Bennett. But there are some interesting notes on Henry James and his attempt, when he thought he was hard up, to write plays for money:

The votaries of the cult try to gloss over this fact. But it cannot be glossed over. 'My books don't sell, and it looks as if my plays might. Therefore, I am going with a brazen front to write half a dozen.' And then, after the definite failure: "The money disappointment is, of course, keen, as it was wholly for money I adventured.' I reckon this to be pretty bad; but nobody animadverts upon it. Strange how one artist may steal a horse while another may not look over a hedge.

It would be hard to find two novelists with a larger number of fundamental differences than James and

he was, in life, more than a dilettante. And, if it were so, that is what is the matter with his novels. They lack ecstasy, guts.

Guts, perhaps, but the champion of James might inquire how long Mr. Bennett has been an authority on ecstasy.

[The Athenæum]

AN ORDINARY MAN

BY ELIZABETH BIBESCO

[Editorial Note: Princess Bibesco is the daughter of Mrs. Asquith, and wife of the new Roumanian ambassador to the United States.]

about this account of their second and last

meeting:

In the coffee room of the Reform Club he came up to me and said: 'You probably don't remember me. I'm Henry James.' I blushed. (Just as I blushed when in the stalls of a theatre someone tapped my arm from behind and said: "You don't know me, Mr. Bennett, but I know you. I'm Ellen Terry.' I think that great legendary figures really ought not to make such remarks to their juniors.) I have a most disconcerting memory. I once met a man in St. James's Street, and he stopped and I stopped. I said: 'You must excuse me. I remember your face, but I can't think who you are.' He replied: 'You and I dined together last night with our friend

But this man was not a Henry James. And, with all its faults, my memory was incapable of forgetting a Henry James. He asked me if I were alone. I said I had two guests. He said: "May I join your party upstairs?' I blushed again. It seemed to me incredible that Henry James should actually be asking to join my party. We received him with all the empressement that he desired. He talked. He did all the talking, and he was exceedingly interesting. He said that to him the Reform Club was full of ghosts. He told us about all the ghosts, one after another. There was no touch of sentimentality in his recollections. Everything was detached, just, passionless, and a little severe - as became his age. His ghosts were the ghosts of dead men, and his judgments on them were no longer at the mercy of his affections. He was not writing to them, or to their friends. I doubt whether Henry James ever felt a passion, except for literature. I doubt whether

hand. With a jerk, he shrank back into his corner, and revealed to her for the first time the intensity of his passion for her. After that, she avoided seeing him alone; but the very fact that they both knew made the atmosphere more explosive. The air was unbreathable with the impending thunderstorm.

To-day it had broken, and she was looking at him with big, distressed eyes, feeling it indecent for her to be seeing a naked soul. His whole face and voice had changed. Every now and then he shut his eyes as if to blot out her physical presence. His mouth seemed a different shape, and his hot, dry lips had a limp, formless look as if he had no control over them.

The thought struck her that they looked waterproof, but she put the ribald suggestion from her, shocked by her own levity.

"You are so unlike other women,' he said. She accepted it with a sigh, wondering if anyone would ever say to her: "You are all the women who have ever lived, and yourself.' What fun to be Helen, and Cleopatra, and Madame de Genlis, and Jane Welsh Carlyle! Her mind was wandering.

'You see, I have never met anyone at all like you,' he went on, while she added Ninon de l'Enclos and Jane Austen to her list. 'I did n't know I could want to kiss anyone more than anything in the world, and then not do it out of love.'

This brought back her attention. Always she had been loved by sensual men reverently; once, only, by an intellectual passionately.. Both were flattering, the first more convenient, the second more satisfactory.

'I wonder if you know what I mean?' 'I think I do,' she said, very gently, as one who had strained her subtlety to meet the peculiarities of the situation.

'I believe you would find it difficult to forgive me if I kissed you,' he went on, 'you are so odd. I believe you would really be angry.'

'Not angry-sad,' she said, smiling a little cynically at this mobilization of his chivalry.

'Good God! don't you know I would rather die than make you that?'

He knelt down and put his head in her lap. 'I wish I could do things for you every day and all day, for ever.'

She seemed to meet him everywhere, and always the knowledge that he was in the room made her prettier. There is nothing so beautifying as being loved. It was delightful to feel that, whomever he was talking to and whomever he was looking at, his ears and eyes were really running away toward her.

He never could make up his mind whether to go up to her or not. He hated to have to snatch little moments of her time away from other people — people to whom she was merely a woman, or a friend, or even an acquaintance and yet he could not keep away. He had to come up to see whether her face was just the same as he remembered it, and to hear the

gurgle in her voice like the pouring of water when the jug is nearly full. 'Poor man, he is terribly in love with you.'

'Do you think so?' she answered, with arched eyebrows. 'He is always very sweet to me and is wonderfully unselfish, and then, poor man'- her voice was infinitely tender-'he is suffering from shell-shock.'

She liked him best when he hurried her out of draughts, wrapped rugs round her legs, pulled up the collars of her coats and nearly strangled her with her furs. The little touch of clumsiness in his tenderness always melted her....

'All the afternoon, while I played cards at my club, I smelled my hands, for it seemed to me that a little whiff of your scent had clung to them.' .

...

His letters were curiously better than she expected them to be- always. And she liked his graceful handwriting and the way he wrote her name.

There was a woman a girl who was in love with him and of whom he saw a great deal. She always praised her and sometimes wondered.

The doctor sent him to the country; and twice every day he wrote to her from his chaise-longue, and twice every day she wrote to him in order that no post should be a disappointment. She never could resist illness. He went to stay with the girl and mentioned her very little in his letters. Also he wrote about 'your great superiority; when we are together, I always feel that I am mixing dross with gold.' Little twinges of anxiety went through her.

'What a contemptible creature I am!' she thought. ‘After all, I did n't want his love.'

He came to stay with her, and his great talent came into play, his talent for country-house life. He did everything better than anyone else; but just now under doctor's orders he was forbidden exercise. Every morning she

very courte

went into his room, and he ously refused every suggestion she made for his comfort or his happiness. Sometimes she played golf before breakfast so that she should be back in time for him, should he want her. Always, she tried to conceal the sacrifices she was making. 'I would be so grateful if you would come with me in the motor. . . .' Or, if he was installed in the garden, 'May I come and sit here for a few minutes?'

There were days when nothing was right. He contradicted everything she said, and asked her if she were trying to irritate him. Sometimes at night, in bed, she cried with exhaustion.

Her aunt loved him. Such a very nice young man. So sweet to old people. So touchingly devoted to his mother. Why, he never seemed to think of himself at all. His manners were perfect. He was charming to everyone. He knew something about everything. He rarely seemed to be out of his depth, but then he could swim a little. She smiled at his beautiful steering through the heavy traffic of facts. His public attitude toward her was perfect. Tender, deferential, anxiously considerate, he always seemed to be there to push her chair in or to pull it out: and when he picked up her handkerchief or her glove, he gave it to her with a peculiar little intimate look that everyone noticed. She knew that people said: His care of her is really very touching. She is rather a selfish woman.' She went on bearing it all, deaf to his delicate, ingenious insults.

'I suppose,' she said to herself, 'that I love him, now that I know the very bottom of his shallows.' The thought humiliated her, but she faced it with the rest.

She could register the arrival of a third person by the change in his

It appeared that the girl was engaged to someone else. Perhaps they were keeping up appearances. She was keeping up appearances for them. And he had once loved her!

At last one day he went. He said good-bye very tenderly, though there was only a porter to see them. He looked, she thought, a little guilty.

Out of the window of the train he took her hand and kissed it.

'Still the same old scent. I have forgotten what it was called.'

'Gage d'amour,' she murmured, ridiculously conscious that a mist of tears. was clouding her eyes.

[The Outlook]

ANY WORKMAN TO THE CHURCHES

BY H. G. LYALL

[The author of this article won the prize for all Great Britain and Ireland offered by the Walker Trust (St. Andrews University, Scotland) for an essay on 'Spiritual Regeneration as the Basis of World Reconstruction' (December 1920). We publish the article as representing the opinions of thoughtful youth to-day, and not necessarily with any endorsement of the views expressed.Ed. The Outlook.]

The contagion of practical materialism has spread to the Church itself, infecting its whole outlook and poisoning the springs of its life.The Army and Religion (Second Part).

THERE seems little left for workingmen to add to this condemnation of you out of your own mouth, but, while conscious of the truth of this condemnation, our most pressing grievances lie elsewhere.

To us, you are the most unreal thing in the world. The scientific discoveries but of yesterday are as familiar to us as our own hands, but you have a faraway mistiness about you, impossible to describe; or if, for a moment, we can catch your outline, you seem like some ruin the relic of a past age.

The reason for this unreality is, we feel, not far to seek. You do not yet understand the spirit of this age. You do not yet realize the spirit of inquiry that is abroad to-day: that same eager desire to see, to know, to understand, at whose imperious command science has moved to its discoveries; a desire, not peculiar to one class, but penetrating and permeating every class, and as strong among us workers as anywhere.

We know something of the advances that have been made during the last hundred years or so in the business and commercial world, and much of those made in the realm of science. And we now know that the war was largely the

If you did not know before, you now know that for long you have had nothing to offer the young, the eager, the enthusiast the most vital part of our nation; and that those who have found Christ have found Him outside your gates-found Him, almost, in spite of you.

It

'It is fear that holds men back.' is fear that has held you back; fear of upsetting the fixed and comfortable beliefs of the old, fear of appealing to the hearts through the undimmed minds of the young. And so, the young who grow up under you are like the old of a past generation, and there is no change. Better a hundredfold that the old be disturbed than that the young be left to perish! You have n't trusted us, you have n't taken us into your confidence. You have n't taught us with the simplicity necessary in teaching children—we wish you had; but in other ways you have treated us like children, and we don't like it. Old people may tolerate being treated as children, but the young never will.

- to

But, keeping away from our own unaided struggles, what are we to think of your attitude to wider things the League of Nations, for example? To us in France and scattered over the rest of the earth, this idea, this hope, became something worth fighting for. We venerated the handful of humane statesmen and scholars who gave it birth, and the ever-growing army of public and private persons who kept it in being. Why had we to look so long to you for a response? Only after it had been hailed by the most earnest statesmen the world over and by all Labor and Socialist bodies, did you raise your voice on its behalf; and today you seem helpless to prevent it becoming little else than a mockery. Are we wrong in thinking that the ideal of a genuine League of Nations should have sprung to life in your own bosom and been your dearest child?

What about your outlook on starving Europe? We could find it in our hearts to forgive you your compromises during the war, and your giving of your voice to swell the general shout of hate. We can understand a little of your belief that encouragement of the soldiers lay on one and the same plane with your duty to Christ. But the war has been over for two years. Why have you been so slow to lend your ear to the pitiful cry that has been going up from millions of starving women and children? That cry has melted even the hearts of those whom you perhaps look upon as outcasts. We looked for a passion of pity to stir your heart. Why was it that the first reproof to the Allies for allowing these women and children to starve came from our army of occupation and not from you? Had our soldiers more compassion than you could find in your heart? At last you have joined your voice to the appeal to fight the famine, but a laggard as ever!— only after the famine has been

VOL. 21-NO. 1084

for long the obsessing thought of thousands of humane men and women in every land.

What do we expect from you?

We expect reality, consistency, courage, sympathy, life. Above all, we expect Christ. 'My humanity is the road by which men must travel.' When will you understand that the humanity of Jesus means all in all to us, and that little else matters? We look to you for an interpretation, for a re-interpretation. We look for that broad and imaginative sympathy that counts all men brothers. We look to you to show us Christ's reasonableness, his wonderful knowledge of the springs that move the human soul. We look to you to make living to us his great love for humanity; a love that made him not only suffer for us, but with us; that made him search for means whereby we could be saved from ourselves, from the suffering and misery and loss that we bring upon our own heads and upon the heads of those whom we love.

Now, as never before, you must tell us, and tell us again and again, that 'the wages of sin is death.' This war has been cruel and destructive, and our scientists tell us that the next one will be more cruel and more destructive and the one after that more so than any before, until, finally, humanity destroys itself. The wages of sin, that is, of ignorance, of pride, of love of money and of power, is death. Cannot you make the world realize that?

Briefly, we look to you to 'spiritualize democracy.'

But before you can do this, you must have more courage and more life. Had you had in the past as much life, as much conviction, as much fire as our Socialist leaders have, you would have set the world in a blaze by this time. You must also bow to this spirit of inquiry that fills our lives, and do not