plest bit of advice: non ci pensate.' Much of Shaw as of Brieux has sunk under the weight of theses too well remembered and so never absorbed. Nevertheless, the Shavian drama rendered art an immense service, as the forcible expression of discontent. Discontent is the very life of art as of nearly everything else. Indeed, one might add to the two theatrical publics already examined, a third public: the non-contents. They are necessarily a hole-and-corner lot, fitters-up of 'side-shows,' often mere cranks and wild-cat schemers, blindly turning the stage upside down and the drama inside out; but yet all of them to be cherished in that all are but ministers of discontent and feed its sacred flame. The Théâtre Libre, the Chat Noir, and the Œuvre seemed a cloud no bigger than a man's hand, but they revitalized the French theatre. Our own Stage Society gave Shaw his first real recognition. Ibsen got a hearing in Paris and London through side-shows. Today our little bands of experimenters, Pioneer Players, Art Theatres e tutti quanti, are casting about in the void. Some of them try quaint foreign exotics because they are quaint, others vainly suppose that the theatre should be run by painters for painters and would supersede the old Theatre Royal Back Drawing-room, by a new Theatre Royal Top Studio. "These things are but Toyes.' But freakish experi The Cornhill Magazine ment is better than smug complacency. It at least implies the saving grace of belief in the Future. The Future: An old theory of Brunetière's should be of great comfort to us about that. It was a theory that great dramatic outbursts follow great wars. There was Greek tragedy after the Persian War, Calderon and Lope de Vega followed close on the Spanish conquests in the New World, Shakespeare after the Armada, the French romantic drama after the Napoleonic campaigns. If this be a right reading of history, the greatest of all dramatic upheavals ought to be confidently expected after the greatest of all wars. But who shall say what will be engulfed and what cast up? Years before the war Anatole France drew a fancy picture of the future world, in which, he conjectured, the theatre will have become almost exclusively musical. 'An exact knowledge of reality' and 'a life without violence' will have made the human race almost indifferent to drama and tragedy, while the unification of classes and sex-equality will have deprived comedy of nearly all its subject matter. But this prediction of M. France (like Coleridge's metaphysics in Lamb's description) was only his fun.' Any serious pretense to forecast the theatrical future would be the last imbecility. Who can forecast the future of the novel, of pictorial art, of music? One can but be patiently content to watch and pray. VOL. 16-NO. 811 THE LAST MAN BY E. L. DARMADY THE last man was the only child of his parents and his mother died in giving him birth. In its old age the vitality of the race had become impaired and mothers habitually died in childbirth. Few women, only the noblest and most self-sacrificing, would run the risk of maternity, and these fatally bore but one child. Mankind, therefore, diminished with progressive rapidity until the last human birth on the planet had been registered. The Last Man, however, was successfully brought up by his father, who from the earliest educated him for his great mission in life—namely, the preservation of all the knowledge that man had gained during his sojourn on earth, the recording of the secrets he had won from Nature, the final harvesting of the vast body of learning painfully acquired, augmented, and handed down by successive generations of mankind. For this task he was well fitted. The human race in its decadence had grown astoundingly precocious, and the Last Man was an illustrious example of the rule. At the same time the system of education, and especially that of cramming for examinations, had been perfected in the course of centuries to an exact science, so that the Last Man was able to graduate as Bachelor of Arts at the age of thirteen. Shortly after that his father died of senile decay, at forty-three- a great age as things went then. Thus the Last Man was left alone on earth, the first solitary human being since the days of Adam. But unlike the first man, he felt no loneliness, no desire for an Eve. Indeed, the waning attraction of the sexes for one another in the senescence of the species had contributed to its decline no less than the mortality of the women in childbirth. The Last Man, free from the interruptions which a wife and children might have occasioned, applied himself to his labor with a high degree of concentration and an absolute singleness of purpose. Had he chosen he might have lived a life of complete leisure, since having inherited from his father his holding of the entire stock of the consolidated national debts of the world, now amounting to an incredible figure, he was many times over a millionaire and had no occasion to work for a livelihood. But a sense of duty, developed to the highest extent during the age-long struggle of the human race against adverse surroundings, forbade this course, and without an afterthought the Last Man set about his life's work. The plan of this had already been mapped out by his father before marriage, when it appeared possible that he might occupy the position of Last Man now held by his son. The great storehouse of human knowledge was to take the form of a monumental encyclopædia in fortyeight volumes, with an index in an additional volume. The father had, in fact, collected materials for the work, but the march of science, the progress of civilization, had rendered these obsolete before they could be used. The Last Man, therefore, had to begin from the beginning, but nothing daunted, he set about his colossal task with the same dogged determination to see it through to the end that had made the species of which he was the last survivor the master of the world. Nevertheless, his work was subject to constant interruptions, for together with the accumulated wealth of mankind he had inherited most of the diseases which are transmissible from parent to child and a constitution little able to resist such as are not hereditary. It is noteworthy that the first syllable the Last Man had been able to articulate was not some childish name for food or for his father, but the word signifying pain. So early as the article 'Antediluvian' his eyesight all but failed, and he was only able to continue his work by means of the most powerful glasses and at the cost of racking headaches. When he had reached Engineering' he was seized with 'writers' cramp,' from which he was never afterwards wholly free; so that the mechanical process of putting his knowledge on paper, which before had been merely a laborious grind, became henceforward a diabolical torture. But with that tenacity of purpose which had enabled his ancestors to eradicate the thistle and the tiger, and to cause the pig and the potato to increase and multiply, he stuck at his desk daily until his allotted task was accomplished. Midway in Finance' an accidental fire in his library, due to his shortsighted clumsiness, destroyed a good third of his manuscript, and injured him severely in his efforts to rescue the sheets. But with the indomitable perseverance that had helped his forbears to subdue to their purpose the inertia of matter and the motions of the ether, he rewrote the burned portions and pushed ahead with the remaining articles. Long hours and lack of recreation told upon his already feeble health. At 'Garden' and at 'Hydrostatics' and again at 'Linotype' he suffered from attacks of persistent insomnia, which culminated at 'Millennium' in loss of memory-amnesia, of all disabilities the most embarrassing for the compiler of an Encyclopædia. His work was now more than re-duplicated, since he was obliged to hunt in books of reference for information of the most elementary character, and to commit at once to paper every fact, however trivial, before it passed from his mind. He lost, moreover, in the aggregate, hours searching for his fountain pen, his spectacles or his notes, which he now perpetually mislaid. But with the inflexible will to conquer that had caused the race of which he was the ultimate representative to exterminate all other varieties of the human stock of a different color to itself, he overcame one obstacle after another. Through every difficulty he struggled on braced by his high resolve and his obstinate sense of duty. "Zany' was reached, 'Zodiac' passed, 'Zymosis' put behind him, and then at last his task was complete. Only when the proofs had been corrected, and the forty-eight volumes, together with the Index and a supplementary volume descriptive of changes that had occurred while the work was in the press, had been returned from the printers and binders, did he take to his bed, the bed that was to be his deathbed. As he lay there, opening his eyes from time to time to look upon the volumes as he lazily spun them about in the revolving bookcase designed to hold them, suddenly he saw standing by his bedside an Angel. In a flash the Last Man realized what the Angel had come for to carry up to Heaven his Great Work, the Record of all Man had accomplished on earth, the Sum Total of the Knowledge Man had wrung from his environment. The Angel divined his thought. Thoughts need not to be translated into words to reach the intelligence of Angels. He shook his head pityingly. 'My poor fellow,' he said, 'my reason for coming is not what you suppose. I have not come for your knowledge. Man's knowledge is of use only to Man. When Man ceases to be, at the same moment the value of his knowledge will cease.' As he heard these words the heart of the Last Man sank within him. His life work had been wasted. More than that, Man's span of existence on earth had been in vain. A bitterness worse than death gripped him. Still, by an effort greater than any he had been called upon to make hitherto, by a supreme effort of courage, will, and determination the Last Man mastered himself, hid his disappointment from the Angel, and died with a straight face. But as he expired the Angel stooped quickly forward and, with a charmingly wrought vessel that he had brought for the purpose, caught his last breath as it left his lips, and with it that stubborn spirit of man that had made him lord of the earth, of all things living and without life, master of his fellow men, and finally, last and greatest conquest, master of himself, lord of his own soul. Then, soaring aloft, the Angel bore it through space a thousand light years to a point in the sky where two extinct suns in colliding had given birth from their wreckage to a novel solar system. Opening the vessel, he set free its contents into the chaos of flame, and flew back to rejoin the heavenly choir, leaving man's spirit to inform and order the world in growth, and to achieve another cycle of destiny in its series of infinity. The New Statesman ately from Derbyshire, where the future nove.ist's father, Robert Evans, was land agent and farmer under the Newdigates at Kirk Hallam. But no one is named 'Evans' without significance, and the forbears of George Eliot can be traced back to Northop, in the sufficiently Welsh region of Flintshire, where her grandfather was a builder and carpenter in a small way of business. In the service of Francis Newdigate we find Robert Evans so trusted that when that country gentleman inherited the Arbury property, Evans accompanied him, and was so successful in estate management that he eventually managed a number of other large estates in Warwickshire. He was a convinced and particularly hard-shell Tory, born and educated and living his life in the entire conviction that the squires of that age were a superior kind of being; and he called his daughter Mary Ann; a homely christening which she afterwards adapted into Marian. Mary Ann, I can imagine him thinking, good honest man, sufficient for him and his; while Marian was the right of his betters. He died in 1849, when living in Coventry, having retired from the management of estates and from his home at Griff, between Coventry and Nuneaton. It is not a particularly inspiring region, the vicinity of Nuneaton, in THE GEORGE ELIOT COUNTRY Warwickshire, where Mary Ann Evans BY CHARLES G. HARPER THIS year sees the centenary of the birth of Mary Ann Evans, 'George Eliot' of Middle Victorian literary celebrity, who was born on November 22, 1819, at Arbury Farm in the vicinity of the now extremely busy Warwickshire town of Nuneaton. The name 'Evans' is, of course, distinctly Welsh, but the family came immedi spent her early years. It is not the beautiful Warwickshire of Shakespeare, but that more northerly part which even in her time was being exploited in the colliery way and is now being additionally eviscerated and sorted over by quarrymen in search of road-metal. Her birthplace, South Farm, Arbury, is near the gates of the park of Arbury Hall, and the Evans's home, to which they removed some months later, is still to be seen in the rather stately house at Griff, on the road to Astley and Coventry. There she passed her first twenty-one years. The little cottage, formerly a dame-school to which she and her brother were first sent, is yet pointed out at Griff, and one may see Miss Lathom's school at the village of Attleborough on the other side of Chilvers Coton, where she joined her elder sister, Christiana. Attleborough is a pleasant enough village, very much less a place than the 'borough' in its name would suggest. It is entirely rural and has completely escaped the industrial development of Nuneaton; but it has few outstanding features, except the quaintly-pretty gazebo, or summer pavilion, on the garden wall of an old mansion, overlooking the highway. The Newdigates of Arbury Hall were blissfully unconscious that the studious younger daughter of their estate-agent at Griff was absorbing impressions of themselves, their home, and their ancestors, in later years to picture them as the 'Cheverels' of 'Cheverel Manor' in Mr. Gilfil's Love Story. They did not quite relish the performance, but there is little or nothing to their discredit in the story; and, indeed, the portrait drawn of Sir Christopher Cheverel, a fine type of the old English country baronet, is charming and appreciative. The story itself in fact is, as a whole, infinitely superior to Janet's Repentance or the Sad Story of the Reverend Amos Barton. The original of Sir Christopher was Sir Roger Newdigate, the very cultivated eighteenth-century baronet who at great cost entirely remodeled Arbury Hall in a style then fondly thought to be Gothic. If, indeed, we cannot now admire the work he performed, it is only because since then we have learned better; and although to Gothic purists his architectural details have the inevitable vices of that early Gothic revival,-the Strawberry Hill taste and the carpenter-Gothic and Batty Langley manner,-his intentions and the results were as good as the period permitted. Nor was Pugin himself, although later and greatly reverenced, without his very serious artistic insufficiencies. At any rate, Arbury Hall, in its fine park, makes a fine picture from a little distance and merits the glowing description of it in the story, and Sir Roger Newdigate himself is worthy of respect. He was member of Parliament for Oxford University during the thirty years 1750-1780; active in developing his lands, and a connoisseur of art and patron of literature: founder of the 'Newdigate Prize Poem at Oxford.' It was at Ellastone that Robert Evans, George Eliot's father, passed his early years and worked as a carpenter with his brother Samuel; and it was partly from reminiscences of her father's talk and from her uncle Samuel's wife's preaching experiences that the author constructed the very powerful and moving story of Adam Bede. Adam and Seth Bede were her father and uncle idealized, and 'Dinah Morris' was her uncle's wife, similarly treated; while Ellastone figures as 'Hayslope,' the adjacent town of Ashbourne as 'Oakbourne,' Norbury as 'Norbourne,' and Dovedale as 'Eaglebourne.' Staffordshire and Derbyshire are respectively 'Loamshire' and 'Stonyshire.' The 'Bromley Arms,' a very fine architectural work, rather the worse for wear and missing the custom of the jolly old coaching and posting days, is the 'Donnithorne Arms,' of the story, and the description of it and of the village green is close to actual fact, although the author had but little acquaintance with the place; depending upon remembered conversations with her |