a terror which no one can embody in words, no one can explain and justify, but which vaguely hovers over the thoughts of men. It is the terror inspired by a mysterious and hopeless disease which they do not understand or comprehend, but which they are even more keenly aware of for that fact. All they know about it is its name. They call it Bolshevism. At the French border station of Modane three officers searched my books and papers for nearly an hour to assure themselves that I had no Bolshevik propaganda in my luggage. They said I was the first Austrian who had passed this point and it was incredible to think that I could be anything else than a Bolshevik. Finally, they seized with great satisfaction a letter to Sokolof in Paris. I called their attention to the fact that Sokolof was well accredited with the French government. The prompt answer was 'Mais c'est un nom russe.'

So the hatred of the Germans seems to have vanished in Rome. The hatred of the Austrians, which still remains as a more or less intellectual conception, is very moderate. The first breach in the hatred of Germany was made perhaps by German music. It was followed up by the devotion of Italian scholars to German philosophy. There was a sigh of relief through all Italy when the armistice permitted Wagner to be replaced on the concert programme. Brahms and Beethoven had never been rejected since they were not so German as Wagner, and the emo

The Neue Freie Presse (Vienna)

tion they aroused was not likely to be so perilously pro-German as that inspired by Wagner. Now German music is almost exclusively played in the important concerts. However, oddly enough, when advertising Vienna operas, the names of the composer and librettist are usually omitted. Even the names of the leading parts are translated into French. However, they cannot do without the music, and the Merry Widow is having a decided run. The reversal of Italian sentiment toward Germany, encouraged politically by the isolation of Italy in the Entente, intellectually by German art and science, sentimentally by the instinctive disposition of the Italian to mourn for fallen greatness, finds public expression in many ways. At one time it manifests itself in a popular demand for the union of German Austria to Germany. At another time it expresses itself in admiration for German organizing ability which has enabled the country to recover speedily after its collapse and to create a national assembly. Then again, the appeal for closer association comes from artistic and literary circles. Last of all, there seems to be a growing impression that in the eternal action and reaction of history there is to be a repetition of something that has gone before, but will, nevertheless, be newa closer connection with the North, possibly in conformity with some existing political arrangement or under a new dispensation which is yet to arise.

SO

NOVELISTS often complain that people speak with contempt of novel reading. The justice of their complaint depends upon what they mean. If they mean that their art is despised, they could not possibly be more wrong than they are. The lyric and the novel have for the last fifty years or more superseded all other literary forms. Novels long ago attained such a position that a man like Landor, who lived habitually with the literatures to which they are unknown, and knew the world's great epics, especially Homer and Milton, almost by heart, rejoiced in them as 'the least tiresome kind of epics.' Sixty or seventy years ago it might still be possible to think that the writer of Grote's History of Greece was a higher kind of man of letters than the authors of Vanity Fair and Dombey and Son, which were written about the same time. But that is quite impossible now. Everyone saw that Stevenson belonged to a higher order of the literary hierarchy than, say, Bagehot or Lecky; as everyone sees that Mr. Hardy and Mr. Conrad belong to a higher order than even such highlyhonored veterans of history, philosophy, or criticism as Lord Morley, Sir George Trevelyan, and Mr. Saintsbury. Why? For the very simple reason that the first two have not only claimed the right of creation, but have shown themselves possessed of the powers which justify the claim; while the last three have never so much as claimed the right or pretended to the powers. The novelist is now seen to rank with the poet. Scott did for his age just what Homer did for the early Greeks. Anatole France does for the French the work of Aristophanes, and

Mr. Hardy for us something like the work of Euripides. There may be, indeed there are, many deductions and qualifications to be made both from the general principle and from these particular parallels. But the broad truth remains. The re-creation of the world by means of the imagination, that giving of form to the chaos of life, which is the task of the finest art and of the rarest qualities in the mind of man, is now divided between the poet and the novelist, and is in fact more frequently though never so perfectly accomplished by the latter.

This new position of the novel may be measured by the change which has come over the official, or more or less Almanack de Gotha, status of the novelist. Such things always follow a generation or so behind the movements of intelligent opinion. They are not to be blamed for that. It is the business of intelligence to do pioneer work, which often gets on to a wrong track. Official bodies which commit whole orders or nations, wisely follow only when the track has proved itself able to lead somewhere. But then they do follow. So we see to-day. Seventy years ago how many novelists were there elected, as novelists, to the French Academy? To-day any novelist of real imaginative power, any man who can both create and write, is almost certain of his place there, in spite of the fact that elections to the Academy are not always made on purely literary considerations. Seventy years ago Grote would have been thought a far fitter president for the London Library or the Society of Authors than Dickens or Thackeray. To-day it is Thomas Hardy whom the Society of Authors prefers above all

others for its president, and yesterday George Meredith was among the three vice-presidents of the London Library. The most distinguished of all honors, the Order of Merit, has been given to three novelists, and not, as yet, to a single poet, for it seems certain that it was as novelists and not as poets that Meredith and Mr. Hardy were named to the Order; and Henry James wrote no poetry. The National Gallery is at this moment exhibiting a portrait of Henry James presented to the writer by a body of subscribers who were moved as much by admiration of the artist as by love of the man; while it was accepted from him by the nation as the portrait of one whose high place among English men of letters is unquestioned and unquestionable. Has that ever happened before in the case of a novelist's portrait, and in his lifetime? For these arrangements were made before Henry James's death, and before he became a British subject. Nor was he ever a popular figure, either as writer or as man. The tribute was paid to him by the intellectuals with the respectful acquiescence of the great public to whom the things which interested him and the way in which he expressed his interest were alike unintelligible. It was a public recognition that a great novelist, like a great poet, is a man to be honored even by those who themselves cannot read him.

Here, then, is the novelist definitely emerged from the status of intruder, parvenu, or poor relation in the world of letters: admitted indeed as by right, on equal or almost equal terms, into the circle of its very highest and noblest family. But it is just there that the difficulty comes in. That society makes certain demands upon those who enter it. Any attempt to enter it without a wedding garment exposes the intruder not only to rejection but to punishment, which may easily involve weep

ing and gnashing of teeth. Mediocribus esse poetis must be a law for novelists as well as for poets directly they claim to share the poet's throne. And then they must come in the right spirit. A poet who turns out poetry for the market as a tradesman turns out his wares, a poet who looks at the spectacle of life with the eye of a newspaper reporter always seeing without ever perceiving, is not merely despised; he is hated for profaning the name and fellowship of the poets. So now it must be with the novelists. Nobody despises tradesmen or newspaper reporters, and if novelists had never chosen to be anything more nobody would have despised novelists. But after The Heart of Midlothian and Far from the Madding Crowd and Youth, after La Vieille Fille and Un Cœur Simple, after A Sportsman's Sketches and Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, there can be no going back. To-day a novelist can no longer be a journalist or a tradesman with impunity.

That is one of the difficulties which inevitably follow from an art coming of age and having to be taken seriously. To take a humble illustration, it is like the difference between fifty years ago and to-day in the matter of playing the piano. Nobody took music seriously then, and as a result every young lady who had passed beyond her scales would be asked to perform to her mother's friends, and did so without either feeling or appearing contemptible. Now that is impossible. The musical education of the country, though backward enough, as a glance at any music-seller's windows will show, has at last advanced so far as to forbid our forcing every girl to learn to sing and play, irrespective of any question of her possessing a voice or an ear, and to make us require a certain standard before those who may ultimately be able to perform are invited or allowed to do

so in public. In the same way the art of the novelist has grown up, and we have been educated to take it seriously and can no longer endure with patience the punctual arrival every three months of another of Mr. A.'s 'machines' or another of Miss B.'s fashion books.

There lies one cause of the contempt of novels in the antithesis between the greatness of the possibilities of the art as revealed by its masters and the vulgarity, triviality, and commercialism of the bulk of its practitioners. The 'mediocre' poets, who annoy us also, are neither so numerous nor so vulgar; and the public gives them no chance of being so commercial. That is where their art helps even them: its nobility and its difficulty almost forbid vulgarity, and put serious obstacles in the way of commercialism. It is the advantage of sculpture as compared with painting. The sculptor has a more difficult art and much less chance of popularity. The result is that there are fifty bad painters for one bad sculptor. The novelist and the painter find their art too easy. Applause of a kind, to say nothing of profit, can be bought in it at too cheap a rate; and the incompetent come in crowds to obtain it. To write a fourth-rate novel is a kind of trick requiring the fewest and lowest intellectual attainments, and in consequence winning and deserving no more respect than is paid to a juggler. Each has learned to perform a trick which we cannot ourselves perform and do not desire to that is all. It may, or may not, amuse us a little for ten minutes or a few hours. But even if it does, the performer, who is a mere tradesman selling his goods, has no claim to the respect and gratitude which are instantly given to the artist and to him alone.

Nor do such performances bring with them any indirect honor. It is prob

ably not difficult to learn to drive a ! plough or make a coat, and both occupations are commonly pursued solely for the reward they earn. But even the less interesting of the two is ancient and useful, and wins the respect that fairly belongs to ancientry and utility; while the other is, in addition, one of the most beautiful actions which man has ever been seen to perform. But inferior novel writing is neither an ancient nor a beautiful occupation, and scarcely at all a useful one. And of all kinds of writing it gives the least promise that the writer will prove an interesting man or woman. As a photographer who lives by the daily and mechanical reproduction of dull faces which mean nothing to him is almost inevitably a dull man, so with the journeyman novelist. He lives his life with his commonplace echoes of the obvious as the photographer lives with his meaningless photographs; and he is no more likely than the photographer to have anything in him to interest other people. That is where other writers, of no high pretensions, get an advantage over him. The man who makes an edition of Virgil or a short history of France, or writes a book about beekeeping or a treatise on the poor law, is by no means certain to be good company. But he has at least the first qualification for it. For he has himself either lived in the best society, or been occupied in doing interesting or useful things, or in studying the way in which they are done. It is at least as likely to be due to our stupidity as to his if we fail to get anything interesting out of him about his bees or his poor men; and there is almost sure to be an advantage in having lived for years with such a man as Virgil or with the great names and great events which alone keep their heads above the flood of oblivion in a thousand years of history. The society kept by the journeyman novel

ist and photographer profits by no such process of selection and contains no such promise. Then there is another thing, more or less akin to this. The novelist, as has been suggested, is exposed to contempt by the ease of his art, if he be content to take it at its lowest. But he also suffers by a difficulty inherent in it, at least for those who take their imagination at all seriously. The historian, the biographer, the writer of memoirs, the critic, has so much given to him. The novelist has nothing. When he begins to talk of Becky or Bathsheba we care nothing for either. We do not believe in them unless he can make us believe; we do not mind whether they are happy or miserable, live or die, unless he can compel us to do so. That is why indifferent novels are to some of us exactly the most tedious reading in the world. We find more pleasure in a treatise on banking, and far more in a book of Euclid. These at least exercise the mind in a world of truth and provide it with useful information. Any intelligent man, however little concerned in finance, would, on the whole, rather understand it than not. But no intelligent man feels any similar a priori interest in the doings of Mr. A. and Miss B., who, as his intelligence coldly tells him, never so much as existed, and, if they had, would have for him neither importance nor interest. Only the imagination can silence that cold intelligence, and the imagination cannot be set working except by real power. Consequently, to those who demand that a book should interest either the intellect or the imagination, if it cannot interest both, no reading can be so tedious as one which records the empty doings of Mr. Brown, who never comes alive, and his ultimate marriage with Miss Robinson, who was nothing at all in the first chapter and is only a stuffed and clothed wax figure in the last.

Can anybody read The Black Arrow after he has grown up? Can anybody stop before the last page of Kidnapped? There is the contrast in a single author. But this advantage which the novelist has to earn, the historian, the critic, the writer of memoirs has given to him by the nature of things. We do not want to hear about David Balfour and Alan Breck till Stevenson makes us. We want to hear about famous events and great men because, being men, we are in love both with truth and with greatness. The dullest man on earth who personally knew Shakespeare or Napoleon, or even men who are dwarfs beside these, has no need to ask our ears; he has them without asking. Virgilium vidi tantum is his sufficient credential; 'did you once see Shelley plain?' our inevitable attitude toward him. Edward Phillips was not an interesting man, and the treadmill would very likely be as pleasant an occupation as reading a novel of his if he had written one; but he was Milton's nephew and knew him well. He is, therefore, sure of his audience before he begins. Eckermann was apparently rather a stupid man; but because he often talked to Goethe he was able to write one of the most interesting books in existence. So a stupid man who was in the Black Hole of Calcutta, or with Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham, or was a spectator of August 10th or 10th Thermidor or 19th Brumaire, or lived and took notes at the Court of Louis XIV or in the English Parliament in the days of Chatham or Burke, is sure of our attention beforehand. He may and often does throw it away after a while; but the point is that he starts with it and the novelist starts without it. And this is true not merely of firsthand reporters, but of students and critics. Anybody who writes about Rome, whether Republic, Empire, or Church; anybody who writes about