chological analyses, etc., undertaken from time to time, for races are forever changing, and one prejudice should not be replaced by another. Let me call to the general attention one of those volumes in which an inquiring spirit paints for his fellow citizens the characteristics of a foreign country.

Before me lies a brochure by Mr. John Erskine, entitled French Ideals and American, and dated from Beaune in the Cote d'Or. Mr. Erskine, once a professor at Boston if I am not mistaken, is the director of a university which has been created since the armistice for those officers and soldiers of the American Expeditionary Corps who wish to pursue higher studies. Mr. Erskine is a man of a wise and open mind, and I hold in high esteem the idea of France which he has put before his young hearers.

'Before the war,' he writes, 'Americans passed for being millionaires occupied with material interests. Later, while still continuing to be regarded as millionaires, Americans were considered as idealists. And when these crusaders landed in Europe their first cry was "What funny little locomotives!" So some concluded that since machinery interested them so greatly, it might be preferable for them to pay a visit to the Germans, who hold machinery in more honor. But if the Americans spoke thus, it was because they could but ill express their idealism. The Americans, like unto the French, put spirit above matter. Only it must be understood that the French genius has been doing so for centuries.

'Without doubt, the French do not attach to personal hygiene the importance which it bears in the eyes of the Americans. To make up for this, however, they do not slap the shoulders of new acquaintances, and call them by their first names. It is only in the United States that one finds the fam

ily living room wide open to the gaze of every passer-by on the street. There is an art of friendship and intimacy to which Americans have not yet attained. During the war the word foyer, in spite of its literary meaning, passed very naturally into the conversation of the French soldiery, so well does it translate the ancient need of the Latin to feel himself in communion with the earth, in touch with the air of home, with the definite locality in which so many generations have been born and have died. In the United States only two or three per cent of the soldiers, at the recruiting period, inhabited the towns in which they were born. An American says quite casually, "Let's go home to the hotel," which implies that the home is where the valise is. And the family is for him only a group of personal relations without territorial ties.'

Mr. Erskine goes so far as to find religion in the love of a Frenchman for his native soil. If the agriculture of Burgundy does not resemble that of Wisconsin, it is because the French agriculture is less a quasi-industrial exploitation than a collaboration with Demeter and Bacchus. Therein lies the reason why this people prefer wine, a natural product, to beer, a manufactured product. Therein lies the reason why the French have so few children; it is the fear of having to divide the heritage and dilute the communion. American soldiers in France, seeing old roadmenders at work breaking stone with slight result, perhaps were astonished that these grandfathers were not in shelter and provided with a pension. But is it not more human after all to let the old fellow continue with his rôle of roadmender, thus preserving for himself an illusion that he is still good for something and worthy of a place in the world?

As regards the life within, in America the mind follows a sentimental rather than an intellectual path; in France she follows the road of reason, For a Frenchman liberty consists in knowing himself at home and free to choose his way. There is no virtue in France unless one is independent, independent even of law. France, for the mental pleasure which it gives her, formulates concepts, systems, and laws; but she refuses to be their slave. She founds the Academie Francaise and then flouts it. While America sees in life a struggle against bad instincts and temptations, a conception from which she draws an ideal and a morality, Françe considers the world as neither good nor bad, and decides to force it to conform to an order and to a hierarchy whence her ideal of intelligence and taste. More indulgent for a deliberate act if it corresponds even to a very free personal conception, she is more severe for an act whose sources are lying ones. She admits the lover and the saint; she despises equally the prostitute and the professional philanthropist.

For the American, art is an addition to existence, a museum luxury in which he rejoices if he has time and money. For the other, art is a matter of living one's daily life. If the Frenchman sometimes gives the impression of being artificial, it is because his civilization is not spontaneous but a hierarchy imposed upon nature. Consider the value in France put upon manners. 'Etiquette' is not a senseless routine but, a symbolism which appeals to the imagination. Good conversation at the table and good service, for instance, serve to deck an inferior need. Thus the American soldiers ate standing up in the middle of the road or seated any which way by himself, while the French soldier was sure to find himself a place a little bit out of the

way in which he could exchange thoughts with a few companions as well as eat.

Mr. Erskine's study is illumined with a fine and sincere generosity. What a noble effort of comprehension! Sometimes reproaches are cast at the American for being a young man of impetuous character and without delicacy. Let us not forget, however, that the American has all the possibilities of that youth to which he owes his enthusiasm, his sense of great things, his frankness, and his deep desire to know and to wonder.

Le Journal de Geneve

THE PERFECT HOLIDAY

BY J. J. BELL

"THE perfect holiday,' began the man with the mild eyes and silky beard.

'Exists only in the wealthy imagination,' finished the Lawyer.

'Come, come, Barlow!' the former gently expostulated.

'There's always a fly in the ointment,' the Lawyer asserted, with a law-courtly gesture.

'Don't know what you want with ointment on a holiday,' remarked the student of the sports page, and his neighbor, intent on Reviews of Books, murmured:

'It's the flies in everything that spoil holidays for me. For me the perfect holiday would be on the sea not by it if only my stom

'Nothing like a yachting holiday!' exclaimed the youngest in the compartment, who looked as though a sardine would have proved fatal. 'Got a yacht?' demanded the Lawyer.

strictly between ourselves, what is your idea of the perfect holiday?'

'Chloroform!'

term 'inner life' we do not mean the life symbolized in the town of Ballinasloe, for instance, by the huge steeple

No one believed the Lawyer.

But, later in the year, the Bookish Man stumbled on a discovery. him tell of it.

Let

'I went to the seaside as usual. On the last afternoon of my stay the the flies, by the way, were awful! I was walking on the beach when I came upon a family group. A stout lady, novel in hand, was dozing beneath an unbrella. Near by five children were amusing themselves with a man. One little girl twined dried seaweed in his few remaining hairs, while her sister daintily sifted sand down his back. A little boy was busy filling the paternal panama with sand and insects, with the intention, as he decared, of anointing and crowning the paternal pate therewith. Two little boys, screeching all the time, were burying the paternal legs. You have guessed that it was Barlow, though at first I did not recognize him. His complexion was crushed strawberry color with a frightful gloss; his eyes suggested sleepless nights, his

around. We are rather thinking of the kind of life to which such poems as The Jolly Beggars or Tam o' Shanter admits us. There must surely be a life of which the stranger sees nothing, although indeed it seems possible to tell what most of the inhabitants are doing. We suspect, after all, that life is mostly taken up by these simple and obvious doings, not only here but everywhere, till someone like Robert Burns comes along to create a little temporary stir. Human life everywhere is spread rather thinly over the surface of time, but deepens occasionally into those moments when it finds an interpreter. Someone has been writing in this journal of the school of realistic writers which has begun to interpret life in Ireland: but there is this peculiarity about most of the writers mentioned, that they seem relieved to be 'out of' the phases of life which they describe. By the unsparing quality of his realism we may estimate the writer's personal detachment. The mood of such realism is very different from the mood of The Jolly Beggars, in which the writer himself appears to rejoice in his theme: 'Pat M'Carty,' in the North, is the only Irish writer of this kind whom we can think of. We might go far in Ireland with this notion of literature as primarily a vehicle of

escape.

Wandering through Sinn Féin Ireland, it is remarkable how little one sees of Sinn Féin. Except for such legends, whitewashed up on the sides of houses, as 'Up Dublin,' 'Up the Rebels,' 'Don't vote for the English Hack,' etc., there is nothing anywhere to remind us of fierce and resentful passions. So it has been all our days in Ireland. We have heard of fierce

doings, as if a lion had been out ravaging the countryside, and when we come to the place, the rage of a lion seems not more difficult to believe in than that murder and outrage have passed that way. If you go out to see Sinn Féin you will not find it: Sinn Féin being in fact a wild and turbulent idea which is wandering up and down Ireland at present like a mythical monster. In a little town by the western shores of Lough Derg, for instance - a delightful little place, with a shore-road bordered with St. John's wort and a low Jack Yeats wall, running round by the pier under the village there had recently been wild scenes, the military having drawn a cordon across the top of the street and fired some shots; and the four rather sad-looking constabulary men stationed there wore revolvers. The mythical monster had, it appears, actually incarnated itself in these groups of young fellows playing pitch and toss in the road above the little pier. Sinn Féin is a dragon which has issued forth once more in these days from the dark irrational forest of Irish folk-memory and tradition. If it has a vulnerable point, no policeman's revolver will find it. Nevertheless, there are certain ideas of which it is afraid and which it never comes near, and for fear of them, perhaps, it never continues its depredations long in the same locality. In likening Sinn Féin to a dragon, however, and indicating thereby that some champion of the type of Perseus or Siegfried is required, rather than military force, to deliver the country from its depredations, we are far from suggesting that it is an entirely ignoble monster. Some of its heads and limbs have been said, by those who profess to have seen it, to bear a likeness to those of a beautiful woman. We half expect, in fact, when our Irish Siegfried has ap

peared and has tracked the monster to its lair, that he will discover that it is Kathleen Ni Houlihan herself who has been the victim all this time of a gloomy metamorphosis. It is an idea for which we wait, an idea which must embody itself in the beauty as well as the strength of this chimera.

The most interesting person at Mountshannon was one of the four constabulary men already mentioned, with as ingratiating a pair of eyes as we have looked into anywhere. Sinn Féin, he said, was dying out, by which he meant no doubt that the dragon had disappeared from that neighborhood. He proved to be a bookish man, a native Irish speaker of County Kerry, much interested in a member of his clan, the famous poet Eoghan Ruadh O'Sullivan. He spoke sadly of his relations with the young people of the district, most of whom would not speak to him, and boycotted him and his colleagues. The proper way to run this country would be to put in foreigners to do his job; the Ghurkas or Chinese would do it better,' he said, 'than an Irishman who had got Mass that morning.' This policeman, discharging his tasks in a spirit of 'detachment from works,' for which the philosophy of the East would have applauded him as a 'perfect performer of action,' has left us with an image of saintly toleration. Or was he in an intrinsically false position, from which he should have extricated himself at all costs had he been the saint we took him for? The truth was, he did not regard Sinn Féin in itself as a very serious affair, any more than did most Nationalists of the old school with whom we talked. Our host in a public house in Killaloe expressed his opinions in a comprehensive phrase. 'Ireland is one big lunatic asylum,' he said, 'and we are all inmates.'

As we arrived at the door of our