to do what is required of us. The Hotel-Keepers’ Convention in Washington excellently illustrated this will- ingness, even eagerness, to meet all patriotic demands.
HE cause of the explosion in Jersey City last week seems
to have been direct violation of the law, with the guilt divided between the owners of the warehouse and an em- ployee. The owners stored explosives that, according to re- port, they did not think would explode. The employee smoked a cigarette, that, of course, he did not think would do any damage. The moral is so plain that one fears that it will not be heeded. Nothing but unrelenting enforcement of rules made for the purpose of protecting life and property can make such rules worth the paper they are written on. If the owners of the warehouse did not think that the stuff they were storing would explode, why was there no official to set them right and to prevent them from doing what they did? It may be hoped that the price they have paid for their little mistake will impress the lesson upon them, and as no lives were lost, one is tempted to say that it is just as well that the accident happened. It may prevent worse ones. As for the reckless employee, it may as well be recog- nized that there are a considerable number of men who will not pay attention to rules against smoking even in powder factories unless they are compelled to do so. Is there any
. reason why we should go on allowing ourselves to be possible
victims of their criminal obstinacy?
‘O build a great rapid transit system in the face of fast-mounting costs and many delays, and to operate it piecemeal as built, is a work naturally accompanied by dis- couragements. The city of New York must not let them alter its determination to see the task through with faith in its immense ultimate benefits. Commissioner Travis
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The Nation 887
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Whitney reports that the deficits since the first trains ran through the Centre Street loop in August, 1913, amount to slightly over $6,000,000. But look at the larger outlines. Before those first trains ran through the Centre Street loop we had 296 miles of rapid transit track. The whole system, now almost complete, will have 618 miles. The cost of con- structing and equipping the dual system, which was esti- mated in 1913 at $337,000,000, is now placed at nearly $400,- 000,000; and the city, accepting this new cost as inevitable under war conditions, can accept its share in a temporary operating deficit which was always foreseen. Within months the dual system will be operating in its entirety, and its test as a whole will begin only then. A few years from now it ought to be steadily profitable. The city did not undertake the transit partnership to make a direct profit, but to permit expansion of population and property over a wide territory.
ANSAS is nothing if not surprising. Her latest devel-
opment is a crop of Northcliffes, who are looked upon with mingled alarm and admiration. At the top of the pile is Arthur Capper, Governor and leading candidate for the Republican nomination for Senator. It is a question whether or not he has ever taken time to count up the number of his publications, which range from the Topeka Daily Capital to a flock of farm journals that reach every corner of the State. Henry Allen, who has his eye upon the chair that Capper wants to leave gracefully, runs the Wichita Daily Beacon, after having shown what he could do with nobody knows how many smaller newspapers over the State. Be- tween them, aided by their journalistic friends, these two men have almost a monopoly of newspaper support in Kan- sas. That of some of their rivals is comic. Bristow, for instance, is supported in his candidacy for the Senate by hardly more than one newspaper, the Salina Journal—which he owns. W. Y. Morgan, who wants to be Governor, is fa- vored by a bare half-dozen newspapers, led by the Hutchin- son News—which he owns. Ex-Governor Stubbs does not own any newspaper, and is without the support of a single one of importance. Other candidates are fortunate to have the support of the newspapers of their counties. Finally, there is William Allen White, who scorns office, but makes candidates tremble with the Emporia Gazette.
HE world does move, even during a cataclysm. And it
is a long step forward in industrial relations that is taken by the Standard Oil Company in its invitation to its employees to coéperate with it in seeing that they receive fair treatment. The announcement is also a confession. For it was at Bayonne, one of the plants affected, that a short year and a half ago there were outbreaks of dissatis- faction among the men, outbreaks traced to the attitude of local officials of the company. Apparently, the higher offi- cers have seen the folly of refusing to consider complaints from men who are part and parcel of the organization, how- ever humble they may be, and have adopted a formal change of policy. Of course, it is the spirit behind such an announce- ment that makes it count. It sets up machinery by which the men may be officially represented in conferences with representatives of the company at its main office at 26 Broad- way. Every hundred and fifty employees may elect one of these representatives. This makes the units small enough for every man to exert influence in getting his ideas before the conference. The experiment will be watched with keen interest as a possible model for other industries.
Pau ACHILLE DEBUSSY, the noted—some would say notorious—French composer, whose death was an- nounced last week, did not approve of applause in concert halls and opera houses. “When you see the death of the sun, that daily fairy display,” he asked, “has it ever come into your minds to applaud?” This reference to a gorgeous sunset epitomizes his music, which is chiefly color and im- pressionism, without much pattern or coherence. When he won the great prize at the Paris Conservatoire and sent from Rome his symphonic suite, “Spring,” the judges, among whom were Gounod, Delibes, Thomas, Reyer, Massenet, and Saint-Saéns, pronounced it “insufficiently precise in form and design,” while his next work, “The Blessed Damozel,” was also condemned for “vagueness of expression.” These things remained the principal characteristics of his music to the end. He did not deny the charge, but gloried in it, and he won a big following. Some of his champions went so far as to declare that his “Pelléas et Mélisande” superseded Wagner, and that his piano pieces made Chopin seem com- monplace and antiquated. He shared with Brahms the good luck of being taken up by all those who chafed under the Wagner tyranny, and it must be said that, apart from Wag- ner, no other modern composer has been so widely imitated in all countries as Debussy. His constant use of the whole- tone scale and augmented intervals made it easy to imitate him. A clever pianist can make any piece sound as if De- bussy had composed it.
HE sale of the Degas collection in Paris gives practical
proof again of the oft-repeated assertion that artists are often the best judges of paintings. An artist’s own man- ner may indicate to us no more than his limitations. Cole- ridge proved his universality more as appreciator of litera- ture than as poet. Masefield does not let his own peculiar- ities of style blind him to other westhetic values. And now it appears that Degas, who painted in a narrow vein, was a collector of catholic taste and sound discrimination. Pictures of almost all the modern schools, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, appear in the sale catalogue. That they are excellent exam- ples is proved by the prices they fetch in spite of the bom- bardment of the capital which the bidders can hear from the auction rooms. This sale is, in respect of evenness of merit, in contrast with that of the collection of a well-known connoisseur, not an artist, which was recently held in New York.
UR interference with our clocks leads one to wonder
whether we could not go on and fool ourselves a little more. Most people have a secret pleasure in the process. “Don’t tell me you have sugared these peas,” pleads the epi- cure; “let me believe.” Why should not the traditional spring-time languor be converted this thrifty year into waves of energy? A slight further alteration of our mental time- pieces will push us into June or back into the frosty days, and by conscientiously saying each morning as one glances at his perjured watch, “I always feel my best at this time of the year,” conserve contentment along with daylight. The system would have to be generally understood, of course, for a summer devotee would resent having his attention called to the glorious winter sunset in August. But if a false clock can make us rise early, a false calendar may banish spring fever. Kant has said, at some length, that our time is our own.
388 The Nation
[Vol. 106, No. 2753
America and the Unified Command
“ENERAL PERSHING’S offer of the American army
Ito Foch, an offer now accepted, may seem at first sight a bit of unnecessary etiquette in face of a very serious real- ity. Yet the proprieties had to be observed in the case of a nation which has been one of the Allies from its entrance into the war, but technically has not been an ally. The free use of our army by French leadership must have been re- garded as a probability from the first, and became a cer- tainty with the moment America took the lead in pressing for a unity of direction through a Supreme War Council. Like the appointment of Foch, the offer from Pershing was decided upon months ago.
The superiority of French leadership to British leadership must be accepted as one of the lessons of the war. In this there is no reflection on the spirit or native qualities of the British command, from the General Staff down to leaders of the small fighting units. The fact follows inevitably from basic conditions. The British army is, comparatively, an improvised army. More than six million men have had to be pyramided on a foundation of less than 200,000 men which was the British army at the outbreak of the war. It has been obviously different with the French, whose cadres were large enough to embrace such an expansion of the national army as has taken place. Much may be learned in the course of three years of war, and the British have learned. Yet it requires an education of generations to train the imagination of army leadership to think in the enormous quantities brought forward by the war. At the base of the army machine is the non-commissioned officer. To its great reserves of non-coms. the efficiency of the Ger- man army has largely been attributed, and also its capacity for expansion and the task of rapid education of raw fight- ing material. Here again Great Britain, in the nature of the case, had to improvise.
The advent of the American army brought up the prob- lem in an intensified form. Was the experience of the Brit- ish army to be repeated? Were critical months and years to be spent in educating our officers to their task? Take one detail of leadership only, though an important one—namely, the handling of reserves. The British record in this respect shows some tragic failures from Neuve Chapelle and Loos in the first year of the war to Cambrai last November. On the other hand, in the use of reserve strength the French have shown their highest genius. They won the battle of the Marne in this fashion. They saved Verdun in this man- ner. Were we to face the possibility of a great American army taking over an important section of the front yet com- pelled to learn this branch of the business of generalship only through bitter experience? It is to the credit of our purposes and our spirit in entering the war that from the first we were content to accept the réle of learners and sub- ordinates, though that attitude was made easier for us, no doubt, by the comparatively small numbers we could hope to place in the battle-line for some time to come. More than that, the American people as a whole, free from par- ticularism, have been willing to think of their human re- sources as no more than so many extra classes of recruits at the disposal of the French command, to be used as French reinforcements would be used.
Added to the reasons why in any scheme of unified com- mand the supreme direction should fall to the French is the mere question of proportional responsibility which the French have borne and will continue to bear. Before the beginning of the great battle the French held 300 miles out of the 425 miles of front from the Channel to Belfort, in- cluding the short American sector. The British held about 110 miles, and Belgians and Portuguese the rest. To-day the British hold about 95 miles and the French hold about 345 miles. For the British the battle-front has actually shortened by fifteen miles from Arras to their junction with the French. For the latter the line has lengthened out by nearly fifty miles. The preponderance of the French grows still more plain if we think of the necessity of keeping guar« along the entire length of front not now in action for an other such blow as the Germans delivered on March 21; for it is pretty well agreed that this first battle may easily b the opening phase of a much larger plan. It was precisely in face of such a contingency that the Army of Manceuvr: was created; and yet its main strength has not been brought into play.
If American troops are now being directed towards the front near Amiens instead of being detailed to quieter sec- tions of the front, one reason would be that in our presen‘ state of preparedness the Amiens battle-front offers the bet- ter opportunity for utilizing our strength. The elaborate technique of trench warfare is harder to assimilate than the older principles of open warfare; and it is open fight- ing that is now under way in the Arras-Amiens-Noyon tri- angle. We have every ground for believing that the native qualities shown by raw British troops at Ypres in Novem- ber, 1914, will not be lacking in our own levies.
“Guilt of the World-War”
HATEVER else may be said of the revelations made
by Prince Lichnowsky, they constitute an historic! document of the highest importance. Here we have the tes- timony of a first-hand witness. The Prince was German Ambassador in London when the war broke out, was privy to the most critical of the diplomatic negotiations, and speaks of what he knows. Apparently, he did not intend to pub- lish his evidence at the present time. He had written it out as a kind of political testament, for his family and friends, but it was shown around and finally “leaked” into the press, very much as did Herr Ballin’s letter to Privy Councillor Rathenau. Prince Lichnowsky is, in fact, to be tried for violation of diplomatic secrecy, and probably worse crimes, his excuse that he did not mean his disclosures to see the light having availed him nothing. But the mischief is done. Not only in Stockholm but in Berlin has the peril- ous stuff got into print; and nothing but the absorption in the fighting in France has prevented the world from echoing with it.
The ordinary German reply to the Prince’s charges is already indicated. He is a sorehead. This may be true. He left England sorrowfully admitting that his career was ruined, inasmuch as he had informed the Berlin Govern- ment that, in his opinion, the English would not go to war. He was said to have been severely snubbed by the Kaiser on his return to Germany. Hence it is easy to say that he is a man with a grievance. It was also said in the Reichstag, by a spokesman for the Foreign Office, that the Prince had
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April 4, 1918] a great admiration for the diplomacy of every country ex- cept his own. He was charged with being an Anglophile, which is at least as crushing an accusation in Germany to- day as it was in the United States thirty or forty years ago. Doubtless, Prince Lichnowsky has been exposed to other kinds of attack and abuse. But all this is beside the mark. The Prince may be everything that is alleged; he may have had a wrong idea of Anglo-German relations; he may be filled with prejudices and grudges; but the real question is whether he tells the truth about what went on, to his knowi- edge, in Berlin during July, 1914, and whether he accurately reports the attitude and the language of his superiors, the Chancellor and the Foreign Ministry. Until this part of his story is broken down or refuted, all the railing at his motives is a mere beating of the air.
Prince Lichnowsky’s statements fit into what was already known. He confirms other witnesses. To rumors and sus- picions he gives confirmation. Thus his testimony has not at all the air of being manufactured, but of falling in with facts and situations familiar before. Take, for example, the famous “Potsdam conference” of July 5, 1914. Its ex- istence was first alleged, so far as we know, by Herr Haase, a Socialist member of the Reichstag. The assertion was that the Kaiser and the military chiefs and certain civilian officials had conferred over the probable outcome of the em- broilment of Servia and Austria, and had decided to pursue a course which they knew would lead to war. The Govern- ment, shortly after Herr Haase’s charge, issued an official denial that any such gathering ever met in Potsdam. But this must have been only technical, if not a bold attempt to deceive, since the fact of the Potsdam meeting has been established by different kinds of independent evidence. Prince Lichnowsky speaks of it as if it were perfectly well known. It was not the conference but its decision that in- terested him; and he reports that decision to have been a deliberate choice of war with Russia. His interviews with von Bethmann-Hollweg and with the Foreign Minister, von Jagow, left him in no doubt that this policy had been adopted. When he warned of the danger of all Europe, including Eng- land, being drawn in, von Jagow replied: “Germany must simply risk it.” It was this conviction that the German Gov- ernment had deliberately brought on the war, together with the subsequent tortuous policy respecting Austria and Rus- sia, which leads Prince Lichnowsky to record his belief that the whole civilized world cannot be blamed for attributing to Germany the “sole guilt for the world war.”
Some day, perhaps thirty years from now, the full docu- mentary evidence will be available to historical students, and the whole story will be told. But we already have it in accurate outline. One aspect of it is indisputable. The military party had its way, in beginning the war, and has had its way in Germany ever since. Whenever there has been a difference or a clash between the civil government and the army chiefs, the latter have had their way. They have allowed successive Chancellors and Foreign Ministers to talk in the Reichstag and address notes or speeches to foreign nations, but when the time for action came, it was the Supreme Command that showed itself dominant in Ger- many. An inadvertent proof of this has just been furnished by General Ludendorff. Boasting about the length and com- pleteness of the military preparations for the present great offensive, he said that the order for it was given on Febru- ary 1. Yet it was after that date that Chancellor Hertling was speaking about Germany’s readiness to agree to Presi-
dent Wilson’s four points around a table at a peace conference.
and expressing a desire to gather It is now plain that either this was fraud and hypocrisy and an attempt to blind the Allies to the military stroke preparing, or else the Chan- cellor was coolly overridden by the Supreme Command. Either way, the demonstration is complete that the mili- tarists are in full control in Germany. It is this which has made even the Labor party in England and the Socialists everywhere outside of Germany give up all talk of peace, for the present, and abandon their plans for an international conference. First, they hold, the German militarists must be speared out of the saddle.
The Peace Issue
° The com- ing world peace will then, through the German sword, be more assured than hithert 0 help us God [Emperor William
Our next duty is to introduce the policy of permanent prepar- edness. . . . After the war is over all these foolish pacifist creatures will again raise their piping voices against prepared- ness and in favor of devices for maintaining peace without effort
It is a hundred times more important for us to prepare our strength for our own defence than to enter into any of these peace treaties.—[Theodore Roosevelt.
We are not going to give in—not until we have established the world on the new basis. Under the new basis let us have no more standing armies As long as you have militarism as long as you have standing armies and these powers, poor suf fering mankind will never see that development.—[Gen. Smuts.
the German sword will win us peace
HESE three statements, all laid before the American
people within a period of forty-eight hours, present clearly the major issue that is to be determined at the end of this war—is there or is there not to be a new order? It is with no desire to score points, or to indicate disagree ment at a time when unity is imperative, that we call at tention to the agreement between the American ex-Presi dent and the German Kaiser, as against the South African warrior-statesmen, that peace in future must rest on the sword. The German sword would impose an unrighteous peace on an unwilling world; the American sword, needless to say, wielded by Mr. Roosevelt, would maintain solely a peace of righteousness—but both alike would rest on uncon- querable force.
As opposed to these two champions of naked might we hear the piping voice of the foolish pacifist creature from South Africa, the creature that did not hesitate a decade and a half ago to draw the sword against the mightiest empire of the modern world, in behalf of what he believed to be the right, and who triumphed in defeat, who again drew the sword with the outbreak of the present struggle, and who now challenges his fellow-citizens of the British Commonwealth to stand fast till victory comes—to what end? That the British Empire may have the military power to make its righteous will’ effective throughout the world? That universal military service throughout the British do- minions may make the Empire safe from attack? It is not thus that this warrior speaks. His talk is of moral prin-
ciples, of adjustments based on self-government and free- dom, of the abolition, not the reduction, of standing armies. Trained in the school of war, of politics, and of diplomacy, . this statesman yet believes in the possibility of a real peace, based on justice and fairness and mutual consideration He may be wrong, but at least his career is And if he is wror
among states. not that of an impractical visionary.
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then, no matter what else happens, Germany will have won this war, for she will have led the world to accede to armed might as the ultimate arbiter in the affairs of states.
After the agony of the years just past, the American people and all the peoples, we believe, if ever they clearly understand this issue, will not accept defeat; for the un- sophisticated man is ready to believe with General Smuts that we see to-day “the agonies of a dying world,” a world of force and violence that with increasing definiteness the peoples have willed to have no more—and woe to the states- man who stands in their way or fails to guide them to their goal. Two leaders, President Wilson and General Smuts, have seen the issue clearly and have reiterated over and over one idea—that the important thing is not to pile up mili- tary preparations to prevent the next war, but to strive with all our might to secure conditions of peace and world or- ganization to make future wars impossible. President Wil- son has used the resounding words justice, freedom, and self-government, but instead of making them a mere cover and front for the emotional state induced by a national crisis, he has striven, with growing definiteness and suc- cess, to give actual content to those words, to point out the application of those principles, as we see them, to concrete territorial and racial problems. And always he has kept in the forefront the question of world organization.
The President’s diplomacy has not been working in isola- tion for a new world order. The Russian revolution, for all the disastrous accompanying military collapse and inter- nal disorder, has yet removed from the world a militarist autocracy that was a constant threat to peace. British labor has set its face like flint against a British imperialistic peace and in favor of a real peace—organization, disarma- ment, and all. The world over, outside the Central Powers, the democratic forces appear on the whole to have been growing more definite in ideas and better organized in ac- tion for a real peace. Can we snatch it out of the welter?
President Wilson and General Smuts both believe in the possibility of a permanent, guaranteed peace. Both hold such a peace the only gain for which the democratic peoples can hope. Both realize that it is to be attained, if at all, only by a skilful composition of the mighty forces loosed by this earth-shaking war, a composition guided by under- standing, faith, and vision. Against them are arrayed not only the terrific military forces of the German Empire, but the mighty moral and intellectual powers of imperialism and stupidity in the Allied countries. The German military caste have made abundantly clear to all of us the menace of Prussian militarism. But as Mr. Roosevelt’s address makes clear, many of us have not the imagination or the faith to see any actual alternative to Prussian militarism after the war except an American militarism, a British mili- tarism, an Allied militarism too mighty for its Prussian rival. They agree with the Kaiser that “when mankind changes these things also will change, but first mankind must begin to change.”
That is the issue that we face. A whole-hearted faith in the vision of the American President and the South African Premier, and such a faith alone, we believe, can make us strong enough to win this war; for, as General Smuts has Said, in words that we do well to recall with Germany thun- dering at the western gates: “This is not a war of armies; this is not a military war. In the end this war will be de- cided on the moral forces set going in this war, which are far stronger than any army, artillery, or munitions of war.”
Bias in History
° ISTORY is past politics.” This inscription in the
historical seminar of Johns Hopkins University pre- sents an incomplete truth, for much history is present poli- tics. The death of Henry Adams recalls the feeling of many Southern scholars that his work betrayed prejudice, or at least an imperfect sympathy with the South, Jefferson, and Democratic-Republicanism. The first good American his- tory, Hildreth’s, was a sort of Federalist tract in its treat- ment of events from 1790 to 1825. The sons of Jefferson’s followers put forward their own champion in George Tucker, who wrote upon the same topics avowedly as a Southern Democrat. At the time that Henry Adams wrote his thor- ough examination of the period when feeling flamed highest between the Virginia and New England parties, his name assured a suspicious South that here was a volley of barbed arrows. His analysis of the contradictory character of Jef- ferson, and condemnation of many of his acts, his just cen- sure of Madison as war President, confirmed its belief that insensibly this descendant of Jefferson’s chief enemy was unfair. It was useless to point to Adams’s sharp treatment of a narrow, grasping New England, and of the “monarchi- cal Federalists.” Southerners remained firm, and candid men will admit some reason for their opinion.
Adams’s history cannot be read out of court by what- ever bias it may have; its merits are too great to be im- paired by a little partisan pungency. Of late we hear much about the scientific spirit in history, coldly, unswervingly truthful; but history being primarily an interpretation, we may feel sure that it will not lose the controversial flavor that is part of its real vitality. At least half of all the great histories are from one point of view political pamphlets; for great issues have a way of maintaining themselves from one epoch to another, and under cover of re-fighting old his- torical battles, the writers fight in immediate, present con- flicts. Greek history has never dropped far enough behind us to enable men to write of it with detachment. Gillies, Mitford, and Thirlwall treated of it from the Tory point of view, influenced by their hatred of the French Revolution; and the very animosity they excited inspired George Grote to write a democratic, liberal history. He first expressed his ideas in an essay-review of Mitford. Rome is still a battlefield between republicans and imperialists. Mommsen, stanch admirer of Cesar, hater of Cicero and the Senate, believed that the empire was a necessary remedy for the hopeless decay of the republic, and made his belief a stalk- ing horse from behind which to shoot at German republi- canism. Froude made of Roman history simply a demon- stration of his Carlylean taste for heroes; but Napoleon III took his stand by Mommsen. He confessed that he wrote “for the purpose of proving that when Providence raises up such men as Cesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, it is to trace out to peoples the path they ought to follow; to stamp with the seal of their genius a new era; to accomplish in years the work of centuries.”
Were we readier to look upon history as present politics as well as past and dead politics, we could better appreciate its usefulness when rightly written, its menace when wrong- ly. Grote and Dr. Arnold were right in thinking it of real moment, from the standpoint of politics as well as truth, whether the general public and the schoolboys read Greek and Roman history in writers who magnified the faults of
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democracy, loaded its leaders with invective, and lauded all tvrants. The British have seen to it that no succession of Clarendons wrote their constitutional history. It was be- cause he felt the importance of history to current politics that Hazlitt gave up more purely literary occupations to write a five-volume Life of Napoleon, defending the French Revolution. Lord Acton remarked that the two nations in which history is in closest touch with national life, and best able to “make opinions mightier than laws,” are France and Germany.
If the schools of French and British history have on the whole led along the right paths, those of Germany have not. To Ranke, whom Bismarck named with Shakespeare and the Bible as his favorite reading, William I himself explained in 1860 that “all Prussia’s history proves that she is destined to take the lead in German affairs’; and Ranke recorded his approval of such “historico-political conceptions.” Sybel and Treitschke carried on the work of educating their read- ers to a belief in centralization, imperialism, and, to a large extent, armed force.
It is largely the truth of history itself which corrects improper interpretations of it. It is always possible for a fair-minded, competent man to take the misinterpretation of history and demonstrate the point at which its views and conclusions deviate from the line of truth. The lessons of history are essentially just and moral. An immoral, foolish view, as the German view that “war pays,” can be disproved overwhelmingly. With this truth of history a more abstract truth of philosophy must often coéperate in demolishing false doctrines. The democratic philosophy, for example, can be over-stressed, but the world is ever surer that it is the philosophy with which the trend of history harmonizes.
Literary Reactions
6 hee English critic, Dr. A. C. Bradley, recently delivered a lecture in which he thrust at what he termed “the re- action against Tennyson”; and, by natural implication, the whole reaction against Victorianism. Whether such a stroke is needed may be questioned. There has been some evidence of late that Tennyson and the mighty family of Victorians are recovering vogue; the real reaction is against Ibsen and Shaw! From sophistication we seem ready to go back to simple-mindedness, from cynicism to the didacticism of the time when moral problems were uppermost; and from the smartness of paradox to a direct and dignified style. We need no longer utter an apologetic word about being old- fashioned in reaching past George Moore for George Eliot, or Thomas Hardy for Thomas Carlyle. But the new rejec- tions are themselves “reactions.” What is the general ten- dency of these reactions, and why and how do they over- come us like summer clouds?
They are the world-old ups and downs of fashion in lite- rature. Doubtless young Greeks of Sophocles’s day talked scornfully of A®schylus, and those of Euripides’s time min- gled enthusiasm for the newcomers with reverence for €schylus and scorn for Sophocles. We remember how poor Colonel Newcome was troubled by the knowing talk of Clive’s friends:
He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him; he heard that Byron was no great poet, but a very clever man .. . that his favorite, Dr. Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated
in future days with young Raphael; and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verse might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Dr. Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination! Mr. Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge the chiefs of modern poetic literature!
All the names here mentioned have undergone vicissitudes. Byron, after a long eclipse—longer than was thought likely when Arnold predicted that 1900 would see him and Words- worth rated the first two poets of the century—is yearly When Cranford was written, n Dr. Johnson!” to the silly old lady; but Johnson is becoming a Great Cham again. you find one who wrote on almost everything, and said so little, whether on attics, morals, or Shakespeare, which is not still true and still important?” The Keatsian burns with indignation to-day when he recalls that Shelley spoke of the poet just after his death as one of the inheritors of un- fulfilled renown. Keats began climbing fast to his due place about 1880, when Arnold, Colvin, and Buxton Forman united to present his case. Each age makes a variety of mistakes in its appraisals, rating some men too high and others too low; there ensues a period of reappraisal, marked partly by iconoclasm and partly by a rising appreciation of neglected men; and when this subsides calm estimates may
emerging more and more. every one was ready to echo Captain Brown's “D
“Where,” asks a recent critic “shall
begin. Every age reflects itself in its books.
Yet the process of reaction is usually healthy. Dr. Brad- ley admits that it was so in Tennyson’s case, though he thinks that some critics carried it too far. Dickens was worshipped too fervently in his late lifetime, but his enduring merits are such that he could well afford to defy the acid test of reaction. Take the attitude of three successive critics to wards Dickens's emotional scenes. Jeffrey wrote to Dickens of Paul Dombey’s death, that “I have so cried and sobbed over it last night and again this morning, and felt my heart purified by those tears and blessed and loved you for making me shed them.” Stevenson was angered by this and similar scenes into the declaration that Dickens “wallowed naked in the pathetic.” A later, discriminating judgment is that of Paul Elmer More, who condemns bathos where it occurs, but adds: “At his best there is a tenderness in the pathos of Dickens, a divine tenderness, I had almost said, which no other of our novelists has ever found.” The reaction against Moore’s anapestic sentimentalities was not such that it swept away his Irish melodies. adroit trimmer of sails to the popular wind, Bulwer-Lytton,
The reaction against that
swift and deserved, was not so complete but that “The Cax- tons” and some other novels, and the collected review-essays, are still read. us well in burying most of Charles Reade, but it could not bury “The Cloister and the Hearth”; and though it carried most of Trollope to oblivion, his half-dozen best novels sur- vive.
Where we could wish the process more effective is in giv- ing the neglected author, or work of merit, a higher esteem. The general reaction against the typical Victorian did not do a great deal to raise up the contrasting George Meredith; and Landor’s prediction that he would sup late at the feast of appreciation will soon have to be amended to read “very late.” The spirit of reaction has just now turned fiercely upon Stevenson; but the critics who rend him limb from limb might well nominate some one for his place.
The reaction against Victorianism served
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The British Empire and a League of Peace
By GEORGE BURTON ADAMS
HE problem of forming a workable federation for the
British Commonwealth of Nations is the problem of forming a workable league of peace for all English-speaking nations. Fundamentally the two problems are the same. So far as this problem concerns the British Empire, men have worked upon it, with many differing proposals and much discussion, for half a century. But the plans pro- posed have been exclusively along a single line: to find some means for the representation of the outlying Dominions in a central parliament of the Empire, either in the exist- ing Parliament of the British Isles or in an imperial par- liament. Even the latest proposal of an imperial organiza- tion, the most carefully elaborated that has ever been pre- sented, and based upon a very wide collection of opinions, insists upon the necessity of an imperial parliament. It is not strange that a central parliament should seem to Brit- ish students of the problem indispensable. The control of the executive by the legislature through a cabinet of re- sponsible ministers is so successful in practice and so thor- oughly democratic, allowing the quickest action of public opinion upon the central government of any political ma- chinery yet devised, that it may well seem that no British government can exist without it. And yet there can be no doubt that such a conclusion overlooks three important facts: first, that the alliance to be formed is a common- wealth of nations, not a commonwealth of provinces; second, that within a commonwealth of nations internal legislation is not merely out of place but dangerous; third, the proposal overlooks the experience of the United States.
(1.) To call the alliance to be formed even within the British Empire a commonwealth of nations is not a mis- nomer. The five Dominions usually counted, Canada, Aus- tralia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland, are practically now independent nations so far as the legisla- tion of any imperial parliament is concerned. In saying this I am not overlooking the continued survival of the signs and forms of an earlier legislative dependence which was more real. Enabling acts are still sometimes necessary; colonial acts may still be disallowed; the British.Parliament may still legislate in regard to some matters of intercolonial trade; appeals still lie under certain conditions from colonial decisions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. But it is a commonplace of knowledge through- out the Empire that all the survivals of that earlier depen- dence which still exist are formal and technical rather than real. So true is this that a student of imperial affzirs has declared that the Dominions have been granted every item of self-government upon which they have insisted, includ- ing the regulation of immigration and of commercial rela- tions, and that if anything has not yet been granted them it is because they have not insisted upon it. An attempt by the British Parliament to impose legislation upon these Dominions without their consent is an impossibility, and if legislation upon an imperial, intercolonial question should again be necessary, it will be adopted with as full consider- ation of colonial opinion as if adopted by the colonies them- selves. All signs of the past generation indicate that agree- ments upon intercolonial questions in the future will be reached by the methods in use among independent nations,
negotiation and conference, not by legislation from above. The first step towards a British federation is a clear recogni- tion of this fact with all that it logically involves, and the first step towards forming a league of the English-speaking nations for peace is a full recognition of the fact that it is to be formed, not between two independent nations, to which are attached certain dependencies, but between seven nations which stand on the same footing in relation to their interna- tional interests and which are to be equal partners in due proportion in all that is done.
(2.) If it be admitted that the members of an alliance, whether a British Imperial Union or an English-speaking alliance for peace, are independent nations, it follows that internal legislation is not a natural consequence. It could undoubtedly be made possible by the terms of the union, but it would have to be artificially provided for by special enactment. The natural method of settling internal ques- tions would still be negotiation and conference, rendered no doubt especially easy by the existence of the alliance, but not changed in character. A heavy burden of proof rests on those who would create an imperial parliament for real legislation where none now exists. And that is not the way of safety. The greatest danger in any federal union is the temptation to impose legislation upon a local unit for which it is not ready, or to which it is strongly opposed. Within the British Empire the temptation is already at hand in the widely divergent views among the different units on the subject of intercolonial migration, and the danger of uniform legislation on the matter is unmistakable. The result least dangerous to the union which could follow such legislation where feeling is strongly engaged would be that which has followed the violation of the principle of federal government in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitu- tion of the United States, local nullification. Experience shows that even such subjects as internal commerce, involv- ing the vexed questions of protective tariffs, and naturali- zation are best left to local legislation. Why then create the risk? The natural and safe method is local indepen- dence and negotiation under the influence of common im- perial public opinion, and the general principle which should be clearly recognized is that the primary and most essen- tial object of a British federation or of an Engfish-speak- ing alliance is not internal regulation but external unity.
(3.) Avowedly one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for considering an imperial parliament necessary is to se- cure the responsibility of the executive in the British way. Responsibility secured in some way is a necessity. No con- stitution, no alliance or federation, no common understand- ing even, which disregards the matter can hope to obtain the sanction of democratic nations. But it does not follow that the British method of the responsible ministry is the only method of enforcing executive responsibility.
The British method of cabinet responsibility goes back to a time when the legislature was still the best means of gathering and focussing public opinion. It is founded wholly on the theory that through the representatives of the people the will of the nation can best be declared and brought to bear upon the executive. In the eighteenth century, when the responsible ministry was invented, this was still the
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case. It is probable also that the American Congress has departed farther from this ideal of representative govern- ment than any other legislature, but it merely stands in advance on the road which all are following. In this fact consists a part of the value of American experience. It would be, I think, difficult to find a student of public affairs in this country who believes that the public opinion of the United States is best ascertained through Congress, or in the matter of general policy is jn ordinary cases prought to bear upon the executive by means of Congress. Such a stu- dent would be more likely to maintain the opposite, that in many cases during the last twenty years the executive has brought the majority opinion of the country to bear upon Congress. In reality while the President undoubtedly makes use of the knowledge of individual members of Congress, he has other and better means of finding out the judgment of the nation, means unknown to the eighteenth century. On the morning after President Wilson’s speech of Febru- ary 3, 1917, on submarine warfare, the New York Times laid before its readers an impressive collection of opinion upon it from all parts of the country, of fifty-nine news- papers, including seventeen German-language papers, of sixteen Governors of States and of two State Legislatures, and of many men of prominence.
In England itself in extremely important matters the pub- lic opinion of the nation has been ascertained and faithfully acted upon without parliamentary action. This has even been done in the making and unmaking of Cabinets. Twice since the war began the Cabinet has been reconstructed, once involving the fall of the Prime Minister, with no preliminary declaration of Parliament whatever. But, notwithstanding the comment of certain extreme radicals, it would be absurd to maintain that the Ministry of Mr. Lloyd George did not take office because of a public demand, or that it could main- tain itself for a moment if it lost public confidence, whether Parliament registered the change or not. As a distinguished English publicist said at the time: “In the present instance the House has not been defied, but it has not been consulted. Mr. Lloyd George draws his strength from outside the walls of Parliament; he owes his elevation to a kind of informal and irregular, but unmistakably emphatic, plebiscite. The House of Commons did not make him Premier; it is doubt- ful whether it could unmake him.” The truth is that Par- liament is no longer a channel through which the nation communicates with the Government or declares what the Government could not otherwise know, nor an organ for the formation of a national judgment. It has no longer any peculiar access to the springs of opinion.
But this does not cover the entire subject of executive re- sponsibility. It is necessary that the public be confident that the executive will not carry out a policy opposed to its will. Here again the experience of the United States is enlightening, for it shows how a living democracy operates in just this matter as supplementing and modifying the writ- ten law. The President is supposed to appoint his Cabinet to suit himself without formal responsibility, and no doubt Presidents have shown considerable idiosyncrasy in their appointments and considerable power of resistance to popu- lar demand for changes in their Cabinets. There have been 80 many cases, however, within comparatively recent mem- ory, from Alger to Bryan, of members of the Cabinet ac- tually forced out of office by the pressure of public opinion, whatever may have been the pretext upon which they re- signed, that it is not going too far to say that the drift has
—
been decided during the last generation towards reducing to a form the undoubted legal independence of the President in this matter. As to the President himself, we have only to imagine an extreme case in which the will of the nation should unmistakably declare itself against a policy desired by him to be convinced that he would be obliged to abandon it. I do not mean by this the will of the opposition, however loudly expressed, for this, so long as it is this only, he has the right to disregard; nor do | mean that the President is cut off from an attempt to educate the nation up to a policy of his own; but I do mean that we have reached a point in our constitutional development where the President would never insist upon carrying through a policy against the convinced will of the nation. And every American will understand that the President would know what that will is and act upon it without Congressional action
And it is the convinced will of the nation that we must regard as the unit of authority in any international alliance, whatever form it may take. This is something behind which no form of international governmg This@® as true of an alliance with an elaborate constitut ion, which attempts to vest in a céntral body a pawer of coercion, as of a mere understandin# between nations which rests upon common ideals of conduct and policy and is managed by conference The living forces of growth in a democratic world will make
can go
over any written constitution to suit themselves, as the Con stitution of the United States has been made over in so many ways without formal amendment. And what could be the practical operation of any plan with a minutely worked out constit@tion? What would be the force by which it would do its work and which would enable it to maintain any power with which it might be invested? Before we can make any secure advance to g solution of the problenf a workable international union, it must be recognized that the binding force of any alliance cannot be the right of coercion be stowed by legislation or by treaty upon a central body, but the common moral force, the moral unity of ideal and pur- pose, which must underlie any form which ingenuity can devise. A nation, a member of an imperial or a world alli- ance, cannot be coerC€d except by the force of opinion. The nation which will not agree tu the common judgment of other nations, which will not join in common action, by its refusal declares its independence and throws itself out of the world alliance. In otHer words, it declares that it does not share in the common*ideals and standards of conduct on which alone such an alliance can be securely based, and therefore that it is not rightfully a member of it. It is because present experience, gives rise to the hope that such common ideals and standards are shared by many nafions that we may w lieve that a real alliance for future peace is possible.
The inveterate sfowness of the mind to get out of the rutée which time has made is shown in the fact that nine-tenths of the discussion of an international alliance for peace is full , of vested
of elaborate schemes of treaties and constitution powers in parliaments and courts and cabinets. These are all survivals of a time out of which the war has swiftly brought us. They fail to recognize the fact that all things have been made new, and that we are now gathering in a day the harvest of a century since th mocratic move- ment began. How plain is the fact tha e great interna- tional alliance which now exists, which is managing the common affairs of nations on a scale never before thought. possible, exists by virtue of no creative treaties or elaborate agreements, and that it is making the machinery of its
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[Vol. 106, No. 2753
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operation as it goes on with its task. It is the stress of war, no doubt, which is creating new machinery. But this new machinery is not for war alone, and it is equally true that it is a new age upon which the whole world will enter at the close of the war. What we are called upon now to see is how naturally and completely the new machinery we are evolving meets the demands of the new world after the war. The problem of a union in a common international policy is already almost solved. To all intents and purposes such a union exists to-day with the necessary machinery. Only the slightest adjustment is necessary, mainly in the way of reaching an understanding, not in inventing forms of gov- ernment.
The new machinery marks the way of the future, and it also solves the problem of responsibility. It indicates clear- ly that the scheme for a cabinet is not necessary, even for effective responsibility. Such a plan goes with the idea of internal government in elaborate detail. It is based upon the theory that such internal government must be provided for. If it be true that @ge main purpose of federation is unity of external policy, not internal regulation, it follows that a cabinet is as unnecessary and out of place as an im- perial parliament. The astonishing development of the council method for the management of all sorts of interests and of international conference on a scale never before at- tempted, the gradual evolution of the War Council of the Allies with universal public-approval and a disposition to put under its control affairs of world-wide import, show what should take the place of a cabinet, and events have proved that the responsibility of the council is real and im- mediate. It is exactly the responsibility of the American executive. Mg. Lloyd George certainly learned, as a con- sequence of famous Paris speech, that membership in a council conference was not free from responsibility of a very effective kind, and it will not be forgotten that ear- lier still the conference proposal of an international trade boycott of Germany after the war disappeared from view because of general disapproval.
If the British Empire could advance to a practical, not a merely sentimental, recognition of the fact that it is a commonwealth of nations, and could bring itself to act in international relations in view of the fact, the problem of federation, of such federation as is necessary, would be almost instantly solved. It would be seen at once that the proper method of operation is not legislation, but confer- ence, and that an elaborate machinery of parliament and cabinet need not be provided, but that the far simpler allied council would serve every purpose. The transformation of
ritish Empire actually into a commonwealth of na- tions would also render at once the problem of America’s joining with it in a common international policy far easier of solution. To join in some arrangement, however simple, for a common policy with the British Empire as that has been historically known to us will seem to many a doubt- ful and difficult thing to do. It would not be difficult for us to join with six English-speaking nations, standing upon a common footing of interest and influence, and all alike
peers of ours. If such a common understanding of English-
speaking nations among themselves is seen to be imminent and certain as a result of the war, it can hardly be doubted but that other democratic nations, whose likeness of mind with us in the great problems of the recent past has already been demonstrated, will be attracted into the circle of this agreement and the union become a world league of peace.
Told and Made
By H. W. BOYNTON
The Great Modern French Stories: A Chronological An-
thology. Compiled and edited, with an Introduction, by Willard Huntington Wright. New York: Boni & Live- right.
The Lucky Seven. By John Taintor Foote. New York: D. Appleton & Company.
Nine Tales. By Hugh de Sélincourt. Mead & Company.
Under the Hermes, and Other Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.
Chronicles of St. Tid. By Eden Phillpotts. Macmillan Company.
The Lost Naval Papers. By Bennet Copplestone. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company.
The Long Trick. By “Bartimeus.” Doran Company.
New York: Dodd, By Richard Dehan.
New York: The
New York: George H.
HE reader who is minded to give a few hours to “Great
Modern French Stories” may be doing as fairly by him- self and his authors if he turns an innocent receptive ear to their story-telling before submitting to the exposition of the lecturer whose ponderous presence well-nigh blocks the gate of the bazaar. This, the title-page warns us, is not a group of tales lightly or irresponsibly assembled. Nor is it merely “a chronological anthology.” The long “Introduction” is nothing less than a monograph upon “The Evolution of Mod- ern French Fiction,” and each of the narratives that follows has its place as a document in evidence for the writer’s some- what cumbrous and over-labored argument. Is there nothing in life or art that Mr. Wright would scruple to smother in his heavy enveloping esthetic theory? These tales are good examples, not always happily rendered in English, of the short story in French, from Dumas pére to Charles-Louis Philippe. The quality and bent of the editor’s modernity may be gathered from his closing estimate: “Philippe was a naturalist in the same sense that Maupassant was, but to Maupassant’s naturalism he added realistic and psychologi- cal qualities which gave to his work a brilliant color of truth. He waged an effective war against dilettantism; he held ever before him an unbiassed vision of actuality; there was in his writing no cultural pretensions [sic]. Experience was the basis of his art. He was a serious artist, and recent French literature owes much both to his example and to his accomplishments.” The given example of Phi- lippe’s work, “Le Retour,” is a sufficiently dry and detached account of the return of a laborer who has deserted his wife and children and of his finding them comfortably established with another mate and protector (unofficial), an old friend of his own. He makes his little visit and withdraws, em- bracing both of the technically “guilty pair.” It is all very simple and casual, a situation that hardly develops into an episode. In fact, like many others among these more or less famous tales, it would hardly qualify as a story in the eyes of the American fiction-magazine editor; he would dis- miss it as that commercially worthless thing, a “sketch”— with the possible offer to look at it again after the author had done his duty by his material—that is, worked it onward from the situation, by a series of jolts, to “a snappy ending.”
April 4, 1918]
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The American “short story” is so frankly a commercial article that one finds it difficult to follow those enthusiasts who vaunt it as the great thing in our literature. There is a tremendous market for it, and that market is supplied, like other markets, with a commodity the public wants. But the Saturday Evening Post style and the “O. Henry” formula and the experts wno teach the trick in twenty lessons have so nearly standardized it that any properly equipped plant can produce it, like the Liberty Motor, in quantity. Beyond, of course, lie the chances of the market. This is not the whole truth; we have a good deal of honest short-story tell- ing; but a hundred tales are made to one that is told, and the one that is told is very unlikely to owe its real merit to any trick or two America may have shown the world in this “line.” The popular magician “O. Henry” hit upon a novel way of telling stories and made good use of it for the reason that he was a “born” story-teller. The main thing with him, after all, was the story and not the “stunt.” This is the real test of any story-teller; if he cannot pass it, he is only a story-maker or faker. “No tricks, not one,” cries the young novelist in “Bolters,” the first story of “The Lucky Seven.” “T’ll tell it just as it is, so help me God!” We surmise (it is sheer surmise) that the author of “The Lucky Seven” may have begun to write with a similar vow upon his lips, and that he may have found it expedient to adopt, for the time at least, a less rigid method. There are distinct traces of original quality in these stories, which the conventionally clever manner does its best to conceal. They have “made” the best-paying market for short stories—having been skil- fully made for it. Here are the airy introduction, the inti- mate-facetious setting-forth, the up-and-down of magazine plot, the inevitable punch at the end. Is the entertainer con- tent, we wonder, with his skilful manipulation of this stale bag of tricks? Or has he perhaps some natural way of his own to go with his natural impulse for story-telling?
There is too much of the “stunt” or trick about the cur- rent British short story also. Here and there the American influence is plain, as, for instance, in the “Limehouse Nights” of Thomas Burke. On the whole, the English technique shows less of, as it were, hide-bound cleverness, and in con- sequence more range and flexibility. Beyond our shores, the sharp distinction between the sketch and the plotted tale is hardly drawn and is certainly not dwelt upon. Versatility appears to be the main thing striven for. It marked the collection of stories by A. E. W. Mason, “The Four Corners of the World,” of which we were speaking not long ago. It marks two new collections, “Nine Tales,” by Hugh de Sélin- court, and “Under the Hermes,” by Richard Dehan. The Englishwoman who calls herself on occasion “Richard De- han” is a journalist and a playwright as well as a story- teller. Her object, one would say, is frankly to entertain her listeners; she “covers” many times and climes in her search for romantic materials. When she employs modern England as her scene, it is with the aid of spookish or other decorative accessories. More to her purpose are medizval Italy, or Denmark, or revolutionary Paris, or an island in the southern seas, or an Eskimo settlement. The stories are skilfully and not perfunctorily told. We feel that she has the right impulse to tell stories, but are never quite sure that she felt bound to tell the story in hand, whatever it may be. Hugh de Sélincourt is altogether concerned with the modern scene and action, and his way is modern. He detests con- formity and inclines to identify it with hypocrisy. He has his own little gospel of a moral and social health based upon
physical fitness. He challenges the physical enslavement of women in the name of “holy matrimony.” In two of these tales, “The Sacrifice” and “The Passionate Time-Server,” he challenges (as he did in his recent novel, “A Soldier of Life’) the general agreement to ignore the horror of war- fare and magnify its glory. The most original and imagina- tive story in the collection was written some years before the beginning of the war—“The Birth of an Artist,” inter- preting the release from the body of an old, old man by the kindly spirit of Death, and his dawning consciousness that his real life has just begun.
Mr. Phillpotts has no longer any surprises to offer; open- ing his latest book (for which one never has long to wait) is like reéntering a familiar and pleasant haven. When, some time since, he shifted his scene from Devon to Cornwall, we discovered that changes in setting and costume made little difference to the world of Phillpotts. His people of the quarries have other turns of speech than his people of the moors, but they are more alike than either is like any other people in the flesh or in fancy. They have the same idioms of mind and character, the same appalling frankness, so unlike the reticence of our American rustics, the same direct and primitive reactions to greed, passion, revenge, the same grim, garrulous humor. Among them their annalist moves, as always, with perfect ease and understanding. The sixteen tales in “Chronicles of St. Tid” are told with a sort of non- chalant skill, the apparent carelessness of an artist who is sure of his subject and his medium. Most of them are upon the middle plane of rural comedy; the plane, in chief, of the everlasting conflict between love and duty, or love and prop- erty, or love and friendship. Almost invariably the story- teller is content with leading us quietly along his not too troublous path of action, towards a happy ending that has been in sight almost from the first. That it is his business to “keep us guessing,” in the American fashion, evidently does not occur to him. There is something restful and re- freshing in this simpler method. Two of the tales rather stand out from the rest, “The Reed Rond,” a tale ending in what the newspapers call “a rustic tragedy”—the suiciile of a lonely old woman, to which the artist gives a touch of really tragic nobility—and “The Saint and the Lovers.”
The yarns in “The Lost Naval Papers” pretend to be no- thing but yarns. They belong openly to the order of me- chanical romance—the romance of mystery and detection. The hero is none other than that favorite butt of Sherlock Holmes, a Scotland Yard inspector—or rather it is Scotland Yard itself, with the inspector as its instrument. Officer William Dawson has a great conceit of himself, and appears to justify it by a series of marvellous feats in the way of rounding up German spies and strengthening the hands of the British Admiralty at moments of crucial strain. But his chronicler takes special pains to tell us that this is all an illusion. Scotland Yard, he says, is not showy, but its sys- tem is irresistible: “Though Dawson was not specially in- telligent—in some respects almost stupid—he was dread- fully, terrifyingly efficient, because he was part of the slow- ly grinding Scotland Yard machine.” We suppose that our old friend Dr. Watson, if he admitted this, would trace it to the reforms induced by the great Sherlock’s exposures. These tales are admirable contrivances in their kind. They have, of course, little more to do with the war or with any other reality than the fifteen puzzle or the game of pigs Of very different quality are the stories (or We have had plenty of
in clover. sketches) in “The Long Trick.”
396 The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
books giving the substance and flavor of life in the trenches, but the routine of navy service has gone almost unchron- icled. The motto of this book is taken from the lips of a British Prime Minister, speaking aboard the flagship of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea: “Much of what you have done, as far as the public eye is concerned, may almost be
A Venture in Prophecy
said to have been done in the twilight.” This was said more than two years ago, yet our ignorance of the quality of naval life under the new conditions has remained. These lightly connected chronicles are as vivid as they are unas- suming; it is clear that the writer has wished to paint a true picture rather than a clever one; he has his reward.
—Spring Announcements
By H. R. STEEVES
PR sate at publishers’ announcements will show that the literature of the war is this spring the transcendent interest, not only of the student of events, but of the gen- eral reader. It should be so. In mere bulk this writing is imposing—even to the professional handler of books; and in variety it is something of a revelation of the amazing multiplicity of the world’s one problem and one story. Al- most any spring list will show a sharp preponderance of war books, from important economic and political interpre- tations and forecasts to the host of narratives of adven- ture in and out of the trenches, stories of nurses, ambu- lance drivers, social workers, correspondents, and observers, poems written under fire, and soldiers’ journals. To dismiss all this with an aspersion or a jest is to deny not only the challenge, stimulating and varied, of life lived at the pin- nacle of inward seriousness and vital hazard, but to lose sight of the almost but not quite hopeless complexity of the ultimate lessons to be learned.
In this mass of informed study and ephemeral comment, the European view seems momentarily the most valuable. Of the eight or ten books of the sort that appear to prom- ise most, there stand out a translation of Professor Fer- rero’s “Europe’s Fateful Hour” (Dodd, Mead), a consider- ation of fundamental causes and great effects, especially in the light of Italy’s influence and future; André Chéra- dame’s “The United States and Pan-Germania” (Scrib- ner); and Lieutenant-General Baron von Freytag-Loring- hoven’s “Deductions from the World War” (Putnam), a remarkably enlightening presentation of the German mili- tary situation. Demetra Vaka’s “In the Heart of German Intrigue” (Houghton) is a record of months spent in un- earthing the diplomatic secrets of Greece during the period when Constantine was endeavoring to swing his country to the side of Germany. In both human interest and historical bearing it is said to be very significant. One of the mest illumining of the war volumes is Isaac F. Marcosson’s “The Business of War” (John Lane), which depicts the complex machinery of war production and supply and reveals the economic generalship that sustains enormous military oper- Howe's “The Only Possible Peace” (Scribner) promises a liberal and intelligent view of the essentially economic nature of the struggle, with a plea for a peace which will put an end to economic exploitation and the scramble for exclusive spheres of national opportunity. Another venture in the domain of political and economic prophecy is Walter E. Weyl’s “The End of the War,” pub- lished by Macmillan. A reflection of American interest in the English statesman of the moment is to be found in “Lloyd George and the War” (Macmillan), by an anonymous writer. In two volumes on the collapse of Russia we are given at least a partial answer to the enigma of a new na- tion’s political outlook: “Russia’s Agony” (Longmans), by
’
ations. Frederic C.,
Robert Wilton, the London Times ccrrespondent in Petro- grad, and Ernest Poole’s “The Dark People: Russia’s Crisis” (Macmillan). The story of the actual revolution of March, 1917, and of the contemporary Russian sense of its nature and tendencies, is told in James L. Houghteling, jr.’s, “A Diary of the Russian Revolution” (Dodd, Mead). A clearly authentic pronouncement upon the immediate cause of the war—Balkan unrest—as well as upon Germany’s consistent policy of political irritation in the Near East and the posi- tion of the Balkan countries throughout the war, will be found in H. Charles Woods’s “The Cradle of the War” (Lit- tle, Brown).
Close-at-hand views of the conflict itself are rapidly in- creasing in number. Of them all, Captain Hugh Knyvett’s “‘*Over There’ with the Australians” (Scribner) seems to be the book of the minute, probably because of the sharp im- pression that the author has made in his appearance before American audiences. Coningsby Dawson’s “The Glory of the Trenches” (Lane) will be good, if simply for the reason that the writer is a keen observer of life and a vivid story- teller, either in or out of fiction. A new book by John Masc- field, “The Old Front Line” (Macmillan), follows the cam- paign in France in much the same way as his account of the fighting in Gallipoli. More than everyday interest will probably be found in George Abel Schreiner’s “The Iron Ration” (Harper), which, it is said, handles with excep- tional accuracy and a well-informed point of view the so- cial and economic conditions in the Teuton countries, and particularly the much-debated question of the stability of the Central Powers. A book by Herbert Adams Gibbons, “With Our Rookies in France” (Harper), is intended to present an intimate picture of the conditions of soldier life abroad; and a similar aim—the presentation of the war as a practical problem for soldiers and their families—is found in Guy Empey’s “First Call” (Putnam). Popular interest in the expanding importance of aeroplane work has brought out two notable books on the subject: Lieutenant Edgar Middleton’s “Airfare of To-day and the Future” (Scribner's importation), which deals comprehensibly but thoroughly with the airman’s technique and strategy, and “High Ad- venture” (Houghton), the personal narrative of James Nor- man Hall, author of “Kitchener's Mob,” who was sent abroad to prepare an account of the American Flying Squadron, but enlisting was brought down seriously wounded in a fight with German planes.
On the horizon of ultimate peace are already seen the grave problems of social readjustment growing not only oul of the war itself, but out of the experiments, shifts, and adaptations—industrial and political—by which home sup- port of the war in the belligerent countries has been main- tained. John Spargo’s “Socialism and Americanism” (Har- per) is in this connection a volume which must be looked
2 i 4 s
April 4, 1918]
The Nation
397 -
Be hie yr ; AISL & )
forward to as an enlightened and patriotic Socia
to distinguish the effective force of American Socialism from its alien and partisan drift. Arthur Henderson’s “The
Aims of Labour” (Huebsch) should be an informing volum« from the acknowledged spokesman of the English workers
“Rising Japan—Menace or Friend” (Putnam), by Jabez
T. Sunderland, is a concise treatment of a question of not yet subsiding concern, from a mind familiar with Asiatic conditions and views.
In the realm of fiction it is naturally difficult to accep upon faith anything that does not carry the warranty of an already distinguished name. Indeed, hopes so secured are often enough doomed to reversal. It might be surmised that fiction is not flourishing now. However the echo of war may stimulate the poetic impulse, it apparently leaves the reflective function of the novelist inert. It is true that no very impressive war novel has come from a professed and accepted novelist of to-day; the cogency of even “Mr. Bri ling” as evidence to the contrary may be questioned. That the war, in its distant view, will provide for future Hugo and Tolstoys is not to be doubted; but the contemporaneou novelist is confronted with the unanswerable challenge of the actual, and what distinctly good current fiction we ha\ is in the main fiction dealing with the calmer current of life.
Some “good names” are to be found in the spring offerings
of fiction. Scribner publishes for Mr. Galsworthy a volume of “Five Tales’—one of them reintroducing the Forsyt of “The Man of Property”—and for George W. Cable an other of his delightful stories of Creole society, ‘““The Flower of the Chapdelaines.” Mrs. Barr has in her “Orkney Maid” (Appleton) a Crimean War story of romantic theme. Hen
Iolt & Company announce the last of William De Morgan’s novels, “The Old Madhouse,” finished at his death to within a chapter or two of its conclusion and completed by Mrs. De Morgan from his notes and suggestions. The story, charac teristically a very long one, with much both of scope and in- tricacy, contains a triple romance and a mysterious disap pearance, contrasting, as the spectacular quality of Mr. De Morgan’s themes always did, with the quiet and compassion- ate humor of a rich heart. The publication of this last work of a discerning and mellow novelist must call up a real regre in the minds of readers who have not outgrown the leisurely tradition in fiction. Another noteworthy posthumous vol- ume is a collection of ten recently discovered stories by Joel Chandler Harris—“Uncle Remus Returns” (Houghton Mif- flin). There is obvious promise also in volumes of short stories by Rabindranath Tagore (“Mashi and Other Sto- ries”; Macmillan) and Eden Phillpotts (“Chronicles of St Tid”; Macmillan), and in a detective story, “Vicky Van,” by Carolyn Wells (Lippincott).
For the rest, one must perforce base his guess upon the particular allurement of the publisher’s “write-up.” Arthur Train’s story, “The Earthquake” a lively and convincing picture of the war as a lesson duty and purpose to an “average American family.” The background of war is touched again in Quiller-Couch’ “Foe-Farrell” (Macmillan), the story of which is to!d nich! by night in an officers’ dugout. In “Oh, Money! Money!” (Houghton Mifflin) Eleanor Porter presents a variant upon the old question, “What would you do with a million dol- lars?” Dorothy Richardson introduces a third stage in her heroine’s search for “real” life in her novel “Hone comb” (Alfred Knopf), which has already been very appre- ciatively received in England. Probably the reader of Edward
(Scribner), is said to
Bertrand Ru
,
Supremo” will look forward with some dinary anticipation to his new historical
Vestal” (Dutton), the scene of which
dav A romance of mark in the | be “Old People and the Things h Louis Couperus, which draw rands of the 1 ntic past of a hero of roin f ninety ven. For the reader r a myste ile by Isabel Os McBride & | pany), and Patrick and he Wolf Cu l le, Brown), a stirring nditti. The lure of anonymity is present er’s P mer re ” (Holt), “by an American the pedestrian sentimental journey holar. Here, too, is action. . .. There in old name not over-old, how \ volume called “M ents of Vision,” p Ist } \ ( ne&é Ce pan t it M ld R " Edgrat ; 1 the Gulf,” and T: r I y I Same hou | { not ( that wisest and ght f Celt Reincarnation Altogether, thi pread for publisher to furnish for the writers of the newer age are Jo}
1908-1914" (Dodd, Mead), and ID
rs of Sunrise” (Little, Brown). John hur Yr < volume t por of the Walsh and Ford Maddox Hueffer, and Verhaeren and Emile Cammaerts
haps, is a collection of pieces (‘Post nd after Swinburne’s death and cov
e |} ical caret From at least hal
! two 1 to have outstand
p ent The first is “The Golden ine Verse” (Small, Maynard), by Wil thwaite, whose annual anthologies ha ted his taste and critical perception; th var verse: “Irom the Front’ (App!
Rupert Brooke, Alan ever, and
pr moment
oY he making and { worl
en 1 ft nimble fash will I rmational or historical character would
uch importance to the usher’s function
xluction to the book he wishes to
ozen or score of unquestionably worthy books
vel and discovery, of criticism, of philoso found in the spring lists, however, a fev Morl “Pecollections.” r example, if R. B. Merri | if the to ! d M r. W.S ( ) } } } \Tifll n ; In th \V e Nor Harper
burne Landor’ Macmillan and M 1] j d Other } "
ist he nted, in 7 iv, that in par of t irrent of inter in the p r ft ( } tion whi
the of ic} ty ks ! lm t
l | \ p! i th end
398 The Nation
[Vol. 106, No. 2753
Easter
By CHARLES R. MURPHY
—s perfume from a summer field Shall half-awake the hidden child That lies within you year-long sealed; So, be the summer stern or mild, Something expectant has awaited, Through winter’s snow, a season’s yield Of sun and shower where are fated Resurrection and the seed—
Wherein the listening, ever wild Flower shall blossom if you heed,
Or sleep again until, belated,
A warmer sun shall be your need.
Books by the Yard
By MARY VIDA CLARK
Bg man who said he could “resist anything but temp- tation” arouses my sympathy. During the twenty years that I have lived in New York, I have never been able to reach my office without passing a second-hand book-store— the kind that displays samples of its contents on stands out- side which positively trip up the passerby. The more hu- mane purveyors to the victims of another appetite conceal their stock in trade by opaque swinging doors, but no such protection is placed about the helpless bibliophile. In my case this constant exposure to the ravages of an unconquer- able habit has resulted in my accumulating what would once have been denominated a “gentleman’s library.” My taste in books is like some men’s taste in women. I choose them for their appearance rather than their contents. I like them short and stout and dark, with glints of red and black and gold in their coverings. This is a taste I seem to share with the French and Italians of the eighteenth century.
Recently the vicissitudes of metropolitan life forced upon me the choice of putting my possessions in storage or of loaning them where space was more ample, and I finally set up my collection in the built-in book shelves of an empty cor- ner of the club of my choice. My primary consideration in arranging books is size and color, with such attention to subject, language, and author as will not interfere with the more important requirement of appearance in a pleasing and unobtrusive background. But alas! my collection was ade- quate for but four of the five shelves, and the entire bottom shelf was empty. The dignified remains of the eighteenth century appeared to be perched on stilts. The hiatus in the underpinning spoiled the effect from the point of view of decoration. I could not bear it.
The room was to be formally opened in a few days, and there was no time for the laborious and loving accumulation of treasures. I had heard tales of certain recently rich men who save themselves time and trouble by ordering their libraries through the decorators who devise the furnish- ings of their new mansions. I had once had the rare plea- sure of knowing a genial and humane Congressman, from Boston, as it happened, to whom a constituent had applied for “*The Messages and Documents of the Presidents,’ or any other handsomely bound volumes that would look well in a private library.”
Supported in my purpose by this knowledge of the wide range of possible mental attitudes towards the acquisition of books, I descended upon one of my book men and put the case to him in the following carefully rehearsed phrase: “T want eight feet of old calf bindings not over six inches high, preferably eighteenth century, and I can’t pay more than a dollar a foot.” I endeavored to assume an easy and offhand manner as if shopping for books were cus- tomarily done by the foot or the yard. To my relief the book man appeared entirely unmoved by this extraordinary, this blasphemous request.
“I often get these orders for books in bulk,” he assured me, “mostly from the moving-picture concerns.” I had not appreciated previously the relation of these remarkable en- terprises to the book trade. “Why don’t they use imitation books?” I inquired. “Oh, real books are much cheaper,” my dealer replied; “sometimes they rent them, but they are likely to get damaged, so it’s about as cheap to buy them outright.” My memory of the few “movies” I had felt im- pelled to attend supplied pictures of houses collapsing and rooms being burned up or knocked to pieces by runaway auto- mobiles, and I understood the low expectation of life of a library which might be a feature of such a background.
The tact of the book man made my shopping expedition less of an ordeal than I had prefigured it, and the following day I returned with some eagerness to pass on the results of his endeavors. Sure enough, there were eight feet of dark brown calf bindings ranging from three to six inches in height. I counted eighty-five volumes in all. There were fully two feet of “Elegant Extracts from the Most Eminent Writ- ers, Ancient and Classical,” a set of “Elegant Epistles, being a copious selection of Instructive, Moral, and Entertaining Letters from the Most Eminent Epistolatory Writers.” When the humorous literature of the present fails or palls, we have only to turn for refreshment to the serious litera- ture of the past. How fond were our ancestors of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, especially the Beautiful. There were “The Beauties of Johnson,” “The Beauties of Sterne, including all his Pathetic Tales and most distinguished ob- servations on Life, Selected for the Heart of Sensibility,” three volumes of the “Beauties of the English Stage, consist- ing of the most affecting and sentimental Passages, Solilo- quies, Similes, Descriptions, etc., in the English Plays An- cient and Modern.” What a contrast to the literary matter which appears in our current magazines under the title, “Beauties of the Stage.”
In those days literature was indeed an aristocratic affair. With what splendor of armorial book-plates were some of these volumes distinguished: “Edward Lord Harewood, in solo Deo salus,” “Charles Somers, Earl Somers, Eastnor Cas- tle Library prodesse quam conspici,” “Marquis Townshend, haec generi incrementa fides,” “Lord Carberry, libertas.”
Continental contributions were not lacking to the collec- tion: “Anecdotes du Seiziéme Siécle ou Intrigues de Cour politiques et galantes.” Spicy reading this! “Les Délices de la Hollande,” published in 1710, “a la Haye, chez la veuve de Meyndert Wytwerf dans le Spuy-straat.” How pleasant to think that two hundred years ago this unfortunate little country now “between the Devil and the North Sea” had its “délices”’!
As it is not my custom to penetrate beyond the title-page of my purchases, I can only refer those who read books as well as buy them to the loan collection accessible in the club aforesaid. At the opening of the new room I was effu-
Tah. =
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—_ ler lO hi Or oe CO
April 4, 1918]
The Nation
399
sively thanked by officers and members for my contribution to the charm and distinction of the sacred place. I chanced to overhear the comment of an appreciative member to whom I was not known by sight. “What a discriminating taste this collection indicates,” murmured my flatterer.
“How reconciling that such cultivation still persists in this
workaday world and in our own membership. It is evident that every volume is chosen with profound knowledge and with loving thought.”
Verse and Verse Criticism
By 0. W. FIRKINS
Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. By Amy Lowell. New York: The Macmillan Company. $2.50.
George Edward Woodberry: Contemporary American Poet Series. By Louis V. Ledoux. Cambridge, Mass.: The Poetry Review Company. $1.
Poetry and Nationai Character. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Metaphor in Poetry. By J. C. Jennings. Charles E. Merrill Company. $1.
The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems. Lindsay. New York: The Macmillan Company.
Beggar and King. By Richard Butler Glaenzer.
By W. Macneile Dixon. 45 cents. New York:
By Vachel $1.25. New Ha-
ven: The Yale Press. $1 net.
Nocturne of Remembered Spring. By Conrad Aiken. Bos- ton: The Four Seas Company. $1.25 net.
Streets and Faces. By Scudder Middleton. Arlington,
N. J.: The Little Book Publisher.
ISS AMY LOWELL’S “Tendencies” is partisan and
slipshod, but its real worth as criticism and its greater worth as testimony are indisputable. By looking partly with Miss Lowell, partly past and beyond her, even the skeptic can clarify his vision, and the book will con- ciliate its public by novelty in that kind of biographical detail for which the demand is perennial in the anterooms of literature.
The craftsmanship is rude. A disdain for the fineries of prose style, rather honorable than otherwise in a vir- tuoso, passes rapidly into a neglect of the decencies. At times the notebook has spilled its contents into the volume. Grammar is slighted; figures are confounded; the clasps which solidify a sentence are withheld. Miss Lowell’s dic- tion is “perplexed in the extreme.” Apparently she does not know what irony is (see page 42). Her poets “state” what is in them. She speaks of one person or another shieldingly as “this gentleman,” makes Chaucer a county magistrate (page 150), cannot quote “cabin’d, cribb’d, con- fin’d” without disarrangement and false printing (page 75), grossly mistranslates one Greek epitaph, and shifts the paternity of another from its author, Leonidas of Taren- tum, to its anthologist, Meleager (pages 182-183).
The defects do not end here. I know of no writer who basks in truism more cosily than this champion of innova- tion. She addresses a grade of intelligence which is ex- pected to be thankful for the announcement that “natural bents are often too strong for paternal regulation” and that “a smattering of many subjects is not education.” The metaphors are coeval with the generalities. The author calls H. D.’s poems cameos or intaglios with a pen still all but dripping from the expression of her abhorrence for clichés.
On regular metres Miss Lowell’s exposition is as artless
She is “amused” at Mr. Edward Garnett for presuming, as a “classicist,” to admire the in- trepidities of Mr. Frost’s iambic pentameter. Mr. Garnett has no right to approve the type of blank-verse line which contains, by her scansion, two iambs and two anapests. To what century would Miss Lowell assign the following pentameter consisting of four unmistakable and uncom- promising anapests: “In the head of ye all, with my sword in my hand’? It is exactly three hundred years old, occur- ring in Act I, Scene III, of John Fletcher's “Loyal Sub- ject,” licensed in 1618. Is a man bred in the tradition of which this verse is a part justly chargeable with absurdity for endorsing a type of line in which the toll to conserva- tion is still payable in the retention of two iambs? Does Miss Lowell not know that the mere frame or diagram of the iambic pentameter is to the actual “classic” line simply what the trellis is to the grape-vine—a thing to be strayed from quite as much as to be clung to? Miss Lowell herself is for Mr. Frost’s temerities, heart and soul; but when Mr. Garnett ventures to agree with her, she overflows with the bubbling amusement of the Unitarian who finds a Method ist in his pew on Sunday morning.
According to Miss Lowell, Mr. Frost’s “Call her Nau- sicaa, the unafraid,” is a very bad line by classical stan- dards, and is composed of trochees. H. D. should have been consulted on the accent of “Nausicaa.” In fact, the line is pure iamb except for the “Call her,” and a trochee in the first foot is no blemish on the perfection of its “classic” regularity. Surely the tradition may rejoice in its as- sailants.
I have dwelt on these unworthinesses in protest against the impression, now frequent in authorship and readership alike, that ability can dispense with competence. I turn with pleasure to the cordial acknowledgment of the un- doubted virtues of the book. In reading these essays I have reconvinced myself of the inherent probity of Miss Lowell’s mind. A love for orchids is excusable only when the love itself is not an orchid, but comes up with the riot- ous spontaneity of a weed. That excuse is emphatically Miss Lowell’s. I think her strong in critical faculty—not quite so strong in critical competence since her biases are peculiar and extreme. Even with this discount, her esti- mates of Mr. Robinson, Mr. Frost, Mr. Masters, and Mr. Sandburg are valuable, and in H. D.’s case a paring—per- haps I should rather say a mowing—of superlatives would rectify her verdict. It is only when Mr. Fletcher is reached that one recalls Philaminte and Trissotin.
as it is condescending.
On se sent A ces vers, jusques au fond de |’ame, Couler je ne sais quoi qui fait que l’on se pame.
The usual tone is humane, liberal, and discreet, and the loftiness towards the “classicists” is merely episodic. Her division of the new movement is a solid help. She distin-
400 The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
guishes, first, Messrs. Robinson and Frost, in whom the old order suffers the ferments of disintegration; second, Messrs. Sandburg and Masters, iconoclasts in the cleft between two dispensations, poets in whom revolution is alleviated by free verse, as despotism was once tempered by epigrams; and lastly, H. D. and Mr. Fletcher, in whom art is recon- structive. Miss Lowell sees, in all this, climax and evolution; I am content with its value as perspective. The book’s worth as document is even more serviceable to the needs of spe- cialists like myself. On the purposes of the imagists Miss Lowell is naturally authoritative, and a bit of scansion on page 265 supplied me with a test of my own understand- ing of their aims for which I had searched in vain in the shimmer of their verse and the haze of their prefaces.
Three booklets of critical prose may be mentioned in this place. Mr. Ledoux’s treatment of Mr. Woodberry is deli- cate both in perception and in feeling. I think the critic not duly sensible of the scope, the charm, and the difficulty of the problem offered by the intrusion of the headstrong “Flight” into the level and tranquil course of Mr. Wood- berry’s typical psychology. In what feluceca did he cross from Greece to Algiers? Still, the book is sound and sweet within its shapely limits, and the style recalls the forsaken, if not forgotten, days of the gentility of literature. Mr. Jennings’s not unsuggestive “Metaphor in Poetry” is chiefly useful as a needed preliminary and incitement to a deeper study of its interesting theme. W. Macneile Dixon’s “Po- etry and National Character” is a pattern Leslie Stephen lecture; the insight is real, and the elegance noteworthy.
Mr. Vachel Lindsay is a true poet and an earnest man, but he gives too much play to his elfishness, if I may so define his pursuit of freak in sensible images. He is a pleader for great causes; he would arrest the flow of wine and of blood; and his apostleship ought to dignify, or even consecrate, his fantasies. But somehow the fantasies are unconverted. The whimsicality joins the crusade as Fal- staff went to the wars; the enlistment itself is partly whim- sical. Moreover, it is curious even among freaks. It is prankish, but not gay, and in such material, if I may risk the paradox, the defence against absurdity is humor. A comedian may fittingly stand on one leg; an anchorite in the same pose is out of keeping. Let Mr. Lindsay write “poem games,” if he will, but why five pages of sapient prose exordium? Must poetry solemnize its amalgamation with play? Must we take our teddy-bears to the christen- ing font? But I remember that the volume is the “Chinese Nightingale,” and that in Asia capering is a form of wor- ship
The volume is interesting, and its pursuit of the abstruse in the popular is a curious novelty. Sometimes the poetry ls strong, as in the couplet:
We copied deep books, and we carved in jade, And wove blue silks in the mulberry shade.
To please myself, however, I would take the knotty hickory of the passage in defence of free speech which follows:
Down with the Prussians and all their works. Down with the Turks.
Down with every army that fights against the soap-box, The Pericles, Socrates, Diogenes soap-box,
The old Elijah, Jeremiah, John-the-Baptist soap-hox,
The Rousseau, Mirabeau, Danton soap-box,
The Karl Marx, Henry Ceorge, Woodrow Wilson soap-box. We will make the wide earth safe for the soap-box.
Mr. Glaenzer has the art of writing poems that are aston- ishingly like astonishingly good poems. His first volume is a prodigy in its way. He plies us, he cloys us, with des- serts; but desserts are demands, and one has a lurking pref- erence for entreaties. His suit to the Muse resembles that of Morell to Candida in the Shaw play; it relies too much on exertions and capacities. His “Golden Plover” is bil- leted for immortality by the Yale Press. If I gave clear- ances for immortality like the Yale Press, I should rather choose the ensuing stanza:
If France is dying, she dies as day In the splendor of noon, sun-aureoled ; If France is dying, then youth is gray And steel is soft and flame is cold. France cannot die! France cannot die!
That is very good writing; that is poetry; though not poetry, I should hold, in the same degree in which it is good writ- ing. The difference is instructive. Mr. Glaenzer is a man of letters by nature; he is a poet—so to speak—by diploma. Those who keep in mind the “Empty Ring” and “Diana’s Song” may well protest that it is a diploma cum laude.
Mr. Aiken’s new volume has certain clemencies for the apprehensive reader. It is much clearer than the “Jig of Forslin,” much cleaner than “Turns and Movies.” Litera- ture in this book does not serve the purpose of an eringo, if I may revive a word that would have been transparent to Elizabethans. Rain is ubiquitous in the volume, and it is the rain-world, musical, monotonous, and muffled, the world seen through the blur, heard through the resonance, of falling water that Mr. Aiken embodies in this dim record of sequestered moods. Half the poems have musical titles, and, like music, sink intelligence in feeling. I think they both soothe and rasp; they are soothing to the sensibilities which they nourish, and rasping to the intelligence which they starve. The most significant poem in the book is “In the Trenches,” where effects of lethargy and intensity com- bine in abnormal unity. There is true poetry in lines like:
The sound of guns is in our ears, We are growing old and gray, We have forgotten many simple things.
Mr. Scudder Middleton is a newcomer to whom our doors should be hospitable. What impresses me in his work is sanity. He is sane in his mediation between old ways and new, sane in the proportions which thought, method, feel- ing, and melody occupy in his design, sane in the restriction both of the size and the number of his poems. He possesses also sensibility, imagination, strength, but the question which his volume, “Streets and Faces,” puts and does not clearly answer is whether he possesses these traits in a degree which will qualify him to make the most of his dis- tinguished sanity. One divines a thrift in the book which suggests that the incomes which sustain it are not princely. I care little for the highly praised poems. “Mother” affects me as rather boyish—or mannish, if the reader likes; and the “Clerk,” though surprisingly clever, is the sort of poem that might have been the outcome of a wager. I have the hardihood to prefer the “Return.”
Always the journey ends where it began! Out of my mother’s arms into your own!
Hold me, O love, serene against your breast! The sun takes up the wave and gives the rain. Over the dead the grass is green again.
The lark is singing on the ruined wall.
4
April 4, 1918]
The Nation 401
Academic Freedom in
War Time
To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
Sir: In its issue of March 7 the Nation devotes some edi- torial consideration to the recent report of a committee of the Association of University Professors on “Academic Freedom in War Time.” As chairman of the committee, I venture to count upon your courtesy for space to point out that the Nation’s readers can hardly fail to gather from your comment a very false conception both of the general spirit and purpose of the report, and of some of its specific contentions. The report is not a piece of moralizing in vacuo; it relates to a concrete and serious situation, of which the Nation can scarcely be ignorant. Within a few months there had occurred at least six dismissals of pro- fessors from American colleges or universities upon charges of “disloyalty”; and similar action had been attempted or threatened in other instances. The grounds, or alleged grounds, for these dismissals varied widely in gravity, and were in some cases utterly trivial. There was manifest in many quarters a tendency to petty persecution in the name of patriotism, a disposition to deny to citizens—if they chanced to be also college teachers—the enjoyment of their fundamental constitutional rights, and a growing temper of general reaction and intolerance. It was to this situa- tion that the report was addressed. It is primarily, and, as I had supposed, palpably, a protest against these abuses, and a warning against the danger that sinister forces may take advantage of the excited state of public feeling at such a time “to remove secretly some of the established land- marks of liberty,” both within and without the university. The report declares it to be one of the special war-time du- ties of members of the scholar’s profession to be on guard against “these harmful concomitants even of a war in a just cause.” While not denying—what, in the committee’s opinion, could not be denied—that the existence of a state of war entails some exceptional restrictions upon normal freedom of action and utterance, the report insists “that these restrictions are not to be multiplied, as they tend to be, beyond real necessity.” The report attempts to determine with some precision the limits of such necessity. While the Nation implies that the committee would not have “the uni- versity deal comprehendingly with the despised conscientious objector,” the fact is that the report argues at length against the imposition of penalties upon such objectors by univer- sity authorities, even in cases not covered by the exemption clauses of the draft law. The report, furthermore, in more than one passage pleads for consideration, magnanimity— and common-sense—in the treatment even of known disloy- alists. With the most important of the recent dismissals, that of Professor Cattell, the report deals specifically. The committee pronounces an emphatic condemnation upon the action of the Columbia trustees; and it declares the removal of any university teacher upon such grounds as were offi- cially put forward in this case to be contrary to all the essen- tial distinctions which the report sets forth.
No reader whose knowledge of the report is derived solely from the Nation’s account of it is likely to have surmised any of these pertinent facts. And in at least one instance your editorial article, by means of a rhetorical question, makes a direct suggestio falsi. The Nation ostensibly “in-
quires in all seriousness, does the committee hold that a Ger- man university ought to dismiss one of its men for taking an attitude of criticism or opposition to the majority, so long as he keeps within the limits imposed by the law?” The pur- pose of this question is manifestly to cause the reader to believe that the report implies that American professors may rightfully be dismissed for taking “an attitude of criticism or opposition to the majority.” Yet the report contains some five paragraphs directed against precisely the view thus im- puted to it. The committee declares that exists which makes it either necessa nation’s general policy in one of thet
“no emergency y or desirable that the ost pregnant moments of its history should be determined without general consid eration or discussion, or that minorities of all right to influence that policy by laying their opinions and arguments before their fellow-citizens.” While war is going on, it still remains the citizen's right, the report main- tains, “to express his opinion as to the terms on which peace
should be deprived
should be concluded, or as to the wisdom or eflicacy of pro posed measures or instrumentalities for the conduct of the war.”
It is true, however, that the committee holds that there are certain acts which in time of war should not be tolerated, on the part either of college professors or of other men, It is not, in the committee's tween the declaration of war and the conclusions of peace,
opinion, “the citizen’s right, be
to obstruct or impede the execution of any measure lawfully determined upon as requisite for the safety of the country and the successful prosecution of the war.” The specifi modes of obstructive action which the committee regards as inadmissible are not stated with complete accuracy by the Nation; but I will not take space to repeat the commit tee’s formulation of them.
Does or does not the Nation maintain that teachers, and others, should, at such a time as this, be given full license to carry on the activities which the report condemns? Does it contend that a college instructor should (so long as the police do not apprehend him) be permitted to employ his leisure in inciting other citizens to resist the draft laws; or to go about urging farmers, by adroit appeals to self- interest and class prejudice, to reduce the production of ce reals (which is, I take it, probably not an indictable offence) ; or to denounce as immoral the payment of taxes or the lending of money to any Government engayed in waging war? It is not, as your article seems to imply, the com mittee’s view that such acts as these ought to be tolerated in other men, but forbidden to college professo: It is its view that, by whomsoever committed, they are ably and gravely threatening to public order and the na tional security; and that college authcrities are therefore justified in notifying members of their staffs that those who, during the war, engage in such activities will be re garded as violating the statutes of their institutions, and therefore as subject to dismissal.
The Association of University Professors has, so far as I recall, never maintained, even in time of peace, that there are absolutely no requirements whatever which may be laid upon the conduct of college teachers, out of the penitentiary. It has never declared it to be an infringement of academic freedom to remove a teacher for grave moral delinquencies, or for violations of professional ethics, or for gross and habitual discourtesy. It has, in short, never adopted the principle which appears to be the the principle of
unmistak-
«0 long as they keep
major premise of the Nation's reasoning
402 The Nation
[Vol. 106, No. 2753
complete academic anarchism. It is, therefore, not surpris- ing that the committee which drafted the recent report, while condemning all restrictions not required by the public safety, has refused to declare it to be the duty of American colleges and universities to furnish a livelihood, and a plat- form, and the prestige of academic office to men actively and persistently engaged in doing what they can to bring about the defeat of the United States in this war and the betrayal of those—many of them sons of the same colleges —who are already placing their lives in jeopardy in the ser- vice of the country.
Freedom, academic or other, is not an absolute and all- sufficient end in itself, to be pursued at the sacrifice of all other human interests. It is in the main a means to ulte- rior ends. In any normal (that is, pacific) condition of a civilized society, it is an indispensable means to certain of the greatest and most valuable ends—-to the progressive discovery of truth, to the enrichment of human life by the development of diverse types of personality, to the effec- tual yet safe operation of those forces which in all societies are needed to rectify injustices and to destroy intrenched abuses. These reasons for freedom within the universities were valid before the war, and were duly insisted upon in reports of the Association of University Professors; they will be equally valid after the war, and will certainly not be then less tenaciously affirmed by the same body. But—little though the Nation seems to have realized the fact—such a war as this, in which the entire world is involved and the future character of human life and human relations upon this planet is at issue, alters many things and suspends some of the rules of less critical and perilous times. Such a conflict has a troublesome way of compelling men and institutions to take sides. The American college, if it main- tained the kind of neutrality, with respect to the present struggle, which the Nation regards as essential to academic freedom, would, in fact, be not merely tolerating but facili- tating the efforts of those who would repeat in America the achievement of the Lenines and the Trotzkys in Russia. In such a case, the college cannot escape the hard necessities of the situation. It must either be—in fact, and by the ac- tual operation of cause and effect, if not in intent—an accomplice in activities which, if successful, would bring about the defeat and the dishonor of the republic and do immeasurable injury to the cause of freedom throughout the world; or else it must determine that it will not give countenance and aid to those who, upon a fair trial, are clearly proved to be engaged in such activities—whether or not they have already come within the reach of the law. To the committee, I think—though I have no authority to speak for the other members of it—it seemed clear that, when faced by such an alternative, no American college or university could hesitate in its choice. The scholar’s free- dom, though even now to be protected against all avoidable infringement, must not be converted into a shelter from which, at a time of unprecedented peril and momentousness in the world’s history, men may threaten the very existence of the state and weaken the forces upon whose strength and cohesion and eventual triumph the hope of freedom every- where depends.
The committee, in short, has sought to face realities. It has consequently seen that there are two contrary dangers in the present situation—the danger of attempts by the forces of reaction at home to impose unnecessary and harm- ful restrictions, under the pretext of “patriotism,” and the
danger that, by its abuse and exaggeration in a time of crisis, “academic freedom” itself may become the disguised but not ineffectual ally of those still more menacing forces of reaction—and of yet worse things—against which the democracies of the world are now engaged in a life-and- death struggle. There are thus two sides to the committee’s report, but on both sides it defends the same cause. ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY Baltimore, March 15
TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
Sir: I beg leave to thank you for the editorial in your latest issue respecting the report of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the American Association of Uni- versity Professors, and for your other sturdy utterances on behalf of sane academic principles in war time as well as in peace. To some of us who have been happily preserved from personal or local friction in this matter, it has never- theless been a cause of deep regret to note how far supposed patriotism will lead those who should be among the first to see that temporary conditions cannot alter the funda- mental conditions of intellectual independence.
But, so far as university professors are concerned, we have been preparing the way for these war-time misunder- standings by a long period of development of false notions regarding the relation of a member of a university faculty to the institution he serves. I do not refer to such a notion as that he is an employee of the corporation of the univer- sity; for, though this may not be the ideal form of univer- sity organization, or the one best fitted to promote respect for scholarship, I take it that it is the form under which we actually live in practically all American institutions of higher learning. So, for myself, I cheerfully admit that I am an employee of a board of trustees, and that, in case of alleged incompetency or misconduct on my part, they are the sole court of last resort. But I should certainly not care to remain in their employ if I were under the impression that they considered themselves responsible for my opinions on any subject, as I should not have entered their employ if they had made a test of such opinions a prerequisite to my doing so. The real question is (as you have said, in substance), not who shall judge me, but in accordance with what law of responsibility.
“I find this question raised from another angle by the re- port of another committee of the Association of University Professors, that on university ethics, which has recently passed on to members of the Association the following ques- tions, as having been presented to it and promising to be suitable for discussion:
Should there be a definite understanding that no professor should use his title or the name of his institution in any con- nection not directly cognate to his scientific and educational activities? In addressing letters to the newspapers, signing petitions, etc., is it desirable that the name of the university should not be introduced either to identify the signer or to give his mail address? The same question may be asked about petitions on all political or semi-political matters.
This may seem to be a comparatively trifling matter, having no connection with the more serious issues already under discussion; certainly it is, if it be only a question of taste— whether it is good form for a professor to write a recom- mendation of a typewriter or a brand of soap on his univer- sity letterhead—or if it be one of punctilious honesty in the use of stationery, now becoming so expensive. But it is
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April 4, 1918]
The Nation
403
obvious that there underlies the query the fundamental mat- ter of responsibility for opinion. The ordinary reason for the use of title or university name, in matters not cognate to education, would be merely the same that leads to the use of such descriptive phrases as “President of the First National Bank,” “Head of the firm of Smith & Jones,” “Pas- tor of the First Presbyterian Church”—a convenient indi- cation of the standing of the person concerned in the com- munity. And if the propriety of such a use is questioned, it is because of a lurking feeling that in the case of a pro- fessor it means something more; it means that he “repre- sents the university.”
We should therefore ask ourselves with all possible defi- niteness what it is to “represent a university.” And a mo- ment’s reflection will show that it is what no professor ever undertakes to do, unless he is speaking on an educational matter concerning which his university has taken action. If he speaks concerning some non-academic matter—a ques- tion of dispute in the air of the moment—it will be in a field related either to the subject he professes or to an out- side field. If the former, it is obvious that he speaks for no one save himself, or at most his own department; that the university as such has no opinion except that he has some competence in that general field. If the latter, it is equally obvious that he speaks only for himself, since in a matter of public dispute all sides are probably represented in the university. Or again, what does “the university” mean? If the corporation, then no one in the least ac- quainted with universities supposes that the opinions of pro- fessors represent those of members of the corporation. If the faculty, then every one knows that university faculties differ among themselves on every subject under heaven and never attempt to act as a unit except in matters for which they are officially responsible. If the student body, the public has better means for getting student opinion than through professors. The notion, then, that when a professor expresses himself on some issue, whether local or national, he represents any one but himself or an accidentally like- minded group is a baseless superstition, no doubt held by a certain ignorant portion of the public, but certain to lead to confusion and injustice whenever it is acted upon, and one which every intelligent person should try to dispel.
The question involved, then, is really whether we should tolerate any tendency to make university scholars a class characterized by special privileges and special restrictions, like priests, diplomats, and soldiers. Members of these classes claim to speak with the authority of church or gov- ernment when they speak ex cathedra, and are often re- strained from uttering their private judgments because of the peculiar relation they hold to the authority to which they have submitted their individuality in a special way. Is it desirable that professors should form a similar group? If so, we shall have to go about the organization of the hierarchy more systematically. There are certain colleges whose professors, to be eligible, must conform to some religious or theological test—their individual opinions on religion and theology being correspondingly undervalued by the public; but I know of none as yet, which has adopted tests in the field of economics, politics, or law.
Because the point of view of the individual speaker is often of significance in debate, it may be proper for me to depose that I do not argue as one who has suffered from restrictions or misjudgments of public utterances. I hap- pen to be a professor of language and literature, and my
opinions are not usually solicited by the public, except when an occasional reporter calls me up to know what I think of the morality of a popular play, or a divided family wish to know whether they may say, “It is me.” Hence when I express myself on the income tax or on evolution, no one dreams that I represent the opinion of any one else. I am also so fortunate as to belong to a faculty which every one knows includes pacifists and belligerents, radicals and stand- patters, and representatives of many creeds. When any of us speaks on non-academic matters, with the university name attached to his, I think it is understood that he speaks “for the university” in this sense, and in this only—that the uni- versity is a body of scholars, each of whom is to form and utter his opinions as he sees the truth. Naturally, I covet the same conditions for my colleagues everywhere.
There are perhaps two remarks that may be made in sup- port of a different attitude. ignorant public will sometimes confuse individual professors and their universities, would it not at least be a matter of wisdom, in case one knows himself to be in a minority on a public issue, to keep silence? To which I answer that even the ignorant public knows the meaning of the argumentum a silentio, though it may not know the name, and if issues are really joined, to be silent may be to speak with all the qualities of a speaker except courage. Or again, it may be said that the mere expression of opinion may be, under cer- tain circumstances, a sign of intellectual or moral unfitness for a professor’s chair. To this I cheerfully agree, and I have not tried to argue that university authorities should not take action where they think that such unfitness has been demonstrated. I suppose it is quite possible that one who should advocate a return to the Ptolemaic astrenomy or to primitive polygamy would thereby give proof of in- eligibility for an American professorship. Perhaps the re- port of the Committee on Academic Freedom, concerning acts of professors during the present war, is really based on this ground; if so, we may agree with it in principle, after all. But the point is that we should be very clear that we are not assuming that what seems to us to be incompatible with mental and moral integrity is actually so. I may be unable to see how a person of intellect can believe in the infallibility of the Pope, or how a moral man can support anti-Japanese legislation; but some observation will disclose that these things are nevertheless possible in fact. To assume at once that those opposed to one’s own principles are the enemies of mankind is the prerogative of children, ladies of the old school, Mr. Roosevelt, and some university trustees.
RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN
Stanford University, Cal., March 12
Since (it may be said) the
Contributors to this Issue
GEORGE BurRTON ADAMS is professor of history, emeritus, in Yale University. ,
H. W. Boynton is a well-known essayist and literary critic whose work appears in the best reviews.
H. R. STEEVEs is assistant professor of English in Columbia University.
Mary VipA CLARK is assistant secretary of the State Charities Aid Association of New York
O. W. Firkins is professor of English in the Univ of Minnesota.
ArTHuR O. Lovesoy is profess: Hopkins University.
RAYMOND MACDONALD ALDEN is Stanford University
ersity r of philosophy in Johns
professor of English in
The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
Correspondence
War by Starvation
To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
Sir: | wish to give my cordial endorsement to Mr. Oldys’s letter on starvation in the Nation for March 14. Star- vation on a national scale means war on women, war on children, war on babes, born and unborn, war on old men, war on the sick and wounded, war on neutrals, and war on prisoners—in the last-named case, as Mr. Oldys has tren- chantly shown, often involving war on our own countrymen. In short, it includes half the brutalities for which Germany is to-day an outlaw and outcast among nations. We all hope that the abolition of war after the end of this conflict may reduce to irrelevance the question of the comparative bar- barity of its instruments. But the event is not yet so secure as to rob Mr. Oldys’s plea of pertinence or usefulness.
O. W. FIRKINS
Minneapolis, Minn., March 22
The “ Tread”’ that Follows War
To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
Sir: A trifle of no importance gives me the opportunity of a quotation and a mention. In “A French Soldier Poet” (Nation of January 31), “To a Mother” has in the last stanza the word “step” instead of “tread” which the rhyme requires, which was intended, and which has meaning of the utmost import.
For your grief is like the night, full of stars that shine;
There’s a glory waits on your tread: With the crape of your veil mingle laurels divine— And we see the dark splendor of the dead. In “Thorndale, or a Conflict of Opinions,” by William Smith (1857) — book and author still influencing our thought, though little known—Cyril says:
Even Infinite Love and Infinite Compassion must strike a guilty race with terror and remorse. This transgressing world, since the day of its sin, has seen, and could see, nothing so awful as that mild Presence which walked forth from the vil- lage of Nazareth. Under that naked footfall the earth trembles still.
I should like to add that the Soldier Poet, Captain Alfred Droin, was wounded grievously in the war, and, after many weary months in hospital, has been invalided permanently.
STODDARD DEWEY
Paris, March 1
Gray’s “‘ Elegy’ in Spanish To THE Epitor oF THE NATION:
Sir: The two Spanish versions of Gray’s “Elegy” noted in Mr. C. S. Northup’s “Bibliography of Thomas Gray,” recently reviewed in the Nation (February 21, pp. 214-215), fail to give an adequate idea of the extraordinary popular- ity of the poem in Spanish-speaking countries. In Menén- dez y Pelayo’s “Historia de la Poesia Hispano-Americana” (1918, II, 409-414), reference is made to the following translations: Juan Antonio Miralla’s, 1823 (not “about 1823,” as Mr. Northup states) ; Manuel N. Pérez del Cami-
no’s, 1822; José V. Alonso’s (published ?) ; José Fernandez Guerra’s two versions, 1840, 1850; Enrique de Vedia’s pub- lished about 1845-1848, and frequently afterwards, so that Mr. Northup’s “n. d. pref. 1860" may be correct of one edition: Ignacio Gémez’s, 1888. To this list may be added the following translations, and doubtless a few more: one, apparently the first, published in La Minerva, 1805, I, 15 (author ?); José de Urcullu’s, La Colmena, London, 1843, II, 73-77 (illustrated); Roberte MacDouall’s, La Revista del Ateneo Hispano-Americano, Washington, 1914, I, 12-18 (with English text). Mr. MacDouall refers to a translation by Hevia, but this is a mistake for Vedia, whose name was Enrique, not “H. L.,” as given by Mr. Northup. The same bibliographer refers to a possible anonymous Spanish ver- sion published about 1839, but there is no justification what- soever for his interpretation of a sentence in the Gentleman's Magazine, November, 1839, 470: “Both [7. e., Spanish and Portuguese translations] however exist, and I have now before me the latter Be MILTON A. BUCHANAN
Toronto, Can., March 1
BOOKS A Fighting Critic
On Contemporary Literature. By Stuart P. Sherman. Henry Holt & Co. $1.50.
NCE in Plato’s year or thereabouts reviewing becomes
a pleasure, not a task. In some unaccountable whim, Fate drops on the case-hardened reviewer’s desk a book he really wants to read. It holds him away from his luxurious table and from his downy couch. He chuckles and crows with sheer intellectual delight, as his busy pencil under- scores passage after memorable passage. Best of all, he actually forgets that he has to render an opinion on his reading to the public. Such a volume is Mr. Sherman’s col- lected appraisements of certain contemporary writers. They appeared separately, not without applause, in the pages of the Nation. Massed in a book, they form a body of critical doctrine impressive by reason of its brilliant expression, its philosophical basis, and its consistency with itself.
Ideas, says Heine, force us into the arena and make us fight for them. This is Mr. Sherman’s case. He is pos- sessed of very definite ideas for which he is ready to do battle on the instant with all comers. Those ideas are the reverse of popular. For it must be confessed that he is 2 convinced and unrepentant “Victorian,” and all that fear- some term implies. He has even been dubbed a “besotted Victorian.” If the phrase is a reproach, he certainly ac- cepts it without fear. He is the champion of what Carlyle calls the Great Decency Principle and the enemy of Natural- ism and the Naturalists. He is a bonny fighter. He has well been taught his dazzling fence; and he enjoys the dis- tinction of fighting with perfect good humor, like Mercutio or Cyrano. He is no stranger to the gaudium certaminis. To take liberties with a famous purple passage, it is inspir- iting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw—read “Vic- torian”—advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and, it might have been thought, irresistible when combined. He distributes his swashing blows among George Moore, H. G. Wells, and Synge, and treads the wretched Dreiser down in the dirt underneath his feet.
>.
April 4, 1918]
Next to his militancy, Mr. Sherman's distinction as a critic is that his criticism has for its basis a definite philoso- phy of life. In the welter of mere esthetic preferences, this critic offers a rounded, reasoned scheme of values and stan- dards. His scheme may be attacked as a system and it can be defended as a system. Friends and foes alike will always find him at his old ward and bearing his point in an un- mistakable direction. A line from Matthew Arnold, “Man must begin, know this, where nature ends,” is the device on his shield. In other words, Nature is not enough, we can- not rest in Nature; the ape and the tiger are natural, but we must let the ape and the tiger in us die. The watch- words on the opposite side are “Follow Nature,” “Trust your instincts, sack to Nature.” In a masterly prologue, Mr. Sherman sets his principles forth with great clearness and force. It is a resounding challenge to the Naturalists, all and sundry.
To defeat Mr. George Moore is almost too easy; he him- self has put the weapons into the hand of any adversary. In his five autobiographic volumes, he writes himself down “an elderly Irish satyr fluting among the reeds to a decadent Irish naiad.” Mr. Sherman’s careful and impartial analysis of his works makes plain that Moore’s failure is in having “shaken off the bonds which united him to civil life,” that the logical outcome of his naturalism is social anarchy. “The sanguine and mellifluous egotism” of Mr. H. G. Wells prompts the self-revelations of Mr. Britling, which gives the measure of the man. It is almost cruel to point out that “German efficiency is the realization of his lifelong dreams, that modern Germany is, in short, the naturalistic Wellsian Utopia militant.” One admires Mr. Wells because he is con- stantly growing; the trouble is that he never grows up. As Mr. Sherman says, he is “protean.”
7? 46
Each new message of his conceals the last. . . He is still the grandiose and romantic dreamer bent upon bringing for- ward a brand-new scheme for the salvation of the world. A few years ago it was world-Socialism: a little later it was world- aristocracy; to-day it is world-theocracy. What it will be to- morrow no man knows, but every man can guess that it will be
mething different and equally evanescent.
The end of the Wellsian philosophy is also anarchy. The study of Synge is a genuine clearing up of an obscure mat- ter. The “legend of the joyous Synge bounding over the hills with the glad wild life of the unspoiled barbarian” is given its quietus. Instead we find a sophisticated Parisian- moulded Irishman approaching the Aran Islands in the spirit of Pierre Loti approaching Japan, a Synge basing one of his plays on Clemenceau’s “Voile de Bonheur,” and one of his poems on Leopardi’s “Silva.” The charge against Dreiser (“whoso can him read’) is that his “art” defeats itself. “He has deliberately rejected the novelist’s supreme task— understanding and presenting the development of character.
He has evaded the enterprise of representing human conduct; he has confined himself to a representation of ani- mal behavior.” Here again naturalism leads to anarchy in art.
To record even half the judgments of Mr. Sherman to which sensible men will cry Amen is impossible within the compass of an ordinary review. He understands the art of mingling blame and praise. In the case of Meredith and Henry James, for instance, he does not spare the faults of a tortured style, but he inspires the baffled reader to attack those difficult authors once more, in spite of many repulses. “The mass of mankind will never have any ardent zeal for
The Nation 405
seeing thing s they art But Mr. Sherman differs from he mas H dent desire to see contemporary lite-
rature as it is. To the task he brings a clear, a learned, and withal a merry eye. Castigat ridendo. Very many readers ion he presents is essentially true, for, in the words of a master he delights to honor, his is a “dis
interested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that
A Feast of Morsels
iB Budge Composed and compiled by Austin Dobson. Oxford University Press. $1.50.
eset his ordinary plans and projects suspended, pre sumably by the war, Mr. Austin Dobson had the happ)
thought of king together from various sources much va
nonplace book. He took his good things where he found them, in the writings of other men and in his own. The outcome is an agreeable medley of prose and verse, literary odds and ends, curious facts, into which the bookish person may dip at random, sure of fish ing up something of interest. It is not a book to read at a sitting; its place is on the table, or on a handy shelf whence it may be taken up at odd moments. None the les
if one begins to browse, it is hard to lay the book aside. The matter is generally new and is set forth in an attractive manner. The short paragraphs, like little dainty dishes stimulate the taste for 1
As might be expected from Mr. Dobson's well-known pret erences, the eighteenth century and French literature forin his happy hunting-grounds, though he ranges also the demesnes that thereto adjacent lie, the Carolinians and the classics on the one side, and moderns, even American men of letters like Lowell and Aldrich, on the other. The book a piece of pathetic flotsam from the world that was sub
erged in August, 1914, a world which could be intereste| in “mere literature.”
It cannot escape the great shadow of the present conflict An excerpt from a sermon by Sydney Smith, on the danger of invasion, shows that the British people had the same fears to combat in their struggle with Napoleon, the Invin cible, as at the present time. Sprinkled throughout the book
are verses of Mr. Dobson’s own confection—epigrams, trans- lations, rondeaus on blinded soldiers. Against the black background of war, they seem pitifully frail, like the re- sistance of little crimson-winged Love to the Shadow feared of man in Watts’s allegory.
The main value of such a book is to turn away our minds from the present nightmare in which we are all living, and so to interpose a little ease. It is worth while to be reminded that literary gossip once had a certain value, and may have again. Why Cory, the author of “lIonica,” admired “Les Misérables,” what became of the monuments to Hogarth’s pets, how to find the tomb of Fielding, near Lisbon, would interest normal persons in normal times. To see holes picked in the omniscience of Macaulay is not unpleasing, even now; or to witness the magisterial Carlyle taken down a peg. How the fat famous sea-fighter Suffren came by his end is an intriguing mystery; and that the Redoubtable from which Nelson received his death wound was originally christened the Suffren is a rather memorable fact. There are facts in plenty. The information regarding Lord George Gordon of the Gordon riots and Barnaby Rudge is ample and illumi-
406 The Nation
[ Vol. 106, No. 2753
—_—
nating. A portrait of the fanatic reminds one of Knox: it might find a place in a group of Auld Licht elders. Gordon became a Jew from conviction, and was most exact in fol- lowing the rules of his new religion.
A feature of the book are the illustrations. The frontis- piece of the lonely shut-in child suggests the general dreari- ness of the eighteenth century, and reveals another facet of the genius of Blake. Maclise’s caricature of Talleyrand is a good example of his peculiar art. He was a master of line. The picture of a French bookshop circa 1762 is alto- gether charming. All these things were worth rescuing from the past. “Europe’s sagest head” declared that it was always good to know something, to be learning always. This commonplace book presents the material and the opportunity for putting this precept in practice.
On Keeping Your Eyes Open and Following Your Nose
By Walter Prichard $1.60 net.
By David
Green Trails and Upland Pastures. Eaton. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.
Great Possessions: A New Series of Adventures.
Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.30 net.
N living a metropolitan life and loving it, Walter Prich-
ard Eaton differs from most of our writers on nature. Born and bred in “our” Berkshire Hills, as he likes to put it, he knows nature as he knows life itself, and has acquired something like scorn for both the professional naturalist, devoted to fact, and the amateur naturalist, devoted to sen- timentalism. He is not so foolish as to disparage man and man’s city life; “It is a law of our nature,” he wrote in “Barn Doors and Byways” a few years ago, “to herd with our kind, and fight for things material, to create art and skyscrapers and fine clothes and grand opera and high tariffs and slums and creeds and all sorts of jumbled wisdom and folly.” “But it is a law of our nature, too,” he goes on, “sometimes to revolt, to throw ourselves back on the bosom of the inanimate, to cry out not for art, but the huddle of hills into the sunset and the song of the thrush . . . and the soft seduction of a little river.”
Neither naturalist nor sentimentalist, he approaches na- ture as an artist. He urges going to nature for “the great, simple mysteries”; to him, clearly, the great, simple mys- teries speak in terms of line, color, and texture. He does not “philosophize,” he describes; and his allusions are to the playhouse, to music, to sculpture (a certain white pine re- minding him of the Winged Victory), and more especially to painting (he sees in his landscape suggestions now of Corot, now of Whistler, now of Botticelli). A Poe among writers on nature, he looks for “effects” and “values,” for interesting “lines” and “fluid curves,” for “high lights” and “foregrounds” and “frames.” The open barn doors of his earlier book framed the landscape; the seme function is per- formed now by the arching elm boughs. For a whole season, he tells us, he kept a snow diary; the result of this interest is apparent in his records of the various appearances of win- ter weeds, or of the “soft, delicate shades” of “the winter landscape by the river bank, where the gray and coffee-tan of a mottled old sycamore leans out over the dark ice or the black streaks of open water, while beneath its bare limbs, over the snowy fields, we see the blue dome of a mountain” — a felicitous composition which the illustrator, Walter King Stone, has rendered with fair skill. In reading these en-
Grayson.
thusiastic records of the pictorial qualities of nature, the novice will perhaps gain an insight into this mode of view- ing nature more easily than through the study of landscape painting. Here, for example, is a bit of description in which color is handled charmingly and in which the music of nature, mute in landscape painting, blends into the picture as it does in actual life (the “Peabodies” are, of course, the white- throated sparrows) :
Now there comes a hush in the bird songs, a hush in all nature, while the peak behind us grows amethyst, the high zenith clouds are salmon streamers, and the golden west blushes into rose. The woods grow dim. The rose dusks to a deeper hue, and sud- denly against it all the pointed firs stand darkly up like a spired city in fairyland. At that moment the birds break their hush, the Peabodies flute from spire to spire like little Moslems in Christian belfries, and from the dusk of the forest wall behind us comes ringing the full-throated song of a hermit thrush.
A quite different point of view prevails in the essays or “adventures,” as he alluringly calls them, of “David Gray- son.” City life did not turn out so happily for him; his revolt was sudden’and bitter. Readers of “Adventures in Contentment,” which appeared ten years ago, will recall the sharp reversal of his whole inward life on that April day among the soft maples of the park, when his mad haste towards a dimly imaged Success collapsed, and he with it. Then followed eight years of farming, and the reconstruction of the inner life; and the latter led to the popular “Adven- tures” and “Great Possessions.”
“Great Possessions” is quite as good as the earlier books. Here are, once more, the humor, the poise, the literary charm, the facile optimism, the love of sentiment bordering upon sentimentalism, that accounted for previous successes. The perception of character is as keen as before and as incisively utilized. Again the reader may immerse himself in that breathing stillness, as of an eloquent summer evening, that pervades all these books. David Grayson is right in imply- ing that the great adventure comes to him whose soul is still in the presence of Nature, that, if Nature speaks at all, it is when she has absorbed our excitement, so to speak, and given us her own serenity. Such work as this might succeed in any age; to-day, it succeeds largely because it pictures with skill that Arcady towards which spent city folk are always long- ing—farm life lived for immaterial ends.
David Grayson’s “philosophy” is indeed simple: he in- sists, with all poets, that life is to be realized; he calls for “awareness,” “aliveness,” emphasis, not on to-morrow, but on “this moment, this great and golden moment!” He tells his neighbor Horace, the type of the practical man: “I’m the practical man, Horace, for I want my peace now, and my happiness now, and my God now. I can’t wait. My barns may burn and my cattle die, or the solid bank where I keep my deferred joy may fail, or I myself by to-morrow be no longer here.” That is good advice to give to an age that rushes and frets and knows not what it seeks, and friend David gives it in a hundred guises and always acceptably. Nor does he commit the error of merely preaching the simple life. He presents an amusing picture of a woman who re- coils from the complexity of modern life and cultivates simplicity. She fails. “You were trying to be simple,” David tells her, “for the sake of being simple. I wonder if true simplicity is ever anything but a by-product.”
A by-product of what? Well, something higher. So far our farmer poet is with the great spirits of the past. But he does not ascend with them into the empyrean. His some- thing higher is not high enough; he dwells in the foothills
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April 4, 1918]
The Nation 407
of the spirit, where most of us dwell, and for that very reason is a fit leader for those who dwell there or lower down. To other readers he will seem to corroborate, rather than to lead upward. He is, indeed, a kind of tame Whitman plus Thoreau, and is for those to whom Whitman is too wild and Thoreau at once too wild and too civilized.
Like Thoreau he believes in abstaining from drink, to- bacco, and excessive eating in order that the sensuous life may be subtle and rich. Like both Thoreau and Whitman he has developed his sense of smell, and in his latest book celebrates this unpopular sense in two chapters, Of Good and Evil Odors and Follow Your Nose! leaving sight to the more competent Mr. Eaton. His sense of taste he has developed as Thoreau did (Whitman did not choose to experi- ment with him), enjoying all of nature’s sours and bitters within reach. By these means he eventually attained “the heights.” Enlarging his acquaintance with the concrete world, concentrating his attention first on one sense and then on another, he found himself composing certain de- scriptive and appreciatory phrases. These in turn led to a perception of Nature’s meaning, which came “like a flame for clearness.” The only example he gives is this message from Nature: “We are to be like the friendly pines, and the elm trees, and the open fields, and reject no man and judge no man.” After all, his “heights” are merely a readiness to perceive what goes on outside of our minds and inside of them: a readiness that calls for a degree of observation and reflection that are all too rare among men. “David Gray- son” himself is not quite the shining leader in observation and reflection that Graysonians imagine him to be.
The Afrikander Warrior-Statesman
War Time Speeches. By Lt.-Gen. the Rt. Hon. J. C. Smuts. New York: George H. Doran Company.
URING the course of his mission to England as the
representative of South Africa in the Imperial War Cabinet and Conference held in London last spring, General Smuts delivered a number of public addresses upon subjects related to the war, which were widely commented upon in the British press. Several of them have been collected and published in pamphlet form. Among the questions which he discussed one is the British Commonwealth, another a fu- ture League of Nations. In a speech delivered in the Impe- rial War Conference he shows the relation between these two themes. “People talk about a league of nations and international government, but the only successful experi- ment in international government that has ever been made is the British Empire. .’ In common with every one else who has given any attention to the problems of the Empire, he perceives that the status quo, the present rela- tions between the Dominions and the United Kingdom, can- not endure. Smuts’s attitude towards reconstruction is de- termined in part by his outlook as a South African, in part by his conception of the true nature of the Empire, or as he calls it, and less inaccurately, the British Commonwealth of Nations, and his interpretation of its history. Though his patriotism is of the coéperative rather than the com- petitive type, Smuts is a South African patriot, and no solu- tion of the imperial problem could be satisfactory to him that did not assure the fullest opportunity for the develop- ment of what Mr. Jebb has aptly termed “colonial national- ism.” In his view, the British Commonwealth is not a single
state, but rather an association of states. “We are not a state, but a community of states and nations,” he asserts. In these words he summarily consigns to the scrap heap of rusty legalism what Bagehot, were he writing to-day, would call the “literary theory” of the British Empire, the doc- trine of the imperial sovereignty of the British Parliament.
Viewing the British Commonwealth as he does, Smuts naturally rejects all projects for reconstruction through federation, or any other form of organic union. Actual facts seem to him absolutely to preclude such a solution of the problem. “Here we are . he exclaims, “a group of nations spread over the whole world, speaking different languages, belonging to different races, with entirely dif- ferent economic circumstances, and to attempt to run even the common concerns of that group of nations by means of a Central Parliament and a Central Executive is, to my mind, absolutely to court disaster.”
How, then, is this unprecedented Commonwealth of Na- tions to be preserved? Not, Smuts emphatically answers, by following precedents, for these are inapplicable to a com- monwealth that is sui generis. The federalism of the United States, for example, must not be copied, for the framers of the Constitution of the United States were seeking unity and assimilation, whereas the fundamental principle of the British Commonwealth is, according to Smuts, that it “does not stand for standardization or denationalization, but for the fuller, richer, and more various life of all the nations comprised in it.” Not “liberty and union,” Webster used that phrase, but “freedom and diversity” would appear to be the maxim of this soldier-statesman, who, though a patriotic South African and an erstwhile foe of Britain, yet sees in the British Commonwealth a beacon torch of liberty and international coédperation for the whole world. In the Imperial War Conference Smuts spoke in sup- port of a resolution which was adopted in favor of imperial reorganization on the basis of a full recognition of the Do- minions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Common- wealth.
So far as institutions are concerned, Smuts is opposed to arduous feats of constitutionalism. The kingship seems to him a sufficient symbol of permanent codperation between the partner states of the Commonwealth, and he looks to some development of the present system of Imperial Con- ference to afford more adequate opportunity than now exists for common consultation between them. But he does not view the problem as one mainly of constitutional reorgani- zation. Ultimate reliance for the preservation of the Com- monwealth, he holds, is not to be placed upon any instru ment of government or machinery of coercion, but upon the public opinion of the peoples that compose it. “People are inclined to forget that the world is growing more demo- cratic, and that public opinion and the forces finding expres- sion in public opinion are going to be far more powerful than they have been in the past.”
Smuts believes in the practicability of permanent and guaranteed peace. He is in entire agreement with Presi- dent Wilson that it will require recognition of the principle of national self-determination and some plan for disarma- ment. He desires the creation of a League of Nations with force behind it. But here, as in the case of the British Commonwealth, his ultimate reliance would be upon public opinion in the nations. The problem, as he sees it, is funda- mentally one of psychology, rather than of political mechan ics. What is needful is a “change in the hearts of men.”
in the sense that
408 The Nation
[Vol. 106, No. 2753
Without this, international agreements will be but so many scraps of paper. “I am not sure that a passion has not been born for peace after this war which in the end will prove stronger than all the passion for war which has so far over- whelmed us, and that is the only thing that can save us in the long run.” These are the words not of a mollycoddle or a sentimentalist, but of a veteran soldier who knows war and hates it, though he hates servitude more. When a Bern- hardi preaches the religion of valor, we are disposed to at- tribute the sentiments of the sermon to the psychology of his profession rather than to independent inquiry and judg- ment of his own. When, however, a soldier talks like an internationalist and a humanitarian, he creates a strong pre- sumption in favor of his capacity to think for himself. His words are sure to be worth attending to.
How Germany Does Business
How Germany Does Business. By P. P. Gourvitch. New
York: B. W. Huebsch.
OR about a hundred years prior to the Franco-Prussian
War Great Britain was engaged in showing the world how to make things; for a good part of the time since then Germany has been engaged in showing the world how to sell things. In a few lines her products have unquestionably been superior to those of other nations, but as a whole they have not possessed this advantage. Yet she has excelled in marketing them. And after German commerce has been three years off the sea there is a lively fear that German trade predominance will be greater after the war than be- fore. Our own State Department, for example, says that American business must not make the mistake of under- estimating our enemy’s capacity for foreign trade or the energy, application, and craft with which German business will address itself to the task of regaining favor in markets in which it once prospered.
For years discussion has been rife regarding German trade methods. The merit of the work before us is that it goes far towards showing us how to achieve similar suc- cess. The author creates the impression of knowing his subject root and branch, and he has a sharp sense for the distinction between essentials and non-essentials. Hence his ability to compact a great world-subject into one hundred and thirty small pages.
Dr. Gourvitch says the Germans financed their foreign trade largely through London, but sometimes through Paris and other money markets. Their great aim was to be re lieved of the financial burden of trade, and they appear to have thus freed themselves for the great task of working up demand for their commodities in foreign countries.
The Germans offered credit to their customers primarily because English merchants sold chiefly on a cash basis. But they soon found out by experience that credit is a creato? of demand and therefore an incentive to consumption and at the same time a stimulus to production and the saving of capital. They made some costly mistakes in acquiring this knowledge, as Dr. Gourvitch points out. They were, however, able and willing to profit by the lessons of their experience. They abandoned speculation in credit and found a sound economic basis for it.
The Germans reasoned in this fashion: in a little Ger- man town, in every line of trade there are a certain number of small dealers who are good for a credit of perhaps one
thousand marks, just as Frau Krupp-Bohlen is good for one million. As there are many such small towns in Ger- many, there are plenty of these good credit risks. If that is true of Germany, it is true of other countries and of all the world. In business as in philosophy, the Germans liked to embrace the whole of the universe.
That policy, so different from the English exporter’s pol- icy of dealing only with first-class, big importing concerns, amounted to a stroke of genius. To give these smaller for- eign dealers such facilities as would enable them to buy and to pay meant, according to the theory of probabilities, building up a sure, conservative clientéle of “geographical distribution.” The individual units were good because small and conservative and because the credit granted them was only such as their character and ability warranted. The number was also an important factor, as the magnitude of the number of units made it possible to depend less on any one of them. One concern is mentioned which in a period of eight years incurred a loss of less than one-fifth of ons per cent. of its total business, which was entirely on credit.
The Germans had a way of opening credits for foreign importers of their goods without the latter’s knowledge. A German shoe factory sent its travelling agent to Russia with a list of very small towns with which it felt it was safe to do business. The agent would go into a town and use his eyes and ears and pick out the merchants he thought it advisable to approach. Next day at the leading bank of the community he would announce that his factory would like to deal with these particular merchants, if the bank con- sidered them good credit. If the answer was satisfactory, he would add that the factory was going to sell on credit and that it would be glad to have the bank present the drafts for acceptance and buy them when accepted. By such meth- ods the factory not only learned all there was to be known about credits in that community, but acquired the money to finance its exports as well. Incidentally, when the German agent got down to the actual work of selling his shoes to the Russian merchant, he would pretend that they were made by an American factory in Germany for the sake of cheapness. He was, says Dr. Gourvitch, of the opinion of some German philosophers, “that truth is only a relative matter and is no more than a judgment that does not bring one to contra- dictions.”
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Notes
HE Century Company announces for early publication:
“The Nations at the Peace Table,” by Lothrop Stoddard and Glenn Frank, and “Russia in Upheaval,” by Edward Alsworth Ross.
The following volumes are announced for early publica- tion by J. B. Lippincott Company: “Submarine in War and Peace: Its Development and Possibilities,” by Simon Lake; “Over the Threshold of War,” by Nevil Monroe Hopkins, and “Over There,” by Lieut. Hector MacQuarrie.
“Bombs and Hand Grenades,” by Captain Bertram Smith, and “A Happy Garret,” by V. Goldie, are announced for publication in the near future by E. P. Dutton & Co.
D. Appleton & Company announce for immediate publi- cation: “Glorious Exploits of the Air,” by Edgar C. Middle- ton; “Military Map Making and Reading,” the joint work of Lieut.-Col. James M. Hutchinson and Captain Andrew J. MacElroy.
Among the April publications of the Macmillan Company are the following: “The Boardman Family,” by Mary S. Watts; “First the Blade: A Comedy of Growth,” by Cle- mence Dane; “The Book of High Romance,” by Michael Williams; “The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me,” by William Allen White; “History of Labor in the United States,” by John R. Commons; “Reincarnations,” by James Stephens; “Historic Mackinac,” by Edwin O. Wocd; “Co- operation, the Hope of the Consumer,” by Emerson P. Harris.
Small, Maynard & Company announce for publication April 20 “Shellproof Mack,” by Arthur Mack.
Harper & Brothers announce for publication immediately the following volumes: “How to Sell More Goods,” by H. J. Barrett, and “Gaslight Sonatas,” by Fannie Hurst.
Early in May the University of Chicago Press will pub- lish “The Greek Theatre and its Drama” by Roy C. Flick- inger.
URTHER evidence that the teaching force in the United
States is awakening to the importance of the Spanish language is shown by the publication of Hispania, a maga- zine issued quarterly at Stanford University by the Ameri- can Association of Teachers of Spanish, under the editor- ship of Professors Espinosa, Fitz-Gerald, and Ford. The bibliography and textbook reviews will be found valuable to students and teachers of Spanish. The fairness and ma- turity of thought in the first issue, February, 1918, promise well.
TUDENTS of Dante have long treasured the first three
series of the late Dr. Edward Moore’s “Studies in Dante” and will welcome with memorial gratitude the Fourth Series, now published by the Oxford University Press. The first half of the volume is occupied by an essay on the “Textual Criticism of the Convivio,” which justifies many new read- ings adopted, necessarily without discussion, in the last ed- tion of the Oxford Dante. There follow three articles not previously published—two very valuable studies on “Dante’s Theory of Creation” and “Sta. Lucia in the Divina Com- media,” and an excellent lecture introductory to the study of the Paradiso—and a few other articles reprinted from various reviews.
=
NOTABLE little volume is the “Airy Nothings” of
George Gordon (Sturgis & Walton Co.; $1.25 net). It is the work of a devoted and exceedingly capable Shake- spearean in which intimate knowledge and common-sense are most felicitously blended. More than half of it is devoted to a preface—remarkable alike for its style, sincerity, and cogency—introducing a one-act play, “Mary, Mary,” of which the heroine is the much-discussed Mary Fitton, whom the author identifies positively with the dark lady of the sonnets. The play, though it might, if capably interpreted, prove ef- fective on the stage, is more striking as a literary study in the Elizabethan manner than as drama. The scene is laid in a room of the Mermaid Tavern, whither Mary, in the disguise of a young gallant, comes, attended by her brother, in order to catch a secret glimpse of her lover, Shakespeare, in association with his brother poets and boon companions. She has heard that he is to read a sonnet in her honor. To them unnoticed presently enter Henry Chettle, Ben Jon- son, Shakespeare, Fletcher, John Lyly, Michael Drayton, John Florio, William Kemp, Walter Raleigh, and William Herbert, all prepared with specimens of their own verse to be judged by the standard of Marlowe’s famous lines to Helen. Each recites in turn some passage of classic verse, until, last of all, Shakespeare delivers his sonnet, “My mis- tress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” which so wounds Mary’s vanity that, regardless of concealment, she roundly denounces the poet and attacks him with her rapier. Seized by Herbert, who has already attracted her lively fancy, she reposes con- fidingly in his arms and is by him tenderly withdrawn from the inn, while the disheartened Shakespeare is left to the rough consolation of Chettle.
HOUGH there is not in this much that is effectively
dramatic, there is no lack of literary interest. Much of the dialogue—all the verse—is quotation, but in the connecting links Mr. Gordon exhibits imagination as well as an uncommon imitative faculty. He preserves through- out the Elizabethan manner and atmosphere, and, with the proper actors, it is conceivable that his little play might act as well as it reads. His preface demonstrates the scope of his study, his clearness of vision, and his mastery of trenchant English. Most true Shakespeareans will be heartily in accord with him, and even those who may not agree with all his conclusions will relish the sturdiness of his zeal, the incisiveness of his argument, the vigor of his onslaught, and the clarity of his convic- tions. For him the great mass of minor and miscellaneous Shakespearean commentary, with all its dry-as-dust dis- cussions of non-essentials, its conjectural emendations, and mystifying speculations, is so much tedious, mischievous, and impertinent piffle.e He derides the nonsense that is talked about our ignorance cf the lesser details of Shake- speare’s life—as if it were strange in the circumstances. He holds the Bacon folly, that would disprove the possibility of one miracle by demanding credence for a greater one, lunatic. He strips the pretence from Bernard Shaw with an unsparing ridicule worthy of that witty Irishman him- self. He deals Professor Kittredge some doughty blows and vehemently assails some favorite notions of Sir Sidney Lee. This preface, indeed, is full of pregnant thought, in- spired by enthusiastic study and sympathetic intelligence, and expressed in a vigorous and happy phraseology worthy of its subject.
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HE merit of Mr. C. E. Bechhofer’s “Russian Anthology
in English” (Dutton; $1.50) lies in its offering good reading matter in exceptionally adequate translation. The editor’s prose rendering of two scenes from Pushkin’s “Mo- zart and Salieri” is very gratifying. Russian poetry has thus far fared ill in the hands of English translators. Less successful is the prose translation of “Katerina,” the most popular poem of the Little-Russian bard, Shevchenko; it is questionable, moreover, whether Ukrainian authors should be included in a Russian anthology; it smacks of literary imperialism. The editor has done well in selecting extracts from less-known authors; the keen sketch, “Dostoievsky and Tolstoy,” by A. Volynsky, introduces for the first time a critic who has been ostracized in Russia for his heterodoxy in literary criticism, but whose sincerity and profundity are beginning to be recognized among the younger schools. There is considerable lack of proportion in the selections. Krylov is represented with eight fables, while only one in- significant poem is selected from one of the most remarkable lyricists, Tyutchev. As an anthology the book is a failure; the selecticns, however good in themselves, do not give a complete or fairly representative picture of Russian litera- ture. Not only are many important authors omitted (e. g., Yevreinov is the only living writer included besides the critic Volynsky), but some of the extracts in the book are far from being characteristic of their authors. The reader who will take up the Anthology with the view of becoming acquainted with Russian literature may be misled in many instances. Mr. Bechhofer admits that he has selected “such characteristic passages as are likely at the same time to interest the non-Russian.”
_ a series of letters to her mother, but possibly with an eye to a larger audience, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy in “Diplo- matic Days” (Harpers; $2) gives her impressions of Mex- ico as she saw it from May, 1911, to October, 1912. The period embraces the resignation of Diaz, his departure in the early dawn of the next day for Europe, the interregnum of De la Barra, the arrival of Madero and the first part of his Administration. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy has an acute and analytic mind. She has few illusions and she writes well, though her Spanish crthography is not always impec- cable. Her point of view is probably that cf the diplomatic corps of which her husband was a member under the Amer- ican Ambassador, Mr. H. L. Wilson. From day to day, along with details of parties and balls, dinners and receptions, ac- counts of dress, furniture, and household matters, she sets down her impressions of the Mexican political world as they occur to her. She has a graphic touch, and one sees many historic personages pass in review: Diaz at eighty-three, tormented with disease, relinquishing a stable and respected Government with sixty-five million dollars in the Treasury ; De la Barra, a mere locum tenens, suave, polished, uneasy; Madero, dreamy, fanatical, given over to spiritualism and occult influences; Pino Suarez, Madero’s choice for Vice- President, an obscure country editor from Yucatan, of whom the populace shows its dislike by crying in the streets Pino- no-no-no; Orozco, powerful and mistrusted; Huerta, the successful Federal general, the strong man of the day; Za- pata, the murderer whose unchecked hordes ravage the coun- try up to the city gates; von Hintze, the German Minister, amiable and affable, whose absences from the city are ex- plained by his having to attend to German interests in the interior of the republic. Outside of the domain of politics,
the letters give charming sketches of the cld Mexican first families, the intellectuals, the cientificos, the newly arrived —“surprised looking ladies in high-necked dresses and eager looking men,” who had evidently seen worse days. The stu- dent of the time of the Conquest will find interspersed in these pages much interesting lore. The devotee of the culinary art will be thankful for the receipt for mole de guajolote, which should be cooked over a brasero while the coals are fanned by a turkey wing. For much needed light on one of the pressing problems that will come up for solu- tion by the American people after the present war, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s books will be found very valuable.
ht his “Nationalism” (Macmillan; $1.25) Sir Rabindra- nath Tagore assails with a vivid Oriental rhetoric that rises at times to real eloquence the monstrous fetish of mechanical efficiency which, coalescing with the idea of the nation, is now driving the whole Occident to its ruin. The blame for the present situation is not with this or that par- ticular nation, but with the underlying conception of nation- ality itself. The nation thus conceived “may grow on to an unimaginable corpulence, not of a living body, but of steel and steam and office buildings, till its deformity can contain no longer its ugly voluminousness—till it begins to crack and gape, breathe gas and fire in gasps, and its death-rattles sound in cannon roars. In this war, the death- throes of the nation have commenced. Suddenly all its mechanism going mad, it has begun the dance of the furies, shattering its own limbs, scattering them into the dust. It is the fifth act of the tragedy of the unreal.” If this war is the tragedy of the unreal, what then is the real? We gather from other passages in the book that the real is at the oppo- site pole from intellect or science or law. It is with the aid of these things that the West has built up “her gigantic ab- stractions of efficiency.” The nation, armed with these abstractions and “having the conscience of a ghost and the callous perfection of an automaton, is causing disas- ters of which the volcanic dissipations of the youthful moon would be ashamed to be brought into comparison.” We are to be redeemed if at all “not by methods of analytical knowl- edge, but by sympathy.” We must put a soul into the na- tion—a soul of love. A league to enforce peace would under existing conditions be only a “federation of steam-boilers.”
HESE attacks on analysis and mechanism and this
exaltation of love and spontaneity and the unconscious (“where man is at his greatest,” says Tagore, “he is un- conscious”) have as a matter of fact been very familiar to the Occident for the past century or more. Tagore’s notions as to how Europe has lost its spiritual unity and as to how it may hope to recover this unity will be found to run closely parallel in particular to those of Novalis in his essay entitled “Christianity or Europe.” Tagore would seem to miss the real problem in looking upon the type of nation that has grown up in the last hundred years or so as a soulless abstraction. This nation has a very potent soul— a soul of expansive emotion; and the love and brotherhood that he and others are preaching may turn out to be only a less potent form of the same emotion. The outlook is dark indeed if one’s only recourse is from an emotional nation- alism to an equally emotional but feebler internationalism. Tagore invokes his “ancestral rishis”; but these rishis were, one suspects, made of sterner stuff than their descendant. The “soul” on which they meditated was a soul of restraint
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—an inner check on expansive emotion. It is precisely in discriminating between the different meanings that may be given to such a word as “soul” that one needs the keen analysis that Tagore disparages on the ground that it min- isters to the “ghastly abstraction” of the man of science bent on a heartless efficiency. Without affirming a com- plete parallelism between Tagore’s views and certain Occi- dental movements, one may nevertheless conclude that his popularity with many readers is due to the fact that they may enjoy in reading him the illusion of being initiated into the wisdom of the East and at the same time continue to float on the main stream of primitivism and emotional romanticism that comes down from the eighteenth century.
Art
The Academy of Design’s Ninety-third Exhibition By N. N.
O anybody who is not familiar with the galleries of America, the present exhibition of the National Acad- emy of Design must prove something of a surprise and a disappointment. The Academy is a venerable institution for America; this is its ninety-third exhibition. Moreover, it calls itself National, and it is the only society of artists of the kind in the country. It would therefore seem reason- able to expect a show as representative at least as the Royal Academy is in London, if not as liberal as the two Salons are in Paris. But that so small and somewhat mediocre a collection is representative of the art of the United States is not easy to believe. It has neither the variety nor the distinction of the exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy, which does not pretend to be national and which is not run by a body of artists. Painters and sculptors who are among the most interesting exhibitors in Philadelphia Alden Weir, Davies, McLure Hamilton, Wayman Adams, William M. Paxton, Grafly, Adolphe Borie—have no place at all in New York. Painters like Frieseke and Richard Miller send less important work. Others, with names as well known as Sargent, Henri, De Camp, Hawthorne, Mau- rer, are among the absent, though these men also are in the Philadelphia show. The exhibitors seem bent on maintain- ing an academic level, undisturbed by any large ambitious adventure or any suggestion that the younger men of to- day, like the younger men of all days, have risen in revolt. One reason probably is the size of the galleries, unexpect- edly small for an Academy. Another may be that many artists, as in France and England, are busy with war work. The first interest lies in the excellence of many land- sScupes. It is likely that nobody in Venice ever saw quite the color scheme revealed on The Grand Canal to Walter Griffin, whose deep rich greens and blues are as far re- moved from the mists and vapory effects of Turner as from the brilliant, glittering, blinding light of Rico, as different from the stereotyped rendering of Venice as that is from Venice itself. But the artist has looked at the Grand Canal with his own eyes, has presented what he saw there in his own fashion; the city, or the special scene in it, painted thousands of times by thousands of artists, has yielded to him a beauty that he has made all his own, and he, in his rendering of it, has opened our eyes in our turn to a new
and very lovely aspect of that most beautiful of all cities which the Germans hope never to give us a chance to look at again. Griffin has found very much the same deep rich greens and blues in Autumn—France, and the purist who prizes local color above art might object, but any one with a sense of beauty can only rejoice in the loveliness that 1s the result on his canvas. Robert W. Vonnoh in Sunset Moon has worked out the mingling of the two lights with great tenderness, and sought rhythm in the arrangement of line where the autumn-tinted foliage dips towards the group of trees in the centre of the composition. Snow is more often the inspiration of the landscapes. E. W. Redfield records its sadness in his Snow-bound Village; Jonas Lie and Gifford Beal are concerned with its brilliancy, the first in a Winter Morning, the second in Winter Woodlands. Snow effects have also been studied by George Bellows, Gustave Wiegand, Charles Rosen. There is no question of the American painter’s interest in the American winter, but mannerism has crept into the use he makes of it, he threatens to drop into formula, to reduce both his method of vision and his method of expression to a recipe. It might be a surprise, or a shock, if one of Fritz Thaulow’s im- pressions of snow in Norway could be hung in the midst of this American series. Other landscapes are by Daniel Gar- ber, Paul King, Bruce Crane. The grimness of Spain 1s sug- gested in Ernest Lawson’s Spanish Castles, with its oasis of green in the stony wilderness. The figures and the wind- swept clouds give a sense of movement to Walter Ufer’s Going West. But of more note is Childe Hassam’s New York Landscape, with the delicate grays in the architecture and the delicate blues in the sky, characteristic of a town more renowned for its glitter and glare. The same painter's Allies’ Day is gay and garden-like.
The portraits are not remarkable. The American seems to be spared the official or presentation portrait that chills, that paralyzes the British and French painter into banality and worse. But he hardly profits by his independence. He has evidently his own timidities to overcome in face of less formal sitters and less official commissions. The large full-length portrait of Mrs. William M. Chase and Her Son Dana, begun by Chase and carried out by Irving R. Wiles, is weak and spiritless. Any relation between the two figures, or character in either, is as far to seek as any dig- nity of design or harmony in the color scheme. The artist’s attempt to complete another man’s painting is apt to be as unsatisfactory a tribute to the dead as the author’s effort to invent an end to the unfinished tale. In the Portrait of Mrs. Leonard Cox, Kenyon Cox apparently shrinks from real flesh and blood. His sitter, in evening gown with cloak thrown open, on her massive high-backed chair, is well posed, her red and white draperies are painted with care. But there is no life in the figure, the head scarcely seems to mark the chair against which it rests, there is no living, breathing body within the draperies. Turn from it to Miss Cecilia Beaux’s Portrait, and how animated and alert and full of life the girl here seems in her simple black gown with the white fur at the neck and the sleeves, with what vivacity that fur is painted, and how the gown seems worn by and to belong to the figure inside it! What character there is even in the rather badly drawn hands, one all dis- torted in the white kid glove! It is clear that Miss Beaux was vastly amused when she painted that hand squeezed out of shape, and if she has not quite succeeded, there is more life in her failure than in the better drawn but ex-
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pressionless hand in the Mrs. Leonard Cox. It is a pity she did not paint her own portrait, for in sitting to Robert B. Brandegee she appears to have puzzled him to the verge of caricature. Leopold Seyfert, in his Mrs. Leopold Sey- fert, is as indifferent to atmosphere as Wayman Adams in the portraits at the Pennsylvania Academy. But he has not Adams’s complete absorption in his work. He is self- conscious. The clouds in his background swirl as clouds never did out of his painting and do in it only to repeat the lines of the big hat. The pattern of the gown and the touches of green in belt and buttons are over-accentuated. The whole portrait is as inanimate as a study in still-life. Character is much better obtained by tthe simpler, less showy methods of Sydney E. Dickinson in his small Por- trait of Emily Hallowell, quiet, restrained, sombre in tone, the face flatly modelled, just a glint of light on the brown hair—a little Old Masterish, perhaps, in tone and senti- ment, but the rendering of a very real person. Colin Camp- bell Cooper has a Portrait of a Lady in gauzy pink drape- ries, which is, as far as I know, a new departure for him, and he, in his turn, has sat for an excellent but somewhat perfunctory portrait by Henry R. Rittenberg. And there are portraits also by Mary Fairchild Low and Sergeant Ken- dall, but among them all, in the entire collection, not one of special distinction.
The big machine of the big French and English exhibi- tions does not appear, which is something to be thankful for. Nor is there any decorative design destined to adorn a given space, which is to be regretted, for it is in decora- tion of this kind that the painter to-day is given his finest chance. The paintings by Frieseke and Richard Miller are indeed so decorative in intention that they always suggest a purely decorative end, as if their destined place was to be, not enclosed as pictures in frames, but set as panels in the wall. However, neither artist is now exhibiting work that he has not himself surpassed. In Miller’s Far Away Thoughts the light, drifting through the leaves over a balcony where a woman sits in a low rocking-chair, hold- ing a guitar, has not the usual gayety and play of sun- shine which is the charm of his work; nor has the woman the usual splendor, flamboyancy even, which it delights him to give; the whole effect is, for the subject, a trifle dull, al- most as if the painter were wearying of a theme that has for long enthralled him. In Frieseke’s Peignoir Rose, there is the expected delicacy in the treatment, the expected dain- tiness and balance in the color scheme, the expected har- mony in the arrangement of rose—rose in the curtain, rose in the gown, rose in the coral of necklace and earrings, touches of rose in the dark flowered pattern of the chair covering. But the woman who wears the gown and coral, who sits in the flowered chair against the curtain, is more shadowy than Frieseke’s shadowy women usually are, the color scheme is fainter and more evanescent. And yet, there is nothing else of the kind in the collection that can compare with these two paintings.
It strikes me as no less remarkable here, than in England, that the tragedy through which we are living has stirred neither painter nor sculptor. H. R. Poore, in Out of the West, presents with some swing and movement the march of men in khaki through a hilly country. But this is the only note- worthy reminder that we are deep in the most horrible war of all time. It may be because we are so moved, and the art of our own day remains apparently so unmoved, that the exhibition is disappointing.
Music
American Operas By HENRY T. FINCK
F- is a singular fact that while many countries have added to the world’s stock of good music, only four of them have produced first-class operas: Italy, France, Germany, and Austria. Spain has her zarzuelas, but these are merely operettas, like the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in England. In Russia, it is true, there has been a great cult of native operas by Glinka, Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky- Korsakov, but few of them have found their way into the opera houses of other countries. This being true of Euro- pean countries, it is perhaps not strange that America has done so little in this line. Our foremost composer, Edward MacDowell, was not particularly interested in opera, nor would he have been likely to succeed in this field, because he was not an al fresco painter in tones.
Some years ago the directors of the Metropolitan Opera House decided to open its doors to American composers. So the subscribers were regaled (to use a polite word) in succession with Converse’s “Pipe of Desire,” Horatio Par- ker’s “Mona,” Walter Damrosch’s “Cyrano,” Victor Her- bert’s “Madeleine,“ and Reginald De Koven’s “Canterbury Pilgrims.” None of these proved a perennial. They were staged, heard, and shelved. None of them showed the abun- dance of melody and the theatrical instinct essential to an operatic success. Victor Herbert had previously composed an excellent opera—“Natoma”—produced by the Chicago Opera Company, which has sung it thirty-five times.
At last the Metropolitan also may claim a successful Amer- ican premiére. Charles Wakefield Cadman’s “Shanewis” is, in my opinion, the best opera ever composed (or produced) in America, with the exception of “Natoma.” Both have an Indian girl for a heroine, and both, like the successful novel, “Ramona,” introduce other red women and men intermin- gled with whites. This ought not to persuade our composers that red music is necessary for the success of an American opera; but it is interesting to note the fact. The sensation of Herbert’s opera was the native “Dagger Dance.” To match this, Cadman has, in his opera, a quartet of medicine men singing an aboriginal song with the accompaniment of gourd rattles. Here we have the real thing, and the audi- ence liked it. Shanewis alone sings two melodies which, as their names suggest—“Spring Song of the Robin Woman” and “Ojibway Canoe Song”—are also aboriginal. They are Indian maize, but with more admixture of white flour. As a baker of this kind of American bread, Mr. Cadman is very clever. He made his reputation (or, rather, Lillian Nordica made it for him) with a song of this mixed character called “Land of the Sky Blue Water,” and he has written others equally charming. But though a nationalist in so far as he uses American aboriginal folk music, he by no means relies on such themes entirely. In his first opera, which includes forty-seven Indian themes, he apparently did this; but in “Shanewis” there is plenty of music showing that he can stand on his own feet, for there is much original vocal mel- ody, and the treatment of the orchestra is admirable also. Shanewis is an educated Indian girl with whom a Califor- nian becomes infatuated. She renounces him on discovering that he is engaged to a white girl. The opportunities for fine scenic effects have not been neglected.
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Drama
Plays of Two Cities
By WILLIAM ARCHER
FTER spending a couple of weeks in Paris last month,
I returned to England with a feeling that the war had exercised an even more depressing influence on the French drama than on the British. The only piece of the slightest originality that I could discover was “Les Butors et la Finette,” an allegory of the war, in which Madame Simone and M. Jean Worms declaimed with boundless energy and conviction. The play had had considerable success and was much admired in some quarters—to me it seemed to belittle the whole vast spectacle of the war, and almost to vulgarize the glory of France. There is a heroism that transcends all heroics and that ought not to be made the subject of declamation. And if “Les Butors” gave me little satis- faction, the other pieces I saw gave me less. “Compared with France,” I said to myself, “England has not done so badly after all.”
This self-complacent mood was, alas! short-lived. It did not survive a round of the melancholy trivialities that had been produced in my absence. Yet the list included plays by two of our leading dramatists—Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Somerset Maugham.
There are some English critics who never lose an oppor- tunity of belittling the talent of Sir Arthur Pinero. They have eyes only for his foibles. If he chances to use a phrase that is unfamiliar to them and that strikes them as pompous, they will let that little speck, if speck it be, blind them to the merits of a great play. With this sort of criticism I have no sympathy and very little patience. I, at any rate, shall never write without respect and grati- tude of the dramatist to whom we owe such admirable crea- tions as “Trelawny of the Wells,” “Iris,” “Letty,” “His House in Order,” “Mid-Channel,” and “The Thunderbolt.” They have their limitations, no doubt, both intellectual and artistic; but in all the essential qualities of drama they take very high rank. Each of them has an individuality of its own that leaves an indelible imprint on the memory. Sir Arthur Pinero was one of the pioneers of the modern move- ment, and in specifically dramatic power he still stands eas- ily first among British playwrights.
But it is perhaps easier in the drama than in any other art to make an unqualified blunder. A theme which at first sight seemed promising will often “pan out” most disap- pointingly; but one has in the meantime worked at it until one has lost all freshness of perception. One cannot get far enough away from it to see it as it really is. Something of this sort, I imagine, must have happened to Sir Arthur Pinero in the case of “The Freaks.” It tells a story which we cannot believe, and—what is worse—do not want to be- lieve. Its characters are either shadowy or overdrawn. It never moves and seldom amuses us. And it comes to an end which, if we cared a bit about the characters, would be unnecessarily depressing. Not often has so accomplished a dramatist produced so faulty a piece of work.
Mrs. Herrick is a wealthy widow, living, with her son and daughter, Ronald and Sheila, in a large suburban man- sion. Her brother, the black sheep of the family, became a circus proprietor, and, dying, left her some money with
the request that she would be kind to any of his circus-folk that might come across her path. Being a most conscien- tious woman, she seeks out the scattered members of her brother’s troupe, finds that five of them are “resting’’— that is to say, disengaged—in London, and forthwith in- vites them to her house. They arrive in the shape of a little procession of freaks—a Living Skeleton, a Giant, a male and a female Dwarf, and an India-Rubber Lady, pos- sessed of the engaging accomplishment of tying herself up in knots. Their leader and mouthpiece is Mr. Horatio Til- ney, the Living Skeleton, who, by the way, has not the smallest claim to that title. The Giant is a weak, ineffectual creature, as giants are apt to be, who is good enough to spare the dramatist some technical difficulties by presently falling ill and remaining invisible during the second and third acts. The Dwarfs are an excessively tedious couple, who speak an elaborate jargon represented as being Ameri- can. The Human Knot, Miss Rosa Balmano, is a person- able young female, whose dialect out-Whitechapels White- chapel. They are supposed to be, beneath their outward eccentricities, a fundamentally amiable little party, for whom our cordial sympathies are invited.
But the whole situation is so artificial and strained that our sympathies fail to respond. We feel that Mrs. Herrick could well carry out her brother’s injunction without trans- planting the freaks into an environment in