a letter to the Globe by an old resident in Japan. He wrote:

It does not by any means follow that this enormous sum of money will be lost to Japan. This is the amount that the Japanese Government expect to spend, but the bulk of it will remain in the country. Japan manufactures all her field guns and their equipments, rifles and small arms, accoutrements, saddles, boots, clothing, blankets, &c. All ammunition is made at home, and many of the ingredients are found in the country, such as camphor, sulphur, &c. All her field telegraph is supplied at home; copper she has in abundance. Nearly all the food required for the army is grown in the country, with the exception of a few tinned meats, but the Japanese soldier prefers fish, and there are large salmon canneries in the Hokkaido. Of ponies and horses, up to the time I left, the supply was by по means exhausted. Japan has plenty of transports, drawn from her own mercantile marine; and for these she has an abundance of steam coal. For her warships, however, she prefers Cardiff coal, as it gives better results. She has her own docks and repairing and building yards, and with all the skilled labor required it is not necessary to import highly-paid foreign workmen. There is no doubt that she is busily engaged in building cruisers and destroyers.

From all this it can be plainly seen that Japan is practically self-sufficient, she having only to import such raw materials as steel, iron, lead, wool, &c. Therefore the only money lost to the country will be the cost of native coolie labor at the seat of war, and for railway work in Manchuria and other incidentals.

A striking proof of the truth of this has been afforded by the fact that during the months of the war itself the deposits in the Japanese Post Office savings banks have largely increased. Thus the great expenditures are causing much more money to be distributed throughout the country. It is estimated that over 70 per cent. of the expenditure is spent in Japan.

Baron Kaneko thus sums up the economic and financial conditions of Japan:

are

In a comparatively brief space of time there has been an enormous increase in our industrial and commercial prosperity; the national revenues have advanced in amount literally by leaps and bounds; our financial condition and prospects, even though we carrying on a costly war, were never so good as at present; and firmly guiding her ship of state through the problems of the moment, Japan has every reason to anticipate a smooth and prosperous voyage for the future of her national life. Already the faith of the Japanese people in that future is shown by the fact that when the Government planned to issue exchequer bonds to the amount of £10,000,000 they responded with the offer of four or five times that amount, and in place of the minimum rate of application, fixed by the Government at 95 yen, showed their willingness to contribute a much larger sum. This of itself shows how patriotic the Japanese really are, but it also indicates something more, for as patriotic feeling cannot be manifested in such a matter unless there is enough money forthcoming, the taking up of bonds on such liberal terms reveals the existence of a people on whose thrift-a priceless national possession-the Government of Japan can always depend. . . . In all this patriotism there is an element of voluntary retrenchment, not to say self-sacrifice. Not only have our people felt encouraged to engage more extensively in industrial enterprises-they have freely given up what is known as "luxurious expenditure," and have resorted to not a few of the practical economies of life as a means of enabling them to contribute all the more to the expenses of the war. It is therefore in the self-confidence born of economic strength that the Japanese people have encouraged their Government to prosecute this war to its conclusion utterly regardless of financial considerations and of what the operations may cost. They have determined, should it become necessary, to

spend the whole of the national wealth in realizing the objects for which hostilities were begun. They have selfreliance enough to feel that, should the war be prolonged for three, or even five, years more, Japan will be strong enough to respond to its most exacting demands upon her economic and financial resources.

As

Both nations may be determined to fight to the last man, and to spend their last penny in carrying on the war; but the Japanese last penny is much less imminent than the Russian one, and it is probable that neither nation will reach anything like the last man. Japan has won the war on sea and on land, so she has in advance won the financial battle. By wise and foreseeing measures of taxation and finance, Japan has prepared for this war as thoroughly in her Ministry of Finance as in her Ministries of Marine and of Army.

To sum up, it may be said that Russia has lost, and will continue to lose, not so much perhaps because of the superiority of her adversaries, although there is sufficient proof of this, but for the following reasons-lack of preparation, lack of plans, lack of unanimity as a government or as a nation: all these are enormous obstacles in the way of success. The distance from the base in Russia, the bad quality of the majority of the Russian officers, the prevalence of corruption even in the highest quarters, the loss of the command of the sea, which the Baltic Fleet will never restore to Russia; these, added to the list given above, render it impossible for Russia to succeed. It must not be forgotten that Japan, lying far away from any other first-class Power, can reduce herself to the last straits with comparative impunity, whereas Russia is sufficiently The Fortnightly Review.

near other Powers for her to regard a serious weakening as an almost fatal event. The Siberian line has indeed proved the rope by which Russia has hanged herself, and the sooner her rulers or friends decide to cut her down and revive her the more the world should rejoice. Russia has been defeated as much by circumstances as by the Japanese. Over the circumstances she can well plead that she has no control, but that does not excuse her culpable ignorance in overlooking their existence. In many ways Russia is to be pitied, and many worse things might happen than a cordial understanding between England and Japan on the one hand, and France and a chastened Russia on the other. The first step has been taken in the entente between England and France. On both sides one of the nations would come chastened in spirit-England by the South African war, and Russia by the war with Japan. Such an entente would make for the peace of the world. Russia is much less of a danger to the British Empire than is Germany, and if, after the war, Russia were to seek an amicable arrangement with Japan, her ally, the idea might well be entertained. But the wish must come from Russia to both the allies; any idea that Japan would throw over her ally in order to curry favor with Russia, as suggested by the Master of Elibank in his singularly ill-advised letter in the Times, is so absurd that Baron Suyematsu's answering letter was scarcely needed. We may be assured that there will be no attempt even to keep only to the letter of the alliance by our ally, however events might arise which would render such a course advantageous to Japan. Japan is a sincere, honest nation, and in this, as in many other directions, sets an example which other nations would do well to follow.

Alfred Stead.

MAETERLINCK AS A

Maeterlinck, after writing his first volume of verses, called Serres chaudes, a few poems published in Parnasse de la jeune Belgique, and then a volume of ballads and songs, La quenouille et la besace, passed into the field of drama and, but for some prose writing, has remained faithful to that literary form ever since.

As to the real causes of that change, he alone could say anything authentic.

The probability is that the Belgian poet-dramatist thought that the antithesis between infinity and limitation-the continual friction of those two sides of human nature in endless shapes and combinations, furnished by the variety of the phenomena of infinite existence in sensuous life,-could be better expressed in the dramatic form, which serves to render internal conflicts in the broadest way, to picture them better than could be done by epic or lyric poetry. That change, however, was not so essential with Maeterlinck as it would be with any other poet, on account of his original views on the theatre and the drama. "Art," he says,

is a temporary mask, under which the unknown without a face puzzles us. It is the substance of eternity, introduced within us by a distillation of infinity. It is the honey of eternity, taken from a flower which we do not see. A dramatic poem was a work of art, and bore the charming characteristics of such a work, but a show on the stage suddenly frightened the swans from the pond, and threw the pearls into bottomless depths: the mystic transparency of a work of art disappeared. King Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet should not be performed. Something of Hamlet dies as soon as we see him dying on the stage. The ghost of the actor has dethroned him, and from that moment

we are unable to drive away the usurper from our dream. We open the book, the former prince does not return; almost all the inward voices that used to bring him forth have died out.

The stage is a place where masterpieces die; for the production of a masterpiece by means of accidental and human elements has something antinomic in itself. Every masterpiece is a symbol, and a symbol cannot bear the active presence of a man. There is continual discord between the forces of a symbol and the forces of a man; the symbol of a poem is the centre, the rays of which stretch into infinity; and these rays, as long as they come from a masterpiece, have an importance that is limited only by the might of an eye following them. But an actor's eye oversteps the sphere of the symbol. In the passive subject of a poem (the spectator) there appears a phenomenon of polarization; he does not any more see the diverging rays, he sees only the converging ones; an accidental thing spoiled the symbol, and the masterpiece in its essence was dead during the whole time of that presence. The Greeks felt that antinomy, and their masks, which seem incomprehensible to us, served to smooth down the presence of the man and to facilitate the symbol. During the Elizabethan time the recitation was melopoeian, the acting conventional and the stage symbolic. It was about the same in Louis XIV.'s time.

The poem begins to retreat into shadow as the man comes forth. A poem wishes to rescue us from the domination of the senses and to give a preponderance to the past and future; man acts only on our senses and exists only as far as he is able to attenuate that preponderance of past and future by interesting us exclusively in the moment at which he speaks. If man enters on the stage with all his faculties and his whole freedom, if his voice, gestures, attitude are not veiled by a great number of synthetic conditions, if even for a moment the human

being appears such as he is, there is not a poem in this world which could stand that event. In that moment, the spectacle of the poem is interrupted and we are present at some scene of outward life.

When man oversteps the limits of a poem, the gigantic poem of his presence overshadows everything round him.

A poem which I see on the stage seems to me always a lie; in everyday life I must see man, who speaks to me, because the majority of his words have no meaning at all without his presence; a poem on the contrary, is a gathering of such unusual words, that the presence of the poet is connected with them for ever; one cannot free from voluntary slavery a soul dearer than others, in order to replace it by the manifestations of another soul, almost always insignificant, for in that moment it is impossible to assimilate those manifestations.1

The essay from which these words are taken shows the fundamental principles of Maeterlinck's poetical æsthetics; it marks, in general but positive words, the tendencies of the symbolic drama; it emphasizes the unfitness of those means which the modern theatre uses to reproduce dramatic poems and explains all the peculiarities which may strike us in Maeterlinck's plays.

Every poetical work, and therefore a drama as well, ought to be "a temple of dreams." But the dream is only possible where the flight of imagination is not limited by narrow bounds; so that the poet does not limit his work, but leaves to the spirit of the reader a free field, where boundless horizons open beyond the picture itself, and where the work contains a symbol clothed in a piece of infinity, if one may put it so.

Therefore the interior depth, hidden at the bottom of infinity, is, according to Maeterlinck, the most important

1 La jeune Belgique, 1890, No. 9-Menus propos, Le Théâtre.

and the principal source of poetical beauty. This is the beginning of the most logical definition of the beautiful. After the downfall of all ideas and definitions of absolute beauty, and in presence of the necessity of a criterion for appreciation of a work of art, Maeterlinck's measure for the beautiful seems to be the only one which one can put against the positive and à posteriori view which indeed decides nothing. Maeterlinck's criterion of the beautiful seems to be in harmony with the lasting works of genius and to answer the mysterious question: Why? Why is this beautiful and that ugly? Why do we call this man a genius and that one only talented? What is it that assures life in the world of the beautiful?

Every creative artistic power consists in the capacity of seeing visions and of knowing how to communicate them to others. The greater an artist or a poet is, the more precise is his vision of the things in themselves, their real essence, that which they are and not which they seem to be superficially to our senses. The more visionary the words, the greater is the power, the more absolute its influence over other people's souls, its ability to keep them in a magic circle. The depth constitutes the grandeur of art. Suggestion, coming from a subject, gives only a value to it. Art cannot limit itself to pure sensation, color, sound and the exterior side of things. The artist, whose aim is reality, will not be satisfied with its apparent and vulgar side. To understand and penetrate, to fathom with the eyes of the soul the abyss of the fathomless and the incomprehensible, this is the greatest satisfaction we can get from poetry.

Consequently the beautiful cannot exist without the background of infinity, without a perspective looking towards the stars and even beyond them; the artist, poet, creator, genius, is he

whose imagination worlds, who from every phenomenon of external existence, from every shiver of thought or sentiment, can bring out symbolically the element of infinity as well as the sensuous element, who can unite that which is small and ephemeral with the great everlasting eternity in a vision of unity such as one sees in real life. That constitutes the imperishability of masterpieces, because they contain an immutable, universal, immortal element, not subject to the evolutions of the material world.

Every immortal masterpiece affirms that assertion. What are the Rig-Veda and the Bible if not great metaphysical poems, in which the external view of nature, colored by imagination, is united with deep and melancholy views about things that lie beyond the limits of the sensuous world. Shakespeare's supremacy in literature depends on these depths of view, which he was able to unveil in themes often used and borrowed by him here and there.

This carries weight not in literature alone, but in every other art as well. Great, true, immortal art was and is symbolic; under sensuous analogy it hides elements of infinity, it unveils boundless horizons. Formerly it was so unconsciously, through the instinct of genius; to-day-perchance stimulated by the examples of daring pioneers of science, who, throwing themselves boldly into the abyss of the unknown, began to investigate the mysterious manifestations of death, dreams, instincts, hypnotism, magnetism, psychical force, etc.-it has become consciously symbolic. It is now clear that the fear of poets and æsthetes lest the sciences, explaining everything, should deprive poetry of the regions of infinity and mystery, is without any foundation; for the whole series of facts testifies to the fathomless abyss of unknown laws, and proves that the small island of our knowledge is surrounded by an infinite

On the other hand the same investigations and discoveries prove in fact that presentiments, predictions, witchcraft, supernatural things and miracles of the romantics and mystics, are not simply vain visions of their imagina. tion, but that they are proofs of their great intuitive power in foreseeing facts which the sciences began to affirm. Formerly they classified those facts improperly, seeing in them something unusual and supernatural; and very often they searched for their explanation in religious dogmas. But having changed its point of view, mysticism was bound to continue its work in literature and it was born again in modern symbolism, which must be considered as the next true halting place in the development of poetry-next after the romantic movement-for naturalism, on account of its onesidedness, is only a phenomenon of reaction, and not a further step in the progress of evolution.

Modern mysticism in art has lost its former note of religious asceticism, its unearthly character, and has rather become scientific. Its prophets understand that infinity, towards which we are drawn by an eternal longing which never rests, is not hidden beyond the bounds of the real world, but that it constitutes the very essence of the universe, of every man, of the smallest phenomenon. They understand also, that if, on the one hand, naturalism, which deals only with the reality reached by the senses, deceives itself in thinking that it leads to the truth, on the other hand, mysticism, if it separates itself from the real world, cannot embrace the whole, and loses also in accessibility and clearness; for it speaks abstractly or by means of artificial symbols of the essence of things, which in most cases we can