For no single nation has the right to an air force, any more than a county has the right to an army. The air will defy all attempts at ownership. Pilots smile when they hear wise men talking about the air customs service. We shall have an amusing time watching those customs services. They will be established, no doubt, and they will lastfor a time. But the air has doomed international tariffs as surely as the octroi is doomed. The first citizen of the world, the superman who is coming, is likely to be the international military pilot. If he be taken young from the intellectual and physical aristocracy of the nations, and sent to the World's War College, a sort of super-Osborne in Egypt or California or other suitable climate, he may reach to heights in the reach to heights in the development of human faculty of which we have just begun to dream. All the great languages of the world he may speak with ease. Science can be his fairy godmother and the aeroplane and airship his magic carpet, so that he who reads may run, even to the end of the world. He will be the civilized man, knowing all countries and all peoples, and hating nothing that he knows. The sweet airs of the world will keep his mind clean, and the military and knightly tradition of faith, truth, and gentleness that has come down through the ages will weave its last and most perfect mantle for his shoulders as he studies the high and perilous art of war in the clouds. Spurned on the ground, and well-nigh stifled in the fumes of poison gas, chivalry has sprung into the air, to make it its eternal home. A force composed of such citizens of the world, and controlled by its own general staff, would be the irresistible servant of the League of Nations. No single nation would be able to influence it or to produce disloyalty in its disciplined cohesion. Its members would be so trained as to be as unlikely to put the interests of their native country before those of the world's justice and the world's peace as a British Prime Minister is unlikely to sacrifice the interests of our Empire to his native town, proud though he may be of the latter. Its stations would exist throughout the world on every frontier, and its squadrons would be ready to mete out swift punishment to any armed force that crossed a legal frontier. They would move on both sides of every frontier, so that no nation should have military surprises guarded from their eyes. If a national frontier, which for any reason became obsolete or unjust, were altered legally in the League's parliament, the World's Air Force would be there to enforce the new delimitation. And if, for instance, a restless tribe broke the peace of our Indian frontier, it would be the local squadrons of the World's Air Force, and not of Britain, that would be launched against it. There would be no need for delay, no need for reference to the tribunal of the League of Nations. The rights and wrongs of the quarrel could be settled in court afterwards, but forthwith any armed force operating on the wrong side of the frontier would be the enemy of the World's Air Force, just as the man who tries to wreak his private vengeance on his adversary's person promptly finds himself attended to by the police, however just his quarrel. With stores and petrol depôts on both sides of the frontier there would be little temptation to one nation to attempt a coup against the League's squadrons. The increasing ease of long-distance communications, and the speed with which the world's air fleets could be mobilized against the offender, would also deprive a rebellious nation of hope of more than a tempo VOL. 15-NO. 770 rary local success. For in time the air will be a supply route also, and air squadrons in emergency will be largely independent of land routes. Is not this the way? The International Review TIMOTHY WHITEBONNET AND TIMOTHY THE CAT BY E. M. FORSTER 'MIAOU!' some Such was the terrible sound which, half way through the fifth century, disturbed the slumbers of certain Monophysite monks. Their flesh crept. Moved by a common impulse, each stole from his cell, and saw, in the dimly-lighted corridor, a figure even more mysterious than pussy's thing that gibbered and bowed, and said, in hollow and sepulchral tones, 'Consecrate Timothy.' They stood motionless until the figure disappeared, then ran this way and that in search of it. There was nothing to be seen. They opened the convent doors. Nothing to be seen except Alexandria glimmering, still entirely marble; nothing except the Pharos, still working and sending out from the height of five hundred feet a beam visible over a radius of seventy miles. The streets were quiet, owing to the absence of the Greek garrison in Upper Egypt. Having looked at the tedious prospect, the monks withdrew, for much had to be done before morning: they had to decide whether it was an angel or a devil who had said 'Miaou.' If the former, they must do penance for their lack of faith; if the latter, they were in danger of hell-fire. While they argued over a point that has puzzled the sharpest of saints, the attention of some of them began to wander, and to dwell on one who was beyond doubt a devil-Proterius, whom the Emperor had imposed on them as their Patriarch, and who slept in a convent near by. They cursed Proterius. They reflected too that in the absence of the garrison he no longer slept safely that they were Egyptians and numerous, he a Greek and alone. They cursed him again, and the apparition reappeared repeating, 'Consecrate Timothy.' Timothy was one of their own number and the holiest of men. When, after an interval, they ran to his cell, they found him upon his knees in prayer. They told him of the ghostly message, and he seemed dazed, but on collecting himself implored that it might never be mentioned again. Asked whether it was infernal, he refused to reply. Asked whether it was supernal, he replied, 'You, not I, have said so.' All doubts disappeared, and away they ran to find some bishops. Melchite or Aryan or Sabæan or Nestorian or Donatist or Manichæan bishops would not do: they must be Monophysite. Fortunately, there were two, and on the following day Timothy, struggling piously, was carried between Cleopatra's Needles into the cathedral and consecrated Patriarch of Alexandria and of all the preaching of St. Mark. For he held the correct opinion as to the nature of Christ the only possible opinion: Christ has a single nature, divine, which has absorbed the human: how could it be otherwise? The leading residential officials, the municipal authorities, and the business community thought the same; so, attacking Proterius, who thought the contrary, they murdered him in the Baptistery, and hanged him over the city wall. The Greek garrison hurried back, but it was too late. Proterius had gone, nor did the soldiers regret him, for he had made more work than most bishops, having passed the seven years of his episcopate in a constant state of siege. Timothy, for whom no guards need be set, was a great improvement. Diffident and colloquial, he won everyone's heart, and obtained, for some reason or other, the surname of the Cat. Thus the coup d'église had succeeded for the moment. But it had to reckon with another monk, a second Timothy, of whom, as events proved, the angel had really been thinking. He was Timothy Whitebonnet, socalled from his headgear, and his life was more notable than the Cat's, for he lived at Canopus, where the air is so thick with demons that only the most robust of Christians can breathe. Canopus stood on a promontory ten miles east of Alexandria, overlooking the exit of the Nile. Foul influences had haunted it from the first. Helen, a thousand years ago, had come here with Paris on their flight toward Troy, and though the local authorities had expelled her for vagabondage, the ship that carried her might still be seen, upon summer nights, ploughing the waves into fire. In her train had followed Herodotus, asking idle questions of idle men; Alexander, called the Great from his enormous horns; and Serapis, a devil worse than any, who, liking the situation, had summoned his wife and child and established them on a cliff to the north, within sound of the sea. The child never spoke. The wife wore the moon. In their honor the Alexandrians used to come out along the canal in barges and punts, crowned with flowers, robed in gold, and singing spells of such potency that the words remained, though the singers were dead, and would slide into Timothy Whitebonnet's ear, when the air seemed stillest, and pretend to him that they came from God. Often, just as a sentence was completed, he would realize its origin, and have to expectorate it in the form of a toad-a dangerous ex ercise, but it taught him discernment, and fitted him to play his part in the world. He learned with horror of the riots in the metropolis, and of the elevation of the heretical Cat. For he knew that Christ has two natures, one human, the other divine: how can it be otherwise? At Constantinople there seems to have been a little doubt. Leo, the reigning emperor, was anxious not to drive Egypt into revolt, and disposed to let Alexandria follow the faith she preferred. But his theologians took a higher line, and insisted on his sending a new garrison. This was done, the Cat was captured, and Whitebonnet dragged from Canopus and consecrated in his place. There matters rested until the accession of Basiliscus, who sent a new garrison to expel Whitebonnet. Once more the Cat ruled bloodily until the Emperor Zeno took the other view, and sending a However, the curtain may drop now. The controversy blazed for two hundred years, and is smouldering yet. The Copts still believe, with Timothy the Cat, in the single nature of Christ; the double nature, upheld by Timothy Whitebonnet, is still maintained by the rest of Christendom and by the reader. The Pharos, the Temple of Serapis - these have perished, being only stones, and sharing the impermanence of material things. It is ideas that live. The Athenæum A HUNDRED YEARS OF GEORGE ELIOT BY C. H. H. THE Warwickshire Midlands are now celebrating-a little before the event, for she was born in November - the centenary of the woman to whom, after Shakespeare, the literary 594 TIMOTHY rary l will } squa inde I n A HUNDRED YEARS OF GEORGE ELIOT dist motion of the county is chiefly due. are not made but seen, participators In the heyday of George Eliot's fame in an ethical tragedy which echoes in the comparison thus suggested by ggraphy was not seldom taken up, ting all questions of imaginative range us all. All Shakespeare's most consummate humor is drawn, not from the stuff of ordinary goings-on; and or played with, by criticism. And put- extravagance and caricature, but from morrow of the triumph of Adam Bede, able, as a creation, with Falstaff, beand intensity aside, it had, on the Mrs. Poyser, however incommensura certain plausibility which the subse- longs in this respect to the same plane, quent course of her genius, quite as as Micawber or Mrs. Gamp do not; a much as the general trans-valuation of kind of extravagance, now whimsical, Victorian values, has done much to efface. Here was a new writer, generquarters ally assumed, and in some known, to be a man, who was master now romantic, being the very element in which the genius of Dickens moved most freely, and created with most. assured and lasting power. Even more both of the most poignant tragedy and palpable was the difference between humor; who could hold readers breath- aged gentilities and sentimental affecof the gayest and most irresistible Thackeray's brilliant world of damtations and this story of primal symless with the recital of Hetty's anguished wanderings and yet delight their hearts with the wit and wisdom of Mrs. Poyser. And the new writer had tilted gayly at the practitioners of pretentious romance, who could paint fancy pictures as vividly as you pleased but could not draw with faithful precision the life before their eyes, just as Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost made game of the fops of fashion and the academic recluses, for whom the staple of common human nature, talk, and manners, was not fine enough. In her genius, as in his, there lay a deep bent to the normal and the natural, which asserts itself through his most fantastic plot and her most labored invention. We accept the pound of flesh, and even the caskets, as natural in modern Venice, because Shylock is no melodramatic villain and Portia no fairy princess, but veraciously real beings who compel us to believe in whatever happens to them. And we accept - less willingly and completely, no doubt the erudite literary fabrications which pass in Romola for the common talk of Florence because Tito and Romola herself pathies, of earth's natural laughter and tears, in the very heart of the English countryside. Brunetière, with just insight, recognized in George Eliot the founder of naturalism in the novel. With all the obvious disparity, she does stand, in the development of our novel writing, for a new start parallel to that of Flaubert in France. But he was careful to add that her novel is still a creation, and not, like Zola's, a scientific experiment; and, great as Zola was in his chosen domain, George Eliot would probably have replied to a claim of affinity, as Taine replied to the ardent Zolaist who hailed him as the founder of his school, by sending him a verse of Racine, written on a card: 'Le flot qui l'apporta recule épouvanté.' To us, no doubt, who look back at George Eliot's completed work, and with full knowledge of all that went before and followed after that wonderful outburst of creative power, the total picture looks almost incredibly different. Her mind, her history, and a great part of her work abound in traits not merely utterly un-Shakespearean but hardly suggestive of genius at all. Almost to the close of the fourth decade of her life that flowering time that flowering time of creative poetry-she was simply an able young woman who read and thought earnestly on religious problems, translated German theological criticism and philosophy, and wielded the sub-editor's blue pencil competently over eminent contributions to the Westminster Review. She sat docilely at the feet of Herbert Spencer, and listened with demure disapproval, only gradually overcome, to the 'flippant' jests of the brilliant G. H. Lewes. Her union with him, in 1854, was entered on in a spirit of grave and resolute protest against the restrictions imposed upon her happiness by a 'diabolical' law; an antinomianism which, however fully we may justify it, belongs to a lower spiritual plane than the lofty altruism and large social sense which pervade and inspire her creative work. Later on, again, the same contrast between a thoughtful, methodical, painstaking, but not very original or brilliant, intellect and the fresh fountains of a spontaneous creative power forces itself upon us. She goes through the galleries of Florence making conscientious notes-'A remarkably fine sea-piece by Salvator Rosa,' 'A placid, contemplative young woman with her finger between the leaves of a book, by Leonardo da Vinci,' and so on; and she makes more elaborate extracts from the Florentine histories and chronicles for the 'background' of Romola. It is a commonplace of criticism to contrast the laboriously got-up' antiquities of this novel with the spontaneous outflow of Scott's abundance from a mind steeped from boyhood in the records of the past. But that is not the whole matter. For when Scott turned from Scotland and England to France and Flanders, he also had to 'get up' environment and atmosphere from chronicles now read for the first time. Yet the result, in Quentin Durward, is as alive through and through as the Scotch novels themselves, and its publication revealed to the French with dazzling effect what treasures of unwritten drama lay unused in the records of their past. Scott's work at his sources was no doubt less meticulous than George Eliot's; he did not hold up his narrative for days, as she did, in order to determine the incidence of Easter in a particular year; but he knew precisely what he wanted, and his creative power organized and animated all his material, whereas George Eliot's 'scholarly' preparation was not even quite first rate as scholarship, for scholarship illuminates as well as collects, and it embarrassed as much as it informed the creative energy, intense and wonderful but far less plastic and protean than Scott's, put forth in a book which remains after all deductions very great. Are we, then, to regard the philosophic and scientific culture of George Eliot as merely regrettable obstruction to her proper genius as an artist? That would be a popular answer. But it would, to our mind, ignore a side of her work which is no more to be spared in a final estimate of her than the brooding intellectuality which went to the making of Hamlet (if one more reference to Shakespeare may be forgiven) can be spared in our final estimate of him. We would not be misunderstood. The marvelous fusion of ideas about life with lifelike elusive creation in Hamlet is nowhere approached by George Eliot. But in a lower plane it is paralleled; and beneath that summit there is scope and verge enough! In other words, George Eliot's 'philosophy,' however often a disturbing interloper in her art, has at certain points fertilized and enriched her imagination, and entered as a cre |