During the war, the necessity of the 'knock-out blow' was emphasized by the bitter-enders, and the treachery of Russia was felt as a blow 'below the belt.' It has been my recent experience to give instruction in English to a number of highly educated students of French nationality. It is interesting to observe that to these students, who are thoroughly conversant with literary English, most of the expressions which I have quoted in this paper are full of mystery. They would be still more puzzled by the fancy variations which are used in the ultra-sporting language of pugilism, a language in which nothing is called by its name. The eyes become 'eepers' or 'optics,' the teeth 'ivories,' an important part of the internal economy is described as the 'pantry,' and the drawing of vital fluid from an opponent's nose takes the picturesque guise of 'tapping his claret.' From a novel by Mr. Oliver Onions, I glean the information that "chucking up the sponge' is sometimes expressed as 'skying the wiper.' There is really a good deal of imagination in this peculiar language of the ring. What, for instance, could be more expressive than 'in chancery,' for a pugilist whose head is in a position from which it cannot be extricated without serious damage?

It will be noticed that I have made no reference to Our two national games. Cricket is not of very great antiquity and was probably, at first, a local game. What small contribution it has made to our metaphor is comparatively recent. The use of the word 'cricket' in the general sense of fair-play is not in the New English Dictionary, so would appear to be an

introduction of the last few years. 'To keep one's end up' is also, I believe, comparatively modern. The five-minute bombardments of our seaside resorts by German destroyers were commonly called 'tip and run raids.' In the Westminster Gazette, I read recently that 'Mr. Marshall Stevens had two questions down to the Prime Minister. On the first occasion, Mr. Neal fielded substitute for Mr. Lloyd George.' Any Englishman understands what is meant, but the metaphor is not in general use. Perhaps the most familiar cricket phrase is 'to score off,' which lickens the baffled one to an unsuccessful bowler. I believe that this figure of speech came into use at Cambridge about 1880.

Football is now a game of skill. Its mediæval ancestor apparently was not. The early allusions to it, from the fourteenth century onwards, are in legal enactments forbidding its practice, the general opinion being well expressed by Elyot, who, in his Governour, describes it as 'nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence.' It has made, as far as I know, no important contribution to English metaphor, for the. figurative sense of 'goal,' as in 'the goal of one's ambition,' is from the foot-race. With the foot-race is also connected the modern expression 'never to look back,' used of a career of uninterrupted success, like that of the runner who leads easily from start to finish.' And, by the way, the word 'career' itself originally meant a chariot-race, a sense which is still hazily present to our minds when we speak of a runaway team 'careering' down the street.

A FEW weeks ago I heard Elgar's new "Cello Concerto' at the Queen's Hall. The solo was played most admirably by Miss Beatrice Harrison, whom I pause to salute as a player of genius, with the touch of personality that labor can develop but never bestow. No quantity of pains that you take (or inflict) will make you a genius on viol, lute, or shawn. Labor will make you technically dexterous, but it will not give you the mysterious something that distinguishes genius from talent, the interpreter from the recorder. Immediately after the Elgar 'Concerto' came Strauss's "Tod und Verklarung,' which I had heard and liked, at its first performance here, in 1897, and have heard and liked many times since. As I wended homewards, reflecting on the music, it seemed to me that these two pieces were engaged in a kind of conflict. They took, at last, the shape of two antagonistic forms of art, the art that is thought out, and the art that is felt out. The contest seems worth following, as it may give us a general view of Elgar and what he represents. A general view is certainly all I propose to attempt at the

Elgar's concerto may prove when tested by familiarity, it was genuinely felt out, that its inspiration was purely artistic, and that Strauss's tone-poem, with all its camouflage of technical effectiveness, was something elaborately thought out; that its inspiration was mainly intellectual. I believe, in fact, that Strauss thinks in the terms of one art and writes in the terms of another. He is like Berlioz, to whose 'Symphonie Fantastique' Strauss's "Tod und Verklarung' is almost exactly parallel. Berlioz was an immensely clever man, with a great knowledge of technique; but Berlioz scarcely exists, to-day, as a musician, because he was a man of letters who tried to express himself in music. Strauss, I feel, is that kind of composer. What captures one, at first, in his music is its air of literary distinction, and, as this is undeniable, and even genuine, one goes on liking him until (as is always the case) the surface wears off, and the nature of the substance exhibits itself. I do not merely mean that Strauss's orchestral pieces are what is called 'programme music.' That does not matter. A great deal of undescribed music is programme music, and the tendency of time is to wear out the programme, and leave the music-if there is any. Elgar's 'Enigma' variations are programme music of which we do not know the programme. Beethoven's great Leonora overture is programme music of which the programme is immaterial; it would remain a superb composition if every

other trace of 'Fidelio' were lost. The point I make about Strauss is that his compositions are conceived and carried out in the spirit of literature, and not in the spirit of music; and what seems to me significant is that he has tended to become more literary and less musical. Consider all his tonepoems from 'Don Juan' to "The Domestic Symphony,' and you will, I think, admit the truth of this. 'Don Quixote' (another 'cello concerto!) is a specially good example, for here he has jumbled his planes, even though in certain passages he has perhaps touched the height of his purely musical achievement. In trying to occupy the desk-chair and the music-stool at once, he has come heavily to the ground.

Long before this, the patient reader will have been wanting to remark that he had supposed this article was to be about Elgar, and that it seems to be about Strauss. I have not forgotten Elgar. In fact, I have been describing him all the time; for the conclusion of my homeward reflections on that conflict of artistic principles was that Elgar's great merit consists in his being just what Richard Strauss is notor, if you prefer it, in his not being just what Richard Strauss is. There are places in his work where he stumbles; there are places where he is clearly below his best; there are places where he becomes elaborate merely because he is concealing a thin patch of invention with technical display; but I think there is no place in all the work of his that I know, where he ceases to be a genuine musician, moved by the spirit of music. Where he succeeds, he succeeds as a musician; where he fails, he fails as Beethoven and Brahms sometimes failed, he fails

as a musician, without trying for success of an alien order. Elgar is a man of serious and cultivated taste in literature, but he never writes the music of a man of letters.

That he is a genuine musician is the major proposition to be asserted of him; and I think the next is that he is a genuinely English musician. Some time ago, the art-for-art's-sake people used to maintain that art was universal, not national, and that to talk about British art was as ridiculous as to talk about British mathematics. (Personally I would not talk about either. I know what English is; I do not know what British is.) The fallacy of the contention is obvious. Art is not mathematics. Art is the embodiment of a personality; mathematics is not. The desire for unnational art comes strangely from the countrymen of Shakespeare, for Shakespeare is richly, almost rankly, English. He could not conceivably have been Irish, or Scottish, or Welsh, or French, or Italian, or Spanish; and, certainly, not German. There is the smell of English earth, the touch of English weather. the breadth of English humor, the soul of English character in all that he wrote. he wrote. Shakespeare is English: Milton might have been translated from the Latin. Elgar's music has an unmistakably English quality. There is nothing of his that could have been written by anyone not English-like Shakespeare, by the way, he is a westmidlander. Whether he writes of Alassio, or Spain, or Bavaria, he writes as an Englishman. Even wher. he drops into a sentimental piece like 'Salut d'Amour' or a popular tune like the 'Pomp and Circumstance' (or 'Land of Hope and Glory') refrain, it is English sentiment, English commonness

hat he achieves. And how, it may be asked, is he especially English? Well, he is strong, sincere, wholesome, reserved, a little self-conscious, humorus without being witty, learned without being pedantic, original, without being eccentric, emotional, and sentinental, without losing restraint and a are for the decencies of life. He puts 11 of a reverent heart into his work, ut he never parades it as a spectacle. He is never showy or bedizened, either he is ever dowdy or sordid. You might call his music moral, and, the best sense, it is respectable. It the music of a country in which onduct is (or was) three parts of life. 'hink of 'Gerontius,' the subject of which is the death of a man and the Passing of his soul into eternity. How asily a musician with all the resources of a modern orchestra and massed Poices could let himself run wild with ich a theme! But Elgar is not metahysical as Brahms would have been, r hysterical as Chaikovsky would Jave been, or realistic as Strauss would have been, or ecclesiastical as ranck would have been. 'Gerontius'

not like the 'German Requiem' of rahms, touched with the dread and ear of death, or like the 'Requiem'

Verdi, an outburst of almost roman¿c emotionalism; it is solemn, sincere, nd deeply moving, but nobly rerained, and mindful of the power at comes from self-reverence, selfnowledge, self-control. By a signifiint chance, the part of Gerontius ound an ideal exponent in the late ervase Elwes, himself the embodient of an English gentlemen's deep eling, restraint, and dignity. Elgar's st Symphony is inscribed to a dead ng of England; but it is not pompous abject, and its 'Funeral March' is

an elegy, not a shriek. Compare his two symphonies with any two symphonies of Chaikovsky, and you will feel the difference between what is English and what is Russian. Scratch

a Russian and you find a Tartar; scratch an Englishman and you find a gentleman. Even in the more impersonal 'Violin Concerto' the national character seems to prevail; it is as English as the last movement of the Brahms 'Concerto' is Hungarian. The grace of Elgar is English, not Latin. He does not glitter, and he does not give us, as Debussy does, with French lucidity, a series of epigrams or choses vues. Elgar is, as I said, almost self-consciously English, for his favorite musical direction is Nobilmente. It is a good word. That is how Cromwell lived and Milton wrote, and Hampden fought, and King Charles died. It is how Algernon Sidney went to the scaffold, and how Robert Scott perished in the Antarctic. Elgar's nobility is not a caste possession, and has nothing in common with the brute tyranny of the Junker, or the elaborate ceremony of the ancien regime. It is the nobility of soul on which he calls, not the pedantry of quarterings-a truly English nobility, the nobility of a people, of a land where a great peer was also the Great Commoner.

Another quality for which he should be praised is that he has never written beyond his means. beyond his means. (In parenthesis I should like to pay a similar tribute to another musician, untimely dead, Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was not a great composer, but who never tried to delude the public into thinking that he was. He never wrote beyond his means, and his music will endure the longer.) The young English com

poser of a generation ago set out with. an oratorio on the scale of the B minor Mass. The young English composer of a time slightly later began with a mythic trilogy on a scale exceeding "The Ring.' The young English composer of recent date procured a quantity of forty-stave music paper, and, having filled every bar of every stave with noises for all possible combinations of instruments (including some new ones), called the product a Symphonic Poem. What early music of Elgar's never came to performance, no one but himself can say; but, certainly, none of his known works overleaped his capacity. He has never made the mistake of writing his last works first. I heard 'King Olaf' and other pieces in the nineties; I heard "The Dream of Gerontius' as soon as it came to London; I attended the Elgar Festival at Covent Garden (and a worse place for hearing his music you could never find); I have heard the first performance of all his later concert works publicly given in London; and I see him, through all those years, a real musician, developing and expanding as naturally as Beethoven developed from the Septet to the last Quartets.

In that development there are the marks of authentic growth. Elgar has grown out of himself, stage by stage, without any abnormality Walter Bagehot long ago pointed out that an enduring community is one that has the gift of conservative innovation, of matching new institutions to old. That this is true of art as well as of politics, Ruskin knew when he said. that men of genius are known by their respect to law and tradition, their work being, not innovation, but a new creation, built upon the foundations.

laid of old. That is a very important principle. The art of To-day that does not contain a little of Yesterday will not have a To-morrow. We are the heirs of time. The inconoclasts who cry 'Let us have done with the Past; we are the men of the Future,' ignore the simple, supreme, and determining fact that we are all (themselves included) creations of the Past, and can neither make nor receive except as the Past has taught us. Indeed, all that we create is part of the Past as soon as it is created, and it is the living Past or dead Past according as we add to, or merely repeat, the Past that was our forefathers'. The original child who decides to be totally unlike its parent and to have two heads and four hands will perish as the freak it is. 'Es klang so alt, und war doch so neu,' exclaimed Hans Sachs, when he thought of the puzzling music he had heard. That is the note that all enduring art must have, the note of a genuine ancestry and of a genuine personal quality. Beethoven took the symphony as Mozart left it, and, destroying nothing, made it a new creation. Brahms took the symphony as Beethoven left it, and, changing little, made it the vehicle of a real contemporary utterance. Elgar has taken, one by one, all the old classical forms, but he has not been mastered by their shapes, or intimidated by their great traditions. His symphonies and concertos are built upon the foundations which were laid by the masters of old, but the building is his own, not an imitation of theirs. His music, with all its homage to the past, is the expression of a new personality. He does not write, he has never written, the Kappelmeister music into which