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ence, its high ardors, its delight in the charged spirit of emotion, love and battle and the open road, against a civilization spreading its by-laws and decencies over all the broken lands, and estimating its progress by its expenditure upon sanitation or the dimensions of its public lavatories. Against such progress he appeals always for those elements of transfiguring flame in which alone man apprehends something of the purpose of his being; against the persistence of "the set gray life and apathetic end," for the pipe of Pan among the reeds, the fire of Prometheus, the moment in which the pent-up spirit breaks through Time "into Eternity its due."

Mr. Nevinson is a child of Shrewsbury and Oxford, of both of which he has written with that love for particular places in his own land which is the essence of the spirit of patriotism. He has lived in a block dwelling in the East End; and from that life came the writing of "Neighbors of Ours," the best volume of tales which ever took as their theatre of action that desolate and fascinating region. The contrast between the Reaction and the newer spirit, exhibited already in the comparison of the poetry of the one and the other, is no less conspicuous in a study of Mr. Nevinson's stories of the life of the poor contrasted with the fruitful crop of pictures of slum life,the mean street, the Jago, Badalia Herodsfoot or 'Liza of Lambeth, which developed under the inspiration of that insistent tyranny. The hard cleverness, the vivid impressions of an essential ignorance, of the journalist who prowls through the streets of poverty as he would prowl through the interior of China seeking copy;-with the same eye for vivid effect and the same essential contempt for its peoples, splashing on his canvas his hard yellows and purples-is revealed in its sudden insolence by these studies of one who has

lived intimately with those who have failed. Certain of these-notably the "St. George of Rochester," or "Father Christmas"-may be commended to those who would understand the meaning of tenderness and a man's compassion for all that is trampled under in the fitful fever of modern life.

From the East End Mr. Nevinson passed into the larger world; to see cities and men; and everywhere the strong triumphant and the weak suffering; to the pitiful comedy of the thirty days' war in Greece; to that more pitiful tragedy of the destruction of two free nations in South Africa amid the heroism of the one side and the other. From these and the lessons there learnt, from the "things seen" in the great moments of life and the quiet interludes "Between the Acts," he has collected those volumes of vivid impressions and appeals which have revealed his power in literature.

Two elements mingle in all his work. The one is Pagan, the plea of Pan, of life and passion, against the cramping boundaries of convention and dead things; the protest of the "Savage Soul." The other is Pity, learnt by the older gods in the watching of two thousand years of human pain; pity for all who find themselves in a minority and crushed under by the clumsiness and violence of the world. The one thing that appears to him intolerable is the rotting at ease; the one tragedy the burning out of high emotion into a little heap of ashes. "To grow fat and foul in clubs and country-houses," is the nightmare of one of his characters, "till I slime away in the funeral of an elderly country gentleman who had been in the army once." He exalts the company of the warrior saints against the crowd of the faint-hearted. "Life piled on life were all too little for the unquenchable passion of my eyes." "To set two bulging, flat-footed gentlemen," is his verdict, "to stand

on a flagstone instead of one, seems an unworthy aim for Evolution after all its labors."

In varied scenes, in Greece, his old home, with all the appeal of natural things, hill and heather, and violet sea; by the ancient wall running across Britain marking the boundaries of another Empire which once thought itself immortal; on the war-scarred slopes of Waggon Hill above Lady. smith in the clear night after the storm of men and elements, watching with pity the bodies of the dead; in the cathedral close, smiling at the anger of the Canon against his servant, Elizabeth, for her transgression with her soldier-lover-Pan appears and claims his heritage.

The contrast between this vision on the hillside, the mingled exultation and lament over the body of a dead peasant, with any of Mr. Kipling's latest tales, "The Captive," or, "Private Capper," will reveal the meaning of a newer time. All the music hall song and hard cleverness have vanished from the horizon of this poor sightless body. Not in this lies its greatness: but in that Divine Fire which entered into the heart of him as he moved through the slow routine of his life, and drove him out here from his dear home into the forefront of the battle with passionate response to the call of the Fatherland.

Pan and the author will hear nothing of the plaint of the priest at man's seeming wickedness. Surveying the long course of history, he will testify with something approaching awe to an endurance and indomitable will which raises him above the level of the older gods. There is a passage in this testimony not unworthy to be placed with Lamennais' "Hymn of the Dead," or Stevenson's awful vision in "Pulvis et Umbra."

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shipwrecked boys they are cast upon.
the shoals of time, and drop off into
darkness. No research of history, no
deciphering of village tombs can ever
recover them. We think that some-
where they may still lie nestled up,.
with all their age about them; but even
darkness holds them no more. They
stood on this flying earth, we see their
footsteps, we hear the thin ghost of
their voices and
stones
the
on
lies the touch of their dead hands,
but they are nowhere to be found
at all. They know how short their
dear life
was, yet they filled it
with labor and unrecorded' toil. Morn-
ing and night, through their little
space of minutes, they struggled and
agonized to keep on living and feed
their children for the struggle and
agony of a few minutes more. The sun
blasted them, ice devoured their flesh,
their mouths were mad with thirst,
hunger twisted them with cramps,
plague consumed them, they rotted as
they stood, bolts of torture drove
through their brains, their bodies were
clamped into hoops; in battle, in child-
bed they died with extremity of pain.
Yet they endured, and into the chinks
and loopholes of their misery they
crammed laughter and beauty and a
passion transfiguring them beyond the
semblance of the gods.

'Tis a sombre picture; yet not without its triumph. "Let us leave it to the priests to marvel at men's wickedness." "Over any such thing as love or laughter in the heart of man I could stand astonished with admiration throughout the lifetime of a god."

The work of these writers is written,. in Mr. Watson's phrase, "in estrangement." Over all is the consciousness of battle upon a losing side. For the new note of buoyancy and conviction that the old is passing, the consciousness of the birth of a new spirit, you must pass to a younger group of writers, to those who have developed when the Reaction, instead of being living and dominant, was become visi

bly dead and sterile. Of such, two of the most vigorous to-day are Mr. Hilaire Belloc and Mr. Gilbert Chesterton.

Mr. Belloc has produced work which is excellent in itself and more excellent in its promise of better things to come. He exhibits especially two qualities always rare in English writing-the quality of rhetoric and the quality of irony. His earlier works, studies of the Revolution in Paris, Danton and Robespierre, are full of the triumph of the assertion of human personality against the influences of outward things; full also of magnificent outbursts of rhetoric and passion. His work, like the architecture of that Middle Age which he loves so ardently, reveals the mingling of this spirit of romance with the spirit of laughter; the high roofs and spires with the gargoyles and grotesques, and all the exuberance of humor and vigor and aspiration which gave its life to the greatest century which the world has ever seen. He will pass from the record of romance to the roaring satire of "Dr. Caliban," or the collaboration with Mr. Chesterton in the ridiculing of the Tariff Reform Commission. High spirits and a kind of elemental energy are characteristics of all his work. No present-day writing conveys so much the impression of a huge enjoyment in its preparation. Much of Mr. Belloc's humor is indeed recondite, written to please himself and for the few who will understand; the decent citizen but becomes conscious that someone is laughing at him and indignantly hurries by.

In "The Path to Rome," the most popular of all his books, this ever-flowing vitality is everywhere present. Youth, its sincerity, its self-sufficiency, its vigor and hope and enormous dreams, is present in all this personal record of pilgrimage. As the traveller swings out from Toul in the sunset

by the Nancy gate and strikes in a beeline across the backbone of Europe to the goal of his wandering, he pours out all the experience of outer and inner things. He makes up songs, and sings them as he journeys, in dispraise of heretics or praise of God. He finds companionship in the common people, the people of the road, the people of the villages, away from the dust of the cities. He apprehends "the solid form of Europe under him like a rock"; unchanged and permanent, beside which all the noise of modern progress appears but vaporous and transitory.

In the story of "Emmanuel Burden," published last month, Mr. Belloc's ironical method has attained its clearest expression. The elaborate satire penetrates every page; from the pompous parody of the title, through the nonsense of the preface, to the Burden genealogies in the heavy futility of the three-volume biography. To nine out of ten, reading as they think a dull and straightforward narrative, all this will appear very tedious. But in the underlying spirit there is a marked and momentous change from the spirit of the social satire of fifteen years ago. The literature of the Reaction found the subject of all its facile humors in the middle class tradesman. It was never tired of mocking at his narrow outlook, his contempt for art and literature and all new ideas, his confine ment in the rigid grooves of sectarianism and the making of money. Mr. Grundy, the husband of the dictator of the suburbs, was to these clever young men the one subject of an unfailing ridicule. They pelted him with epigrams; they caricatured his decencies and devotion; they rolled the poor old gentleman in the gutter and departed laughing hugely at their own

success.

With Mr. Belloc the process is reversed; Satire has come over to the

other side. Over against the new are woven into a social satire in which

wits, the cleverness engaged in the intervals of self-indulgence in running (or ruining) an Empire, with its surface sparkle and its essential emptiness and frivolity, Mr. Grundy with his tenacity, his simplicity, his austere devotion to duty, appears as an entirely reputable figure. Mr. Burden is Mr. Grundy, the "honest man and good citizen," ironmonger of Thames Street. In his side whiskers and frock coat, as depicted by Mr. Chesterton, with his impossible mid-Victorian residence at Avonmore, Alexandrovna Road, Upper Norwood, with his forty years' daily devotion to his trade, "his home, manner and habit of life seemed to me who knew him to be always England, England." "To see him open his umbrella was to comprehend England from the Reform Bill to Home Rule."

Against this old and passing England, the England which had built up the great heritage of Empire, Mr. Belloc exhibits the dismal crowd who have entered into that goodwill and are in danger of losing it-the children of the old mocking at the limitations of their fathers, cosmopolitan financiers of Semitic origin, exploiting, ostensibly, remote marshes, in reality the British public, under the sonorous claptrap of "Empire Expansion"; broken down relics of the feudal system compelled to re-establish their shattered fortunes; the new yellow journalism; and the rank and file of hungry, greedy perSons of all classes who rushed into the flotation as clergymen and society ladies and respectable country gentlemen rushed into the gigantic gambling in South Africans of ten years ago. These are the figures which fill the foreground of the flotation of the M'Korio Delta Development Co. Experience of the bitter food of those astonishing nineties in England, the Hooley scandals, the Liberator, the Chartered Company, Whitaker Wright,

the deliberate restraint of the irony scarcely veils the passionate protest against all this new corruption of a nation marching gaily down calamitous ways.

In such a morass of foulness Mr. Burden is engulfed. He finds himself immediately in the toils, surrounded by vague forces of evil. There is nothing definite. The outline moves. As soon as he strikes out, the walls, which seemed to be closing around him, part aside and elude his blows. The business is of a kind to which he is unaccustomed. The sauvity and plausibility of his confederates are equal to all his approaches. There is a spirit in the air, in the public Press, around the office of the company, a miasma which poisons the blood and turns the balance of the brain. Although the shares still stand high and there is outward prosperity, the conviction deepens that he is in the grasp of unclean forces. He is troubled in the daytime with a haunting sense of shame, at night by monstrous dreams. The attempt of his colleagues to "freeze out" his friend, Mr. Abbott (another absurd, early-Victorian figure), who had refused to "come in," produces a climax. The poor, bewildered mind breaks under the strain. Mr. Burden, feeling actually in the presence of a crowd, "the massed forces of this new world surging against him," in one fine scene of fury denounces all his fellow directors as rogues and thieves and scum, and reels home to Upper Norwood to die. The death scene is not inadequate to life's greatest persistent irony. On the one hand is the outward, pitiful and grotesque incident: a stout old man, muttering gibberish, being put to bed by the knife boy and the cook. On the other is the inward grandeur, Death and his armies and majesty visibly present in this suburban villa, and present also the three great Angels,

"the Design and the Justice and the Mercy of God."

The M'Korio flourishes. Mr. I. Z. Barnett, who is chief promoter, becomes Lord Lambeth. The shares rise. But away in a remote suburb they have buried Emmanuel Burden, Merchant, of Thames Street and Upper Norwood (for whom, one is relieved to hear, Mr. Belloc "has no fears at the Judgment seat"); and with him they have buried the older England.

This remarkable work in some sense gathers up all the threads of remonstrance into one deliberate impeachment of the results of the Reaction; the fine fruits of that "Imperialism” which ran like a species of fluid madness through the veins of England during the later disastrous years. Memorable in itself, it is more memorable as a kind of pioneer of that deliberate revolt which is essaying a return to the broken tradition of reform.

The rise of Mr. Chesterton in the public estimate has exhibited the most sudden growth of all recent reputations. Still on the right side of thirty, he has in two or three years leaped into a position of which older men might well be envious. His early work, "Greybeards at Play," a volume of fantastic verse, "The Wild Knight," serious poetry of quite remarkable originality and power, "The Defendant," a collection of paradoxical essays, revealed only to the few the presence of a new writer and a new method. The "Browning" of last year, however, both in its merit and in its definite challenge, evoked a universal testimony that here was something which, whether you liked it or not, was henceforth to be reckoned with in literature. Since then have followed "Twelve Types," and "Watts," and a novel, once again of daring originality, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"-a parable of the perpetual survival of the spirit of Na

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tionalism and local patriotism, however mystical and irrational, against all the forces of ridicule and common sense. The output continues of an astonishing fertility in daily and weekly and monthly magazines. It is these outpourings of himself, stripped of all reticence, which have earned for Mr. Chesterton the bulk of his fame. loves the very breath of controversy. Open any newspaper interested in the things for which he cares: you will have a good chance of finding Mr. Chesterton in the midst of a lively argument with a host of opponents, with a calm serenity in his rightness, a boisterous delight in the shrewd blows given and taken, an unfailing good temper. You will find him simultaneously controverting with Dr. Clifford for his attack upon Romanism under an appearance of an attack upon the Education Acts; explaining to Mr. Blatchford and Mr. McCabe the impossibility of Agnosticism and his envy of their simple belief; or expounding to an indignant audience the absolute necessity of approving of Russia in the war against Japan.

Beneath all there is no mere love of paradox or intellectual agility but a very definite philosophy of life. As the attitude of Mr. Yeats was one of protest, so that of Mr. Chesterton is one of acceptance. The denial of life, the longing of a wearied civilization for nothingness and the great Void, is to him a fundamental atheism and blasphemy. Not "where there is nothing," but "where there is anything”— there "is God." He is a mystic and an optimist, swaggering down Fleet Street entirely satisfied that all things are very good. Like Whitman, whose spirit is most manifest in his work, he can protest, "No array of terms can express how much at peace I am about God." To many this boisterous content appears as an offence and irreverence. To such he appears of those

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