factories in Germany an arsenal in itself? During the last war three quarters of the explosives that the Germans used were supplied by private factories practically out of their regular line of products. . . .

Instead of venturing an opinion of my own on this whole subject, let me quote two extracts from an article by the British General Morgan in the Quarterly Review:

"The truth is that, as things are, the real security for the peace of Europe is not to be found in the results achieved, or likely to be achieved, by the Control Commission, or any committee organized by the League of Nations.' 'I 'I think it certain that the German Government will never abandon its subtle evasion of the military clauses of the Treaty of Versailles until it has secured the enforcement of that preamble to the military clauses which declares that, "in order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all the nations," Germany agrees to her own disarmament. She will demand the redemption of that preamble, and General von Seeckt is not likely to arrest his present preparations until she gets it, and perhaps not even then. In other words, Germany will never be completely disarmed until Europe completely disarms.'

I foresee that my reader will feel the same sentiment of irritation that I personally experienced in reading these lines; but we must look facts in the face, and not let ourselves be deluded by conventional opinions, stereotyped phrases, and fluent generalities that lead us nowhere. It is our duty, therefore, to examine this statement without prejudice in the light of what we know of human nature.

I met at Berlin an officer of high rank in the army of one of our Allies who asked me a question that I had diffi

culty in answering. I put it to you: 'Is it to be expected of human nature that a people distinguished up to the present for their military qualities will consent of their own accord to disarm themselves as long as they see themselves surrounded by other nations whom they look upon as enemies and who maintain powerful armaments?'

But, you will object, it is not a question of Germany's consenting. She has nothing to say about it. She has promised to disarm. Yes, of course that is very easy to say at Paris; but the fact is that the Allies have not been able during the six years that have elapsed since the Armistice to compel her to keep that promise. You see, unfortunately in practice it depends upon Germany herself to disarm. And since her disarmament is, as an actual fact, something that her own will must decide, how can we doubt what her decision will be? To be sure, we can try to bend her will by threatening to occupy indefinitely the left bank of the Rhine, and it is conceivable that she will ostentatiously make us certain concessions in order to secure its evacuation. But what progress shall we have made if the day after our departure she proceeds to rearm herself something that her huge industrial equipment and her vast resources will enable her to do with ease? Germany's disarmament will mean nothing unless it is continuous, and it will not be continuous unless it is sincere. What will her mere disarmament profit us if we must always contemplate the possibility that she will revert to a state of high military preparation a few years later? Germany we must not deceive ourselves on this point possesses formidable reserves. They constitute her latent strength. It is not in our power to destroy them.

The high military officer I mention also said this to me: 'See, then, the hopeless impasse in which Europe finds

herself. Whether we like it or not, it is human nature for Germany to rearm, for sooner or later she can do so, and she is encouraged to do so by seeing several powerful nations armed to the teeth on her frontiers. But on the other hand, is n't the fact that these nations are armed to the teeth due precisely to their fear and anticipation that the German colossus will again attack them? Is it at all likely that they will reduce their own armaments first, in order to encourage Germany to disarm by their good example? Not by any means. For all Europe is agreed that Germany, thanks to her giant industries, her highly trained engineers and scientists, and the character and discipline of her population, will always be on a war footing even when she herself imagines she is on a peace footing. Consequently we are brought face to face with this hopeless conclusion that "Germany is not disarmed, because, being a natural arsenal, she is not disarmable." This is a disagreeable fact to face, but it is most perilous to refuse to see it. Is n't the sole remedy for the evils that threaten our civilization to provide in some way that Germany will not want to arm herself?'

But is it possible thus to persuade Germany? By what concessions can we buy permanent disarmament from a people whose appetite grows with eating, whose most typical trait is lack of a sense of proportion? Does Germany thank us to-day because we evacuated Dortmund, returned her Rhenish railways, and promise speedily to quit the Ruhr? Not at all. She disregards our conciliatory gestures. What might she not demand of her neighbors if once she became convinced that their chief desire was to convert her to pacifism?

We accuse Germany of refusing to disarm either materially or morally. Moral disarmament would be an admirable thing, but don't you think it an

expression so sublime that it verges on the chimerical? You may, if you have the strength and the determination, force a hostile people to disarm materially for a time, but even if you were to inflict personal punishment upon every individual of that country, you could not know how the person regarded you in his own heart. You may keep order on the public streets, as Suvorov did at Warsaw, with drawn bayonets, but you have no way of knowing that the victims of those bayonets do not curse you with their expiring breath. The human soul is incoercible, its secrets are impenetrable, and you cannot disarm a people morally except by love. You may compel them to modify their conduct temporarily, but you never can compel them to change their opinions that is to say, their intentions.

In order to persuade the Germans to disarm morally we must persuade them that their present idea of all that has happened since 1914 is wrong. Or else we must agree with them that they are unhappy victims of spoilation, and entitled to full reparation for their

wrongs.

Furthermore, if the French were facing the Germans alone they might eventually, if they talked things over long enough, come to some sort of agreement with them, at least for the time being. As a matter of fact, our neighbors practically never mention AlsaceLorraine. They may not have forgotten those provinces, they may unexpectedly bring them to the fore when a favorable opportunity offers, but at the present time they do not talk much about that subject, and make no claims against us on that score.

But the situation is entirely different when one discusses with them the eastern frontier, and especially to Danzig, where East Prussia is completely cut off from the rest of the country. This 'mutilation,' as they call it, — but

more truly reparation for an ancient injustice, exasperates the Germans. They make no secret of their determination to wipe out, and that before very long, the Polish corridor.

'I should not care to be standing in the shoes of the Poles,' writes General Morgan, with disconcerting terseness. But France and Poland are inseparable

friends. If Poland were attacked on the Vistula what should we do? To intervene would mean a new war; to stand passive would be to let a friendly Power, whose existence is very important for us, be crushed. At the present moment the most dangerous and baffling question in European politics is the Danzig Corridor.

THOMAS HARDY was born in 1840 in a Dorsetshire hamlet, and passed his childhood there on the edge of a forest, not far from the heath at Egdon, which he was later to immortalize in one of his finest novels, The Return of the Native. There is valuable information on his life and his work in Madeleine L. Cazamian's book, Le roman et les idées en Angleterre, and in Le roman anglais contemporain, by Firmin Roz, the Roz, the French translator of Jude the Obscure and The Woodlanders, and also in Valéry Larbaud's book, Ce vice impuni, la lecture. It is, I suppose, impossible to form a serious opinion upon contemporary French literature as a whole without making a thorough study of Thomas Hardy's work.

Thomas Hardy counts among his ancestors men of mark like that Hardy who was Nelson's friend, and local benefactors like the man who, in the sixteenth century, founded the little school which the future novelist attended. Still others were farmers and artisans, and Hardy's own father was a builder.

1 From Les Nouvelles Littéraires (Paris literary weekly), February 21

His early education was primarily literary. When he was still a child, his mother put in his hands Dryden's translation of Vergil. She made him learn Latin at the age of twelve, and gave him French lessons at fifteen. At Dorchester, the 'Casterbridge' of his novels, where he was a student of architecture from 1856 to 1860, he read the Greek tragedies and the great English writers with a friend who had gone to the university. The architect's necessity of traveling about the district, which he was later to transform into the Wessex of his novels, in order to make sketches or draw plans which his profession required, enlarged and completed his knowledge of all that country. Later he went to London, where in 1863 he received the medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Tate prize for architectural design, and where he lived for ten years, not returning to Dorchester until 1874, when he married and settled down for good in his native country.

The success of his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, enabled him to devote himself entirely to literature. Besides his professional studies, he kept

up in London the reading that he had begun at Dorchester, which explains why we find him in the list of students for a French course at King's College in 1865; and he also came into contact with scientific and philosophic thought.

In his study of Hardy, one of the most comprehensive ever devoted to the great novelist, M. Firmin Roz writes: 'Mr. Hardy calls one of the volumes in which he has collected his short stories Life's Little Ironies. If we remove the diminutive adjective, that title would apply to all his works. He concerns himself with life's cruelty, with its bitter taste seasoned with misanthropy, with disdain and with revolt.

'If he deals with the tragedies of passion, it is because they show the dramatic irony of our destiny. If he attacks social constraints, it is because they add to it.'

Passion is the inexhaustible theme of Hardy's novels, and passion always creates suffering. This is the inevitable law of which all the work of the great English novelist is the illustration and the development. Three things oppose our desire for harmony: the tyranny of passion, the weight of social custom, and pure chance. It has been said that in Hardy's writings chance always comes in at a certain point to make everything turn out for the worst. On this point one might begin a fierce debate. We should have to take under consideration the fundamental laws of the novel, and we should certainly discover that the novelist's art is first and above all an expression of the tragedy of human life.

This art Hardy possesses in as high a degree as Dostoevskii himself. Hardy lives the life of his characters while he describes it; and that sympathy of his - which is, in fact, intelligence-breeds in him a pity for

the weaknesses of the heart and its misery, anger against the harshness with which society increases the sorrows of humanity.

It has been alleged that too rigorous a determinism weighs down Hardy's books; but it should be said in his defense that his heroes are often simple creatures of instinct, and that the love which overwhelms them is often purely physical passion. Finally it should be made clear that in Hardy's work nature is always present. In The Return of the Native, that marvelous novel which was translated into French last year, year, and rather badly translated, by the by the way, Egdon Heath plays, if I may be allowed to say so, the part of the chief character.

Unhappily all of Hardy's work is not yet translated into French. Lately we have had a new edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles in Madame Rolland's excellent translation - a book which had been out of print for many years. We can now read in our own language Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Under the Greenwood Tree, The Woodlanders, The Well-beloved, and A Pair of Blue Eyes.

We left Reading on our way to visit Thomas Hardy, about ten o'clock in the morning. Reading is a city of about a hundred thousand inhabitants, situated some fifty miles from London in Berkshire county, and is celebrated for its famous biscuits. The night before I had given a lecture in the new university. The biscuits and the university, by the way, are not without a mutual relationship—but that is another story.

Thomas Hardy lives in Dorsetshire, about a mile from Dorchester, only a few miles from the sea, in a modest country house with trees all around it. Scarcely was I out of the train when I hailed a taxi and gave the address of

the master. Then between the chauffeur and the pilgrim this strange dialogue took place: — Myself: 'Max Gate'.

The Chauffeur: 'All right. I'll take you to the seashore. The weather is fine, the view magnificent. The distance is short about three miles.' I looked at him and interrupted: 'What I want you to do is to drive me to Max Gate, Mr. Hardy's house. I am not talking about the sea.'

'I understand that. I get that order several times a week, but I always make the same reply, because I don't want to disappoint the visitors by taking them to a door that I know by old experience is obstinately shut.'

'Well, go there all the same.'

The chauffeur gave a shake of his head which meant, no doubt, 'Oh, these Frenchmen!' and set off. He stopped before the entrance with a knowing whirl, and as I started to pay him said: 'I'll wait. If they don't let you in, I'll take you back to Dorchester.' I had to tell him that the master was expecting me, but even after I had disappeared for several minutes he was still waiting there, uncertain of my reception.

I was received on the threshold by Mrs. Hardy, who made me welcome in the most courteous terms, explaining that the master was delighted to receive one of those young Frenchmen whose affectionate admiration had so deeply touched him. Then we went into the salon, where a few moments later Thomas Hardy joined us. If my emotion was great, my surprise was assuredly no less.

Thomas Hardy will be eighty-five next June, and I had hardly expected the amazing vitality that he displayed throughout our short conversation. He spoke first of his love for France, and what a disappointment it was to think that The Dynasts should have been

translated into German before it was translated into French. When I said that there might still be time to get ahead of the Germans, and that I should be glad to try, he smiled. From Germany our talk passed to the waran easy transition.

'I never can think without astonishment,' said he, 'that there are some people in different countries who dare to talk about the benefits of war. What nonsense, what stupidity! War is an evil thing, and can only breed evil. No one is justified in trying to make out that war has had a beneficial effect upon things æsthetic. I frankly do not understand that. Since war has diminished our human capital - and to what a degree! it has therefore diminished our intellectual capital. Many young writers were killed, and I frankly do not see how their intellectual wealth can have found its way to those who survived.

'You ask about lessons of the war? Yes, but they cannot be utilized. There are no lessons of war. War is a fatality. It has nothing to do with either reason or intelligence. War is something irresistible. It seems to obey some kind of devilish determinism, and when peoples go to war they do not make that ridiculous decision in order to follow the counsels of reason or to obey their intelligence. No development or perfection in either one or the other could stop wars, since neither reason nor intelligence has anything to do with supporting them. Perhaps tomorrow things will be otherwise, but I have no great confidence. I think rather that we are entering on a dark age whose port of entry was the abominable war we have just lived through.

"The Great War seems to me to weigh upon the world like a curse, and it has not yet borne its bitterest fruit. Does it not terrify you to think that, at