nar admirers. Mr. George Moore enters the new order, the communal state. He is done with competition. His 'morality' is secure. He is licensed. He becomes the art guildsman. He can be read on beautiful English hand-made rag paper, and re-sold even on the basis of the material at a profit. He is no longer a marauding element in the body politic. He withdraws to the illimitude of the armchair. as a challenge. In the commercial book, limited to a small band of state, men are commercial, and commerce decides. But art, which is the criticism or recreation of life, cannot be commercial, or it ceases to be art. The pure artist thus finds himself exposed to contumely and obloquy. He is misunderstood and persecuted. The commercialism of prose rative compels the writer to be a kind of general secretary to the public who, as the arbiter, controls the matter for presentation, so that the man who does not accept the obligation to spend his life ministering to the fashions and foibles of the time, refuses to be a clown, a trapezist, or trick cyclist, a haberdasher of the prejudices, sentiment, hate, or 'morality' of his day, is a rebel and a pariah in the mind of the public, who feels but does not think: who as the judicature in the absence of standard and standards of criticism consigns any deviation from the current canons to the hangman or the ingheap. mo Mr. George Moore now seeks freem in withdrawal. Henceforth he I no longer belong to the public a of letters. Man may continue e the librarian, the custodian of als, but no more can democracy and the librarians imprison his art form, which, as Avowals, will be printed for private circulation only.' Mr. George Moore confers upon himself the freedom of his trade. He will joust in public no longer. In 'perfect calm and serenity of mind' he will henceforth write with that freedom that none has enjoyed since Elizabethan times; no publisher can worry him; the books are sold before they are written; no itching society can disturb, no anonymous scribe can assail, either his equanimity or sincerity. Thus to the public Mr. George Moore 'passes over. In the future, his price will be two or three guineas a We have in this 'knockout' of an artist a symbol of our time, for if the public loses art gains, yet in the process both are attainted. If the commercialism of art has made it impossible for a man to write sincerely, to study mankind, that is, rather than the surface of human activities, the isolation of art is equally an abnormality which, if logically carried out, must lead to its inanition and decay, which latter is Mr. Moore's point. Art is life, and where there is no art there civilization, too, is low. So true it is that style is the man. Therefore, however much we sympathize, we must fain view Mr. George Moore's isolation as the paradox of that mentality which for so many centuries has divided this country from Ireland, we English being essentially alloquial or teachers and thinkers, whereas the Irish, like the French, are colloquial, in this capacity dominating our stage, as represented by Sheridan, Synge, Shaw, Yeats, Wilde, and in the art form of prose immortalized by Sterne, from whom George Moore himself candidly derives: he, by the way, derives Pater from Goethe, an interesting discovery. But the genius of England is poetry, as Mr. George Moore admits. Shakespeare and England are one. We do not understand the Irish because they are conversationalists. They elude our sentimentality. We belong to the North, and in our constipated mentality only genius escapes. Yet it does escape. On the other hand, there is no Irish Dante. If the Irish all talk poetry, they have no world poets. The mountain dew is everywhere, but there is no Milton. 'Appareled like the spring,' the Irish span no universe, like Hamlet, or Falstaff, or even Mr. Pickwick, for, as literature is life, so our specifically English genius has been the pulpit, that is, the homily of the public forum-democracy, parliament; thus the larks of speech gave us the inestimable gift of human liberty which is the justification of our British civilization. This English style is Shakespeare's supreme legacy, and we shall reject it at our peril. The nation that lacks style is lacking in balance, perspective, as the world. has seen in the great war. It was the tragedy of Germany. ha German hall no rhetoric, and so we see a country which has never been a free state, never known a popular assembly, never enjoyed the blessins of free speech: a people who la ked style. lacked The German was unable o apply his philosophy because he ino a poet, and because of his want f poetry he is lacking in the humanities, fails, therefore, in the arts of life choked in the metaphysics of the abstract. His history reveals these defects as in a looking-glass. Having no rostrum, b had no vision and so no idea. No style, b them When Spais a, S er marat and equally zenit, her poets flowered Her knell was ready Souded in th pages o Spain, too, b4 no pu fat and uxo us, like Her pulpit as the In tion was iced on t olated int symbolism divorced from life. With her intellect her life also languished, until finally, some twenty years ago, the bones of Columbus were brought back in sorrow from Cuba as the testament of imperial Spain. Similarly with Russia. It was Tolstoi, the new Russian, with (dare it be said?) his mystic truthfulness, who prepared the way for Russian emancipation, he and Turgeniev. With Tolstoi, idea took the place of assent; it polarized into revolution. And Russia's hope to-day is her literature, for it has its roots in life. In the truest sense, it is creation. The Russian artist is pinned to his faith. No doubt the total absence of commercialism in Russian literature gave the artist this love of truth, which is the supreme quality of Russian writing. There is nothing quite like it, and noteworthy is its freedom from coarsenes vulgarity, flippancy, ribaldry, all silliness, all superficiality, and this because of its profound innate quality of seriousness, to be equaled only in the Scandinavians. For Russian literatue deals always with real life. The sbject matter is too actual to be rtificialized. Thus words are to the Russian the incarnation of thought, the very meaning of the monotone and amorphous waste of Russian serfdom. This is the power of the Russians, power which, as De Quincey has fixed for all time, is the definition of literature. It is the sincerity of the Russians, drawn from the tragedy of Russian conditions, which gave them this power of re-creation, and this is the national importance of literature. Witness the Marseillaise. muixote. Walt Whitman had it in his songs of a dex. Her bungler. He takes the English gentleman's view of Tolstoi - a bit of a nuisance. 'Get back to art,' Turgeniev writes on his deathbed to Tolstoi; for Turgeniev was no teacher or reformer and saw little hope. Nor can Mr. Moore, who can discern no outlet for art in the future until the era of mobility has passed and once more men take to potters' clay and the cult of beauty returns to them. So he leaves Mr. Gosse to his young poets, and the American interviewer to his perturbations. "The smart hound gives tongue at all kinds of game; an utterly undependable cur: at this very moment he is baying in the coverts. At what? Rabbit, hare, or fox? "Hark to Priapus!" cries Mudie. "At him, Libertina!" shouts Smith. A mixed pack.'. 'T is a pity Mr. George Moore has not widened his circle to at least five thousand readers, for Avowals is ad mirably just in its estimates and valuations, and a very spate of beautiful prose writing. He is the Anatole France of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. His genius is Pat, the Irish peasant, and his pig. With him we are on earth, among the realities upon which he sprays the mountain dew of race. To us and even to civilization Avowals is a message. It is to fig against the darkness which, as Sh speare said, is the 'burier and to invoke the lig sincerity. So long a true sense the modern poet is the scientist. Wireless, radium, the submarine, the aeroplane- this is the poetry of modern life in a world that takes everything for granted. Mr. Moore may be right in his contention that the formula whereby we have known art for the last four hundred years will not return, which was what Whistler also said: "The history of art is complete.' Such is George Moore's lament. The story of the beautiful is written. We have to await the coming of a new goddess. Has he forgotten women? It is they who are writing to-day, probing, groping, unraveling; they surely will have a message and from the depths, for women are always in and of the essentials, and it was no woman who wrote Peter Pan. Their fairies are of this world. In this, their sex epoch, they will probably revolutionize the whole scope and purpose of fiction, even as Jane Austen and, notably, the Brontë girls began to do, with the introduction of passion. If George Moore is pessimistic, nous autres are not, even though the modern equation of Shelley be the air-boy. And at the very end Mr. Moor himself is optimistic, and clearly e intends to enjoy himself in his dugout, writing about the Troubadours and the love torments of Héloise and Abelard, a opy of why all who love literature subscribe for now, or be they will not be able to get it it does appear and 'high life' g for a book which, seeing that is the Middle Ages and the hould indeed provide matter conducive to n art and catholicity of This Mr. George Moore is select company to img our mortality to THE WINDMILL OF GRAEVE: A STORY BY H. BAGENAL LIKE a good ship, the windmill of Graeve had faced all winds and weathers for two centuries. It stood conspicuously on the top of a little grassy knoll, and from a distance the slender mill house was scarcely noticeable compared with the huge sails. The spread of the sails was nearly four times the width of the mill house. In a fair wind each blade could lift a man from the ground or deal a blow capable of killing an ox. These blades were the pride of the miller: their strong shafts, their delicate lattice framing, their red canvas sails showed them to be servants of the wind, beautiful and industrious; but the slim house that held them captive where the miller used their strength for his own quiet ends was no less excellent in its own way and had seen many a fine set of sails worn out and replaced. The mill house was built entirely of timber. From eaves to skirt the side walls were of long vertical elm planks set from the windward like weatherboards, so that each plank might protect the one behind it. The sail front, which of necessity faced the wind, was covered, like the peaked roof, with shingles resembling a scale armor of wood, and the whole surface of the mill in the course of many years and many gales had been blown to a silver gray, the color of the wind. The mill faced mostly west in autumn and mostly east in spring. Hence in came about that the miller, who frequently went in and out of his door on to the wooden platform high up on the back of the mill, lived mostly in view of Ypres towers in the autumn, but of the sainted Mont de Cats and her sister hills in the spring. The miller's name was Huibrecht de Neerhof. The mill had been in the possession of his family for many generations generations of hardworking, gentleminded Flemish men and women, united directly to the rich soil they lived upon and concerned wholly with the labor of its fruits. But some of the qualities which centuries before had produced artists of the first technique in Europe remained still in their blood. In the case of the present Huibrecht there was a pedantic thoroughness about each of his labors. In every wheel, bush, and spindle of his mill, made and mended by himself, there was simplicity of design and completeness of execution. There was also the instinct for form which can evolve its own decoration. The wooden lever over the flour chute which Huibrecht pushed to one side with a peculiar unconscious movement had a handle carved like an ear of corn. The newel post of the steep ladder stair which led up through a square hole into the grinding loft had on it a carved device of two sheaves and two sickles, and many other similar forms caught the eye. Half way to the ceiling on the wall opposite the door hung an oak panel carved in low relief by an old Neerhof many years ago, and now pegged to the wall with wooden pegs. It represented the Archangel Michael very high in the sky, engaged in fanning with his large wings and turning all the windmills |