The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 (part 5 of 5)

The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 (part 5 of 5)

The democratic society which Mr. Cole foresees will be a co-ordinated system of functional associations, guilds of producers, co-operative societies of consumers, and many others. The State will no longer be sovereign, it will merely be one of those associations, confined to its own specific functions. For each function in society there must be found an association and method of representation, and for each association and body of representatives a function. "Representative democracy," as we see it to-day in a "single omnicompetent Parliament," is a mockery; for "no man can represent another man, and no man's will can be treated as a substitute for, or representative of, the wills of others." This does not mean that Mr. Cole denies the validity of all representative government, only that he wants it put in a truer form. And that form is functional representation. The elected representatives of the future, of whom clearly there will be many--and "Why not?" says Mr. Cole--are not to be mere delegates, but each will have a more limited rôle, subject to more constant and closer criticism and advice from their constituents and, in the last resort, to "recall" by them. It is in this functional organisation that Mr. Cole centres his hopes of social and economic peace and progress, of political justice, of liberty and happiness for the individual. It is a theory that is open to criticism at several points, and no final judgment of it can, of course, be passed on the basis of this book. But Mr. Cole at least argues his case very clearly and trenchantly, and he has made a notable contribution to political science.

THEOLOGY

FIRST CHRISTIAN IDEAS. By E. C. SELWYN. Murray, 9_s._ net.

The late Dr. Murray was of that type of scholar which England produces to perfection, and of whom Dr. Abbott is our most notable and distinguished example. An untiring patience, a close attention to detail, a rather over-dogmatic manner, and at times a simple felicity are the chief marks of the school. In this posthumous volume Dr. Selwyn continues his argument, advocated in previous books, that the writers of the New Testament were familiar with the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, and that a great deal of the New Testament is Midrash--that is, hortatory comment--on Old Testament stories. That he proves this thesis it would be too much to affirm; but he certainly strengthens his case by the careful handling he gives here to selected passages, especially the narratives of the Infancy and the Temptation. At times one meets sentences in which one recognises the old headmaster rather than the student. For instance, "The origin of the term Mass is Mazzoth, the cakes of unleavened bread, and no other etymology is worth a moment's consideration"; but generally Dr. Selwyn's points are made carefully, modestly, and carry conviction. This is especially true of a really startling piece of exegetical translation in Chapter III. The upholders of the Helvidian view that the brethren of Jesus were the children of Mary are fond of quoting the phrase of St. Luke, "She brought forth her first-born son." Dr. Selwyn, with a simplicity that seems unaware of its force, removes this argument in the following passage:

Here we may notice two points which show his [Luke's] close observance of Scripture. The first is one that opens a just complaint against R.V., which renders "She brought forth her first-born son" (τὸν υἱὸν αὐτῆς τὸν Πρωτότοκον {ton huion autês ton Prôtotokon}). Luke is not speaking of uterine children of Mary, but he is declaring a solemn title, on which St. Paul had already dwelt. The title is based upon Ps. 89--"I will make him my First-born, higher than the sons of the earth." Which renders the Greek best, the R.V. or "She brought forth her son, the First-born"? There can be no question.

It is unfortunate that Dr. Selwyn wrote an extremely unattractive style, and is singularly unmethodical in the arrangement of his material. We have little doubt that this and his other books will be pillaged by popular preachers and theologians who have none of his scholarship. After all, such a fact is not an unworthy conclusion to the life of a great schoolmaster, who belongs to a profession which is fated to give ideas to those who will but rarely admit or even remember their source.

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS. By EDWARD CARPENTER. Allen & Unwin. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

No one would deny the correspondence between much of the theology and ceremonial of the Christian religion and previous creeds. What significance is to be attached to that correspondence will depend on the bias of the student. The Christian historian will see in the facts of anthropology evidence that Christianity is a natural as well as a revealed religion, and that its claims are greatly strengthened just because of pagan premonitions. The sceptic may be inclined to dismiss all Christian refinement of older myths as so much rubbish, of which the world must be rid before it can live coldly in the bleak light of a scientific materialism. Anyhow, there seems little advantage in anyone writing elaborately on the subject who is not a scholar. Mr. Carpenter is amiable, occasionally interesting, more often merely garrulous, but he seems to have no claims to scholarship, nor, what is ever fatal, to be able to estimate the value of previous scholars' works. One instance will suffice. He names the few eccentrics, Drews, Robertson, Bossi, Jensen, who deny the historicity of Jesus Christ; calls it a "large and learned body of opinion," and adds that "a still larger (but less learned) body fights desperately for the actual historicity of Jesus." The statement is really absurd. Not to mention orthodox scholars, Harnack alone could swallow his "learned body" without feeling discomfort.

His own method shows too great an eagerness to produce parallels at all costs. He notes that many gods, Dionysus, Mithra, Osiris were born in caves; Jesus Christ was born in a stable. But why call a stable an underground chamber? The facts are twisted to suit his theory; indeed, the whole book reminds one of those strained allegorical treatises which were common in the Middle Ages. The principal flaw in his book, as in all similar essays, is that he never approaches the records of the different religions, to which he is comparing Christianity, with a hundredth part of the severity he applies to Christian documents. He does not even discuss the age of manuscripts, a question of the first importance in the problem of religious origins. How many religions can show pre-Christian manuscript authority for the traits which, in the absence of that evidence, we may have believed were borrowed from Christianity itself?

ANTHROPOLOGY

MAN--PAST AND PRESENT. By A. H. KEANE. Revised and largely rewritten by A. HINGSTON QUIGGIN and A. C. HADDON. Cambridge University Press. 36_s._

What are the chief natural divisions of mankind, and how did they come to be formed? Such is the specific problem of ethnology, and it is one on which the whole body of the anthropological sciences may be said to converge. In a sense physical anthropology--that is to say, the study of the bodily characters of man--has the most direct bearing on the subject. The members of the human family are distinguished by marked differences of physique, which are clearly to a large extent the product of heredity. On the other hand, adaptation to environment must tend to confine each variety to the most suitable area; so that geography, in the specialised form known as anthropo-geography, will be required to help the argument out. Moreover, the history of culture, as variously comprising ideas, institutions, arts, and languages, provides important evidence of those movements and clashings of peoples whereby our ever-shifting balance has been maintained between the forces making severally for a differentiation and for a fusion of types. Nor is it enough for the ethnologist to keep his eye fixed on the existing distribution of these types over the wide surface of the globe. His outlook as it turns towards the past must embrace a tract of time even more formidably wide, inasmuch as we can never hope to explore it as thoroughly. Altogether, the speculative problem is as baffling as it is alluring. On the practical side, too, there is the question to be faced how far civilisation can afford to experiment in the direction of race-amalgamation--whether, in short, physical diversity is or is not compatible with moral unity within the kingdom of man.

Dr. A. H. Keane, for some time Professor of Hindustani at University College, London, was born in 1833 and died in 1912. He was the only Englishman in post-Darwinian times to attempt a grand synthesis of the facts relating to the origin and interrelation of the main human groups. In Ethnology (1896) and Man--Past and Present (1899) he put forward what is in effect the same theory--one to which he adhered for the rest of his days, as may be gathered from his article on Ethnology in Hastings' Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, published in the year of his death. This theory amounted to a vindication on evolutionary grounds of Linnæus' genealogical tree of the human family, with its four branches, the Æthiopian, Mongolian, American, and Caucasian. Keane postulated that these primary groups were independently derived from a common primeval ancestry, first the negro family branching off, then somewhat later the Caucasian and Mongolo-American splitting out of the main stem. Thereupon he brought geography into play, supposing each type to develop in an isolated "cradle-land" where its fundamental characters became fixed, so that no subsequent intermingling could wholly obliterate them. Nor is it for him simply a question of physical differentiation. There are mental and moral peculiarities likewise that go with the race, and these are reflected in markedly divergent outgrowths of culture. On the strength of these assumptions it was possible to construct a highly systematic account of mankind in the mass. For the big differences were taken as established at the outset once for all; whereas the myriad smaller differences that actually distinguish the peoples of the earth were regarded as mere aberrations from these primary norms.

Twenty-one years, however, of further discovery do not confirm this bold explanation of the genesis of human diversity, but even militate against it in a negative way, in so far as some of Keane's most trusted proofs are shown to be invalid. The great antiquity, for instance, of certain fossil men found in America turns out to be by no means so certain as he was ready to believe, and the claim of the New World to rank as an area of primary characterisation is correspondingly weakened. Again, a great deal more is now known about the racial types of Pleistocene Europe, and their multiplicity is hard to reconcile with the view that in early times a given geographical province would foster a single well-marked variety. Thus, so far as regards the prehistoric evidence, the bottom is pretty well knocked out of the theory; and thereupon the genetic significance of the attempted classification of types disappears, unless a new theory of origin can be substituted.

Now to attempt such a reconstruction of the whole argument is a task which no editor as such could well undertake, for he must in that case assume responsibility for every word that appears, the original author being reduced to a mute shade in the background. On the other hand, if the explanation of the present heterogeneity of mankind has become more difficult than ever, the description of it may be improved by incorporating the results of the latest field work. Hence the questionable pedigree is withdrawn; but the list of the surviving members of the human family is carefully revised. A systematic appearance is imparted to the catalogue by dividing up the groups according to the nature of their hair. This leaves Keane's classification almost unaltered in its surface appearance, since his Æthiopians form the woolly-haired division, his Caucasians the wavy-haired, the only difference being that the Australians who count as wavy-haired must now come across from the negroids, of whose characters they otherwise appear to possess a share. As for the Mongolians and Americans, since both alike are straight-haired, they need no longer be kept apart. It is a clever feat of substitution, yet is one that is of little use to the student of the evolutionary problem. The systematist gets on very well with hair as his differentia until the question of development is raised. He thereupon finds, first, that to relate present types to former ones is impossible by this means, since prehistoric skulls have lost their hair entirely; secondly, that the interrelations of present types are not made any clearer, since no one has worked out the effects of cross-breeding on the hair of the offspring. Thus it is a scandalous fact that despite the copious interbreeding of whites with woolly-haired negroes and straight-haired aborigines in America, no trustworthy data are available from this or any other quarter in regard to the physical results of such miscegenation. Is waviness of hair a pure or a mixed form, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? Our authorities do not seem to know; yet, so long as the matter is left undecided, relationships based on similarity of hair can have no genetic significance.

Another consequence of the suppression of the theory of a radical division of the human stocks brought about by their development in isolation is that the assignment of a special kind of mentality to the different races loses most of its point. This never was a very convincing side of Keane's work, for he seemed to lack the delicacy of touch needed in order to bring out the subtler shades of meaning in primitive religion, and hence could hardly do justice to the surest diagnostic of the mental life. As it is, one is inclined to smile at the drastic characterisations of peoples that survive, without the excuse of a genetic explanation, in the revised text. Thus the former edition summed up the Papuasian as "even more cruel than the African Negro." This goes out in the present edition; but as we read immediately below that the Tasmanian, another branch of the stock, was "far less cruel," we have lingering doubts about the Papuasian character as regards the habit of "seeing red." Without altogether denying the possibility of an ethnic psychology, one may ask what scientific basis is provided for one here. Whether Keane was right or wrong, he did mean that temperament went with ancestry. But the present work does not intend us to deduce a man's morality from his hair; so that the bearing of mental traits on the problem of classification can no longer be regarded as essential.

In conclusion, it is only fair to state that no pains have been spared to secure the utmost accuracy in the statement of facts. As an ethnology the book may be disappointing, because it amounts to an admission that Keane's original attempt to construct a genealogy of the human race outran the evidence. On the other hand, as an ethnographic conspectus it will be very serviceable to the student. The idealist, too, who is in a hurry to establish a uniform civilisation for all may here come upon a useful reminder of the actual diversity of mankind, though he may console himself with the thought that, as Heracleitus long ago observed, "opposite friction knits the world together."

SCIENCE

SCIENCE AND LIFE. By FREDERICK SODDY. Murray. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is a collection of addresses and articles indicative of the author's activities as a chemist and as one of the leading figures of Aberdeen University. A proportion of the addresses may be grouped together as representing successive expressions of one leading thought, the social advantages which may accrue from an intelligent application of the method and results of scientific research to the utilisation of natural sources of energy. "Scientific research is capable of raising the general standard of life, without limit, by the solution it affords of the material and physical problems that prevent progress"--this is one of Professor Soddy's chief themes. The disadvantage, largely inherent in a collection of such addresses, delivered to different types of audience, is that, instead of having before us a clearly reasoned and cumulative treatment of the problems involved, we take up the matter afresh, from a slightly different aspect, in each separate address and run over very much the same ground, at one time as a member of the Independent Labour Party, at another as a member of the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce, and so on.

There is much overlapping, and a certain feeling is aroused that we are not much further than we were in the preceding address. Nevertheless, the problems which Professor Soddy handles are of such importance that, while we regret that he has not judged fit to embody the matter of several of his separate addresses in one consecutive essay, we believe that it is right that his opinion should be placed permanently on record. Besides these addresses on the place of science in society, we have two popular expositions of the march of science, in which Professor Soddy has himself made such notable advances--one on the Evolution of Matter and one on Radioactive Change. The views on the transmutations of the elements, which attracted much attention in the daily Press, are not, of course, new, but the account is remarkably clear and affords an excellent summary of the present state of the science of radioactivity, which can be understood by the average reader. Elsewhere in the book, both in separate articles and in addresses, there is much criticism, of more or less parochial interest, of the administration of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

A TEXT-BOOK OF HYGIENE FOR TRAINING COLLEGES. By MARGARET AVERY. Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

This little book has apparently been written chiefly to help students at training colleges through their examinations, and suffers from many of the usual faults of cram books. The information is scrappy, and the style so condensed that in many parts the book reads more like a series of notes than a connected treatise. A more serious fault is that the scientific information is not always correct--for instance, the examination of recruits and pensioners during the war has disproved the common assertion that the cause of short sight is reading small print, doing fine sewing, and so on, and has tended to show that excessive physical exertion of certain types, such as lifting heavy weights, is in many cases the inducing cause. This is a point of importance to school teachers, as short sight is aggravated by many of the physical exercises now in vogue. In other cases, the most recent work is not quoted. But the book is largely redeemed by the very sane way in which wide social topics, such as temperance and eugenics, are discussed. The latter subject is handled with a desire to get at the facts, uncoloured by prejudice, which is to be commended, and Miss Avery seems for the time to get away from the haunting thought of the examination syllabus. The book will appeal to all interested in primary school education, for it contains a good deal of information as to actual conditions in various centres.

HERSCHEL. By HECTOR MACPHERSON. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 2_s._ net.

This short biography is the latest addition to the "Men of Science" section of the series "Pioneers of Progress" now being published by the S.P.C.K. It gives an excellent little account of the life of the older Herschel, and, necessarily, tells us something of his devoted sister Caroline, probably the first woman to do work of importance in the exact sciences. A poor German musician, who left--some say deserted from--the band of the Hanoverian Guards to come to England, Herschel built up for himself a considerable position in the English musical world before he turned his attention to the science in every branch of which he made magnificent advances. His theory of the stellar system opened a fresh field for observation and speculation; his studies of Saturn and Mars gave us our first detailed information about these planets; he discovered Uranus--loyally named "Georgium Sidus"--and binary stars, and contributed important observations in every department of observational astronomy then known. His theory of the sun, if ludicrous in the light of our present knowledge, was the first attempt at a general treatment of solar problems. Considering the small size of the book, Mr. Macpherson's treatment is remarkably comprehensive, and provides a graphic and sympathetic sketch of the life and works of the great astronomer.

DISCOVERY. A Monthly Popular Journal of Knowledge. No. 1. January, 1920. 6_d._ net. No. 2. February. John Murray.

This new periodical appears under distinguished auspices, the trustees of the deed by which it is maintained being Sir J. J. Thomson, Sir F. G. Kenyon, Professor A. C. Seward, and Professor R. S. Conway. The object is to give a popular presentation of advances made "in the chief subjects in which investigation is being actively pursued," and it is announced that the articles will be written in plain, simple language. An imposing list of writers who have made or promised contributions assures us that they will be authoritative. The purpose of the promoters of this journal is worthy of all praise, and the articles in the first number range over a wide field of interest, and include The Secret of Philæ (Professor Conway), The Modern Study of Dreams (Professor T. H. Pear), and Discovery and Education, written by the Master of Balliol, with his usual forcefulness and insight. While paying tribute to the spirit of the undertaking, we venture, with some diffidence, to offer the opinion that in many points the paper might be much improved by more informed editing. In the first place it does not seem that any clear idea has been formulated as to the class of reader to whom appeal is to be made; every author appears to have a different standard of erudition in view. For instance, is it assumed that to the average reader of the Times, say, the vocabulary of Dr. Slater Price's article on Smoke Screens at Sea--chlorinated hydrocarbons, kieselguhr, thermite, oleum, and so on, offered without a word of explanation--is plain, simple language? This article might have been written for professional chemists who want to know what chemicals have proved suitable for producing smoke screens; that on Sound Ranging, on the other hand, with its forced breeziness, reads as if intended for a school magazine. The make-up is not very attractive, not vastly superior to that of the average parish magazine. The single illustration which adorns the pages is a crude and amateurish pen-drawing far better omitted, if nothing better could be found. In short, the paper seems to suffer, at present, from lack of policy as regards public, and lack of high standards as regards production and illustration. We have no doubt that experience will rapidly rectify these minor points, and we sincerely hope that the paper will find its public and develop its sphere of usefulness.

BOOK-PRODUCTION NOTES

By J. H. MASON

The Gazette du Bon Ton, now beginning its third year, is so extraordinarily clever that it sets one thinking about the typographical importance of magazines. It is in them that typography is seen at its liveliest, and it is a pity that after a comet-like career we frequently lose sight of them. Why do not British publishers and printers establish an exhibition hall on the lines of that at the Buchgewerbehaus in Leipzig? The exhibitions should be varied, not permanent, although there should always be an exhibition connected with this all-important group of trades. The book-production of one nation after another, their magazines, their book illustration, their types and posters, their paper, their colour printing and newspapers would provide ample material. Printing in its many forms is an almost omnipresent element of our lives, and for this reason the forms it takes are more important than the much-canvassed forms of modern pictorial art. In the series of exhibitions there should be one of magazines, particular care being taken to include those with a limited circulation, or those which were experimental and ran only for a short period. Gordon Craig's Mask, the Neolith, the Hobbyhorse, the Manchester Playgoer, the Russian Apollon, the Imprint, the Game, are just a few that occur to me as certainly not well known, and yet they are all suggestive attempts to deal with magazine typography, format, paper, and illustration.

The Gazette du Bon Ton would certainly be included in such an exhibition or section of an exhibition. Its two most important features typographically are its type, a revived old style based on a design of Nicolas Cochin, and its coloured illustrations. Three sizes of type are used, in the Avant-Propos a large 18-point, and in the body of the magazine 14-point and 10-point (I give the nearest equivalents in British sizes). The 14-point is an excellent choice, both in point of weight and scale. I should prefer using it all through the magazine to form a stable background to the very varied illustrations and the capricious choice of initials and captions. The fine line illustrations of page 10 are too light to keep the page together as they are meant to do. The drawings were probably made without being tested by comparison with the strong line of the type. The illustrations, in black with one or two flat tints or full colours, give a real colour value that is never obtained by the three-colour process. Take any book illustrated by this process and test it by comparison with these Bon Ton colours, and if the colour sense has not been vitiated by a wrong standard for coloured letterpress illustrations--such as oil paintings--the superiority of the flat colour will be obvious. Even the chiaroscuro block prints are capable of very pleasing effects, a hint of them appearing in the tail-piece on page 4.

The "Gazette du Bon Ton continuera d'être ... le lieu où les couturiers et les peintres collaborent pour composer la silhouette de leur temps." That sentence from the Avant-Propos sums up what I have to say of the type, the illustration, and the work as a whole. The large type attracts attention at once, it spreads itself a little--a shade wide--it slightly emphasises its idiosyncrasies (see the y with its terminal serif, or the s, or the capital G, they have the very accent of our own time); it is elegant, but not content with elegance; it is on a good model, but perfection, the golden mediocrity, is felt as constraint; it attains--reaches something a little outré.

NOTE.--Last month I inadvertently wrote Luckombe for Stower, although the latter's Printer's Grammar was on my table at the time.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS

ROBERT SEYMOUR BRIDGES (Poet Laureate)

Verse

POEMS. Pickering. 1873.

THE GROWTH OF LOVE. Poem in Twenty-four Sonnets. 1876. [Reprinted with omissions and additions, 1890.]

CARMEN ELEGIACUM ROBERTI BRIDGES: IMPENSIS EDUARDI BUMPUS. 1877.

POEMS. By the Author of The Growth of Love. Bumpus. 1879.

POEMS. By the Author of The Growth of Love. 3rd Series. Bumpus. 1880.

PROMETHEUS, THE FIREGIVER. Drama in Verse. Daniel Press. 1883. [Reprinted by Bell, 1884.]

PLAYS: NERO, PALICIO, ULYSSES, CAPTIVES, ACHILLES, HUMOURS OF THE COURT, FEAST OF BACCHUS, Second Part of NERO. Bumpus. 1885-94.

EROS AND PSYCHE. Poem in twelve measures. From Apuleius. Bell. 1885. Again Revised 1894.

THE FEAST OF BACCHUS. A Poem. Privately printed, Oxford. 1889.

THE SHORTER POEMS OF ROBERT BRIDGES. Four books. Bell. 1890. [Frequent reissues, the later have five books.]

SELECTIONS OF THE SHORTER POEMS OF ROBERT BRIDGES. Contemporary Poets. 1891. (Edited by A. H. Miles.)

ACHILLES IN SCYROS. Reprinted. Bell. 1892.

HUMOURS OF THE COURT. A Comedy and other Poems. Bell and Macmillan. Copyright for America. 1893.

ODE FOR THE BICENTENARY COMMEMORATION OF HENRY PURCELL AND OTHER POEMS. The Shilling Garland. Elkin Mathews. 1896.

POETICAL WORKS. Smith, Elder. 1898.

HYMNS FROM THE YATTENDON HYMNAL. Daniel's Private Press. 1899.

NOW IN WINTRY DELIGHTS. A Poem with a Note on Prosody. Daniel Press. 1903.

DEMETER, A MASQUE. Clarendon Press. 1905.

AN INVITATION TO THE PAGEANT. Ode. The Oxford Pageant Book. 1907.

POETICAL WORKS, excluding the Eight Dramas. Clarendon Press. 1912.

POEMS WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1913. Privately printed by St. John Hornby. Ashendene Press. 1914.

IBANT OBSCURI. An experiment in the classical hexameter. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1916.

ODE ON THE TERCENTENARY COMMEMORATION OF SHAKESPEARE. 1916.

Prose

ON THE ELEMENTS OF MILTON'S BLANK VERSE IN PARADISE LOST. Clarendon Press. 1887. (Revised, with additions, 1893.)

ON THE PROSODY OF PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON AGONISTES. Clarendon Press. 1889.

JOHN KEATS. A Critical Essay. Privately printed. 1895. [Originally published as Introduction to the Muses' Library Keats.]

MILTON'S PROSODY AND CLASSICAL METRES IN ENGLISH VERSE. W. J. Stone. Oxford. 1901.

ON THE INFLUENCE OF THE AUDIENCE. Vol. 10, Shakespeare's Works. 1907.

ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION. English Association. 1910. (Reprinted, with three plates, 1913.)

ESSAY ON KEATS. Revised in Poetical Works of John Keats. Hodder and Stoughton. 1916.

POETICAL WORKS OF JOHN KEATS, with Critical Essay. Clarendon Press. 1916.

AN ADDRESS TO THE SWINDON BRANCH OF THE WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION. Clarendon Press. 1918.

THE NECESSITY OF POETRY. An Address. Clarendon Press. 1918.

ON ENGLISH HOMOPHONES. Oxford. 1919. (S.P.E. Tract No. 2.)

He has also edited the Poems of R. W. Dixon, Digby Dolben (with Memoirs), and Gerard Hopkins.

ALICE MEYNELL

Verse

PRELUDES. 1875. H. S. King.

POEMS. 1893. Lane.

OTHER POEMS. 1900. Privately Printed.

LATER POEMS. 1902. (Printed in U.S.A.)

POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1913. [A Collected Edition.]

POEMS ON THE WAR. 1915. Privately Printed.

A FATHER OF WOMEN AND OTHER POEMS. Burns & Oates. 1917.

Prose

THE POOR SISTERS OF NAZARETH. 1889. Burns & Oates.

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1893. Lane.

THE COLOUR OF LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1896. Lane.

THE CHILDREN. 1896. Lane.

LONDON IMPRESSIONS. 1898. Constable.

JOHN RUSKIN. 1899. (Modern English Writers.) Blackwood.

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1899. Lane.

CHILDREN OF THE OLD MASTERS. 1903. Duckworth.

CERES' RUNAWAY AND OTHER ESSAYS. 1909. Constable.

MARY, THE MOTHER OF JESUS. 1912. Medici Society.

ESSAYS. Burns & Oates. 1914. [A "Collected-Selected" edition.]

HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY. Burns & Oates. 1917.

She has also written Introductions to numerous reprints.

She has also selected or edited the following: Poems of T. G. Hake; Extracts from Samuel Johnson (with G. K. Chesterton); _Poems of J. B. Tabb_; The Flower of the Mind.

DRAMA

THE THREE SISTERS (Tchekhov) COURT THEATRE MEDEA (Euripides); CANDIDA (Shaw) HOLBORN EMPIRE PYGMALION (Shaw) ALDWYCH THEATRE THE YOUNG VISITERS (Daisy Ashford) COURT THEATRE JOHN FERGUSON (St. John Ervine) LYRIC THEATRE, HAMMERSMITH MINIATURE BALLET--RUSSIAN MINIATURE THEATRE DUKE OF YORK'S GRIERSON'S WAY (H. V. Esmond) AMBASSADORS

The list of plays which I have selected from those I have seen during the last month is not without interest. It contains one play which is not Tchekhov's finest work, but which nevertheless has no rival among the others on the list, and it was performed for exactly one afternoon by the Art Theatre under Madame Donnet. The plays next in merit--Euripides' Medea and Shaw's Candida--were given by Mr. Lewis Casson and Mr. Bruce Winston at matinées at the Holborn Empire for exactly one week each. Shaw's Pygmalion and Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters may be expected to run--the former in proportion to its merits, the latter in no equality at all, either with its notoriety or its charm--for a couple of months. At a considerable distance comes Mr. Ervine's John Ferguson, a play which, if considered by the side of those I have already named, must be ranked very low, but if considered with all those I have not named--now being played at London theatres--must be ranked as respectably good, neither very much better nor very much worse than the average West-End theatrical entertainment. For John Ferguson, like Tea for Three at the Haymarket, is an entertainment, only it does not make you laugh; it entertains you as a street accident does--a very bloody street accident. Finally--leaving out the Russian Miniature Theatre, which is really Ballet--we come to Grierson's Way, the resuscitated by-product of Mr. H. V. Esmond. Here we come to a play that--if, as our tabulation almost suggests, plays run in inverse proportion to their merit--should run for ever.

Of Tchekhov's The Three Sisters I shall not attempt to say much. Like all Tchekhov's plays, it must be extraordinarily difficult to act, and I did not think that, on the whole, it was acted very well, although Miss Dorothy Massingham (Irina), Miss Helena Millais (Natasha), Mr. Tom Nesbitt (Audrey), Mr. Leyton Cancellor (Chebutikin), Mr. William Armstrong (Kuligin), and others made praiseworthy and not altogether unsuccessful efforts to present the characters they were playing. There was also something very plausible and real about Mr. Harcourt Williams's Vershinin, and Mr. Williams has a great advantage in his voice. It was the production rather than the acting that was at fault, but, inadequate as it may have been, it could not prevent the extraordinary force of the play making itself felt.

There are some people who would call Tchekhov a realist and The Three Sisters realism, but it is Mr. Ervine in John Ferguson who is the realist, if by that one means reproducing on the stage as closely as practicable what might be happening off it, with the action and language rendered as faithfully as possible. It was probably Mr. Ervine's knowledge of this fact, and the serious deficiency which it indicates, that made him introduce the village idiot to talk about "wee" stars, and give the audience what is always the realist's idea of a little poetry. As a man of letters, and not a mere theatrical hack, he knows of the utter barrenness of the photographic reproduction method in art. He probably knows also that it is not even enough to select, that the artist must create. Unfortunately this is just what the mere intellectual, the merely clever man can never do, and when he is clever enough to know that he must make an attempt at it he produces something like Mr. Ervine's village idiot, something that is borrowed and extraneous to the real matter power of the play. The poetry, the creative power of Tchekhov, on the other hand, is immanent and infuses the whole conception of The Three Sisters. So true is this that when we saw the play in the auditorium of the Court Theatre we felt that it was our lives we were watching, our destinies we were seeing played out; and this in spite of the fact that every detail of the scene was strange, every custom unfamiliar, and the wealth of local colour such as to produce a sensuous impression as strong as music.

Nothing extraordinary happens in Tchekhov's play. The characters meet, talk, fall in love, part, die in the casual way in which we all do these things--the actual events in Mr. Ervine's play are far less usual, just as a street accident is an occurrence less frequent than afternoon tea; but the whole play is an imaginative expression of the inner feelings of three human beings--the three sisters. It is extraordinarily imaginative, that is the point I want to make, and it is useless to ask me why it is imaginative--that is Tchekhov's secret. You never feel this is what actually happened three hundred miles from Moscow in the year 1892; you feel, on the contrary, that this never happened at all, but that it is what goes on inside us, millions of us, all the years of our lives, although it may never or very rarely come up to the surface of our consciousness and fill us with the spiritual agony of The Three Sisters. In Mr. Ervine's play, on the other hand, although, as I have said, the actual events are in themselves of less common occurrence, we meet with something that we feel certain must have happened yesterday and will happen to-morrow, and its significance, somehow, seems to be nil. What artistic or spiritual significance has a collision in the Strand between a taxi-cab and a lamp-post? Whatever significance it has, it is that kind of significance that Mr. Ervine's play possesses.

If The Young Visitors had been produced by that Russian Society called Zahda, or by the Russian Miniature Theatre, it would have been hailed as a wonderful masterpiece of bizarre and original art, and all the young freaks of London who frequent the Russian Ballet and sneer at Gilbert and Sullivan would have flocked to see it and talked of nothing else for months. As it is a product, however, of the despised English--the English who have produced the greatest imaginative literature of the world--and as also it has the misfortune to have been in its book form enormously popular, there is little likelihood of its being adequately appreciated. I must confess, however, that by the side of Mr. J. V. Bryant's production of Miss Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters, the productions I have so far seen of the Zahda Art Council, which includes men of ambitious mind, and of the Russian Miniature Theatre have been distinctly jejune and unexhilarating. The Young Visiters is the later Victorian world looked at from the eyes of a child. It is, therefore, a fantasy, and the note of fantasy has been admirably struck in the stage production. Those who have read the book will naturally imagine that it is spoiled upon the stage, but they will be wrong. It is even conceivable that some--there are such people--who have not liked the book will enjoy the play immensely. They should, at all events, not let any distaste of the book's vogue prevent their seeing the play, if they have the opportunity. They will be rewarded by Mr. Harold Anstruther's marvellous presentment of that wonderful creation Bernard Clark. He is a masterpiece in costume, voice, gesture, and make-up, and I expect I shall have to wait a good many years before our Russian friends give us anything comparable for excellence with him. Another perfect--the word perfect is accurate--presentment is Mr. John Deverell's Earl of Clincham--the earl who thought that the glories of this world were but "piffle before the wind." Mr. Lawrence Hanray's Procurio is also perfect. I have never used the word perfect about any acting before, so there is obviously some magic about The Young Visiters to have three parts played perfectly. I wish I could say the same of that delightful person Mr. Salteena. Mr. Ben Field's effort is by no means without merit, but he does not satisfy our preconceived notion of what Mr. Salteena ought to be, as the others do for Bernard Clark, Clincham, and Procurio. Nevertheless, as we get more used to Mr. Field's Salteena we get more satisfied with him. We never, unfortunately, became satisfied with Miss Edyth Goodall's Ethel Morticue, clever as Miss Goodall undeniably is. Miss Goodall's Ethel is sophisticated, Ethel was not. The Prince of Wales at the Levee was excellent, and the Duchess's singing of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay superb. It was an inspiration to think of it.

Of Mr. Esmond's play, Grierson's Way, I should say no more if it were not that it has been praised by the same critics who have written of the "filth" of Dryden's Marriage à la Mode. Those of us who pride ourselves on a somewhat catholic taste, who can see the good points of a revue, a musical comedy, a melodrama, a farce, and a tragedy, who find that, although we may prefer Webster, Dryden, and Tchekhov to Shaw, and Shaw to Arnold Bennett, and Arnold Bennett to Oscar Asche, we are none the less able to be amused by the Pounds sisters in Pretty Peggy, and to enjoy Alfred Lester in The Eclipse--those of us, let me add, who do not turn scarlet at the sight of a bare back are still--strange as it may appear to the pharisaical and the prudish--not without moral sense. And Grierson's Way is a play that offends our moral sense. It is, I would venture to add--using the word with its true but not its current popular meaning--a thoroughly immoral play. That is to say its ideas are false, its sentiment slobbery, and thoroughly rotten with the rottenness of bad fruit. It is worth discussing the play because so few people know a bad thing when they see it. They judge by externals, not by the spirit, for the simple reason that it is so very much easier. Their idea of morality is like that of the old lady who overheard her gardener say "Damn" and said "What a bad wicked man!" and dismissed him, although he was an honest, good-hearted fellow, to put in his place a smooth-tongued, insincere rogue who cheated her for the rest of her life. Of course it served her right; men and women have no excuse to throw up the task of feeling and thinking after real righteousness and beauty in Art or Life for the easy rule-of-thumb method of judging everything by rote or formula. No doubt it is terribly difficult for many of them to feel either beauty or ugliness, good or evil, but without that sensitiveness of the intelligence they can never hope to criticise the productions of the human mind. The foot-rule, whether it is a rule for measuring "damns" or split infinitives, or rapes or murders, or the number of bare backs in a play, is useless for measuring its artistic quality, and a play can have no other quality, provided its murders are not real and its indecencies not practised before our eyes.

In Grierson's Way we have the story of a girl who is loved by a middle-aged bachelor who has a maundering delight in bad music, and also by a once famous violinist, who has lost an arm in an accident, and now is a doddering drunkard, who talks of Art and his soul in the approved manner of the sentimentalist who does not realise what an offence his sickly, insincere slobber is to any profoundly-feeling, austere, and clear-brained artist. The girl has fallen in love with an Army man of the conventional novelette type, who is already married; she is about to have a child by him when she gets a letter from him to say that he is going away and will never see her again. The middle-aged bachelor offers to marry her as a way out of the difficulty; she accepts. The man she loves returns, his wife having died, and the husband, at the instigation of the violinist, commits suicide. The curtain falls leaving this creature expressing with sickly gusto his opinion that the dead husband will now stand for ever between her and her happiness. This account of the play's theme can give no idea of the false sentiment, the maudlin splutter of fine words, and the melodramatic rant with which the play is loaded. Miss Cathleen Nesbitt strove to preserve some personal dignity in the foul mush of words that flowed from the invertebrate jelly-fish around her, but nothing she could do could redeem the play, which is, frankly, disgusting.

DRAMATIC LITERATURE

PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. By CLAYTON HAMILTON. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._ 6_d._

This is a book by an American critic, and it ranges over almost the whole field of dramatic art. Although it consists mainly of articles reprinted from American magazines, it is on a much higher general level of intelligence and taste than we are accustomed to expect from work of this kind. Mr. Hamilton discusses all the modern English dramatists, and, although he is not free from his countrymen's tendency to exaggerated praise--for instance, few English critics of reputation would endorse his opinion that Hindle Wakes is "a great work"--yet he is far from being undiscriminating, and his criticism of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy is penetrating and fresh. Mr. Hamilton has the great merit of thinking for himself instead of merely repeating the current catchwords of the day. He is not afraid to argue that Henry Arthur Jones and Pinero are finer dramatists than Mr. Bernard Shaw, but, on the other hand, he can appreciate Mr. Chesterton and Lord Dunsany. Again, he is full of ingenious suggestions on the subject of dramatic construction, but he is far more conscious of the foolishness of dogmatising and laying down hard-and-fast rules than such a good critic even as Mr. William Archer, to whom his book is dedicated. On the subject of American plays, as represented by the work of Mr. George M. Cohan, he is scathingly severe, and that is a good omen for the future of the drama in America.

W. J. TURNER

THE FINE ARTS

AUGUSTE RENOIR

Renoir is admired by almost all schools of taste, both conservative and radical, and naturally each school endeavours to claim him as its own. The impressionists, for instance, emphasise his adoption of the impressionist palette, his studies in the manner of Monet and Pisarro, his general preoccupation with atmosphere and sunlight; the anti-impressionists point out his deviation from the stippled technique, with its juxtaposition of the colours of the spectrum, his increasing interest in form and composition as contrasted with atmosphere, and his own disclaimer of adherence to the naturalistic principle: "Avec la Nature on fait ce qu'on veut et on aboutit necessairement a l'isolement. Moi, je reste dans le rang"; also the famous reply to the question, where one should learn painting: "Au musée, parbleu!"

The reflections upon art of even the greatest artist are not necessarily correct, and though an artist preaches one theory he may actually practise another. Nor are these brief and pithy utterances of Renoir's altogether unambiguous. In order to appreciate the real meaning of any statement of theory it is necessary to bear in mind the opposite view which it is combating. We cannot infer from Renoir's objection to the indiscriminate realism of the later impressionist doctrine that he was in favour of Cubism, for Cubism was not at the time under discussion. Nor does his reference of students to the old masters (au musée) imply in the least that he would abolish painting from nature. There is, in fact, not the slightest need to read into Renoir's simple, somewhat irritated replies any abstruse semi-metaphysical meaning. They will bear a very normal interpretation, which seems to me to be not only the true one, but also the truth. Renoir did not believe in the chaotic and uninspired painting of anything and everything, nor in the pretended complete severance with tradition and the past. He knew that the study of the old masters had assisted him in giving expression to his emotion, and he left the matter at that. Actually all his life long he painted from nature, and it is said that he hardly ever worked without a model. Indeed many of the intellectualists have been compelled to class Renoir as a "naïf," who was content with the unmediated charms of the external world, and never aspired to more deliberate abstract construction.

The Meaning of Impressionism

This distinction, however, between the realistic impressionist (Monet), the naïf (Renoir and the douanier Rousseau), and the intellectually constructive artist, such as Cézanne, is apt to be thoroughly misleading. It is true that the theory of impressionism, in its later developments, was a scientific formula calculated to fetter rather than help the artist, but it does not follow, nor is it by any means true, that Monet and Pisarro were not sometimes very fine artists. They elaborated a style which expressed admirably their own brisk and vivacious sentiment, and the result was neither photographic nor discontinuous with the past. Surely nothing but prejudice and the new pedantry of hybrid abstract design could deny æsthetic value to Monet's "Gare St. Lazare," and Pisarro's "Red Roofs," in the Luxembourg. Often, however, Monet's work is distinctly laboured and only differentiated from a photograph by the worried surface of the paint. He is more monotonous and uninspired than his contemporaries, but he is none the less the author of some remarkably good prose descriptions.

In short, impressionism has come to stand for two quite distinct things: one a genuine attempt to articulate an emotion connected with light and atmosphere, the other a scientific theory of colour and light. With the latter, few of the important impressionists were concerned. Seurat is the only one who seems to have been influenced to any noticeable extent and yet to have remained an artist. But with the former the whole group were more or less concerned, including Renoir and Cézanne. They all revolted from the old sombre colours, expressive of the worship of hoary antiquity, and astonished their contemporaries by plunging into the brightness of the present. Their different modes of reacting to this general tendency were the natural result of eminently desirable differences in temperament. This is the essence of the divergence between, say, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne. For the very reason that they each possessed a personal vision their work differed, both technically and in its content. It simply is a misrepresentation to say that Cézanne indulged in Cubist deformations. To quote a biographer of Cézanne:--"Ce sont ses disciples, ses plagiaires qui raconte qu'il deforme. Ses deformations, que des cuistres voient si bien, eux qui ne sont pas peintres, ce sont des gestes, des attitudes, des contours vrais pour Cézanne. Il ne voyait pas autrement."

Of course it is possible to soak oneself in Cézanne to such an extent that almost everything else will seem uninteresting. But this is not a magnetism peculiar to Cézanne; it is common to all artists of any comprehensive range, not excepting Renoir. Pass quickly after enjoying a collection of Renoir's completest and most lucid work to some of Cézanne's paintings. Most probably they will appear wooden and unattractive. But this will be a psychological illusion, due to a sudden contrast and the fact that the whole of one's emotional consciousness has been shaped to a certain form, and will not immediately reshape itself. Our minds at any single moment are unable to contain more than a few powerful conceptions and impressions, and there must therefore be times of clashing and transition.

But there is a sense in which Renoir might very well be described as naïf and ingenuous. This would refer not to his method or technique, but to the spiritual content of his work, what he means and has to say. The centre of his enjoyment lay always in something charming, radiant, opulent, and, if you like, sensuous. And so those who are ascetically disposed, if not in their life, in their tastes, condemn Renoir as pretty and sentimental. But often they go further and conclude that he was facile, that he painted without difficulty or trouble, as the birds sing. It may, however, have been as difficult for him to attain a satisfactory expression of his emotion, which was of facility, as it was for Cézanne to express his intense consciousness of beauty struck out of conflicting opposites. Indeed, very often there are distinct indications of a struggle in Renoir, of inability to get exactly what he was aiming at. A superficial glance might put this down to bad elementary draughtsmanship. But one has only to consider the technical proficiency of his earlier work (see "Le Cabaret de la Mere Antony, Diane Chasseresse") to realise that the cause of this apparent ineptitude must be deeper. It is the honesty of the artist who is always developing and refuses to overcome difficulties by resort to the camouflage of the obvious and the hackneyed. Consequently the very failure has its appeal.

Different Periods

There is a great deal of difference of opinion as to the respective value of Renoir's earlier and his later work, and this has afforded an excellent opportunity for the conflicting schools, who all join in admiring Renoir, to set up within this ostensible "union sacrée" their old party divisions. The conservatives adhere, of course, to the first great period from 1870-1881; that is to say between Renoir's thirtieth and fortieth years. In the rest they see a gradual decline of inspiration, an increasing predilection for rotund and almost coarse sensuousness, a pathetic loss of technical power until, when tortured by gout and hopelessly paralysed, the old master could only apply chaotic dabs of hot and hotter colour, his work became worthless. The extremists, on the other hand, see a steady, though uneven, development. They admit readily the enchantment of the period of early maturity when Renoir was at the height of his physical powers, but they have an uncomfortable feeling that this kind of art is a trifle too normal, it is something that practically anyone can enjoy with a little effort. The later work is more difficult. Renoir never lost his peculiar charm, even when painting the fattest of models (his model, I think, just grew fatter), but he experimented in different directions, passing from the study of light more and more to that of form. Latterly, when an invalid, he was compelled to confine himself within narrower bounds, and the appeal of his work has less volume in it. Nevertheless, it is maintained these last are the two greatest periods, if not in positive achievement, at any rate in intention.

I am disposed, if anything, to favour the work done in the first two phases, between his thirtieth and sixtieth years, and I am not sure that some of his most perfect pictures do not belong to the earlier of the two. For he did not produce many perfect pictures; it is nearly always possible to trace some defect. For instance, there has recently been exhibited at the Eldar Gallery one of the remarkable series of "Baigneuses." This particular canvas was painted in 1888. There is a great deal that is very beautiful in it, but it is not a whole. It is a "studio" picture, the nude and the landscape have no inevitable connection, and little interest is displayed in the face. Further, the body is cut off, or rather smoothed off, from its environment by a swish of paint, which signifies nothing, except that Renoir became too excited by the actual touch and feel and putting on of the paint, and also that he had an idée fixe about the gradual merging of the outline into its surroundings. This was the sentimental echo of his former genuine enthusiasm for plein-air effects. In many of his otherwise admirable figure studies this spongy film (especially affecting the hands) spoils the precision of his rendering. Sometimes, however, it is appropriate; for instance, in the famous picture, "La Moulin de la Galette" (1876). Here the flowing atmospheric technique and the significance coincide. The radiant coolness of the dappled light and shade is expressed with a freedom and spontaneity which is often lacking in Monet and Pisarro. Yet in spite of the unalloyed delight of this dancing scene I always feel a lurking criticism. This is not because of the kind of sentiment which might be mistaken for sentimentality; it is due to something else, a sameness and repetition. There is an absence of diversity in these light-hearted revellers; in fact they are just one man and one woman duplicated many times over, and flushed with exactly the same translucent emotion. Renoir did not possess great constructive imaginative power, and he had very little interest in character. This general limitation, however, only became a concrete limitation (that is to say, a defect observable inside a picture, instead of one of the infinite things that the picture is not) when he was actually portraying some scene necessitating a variety of individual characters.

It is in some of his landscapes, or in portrait heads such as that of Madame Charpentier, or studies such as "La Loge," and some of the later nudes that there is the completest fusion of the content and the form, of the technique and the emotion. It is frequently said that Renoir was not a landscape painter, but was par excellence a painter of women or of woman. The latter statement undoubtedly has some truth in it, although the interest was not so much in woman as in a particular roseate emotion, more evident in women than in men. But he was also a very considerable landscape painter, and his figures of women are usually placed in the open air, amid scenery possessing the same soft and sweeping texture. Even when an invalid he still painted out of doors, in a specially constructed glass house, while his model posed, often naked, in his garden.

About 1881 he seems to have exhausted his direct interest in the plein-air movement. Incidentally, he took a journey to Italy, but there is no evidence of any influence of this visit upon his work, except that it may have served to throw into stronger relief the peculiarities of the French school and his own kinship with it--that school which (in his own phrase) "est si gentille, si clair, de si bonne compagnie."

This, however, is least applicable to the artist towards whom his own inner development seems to have guided him, namely Ingres. To put it in the usual superficial and rather unsatisfactory way, he was passing from the study of light to that of two dimensional form. The actual result was a synthesis in which brilliant colour and light played a part never dreamt of by Ingres. At first his work showed an unusual hardness and lack of skill. He never possessed the sureness of touch of Manet, which often was mere virtuosity; nor does one ever feel behind his hand the overwhelming impetuosity of Van Gogh. He feels his way gradually, producing a great deal, in fact too much, and succeeding only in certain moments. The culmination was reached in the large composition of the four bathers (which I have not seen) in the collection of M. J. E. Blanche. Opinion seems to differ as to its value, but, whatever defects it may possess, it is clearly of a monumental character, and probably represents the highest point that Renoir was able to attain in the attempt to bring together the sculpturesque qualities of one of his first large compositions, "Diane Chasseresse," and the luminosity and richness of the "Moulin de la Galette."

Between the years 1885 and 1897 there followed a whole succession of remarkable pictures, including "Les Enfants Benard," "Mère et Enfant," "Les Filles de Catulle Mendès," "Les Parapluies," and "Au Piano," of which there are two examples, one being at the Luxembourg. Although Renoir was moving away from his former softness and mistiness, as if in dissatisfaction with the youthful joy in mere sensation, he never left it right behind, he remained on the borderland and looked back on it, contemplating it with maturer insight.

About 1900 to 1919

The last stage constituted a partial return to the first; he reverted to his former freedom and suppleness of touch. But the method is more direct and the content more realistic and crude, although there is still the same lyrical tenderness. His colours are bolder and hotter, and it is alleged that he strengthened them purposely with a view to their being modified by time. This appears to me a most dangerous doctrine. How could one ever be certain that the present wrong tones would be altered by exposure to exactly the correct tones? And why put oneself to such pain in the present for the sake of an uncertain future? For it must be very painful to a sensitive artist to create something out of tone, even on purpose. For these reasons (and without the backing of any authority) I rather doubt whether there is much truth in this intended excuse. And I doubt whether any excuse is necessary. I believe that in the majority of cases Renoir meant something by this hotter colour, and that in this respect the pictures are their own justification. It is impossible to hail all of them as masterpieces. Many definitely betray loss of vitality and imagination. But I cannot agree that the work of this period is that of an invalided old man who is living sentimentally on his past.

There has recently been on view, at the Chelsea Book Club, a collection of oil paintings and pastels by Renoir. Some of them were relatively unimportant earlier works, but the majority belonged to the later period. None of them, with the exception, perhaps, of a flower piece and a small head of a woman, can be ranked very high; but they indicate the limits and at the same time the mellow charm of the work of this time. This charm is not perhaps immediately felt; it grows upon one, but it is quite real. In his old age Renoir remained as much as ever a poet, only his poetry is thinner and more fragile.

Renoir was born in 1841 and died in 1919. Of his famous contemporaries only Claude Monet is still alive.

HOWARD HANNAY

MUSIC

THE NATURALIZATION OF OPERA IN ENGLAND

In Italy opera is a tree which has sprung from a seed and grown swiftly in the course of centuries to an exuberant, perhaps an over-exuberant, maturity. It has been fertilised from other countries, but its trunk has kept one firm straight line by its own perfectly natural development. In England that tree has not flourished. Various attempts have been made to naturalize it, but for the most part the English cultivators never produced more than stunted and distorted growths. Even when they seemed to do well for a time they bore curiously little resemblance to their original parent. Other gardeners, observing how meagrely the tree prospered in the open ground, transplanted opera full-grown from Italy, and did their best to provide it artificially with its own soil and its own climate. It was an expensive amusement, and the more expensive it was the more successful its promoters proclaimed it to be. But it could not be called naturalization. The only course which has shown any signs of being practicable was to graft the foreign shoot on to a sturdy native growth, if a suitable stock could be found. But it is a process requiring careful handling and careful watching, for the tree takes a long time to become thoroughly acclimatized.

It is pretty generally agreed that English opera must be preceded by opera in English. Our public--our real public, that is to say, not the handful of people who concentrate a special attention on opera, both English and foreign--will not be ready to take new native operas to their hearts until they have got thoroughly into the habit of enjoying those popular works which form the international repertory. Those operas--Faust, Carmen, Il Trovatore, and the rest--are popular in England already, it will be said. Yes, as operas go, they are indeed popular; but only among those people, in whatever section of society, who have developed the opera habit. For even in what are called the popular theatres, where they are played in English to cheap and crowded audiences, they are almost always exotic still. If it were not that a large majority of operas are called by the names of their principal characters, we should see more significance in the fact that we speak of the others in nearly every case by their native titles, and do not translate them. We have learnt to talk of The Magic Flute and The Flying Dutchman; but even at the "Old Vic." they keep the names of Il Trovatore, La Traviata, and Cavalleria Rusticana.

Wherever they are played by English singers in English theatres they remain, as it were, extra-territorial. To begin with, the translations of nearly all popular operas are abominable. This has been said many times before. But what has not been said so often is that, abominable as they are, there is hardly an opera-singer who is willing to learn a new translation, even when it is candidly admitted that the new translation is easier to sing than the old one. There are plenty of sound reasons for this apparent obstinacy. It is not due merely to laziness or to the vested interests of publishers. What is far more important is that a new translation, if it is really good, involves a new style of singing, a new style of acting, a new scheme for the entire production of the opera. The average opera-singer learns his parts in a spirit of routine. He cannot waste time over trying to find out the plot of the opera or to analyse the personalities of the characters. He learns the traditions and is ready to step into his part without rehearsal in any operatic company that may happen to engage him. It may sound very shocking to the reader that operas should be put on the stage without any rehearsal whatever; but it is nothing unusual in the world of actual fact. After all, it is not much more unreasonable that an opera company should sing Maritana without rehearsing than that an orchestra of professionals should give an unrehearsed performance of the overture to William Tell or the ballet music from Rosamunde.

The Function of the Audience

Sir Thomas Beecham, when he first formed his opera company, sought out youth, intelligence and enthusiasm. He began in a brave and gallant spirit, and in his company there is still something of that spirit left. At the beginning it was hardly expected that he would do much better than the well-known provincial companies which used occasionally to give a season in London. But he aimed at storming Covent Garden. Covent Garden was inaccessible during the war, partly because no foreign singers were available to fill it, and partly because it was already filled with furniture. The war ended, the old Covent Garden exotic opera reappeared. Sir Thomas, however, did not leave its territory inviolate, and he is now in complete possession. But Covent Garden has been too strong for the invaders. Like the barbarians who invaded Italy, they are becoming Romanised. At Covent Garden there are boxes and box-holders who adore Melba, Caruso, and the rest. There is a splendid orchestra, there are fine singers, there is magnificent scenery. But the longer the company stays there the less chance there seems to be of their preparing the way for the real English opera of the future.

What English opera wants is an audience. And the best audience that I have ever seen in any opera-house in Europe is the audience at the "Old Vic." Italian audiences are reputed to be appreciative; but they are interested primarily in singing and in little else. They are critical of this only, and they have a certain tendency to be cruel. The "Old Vic." audience, if it is bored, lets the actors know it; but it is never cruel, and it is ready to appreciate other things besides mere singing. Once its attention has been secured there is no audience to equal it for quick intelligence and responsiveness to both tragedy and comedy. But Covent Garden has no pit, and its gallery is too small and too distant to assert itself.

Half-way between the "Old Vic." and Covent Garden stands the new enterprise of Messrs. Miln and Fairbairn, at the Surrey. The Surrey has secured its audience. It has begun with the old familiar favourites, but it has also included in its repertory The Flying Dutchman and Don Giovanni, both of which have drawn full houses. Very wisely the management has not wasted its money on elaborate scenery, though it is in a position to stage the Flying Dutchman quite adequately, and that is no small matter. There is an orchestra which, if not large, is at least complete. It began by being rather rough, and even in Don Giovanni, for which it is just exactly balanced in proportion of wind and strings, it only too forcibly recalled the criticisms made by Mozart's contemporaries on his overpowering orchestration. It is in their singers that Messrs. Miln and Fairbairn have been peculiarly successful. Youth, intelligence, and enthusiasm are certainly well represented here.

The Surrey's Opportunity

Mr. Fairbairn, who is responsible for the production of the operas, has in this company a wonderful opportunity, if he will only seize it. Here is a splendid house that combines the dignity of an eighteenth-century design with the practical convenience of an interior recently remodelled; an audience with no critical and social pretensions to keep up, but unsophisticated, appreciative, and alert; and a company of young singers keen to learn and ready to throw themselves generously into their work. Starting on such a basis, the Surrey has every chance to develop into a great and flourishing school of English opera. But to develop such a school needs more than average courage, initiative, intelligence, and hard work. It means that gradually, one by one, the translations of all the standard operas must be thoroughly revised. Along with this revision there must be a thorough-going revision and reconsideration from the beginning of the system on which each opera is produced. Tradition must be abandoned if it cannot be justified by common sense. Each opera must be worked out afresh from the beginning, as if it had never been put on the stage before. And the director of such a school must be prepared to face possible hostility towards his revisions. There will always be some among his audience who prefer the old tradition, good or bad, simply because they like to hear what they have always heard. Such people have got to be convinced and converted. That is not impossible. Even operatic audiences have a certain amount of common sense, and it is to common sense that an operatic producer must not be afraid of appealing. The plots of most operas are generally admitted to be nonsense, but that is no reason why one should not make a vigorous effort to put sense into them. Few plots could be more absurd than that of Il Trovatore; but if Verdi succeeded in writing music that, by virtue of its persistent directness, its unswerving pursuit of its dramatic end, has made Il Trovatore one of the greatest operas ever composed, surely it is worth a producer's while to concentrate attention on making the libretto as clear and as sure of its dramatic intention as the music is. The translator of an opera must not rest satisfied with merely translating each line as singably and as reasonably as he can, just as it happens to come along. He must regard the libretto as a literary whole, must endeavour to attain some unity of style, and still more to achieve a cumulative dramatic effect by little touches, significant phrases to fit important musical phrases; he must in each recitative or aria see at once where the climax is and fit it with a telling point, to which the rest of the movement will lead up. He must differentiate his characters, giving each its own literary individuality. If his original text is a bad one he must improve upon it. There are many cases in which a librettist has had a good idea but has failed to express it adequately. Sometimes the composer has understood the idea and has clothed the wretched words with music that lifts them on to a higher plane. The translator here finds his opportunity, and must do his best to find English words which may express the poet's intention rather than his actual achievement.

The singer who meets with a good translation is no longer uncomfortable, nervous, and ashamed about his part. He finds that he can bring home his songs to his audience in a way that he never could before; he learns to realise his part as a personality, he may even get as far as beginning to imagine what the character in question might have said or done when he was not on the stage. In this way the double appeal to the audience can be made, the appeal that is irresistible, the appeal to their own common sense, coupled with the overwhelming appeal of real personality in the actor.

If all operatic directors insisted resolutely on good translations and insisted that their singers should sing them like real natural English, we might develop a really English school of opera. Our own poets and composers could watch and listen, and possibly learn something which would guide them in the construction of their own original librettos and music. They would gradually come to find out what even our song-writers have only very partially discovered, namely, what are the true dramatic possibilities of English voices singing English poetry.

EDWARD J. DENT

SELECT LIST OF PUBLICATIONS

ART

JOHN ZOFFANY, R.A.: HIS LIFE AND WORKS, 1735-1810. By LADY VICTORIA MANNERS and DR. G. C. WILLIAMSON. John Lane. £7 7_s._

BELLES-LETTRES

SHAKESPEARE IDENTIFIED IN EDWARD DE VERE, THE SEVENTEENTH EARL OF OXFORD. By J. THOMAS LOONEY. Cecil Palmer. 21_s._

THE ENGLISH ODE TO 1660. An Essay in Literary History. By ROBERT SHAFER. Princeton: University Press. London: Milford. 3_s._ 6_d._

SOME MODERN NOVELISTS. By H. T. and W. FOLLETT. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._ 6_d._

BOOKS IN GENERAL. Second Series. By SOLOMON EAGLE. Secker, 7_s._ 6_d._

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIRS

THE PRIME MINISTER. By HAROLD SPENDER. Hodder & Stoughton. 10_s._ 6_d._

FROM AUTHORITY TO FREEDOM: THE SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE OF CHARLES HARGROVE. By L. P. JACKS. Williams & Norgate. 12_s._ 6_d._

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF GEORGE ALFRED LEFROY, D.D., BISHOP OF CALCUTTA AND METROPOLITAN. By H. H. MONTGOMERY, sometime Bishop of Tasmania, late Secretary of the S.P.G. Longmans. 14_s._

LORD GREY OF THE REFORM BILL. By G. M. TREVELYAN. Longmans. 21_s._

SILVANUS PHILLIPS THOMPSON: HIS LIFE AND LETTERS. By JANE SMEAL THOMPSON and HELEN G. THOMPSON. Fisher Unwin. 21_s._

CLASSICAL

SAPPHO AND THE VIGIL OF VENUS. Translated by ARTHUR S. WAY. Macmillan 3_s._ 6_d._

THE TREES, SHRUBS, AND PLANTS OF VIRGIL. By JOHN SARGEAUNT. Oxford Blackwell. 6_s._

DRAMA

A LITTLE DRAMA OF THE CRUCIFIXION. Being a modernisation of the "Crucifixion" in the Towneley Mystery Plays, circa A.D. 1400. By DR. ERNEST J. B. KIRTLAN. Epworth Press, 1_s._ 3_d._

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE STAGE? By WILLIAM POEL. Allen & Unwin. 2_s._

PROBLEMS OF THE PLAYWRIGHT. By CLAYTON HAMILTON. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._ 6_d._

FICTION

AN IMPERFECT MOTHER. By J. D. BERESFORD. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._

THE BLACK CURTAIN. By DOUGLAS GOLDRING. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ 6_d._

MISER'S MONEY. By EDEN PHILLPOTTS. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._

PIRATES OF THE SPRING. By FORREST REID. Dublin: Talbot Press. London: Fisher Unwin. 7_s._

THE TRIUMPHS OF SARA. By W. E. NORRIS. Hutchinson. 7_s._ 6_d._

ADVENTURES IN MARRIAGE. By WARD MUIR. Simpkin, Marshall. 6_s._

MARY-GIRL. By HOPE MERRICK. Collins. 7_s._

UNCLE LIONEL. By S. P. B. MAIS. Grant Richards. 7_s._ 6_d._

THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR. By WILLIAM J. LOCKE. John Lane. 7_s._

THE WHITE POPE. By S. R. CROCKETT. Liverpool: Books Limited. 6_s._

ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM. By EDNA FERBER. Methuen. 6_s._

RACHEL FITZPATRICK. By LADY POORE. John Lane. 7_s._

TATTERDEMALION. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._

ADMIRAL TEACH. By C. J. CUTCLIFFE HYNE. Methuen. 7_s._

THE GODS OF MARS. By EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS. Methuen. 6_s._

HISTORY

MEDIÆVAL FORGERS AND FORGERIES. By T. F. TOUT. Manchester: University Press. London: Longmans. 1_s._

A HISTORY OF THE VENERABLE ENGLISH COLLEGE, ROME. By His Eminence CARDINAL GASQUET. Longmans. 15_s._

ERASMUS AND LUTHER. By ROBERT H. MURRAY. S.P.C.K. 25_s._

THE ENGLISH CATHOLICS IN THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. By J. H. POLLEN. Longmans. 21_s._

NAVAL AND MILITARY

MY CAMPAIGN IN MESOPOTAMIA. By MAJOR-GENERAL SIR CHARLES V. F. TOWNSHEND, K.C.B. Thornton Butterworth. 28_s._

NAVAL OPERATIONS: VOL. I. TO THE BATTLE OF THE FALKLANDS, DECEMBER, 1914. By SIR JULIAN S. CORBETT. Longmans. 17_s._ 6_d._

THE AMERICAN ARMY IN THE EUROPEAN CONFLICT. By COLONEL DE CHAMBRUN and CAPTAIN DE MARENCHES. The Macmillan Co. 18_s._

REALITIES OF WAR. By PHILIP GIBBS. Heinemann. 15_s._

THE SOUTH AFRICAN FORCES IN FRANCE. By LIEUT.-COLONEL JOHN BUCHAN. Nelson. 15_s._

WITH THE "DIE-HARDS" IN SIBERIA. By COLONEL JOHN WARD, C.B. Cassell. 10_s._ 6_d._

POETRY

COUNTRY SENTIMENT. By ROBERT GRAVES. Secker. 5_s._

THE WHITE ROAD. By EVA MARTIN. Philip Allan. 3_s._ 6_d._

MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM HEINE. By PHILIP G. L. WEBB, C.B. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._

FLOWERS IN THE GRASS. By MAURICE HEWLETT. Constable. 5_s._

ULSTER SONGS AND BALLADS. By PADRIC GREGORY. Dublin: Talbot Press. London: Fisher Unwin. 2_s._ 6_d._

THE WELL OF BEING. By HERBERT JONES. Lane. 5_s._

POLITICS, ECONOMICS, etc.

FLEET STREET AND DOWNING STREET. By KENNEDY JONES. Hutchinson. 16_s._

SOCIAL THEORY. By G. D. H. COLE. Methuen. 5_s._

THE UNSOLVED RIDDLE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE. By STEPHEN LEACOCK. John Lane. 5_s._

THE SOCIAL WORKER. By C. R. ATTLEE. (The Social Service Library.) Bell. 6_s._

COAL MINING AND THE COAL MINER. By H. F. BULMAN. Methuen. 12_s._ 6_d._

ECONOMICS FOR TO-DAY. An Elementary View. By ALFRED MILNES. Dent. 3_s._ 6_d._

THE EVOLUTION OF SINN FEIN. By ROBERT MITCHELL HENRY. Dublin: Talbot Press. London: Fisher Unwin. 5_s._

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY. By MAJOR C. H. DOUGLAS. Cecil Palmer. 5_s._

THE NEW GERMANY. By GEORGE YOUNG. Constable. 8_s._

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL PROBLEMS. By DR. G. VISSERING. Macmillan. 4_s._

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE. By DARWELL STONE. Robert Scott. 3_s._ 6_d._

THE RE-MAKING OF A MIND. A Soldier's Thoughts on War and Reconstruction. Allen & Unwin. 7_s._ 6_d._

MORNING KNOWLEDGE. By ALASTAIR SHANNON. Longmans. 14_s._

THE SWORD OF JUSTICE. By JOHN EYRE WINSTANLEY WALLIS, Brasenose College, Oxford; Vicar of Whalley. With an Introduction by ERNEST BARKER, Fellow and Tutor of New College, Oxford. Oxford: Blackwell. 5_s._

SCIENCE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF CYTOLOGY. By L. DONCASTER, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; Derby Professor of Zoology in the University of Liverpool. Cambridge University Press. 21_s._

THE FOUNDATIONS OF EINSTEIN'S THEORY OF GRAVITATION. By ERWIN FREUNDLICH. Cambridge University Press. 5_s._

THE THEORY OF THE IMAGINARY IN GEOMETRY. By J. L. S. HATTON, Professor of Mathematics and Principal of East London College. Cambridge University Press. 18_s._

THE PRINCIPLES OF AEROGRAPHY. By ALEXANDER McADIE. Harrap. 21_s._

COLLECTED SCIENTIFIC PAPERS. By JOHN HENRY POYNTING. Cambridge University Press. 37_s._ 6_d._

Transcribers' Notes:

Greek transliterations provided by transcribers are enclosed in {curly braces}. Greek letters and special symbols that cannot be displayed with simple text have been omitted from some versions of this eBook, and may be displayed as question marks on some mobile devices.

Footnotes have been moved to immediately follow the paragraphs or headings that refer to them.

Since this eBook contains text written by many authors, inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation have not been changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Inconsistent hyphenation and ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Text uses both "Newdigate" and "Newdegate".

Page 53: "God bless your Majesty" is missing ending punctuation.

Page 65: "the corn of the crocus" perhaps should be "corm".

Page 201: "rallying-point or the new" perhaps should be "of".

Page 202: "an" was added by Transcribers to "a familiar thing from an unfamiliar angle", as there was empty space where a short word belonged.

Page 243: "Les Précieuses Ridicules" was printed without the acute accent.

Page 262: "Keatsiam" probably should be "Keatsian".

Page 367: Unclear whether the punctuation after "Ramsay Macdonald" is a comma or period.

Page 388: "rake-hells" was printed that way.

Page 388: "with a priceless gift" had blank space where the "a" has been added in this eBook.

Page 560: "as the authors' record" was printed with the apostrophe.

Page 608: "deeplier" was printed that way.

Page 714: The printing of "twenty more he lover's" was defective.

Page 719: "^e" represents the superscript "e".

Page 720: "^a" represents the superscript "a".

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