is considered a bad one, and the growing oppression is well suggested. The two families have suffered no loss, but the fighting is always becoming intenser and doubt and fear of the final issue continually increase. The report is received that Rudolph, the eldest Bertholdi, has been killed in action. Annemarie is thus left a widow, like her friend Lili Rossi, who had married an Italian officer before the outbreak of the war. The two women are thrown much more in each other's company. Lili falls in love with Heinz, the younger Bertholdi, who is an officer in the flying corps. Annemarie goes to stay at a watering place, the description of which forms an excellent study in German war-time psychology women anxious to have their attention diverted from the war and its horrors, the officers on leave desirous of nothing but to forget their experiences for a time in a mad rush of irresponsible pleasure.

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Two men fall in love with Annemarie a young officer and an older man, an industrial magnate of the Rhineland. Annemarie decides to accept the second. In the meantime the Bertholdi family, whose heroic struggle with the growing hardships is well depicted throughout, receive the news that Heinz has lost his sight. This is shortly before the retreat and the beginning of the end. He comes home and decides that, although he had come to love Lili, he cannot marry her in consequence of his blindness. But she insists that this makes no difference to her affections, and the two are formally betrothed Then comes the Revolution; and a vivid picture is given of the events in Berlin, where Lili and Heinz happen to be out walking. After an encounter with a crowd of rioters,

who wish to tear off Heinz's marks of his rank until they perceive that he is blind, the two go home; and the novel ends on the note of sentiment.

Der neue Blaubart* is a story of a Graf who lived in a villa in the Italian Alps with his daughter Leocardia. After the death of the child's mother he has a succession of love adventures. One of these, with an inn-keeper's daughter, results in the girl's suicide and the naming of the Count 'the new Bluebeard.' He grows old, his beloved Leocardia marries the son of a friend of his youth, and he is left alone. 'He who had so often deserted is himself at last deserted.' The most remarkable feature of the book is not the rather monotonous story, but the occasional passages of description of landscape.

MADAME SARAH BERNHARDT, in spite of the great fame she has attained not only as the creator of so many diverse characters on the stage, as well as in the capacity of theatrical manager, painter, and sculptor-she has exhibited at the Salon with successnow appears in yet another rôle. Her memoirs are well known to the public, but it is as a novelist that she now. makes her début in the pages of Excelsior. The first chapter of her first novel, La Petite Idole, gives a graphic picture of a young girl seeking to choose her own career. It is understood that the succeeding chapters will deal with bygone but arresting figures which, though they left the world's stage more than half a century ago, are still of arresting interest, in the persons of men of the world, actors, men of letters diplomats, and artists.

*Der Neue Blaubart. Von Georg Freiherr von Ompteda. (Berlin; Egon Fleischel. 6m.)

I HAVE been only three months in the United States, and I have seen little of them outside New York, Chicago, a few cities in the Northeastern States, and a few patches of open country. Some rapid travelers, with no greater acquaintance, can express their opinion of the American people decisively and with entire confidence. But for me it would be as absurd to generalize about Americans as to generalize about Europeans after three months in Paris and Marseilles. I can only say that I leave this continent with peculiar regret. I have found the men and women there so polite, so friendly, so ready to please and to be pleased. I have found them so companionable, so free from care, so casual about business, so indifferent to the daily worries of making a livelihood or maintaining a social position. To me they have seemed to possess all the fine qualities essential for human intercourse.

I do not know for certain to what these delightful characteristics are due. Partly, I suppose, to carelessness about money in a society where the line between rich and poor fluctuates so rapidly, and where 'Quickly come, quickly go' is answered by 'Quickly go, quickly come again!' Wealth is sometimes hereditary here, but no one seems to take any special pride in belonging to a parasite family which lives upon other people's work from one generation to another. The barriers and entanglements of 'family' hardly exist. They are not barbed as they were in Germany before the war,

and as I suppose they are still in England to-day. Social equality is unconsciously assumed, and courtesy between rich and poor is thought no miracle. There is a higher standard, not of special, but of general education than in our country, and the custom of educating boys and girls together removes shyness (a frequent cause of bad manners), though it is said to reduce the romance and passion which are the staple subjects of English and French novels and sentimental plays. I have not found it true that American women are much better educated and more intellectual than the men. Nor have I found that they spend their days in shopping, eating candy, and listening to lectures, while the men are toiling to death in the city's tumult. The men do not toil to death any more than in other countries, though they make more tumult about it. And the women are not in comparison more intellectual. The difference between men and women is much the same as in the rest of the world. But it is true that both men and women will listen to more lectures than the English will, and with greater patience.

This patience is partly due to American politeness, but partly to a lingering belief that if a lecturer comes from Europe he can diffuse a culture which it would be 'colonial' or 'provincial' not to absorb. One must remember, too, that lectures take the place of political meetings, which are not so common as in England, and are not characterized by any special knowl

edge, or by any humor beyond irrelevant anecdotes. But there are deeper

reasons.

The American people are by nature patient, by nature obedient. One reads patience and obedience in all manner of small details. Watch with what interminable patience the people will wait in queues. Watch their obedience to the police in traffic-the obedience of the foot-passengers waiting to cross, as well as the obedience of the drivers. Even a suicide will obey rather than risk a run. Or take the parks. In the Central Park of New York there is a large expanse of good grass among the outcropping rocks, yet I have never seen man, woman, or child venture to sprawl or even to walk on it. Perhaps it is forbidden by penalty, but I doubt if any penalty would keep the sprawlers in St. James's Park off. In a Pullman train there is sometimes one smoking carriage at the end. But if there is not, no one thinks of smoking except in the lavatory cupboards provided for men in each car, and usually crammed to suffocation with men washing and dressing as well as smoking. There is no place for a woman to smoke upon a train, and even in a restaurant or on a steamer a woman who smokes is stared at, and sometimes insulted.

Obedience to authority runs very deep here, and it is the more surprising when we remember the absence of control over the American child, who, as I noticed in a previous letter, is usually a tiresome, whining, and plaguey little 'terror.' By governors, officials, teachers, and lecturers obedience is naturally welcomed and esteemed, but I doubt if the American people gain by it. After all, it was through obedience that Germany fell, and other nations should take warning by so appalling an example; for obedience is young despotism's ladder. American obedi

ence keeps Eugene Debs in prison for ten yearsEugene Debs, the Socialist leader, most innocent and lovable of men. Obedience keeps Mollie Steimer, the young pacifist girl, in prison for fifteen years. Obedience keeps Jim Larkin, the Irish Labor leader, in Dannemora prison, where, I am told, the treatment is so hideous that his chief prayer is to be returned to Sing Sing before the state can accomplish its purpose of killing him. Obedience allows about a thousand political prisoners to be kept in prison under the Espionage Act (our D.O.R.A.'s ugly twin), though the war for which the Act was passed has been over twenty months. Among those prisoners there are said to be seventy conscientious objectors, and it is American obedience that keeps them there. Even D.O.R.A. has not been so relentless in malign injustice. That is because English obedience cannot be so securely counted upon, though we are still, as Burke said, a fierce people.

Why are Americans more patient, more obedient under oppression and injustice than their ancestors were? Why do they submit so quietly to what one of their own poets (one might say their only poet) called 'the never ending audacity of elected persons'? Perhaps it comes from the rigid habits inculcated by those depressing Pilgrim Fathers. Perhaps from the bygone habit of negro slavery, and the continued presence of millions from whom absolute obedience is still expected. Perhaps from the large intermixture of races Jews, Slavs, Italians, and so on who inherit little of our fierce temper, and have been accustomed for centuries to endure domination. The presence of these foreigners is to many also a constant source of fear, and fear is a great incentive to obedience.

When at least one quarter of a

country's population is of foreign descent, the main body of inhabitants (the '100 per cent Americans,' as one hears them called to satiety) are cautious of any change, and fear every opposition to official rule. They bear the ills they know the Secret Police, shameless and avowed employment by government of agents provocateurs (called 'undercover informants' by their employers, and 'stool pigeons' by their deluded victims). They bear the atrocious system of keeping prisoners 'incommunicado' before trial, and the unspeakable abominations of 'the Third Degree.' To submission under these atrocities at the hands of the state fear reconciles a nominally free and democratic people.

Perhaps it is this fear of unknown change that keeps the Americans patient also under their Constitution. The Constitution is to them the Ark of the Covenant, the Law of the Medes and Persians. Foreigners perceive it to be obviously obsolete a form of government fairly well designed by predecessors of the French Revolution, but as much out of date as Washington's gilded sword. Yet, if I suggest the advantage of the melting-pot, or even the smallest change in the creaking old machine, I hear a gasp go round the circle as though I had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. Yet, after all, the greatest danger to America's freedom greater even than fear or the adoration of the constitutional idol is space. The continent of the states is so vast that indignation cannot concentrate.

The government in Washington may impose injustice, but resistance to injustice cannot gather head. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are too far from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to muster their forces of indignation and to strike together. Each state, it is true, has its own gov

ernment, and each government is as capable of injustice as any other form of government. But in each state the injustice may be thwarted, as was seen in the case of the Lusk Laws, passed at Albany for the State of New York, but vetoed amid general applause by the Governor of the State. When the central government's action affects the whole continent it is a harder matter to organize resistance. It is almost impossible for indignation to concentrate as it concentrates in London, and so 'that cold-hearted monster, the state,' as Nietzsche called it, goes unchecked and even uncriticized upon its way to the brutish 'standardization' of men and women.

But I will not end my visit to these hopeful and attractive people upon the note of criticism. Rather, as the shore fades in distance, I will dwell in memory upon my vision of the one place that above all others I longed to see in their country. For wandering among the woods that encircle Walden Pool, I thought only with grateful joy of the race which produced Thoreau, the patient lover of nature, the impatient rebel against the injustice of the state, who is to me the most lovable type of the American and of mankind.

[The New Statesman] IMMODESTY: A MODEST ESSAY

THE cables from America told us the other day of a Catholic priest who refused to perform the marriage ceremony because he considered the bride was immodestly dressed. She accordingly had to go home and change her clothes, after which she was given the benefit of Christian marriage. It is difficult to read of such an incident without a smile. Yet the Puritanical priest is not an oddity among human beings. His convention of modesty

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may be a shade different from that of other people, but the convention of modesty itself is practically universal. Everybody draws the line, as we say, somewhere. And everybody is shocked (or tickled) if other people do not draw the line in almost the same place.

No man would propose to live a hundred per cent in public. He instinctively lives a part of his life in secret. He is ashamed, in certain circumstances, of the gaze of his fellows, and he easily persuades himself that he th has a duty to be so ashamed. He would even impose a decalogue of shame on other people, and he feels hostile to them if they do not accept the same standards as himself. Hence hes the iron law of decency. In the ninethteenth century it was common to find men of letters denouncing the instinct of modesty. They felt that shame was being carried too far when a lady would offer you a limb of a chicken in fear of raising a blush by the use of the word 'leg,' and when the very legs of the table were, according to the anecdote, dressed in trousers.

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The Puritanism that at one time fined even a husband and wife who were seen kissing in public, and that to the present day forbids a girl in a convent school to bathe her body as ordinary human beings bathe theirs, seems to most of us to make life unnecessarily evil- to invent sins where they do not exist. We call this sort of thing prurience, and with some justice. An excessive passion for modesty is more likely to be the outcome of a sense of sin than of innocence. The Puritans, we may take it, were stern, not because they were cold, but because they were susceptible to desire. If they had been as frigid as statues, they would have worried as little as statues about what to wear. Angels, we may be sure, have no modesty. There would be very little modesty if

it were not for sex and the temptations of sex. The saying that to the pure all things are pure is perfectly true. It is untrue only on the lips of those who follow the cult of Peeping Tom, and wish to justify themselves with a text of Scripture.

Saints are not so easily shocked as suburbans. If once human beings ceased to look on each other as objects of desire, it would not matter twopence whether they dressed like balletgirls or like Plymouth Brethren. As it is, our views on dress are bound to vary according to whether we regard desire as an admirable or a reprehensible thing. Among the religious during certain periods the dominant attitude has been one of absolute hostility to desire. They have proclaimed that both for man and woman the ideal life is one of virginity. It was only logical that people who took this view should regard the body as a temptress, and should see to it that it must dress itself up in no vain allurements. Not for them the body armed with ornaments - with hair, and neck, and breast, and wrist, and ankle bright with precious metals and jewels. Rather the body was the skeleton in the cupboard, and must on no account be allowed to stray into the wardrobe. It was but earthy matter carrying and incidentally defiling the golden burden of the immortal soul. It was a waste of time even to wash such an object. The great thing was to cleanse the soul and leave the body to its filth.

Many Christians deliberately abstained from physical cleanliness as a symbol of their contempt for the flesh which is grass and withers like the grass. For them the soul and the body stood in eternal opposition, and to love the one was to hate the other. The body, indeed, was only the Devil's trap for the soul. The happiest moment of their lives would be the mo