The women of to-day are so different from those of the preceding generation, so nearly their opposite, that the elders have every reason to desire to correct them of error. They are alert, but they are not placid enough to give their alertness its chance; their minds seem to follow a brilliant but unnatural ordder in discovering the implications of facts almost before they have recognized the facts. It is impossible to find anthem at a moment when they are not spending their vitality in some purposive way, so that they prefer painters, like Mr. Ambrose McEvoy, who do violence to their art, which ought to record preparation for movement rather than movement itself, by representing them fluttering with restlessness. They are obviously ready to avail themselves of the emotional opportunities open to women and yet they are almost androgynous in their lack of the gentleness and of leisure which are among the secondary feminine characteristics.

It would be hard to find sufficient women of to-day who were possessed of the large tranquillity that is appropriate to the cast of a Greek play; but there are many whose beauty has a real tragic significance. They are at once more and less fastidious than the typical figure of the last generation. They pursue their intellectual and social lions not too avidly but less discriminatingly, becoming involved with innumerable spurious movements of the arts, vulgar amassers of wealth; yet it is quite impossible to imagine that they would write in the newspaper concerning their proposals. Perhaps that is not altogether to their credit. It may be that they are too sensitive to the implications of certain facts.

The truth is that beauty ought not to be considered in a mass. If one does that one perceives to what degree it reflects the state of society in which it

was produced, and since all states of society are imperfect (particularly to the eye of the state that immediately precedes or succeeds it) this clouds the clear surface of its perfection. Vision of the opaque handsomeness of the women of the last generation, their smoothness, so innocent of lines traced by fastidiousness, is faintly jaundiced by our disapproval of an age that in the trough of prosperity between the Crimean and the South African War grew heavy with prosperity; while they dislike the restlessness of the beauties of to-day because it is the consequence of the trials of a period that must seem to them so much more uncomfortable than they had ever thought life could be. To do anything more than hail beauty when one sees it in one's present world is to exchange the emotion of the artist for the mild interest of the historian.

[The New Witness] AEROPLANES AND MORALS

BY G. K. CHESTERTON

THERE was recently a highly distinguished gathering to celebrate the past, present, and especially future triumphs of aviation. I rather think it was a dinner; but anyhow it was a festival if it was not a feast. Some of the most brilliant men of the age, such as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. J. L. Garvin, made interesting and important speeches, and many scientific aviators luminously discussed the new science. Among their graceful felicitations and grave and quiet analyses a word was said, or a note was struck, which I myself can never hear, in the most harmless after-dinner speech, without an impulse to jump up and scream and smash the decanters and wreck the dinner table.

Long ago, when I was a boy, I heard

it with fury; and never since have I been able to understand any free man hearing it without fury. I heard it when Bloch, and the old prophets of pacifism by panic, preached that war would become too horrible for patriots to endure. It sounded to me like saying that an instrument of torture was being prepared by my dentist, that would finally cure me of loving my dog. In a far milder and more unconscious form, through a far more indirect and delicate process of suggestion, I hear it of suggestion, I hear it again when so thoughtful a man as Mr. Garvin talks of aviation as altering all international policy, especially in the relation of England and America.

For I not only resent the suggestion that a machine can make me bad I resent almost equally even the suggestion that a machine can make me good. It might be the unfortunate fact that a coolness had arisen between myself and Mr. Fitzarlington Blenkinsop, inhabiting the surburban villa and garden next to mine; and I might even be largely to blame for it. But if somebody told me that a new kind of lawn mower had just been invented, of so cunning a structure that I should be forced to become a bosom friend of Mr. Blenkinsop, or even the business partner of Mr. Blenkinsop, I should be very much annoyed. I should be moved to say that if that was the only way of cutting my grass I would not cut my grass, but continue to cut my neighbor. Or suppose the difference were even less defensible; suppose a man had suffered from a trifling shindy with his wife. And suppose somody told him that the introduction of an entirely new vacuum cleaner would compel him to a reconciliation with his wife. It would be found, I fancy, that human nature abhors that vacuum. Healthy human beings will not be ordered about by bicycles and sewing machines; and man will not be made

good, let alone bad, by the things he himself had made. I have occasionally dictated to a typewriter; but I will not be dictated to by a typewriter. Nor have I ever met a typewriter, however large and complicated, who attempted to usurp such a position.

Yet this and nothing else is what is implied in all such talk of the aeroplane annihilating distinctions as well as distance; and an international aviation abolishing nationalities. This and nothing else is really implied in Mr. Garvin's prediction that such aviation will almost necessitate an AngloAmerican friendship. Incidentally, I may remark, it is not a true suggestion even in the practical or materialistic sense; and Mr. Garvin's phrase refuted Mr. Garvin's argument. He suggested that international relations must be different when men could get from th England to America in a day.

Well, for a long time past men could get from England to France in a day. Men could get from the coast of England to the coast of France very quickly through nearly all the ages during which those two coasts were bristling with arms against each other. They could get there very quickly when Nelson went down by that Burford inn to embark for Trafalgar; they could get there very quickly when Napoleon sat in his tent in that Boulogne camp that filled England with the alarums of invasion. Are these the amiable and pacific relations which will unite England and America, when Englishmen can get to America in a day? The shortening of the distance seems quite as likely, so far as that argument goes, to facilitate that endless guerilla warfare which raged across the narrow seas in the Middle Ages; when English invaders burned the crops in Brittany or French invaders carried away the bells of Rye. I do not know whether American privateers, landing

f

in Liverpool, would carry away a few of the more elegant factory chimneys as a substitute for the superstitious symbols of the past; or whether it would be considered a corresponding calamity, if English raiders burned at large quantities of the manufacturing machinery of New York.

But anyhow it is anything but selfevident that people cannot fight each other because they are near to each other; and if it were true there would Th never have been any such thing as bordder warfare in the world. As a fact

border warfare has often been the one sort of warfare which it was most difficult to bring under control. In plain words, we have been congratulating ourselves for centuries on having enjoyed peace because we were cut off from our neighbors; and now they are telling us that we shall only enjoy peace when we are joined up with our neighbors. We have pitied the poor nations with frontiers because a frontier only produces fighting, and now we trusting to a frontier as the only thing that will produce friendship. But, as a matter of fact, and for far deeper and more spiritual reasons, it will not produce friendship. Only friendliness produces friendship. And the thing which produces friendliness lies far deeper in the spirit of man.

are

Apart, therefore, from this fallacy about the facts, I feel a strong abstract anger against the idea, and even against the ideal. If it were true that men could be taught and tamed by machines, I should think it was the most tragic truth in experience; even if they were taught wisdom or tamed to amiability. A man so taught and tamed would be, in an exceedingly ugly sense, losing his soul to save it. But in truth he cannot be so completely coerced into good; and in so far as he is incompletely coerced, he is quite as likely to Ebe coerced into evil. It is needless

to say, of many of the philosophies and philanthropies supporting such schemes, that the good is evil. The light in their bodies is darkness; and the very highest objects of such men are often the lowest objects of ordinary men. Their peace is often personal safety, and their international friendship a convenience of international finance. The best we can say of that special school of capitalism is that at least it will be unsuccessful. All its visible manifestations are materialistic; but at least its visions will not materialize. Its worst we suffer, but its best we shall at any rate escape; we may continue to suffer the realities of cosmopolitan capitalism, but we shall be spared its ideals.

'Peace to all such'; for I do not deal here with such vulgar cosmopolitanism, but with the vaguer and subtler way in which the same error affects minds of the very finest type. Men like Mr. Wells and Mr. Garvin do not easily dismiss from their minds, I fancy, a general notion that anything so new, so striking, and even startling, as humanity gaining the power to fly must make some momentous difference to their normal morals and mentality. They do not crudely think of aviators as nearer to angels; but they do generally think of aviation as nearer to the heights of imagination and ideality. In that general sense they think the machine will transform the man. Everybody will remember that splendid stream of prose at the end of Tono Bungay, which describes the rush of the hero in the flying machine down the valley of the Thames, and seems to suggest a sort of answer from the clean and steely energy of the mind of man to all the foul decay and wastage that went to swell a mushroom millionaire. But Mr. Wells wrote that passage because he is a prose poet, not because he is an aviation expert. The poet puts

poetry into aviation, or at any rate he gets it out of aviation, as he gets it out of archery or artillery. But men are not made poets by aviation any more than archery. So a little boy, a hundred years ago, could look up and see his kite sailing in the clouds. If you told him he could sail on his own kite, he would go mad with joy at such a stroke of magic. But that would be because the boy is a boy, not because the kite is a kite.

In truth if there is one thing that really refutes this fallacy or illusion, it is an aeroplane. I have talked to very many of the young Englishmen whose valiant adventures in the air were the glory of the great campaign. They were varied as well as valiant; but if there was one remark which recurred with comparative frequency, it was the remark that the four hours of trial flight were rather monotonous because there was nothing to do. That is the moral that really remains, after all the magic of the machinery invented by man. A man actually attains to the wings of an angel; and the first thing he does is to feel bored. Or rather, to speak more truly, he owes it to something older than the aeroplane if he does not feel bored. He owes it to a certain faculty, which any man in any age might have enjoyed on a horse or in a swing or at the top of a tree. But it is vain to have the power of inventing magic machines, if the same philosophy which is always augmenting the machines is always diminishing the magic.

But

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tual necessity without which a biplane] is no more romantic than a bath chair. Thus in both these aspects of aviation, its services to peace and its ele- r ments of poetry, its admirers put the cart before the horse, or whatever may be the aeronautical equivalent of that old-fashioned figure. I need not say that I hope and believe there may be peaceful relations between Englishmen and Americans, and poetical relations between aviators and aviation. the peaceful and poetical relations will exist first, and the political and scientific methods follow upon them. It may seem queer that we should be offered as an instrument of ideal peace something that has hitherto been almost entirely used as an instrument of peculiarly infernal war; or as a pure refreshment of the spirit what has so often been a weariness to the flesh. But the only real harm that comes from scientific discoveries consists in a few false starts and futile digressions; that distract men from their true pursuit of nourishing the spirit, by a power that makes all things new.

The secret of enjoying being in an aeroplane is still the secret of enjoying being in an apple tree; it is the secret of being a little boy; or, as a more transcendental tradition has expressed it, becoming as a little child. And if that transcendental tradition has indeed any practical possession of that secret, it possesses a permanent spiri

[Punch]

BADLY SYNGED

THE Scene is the morning room of the Smith-Hybrows' South London residence. It is the day following the final performance of the Smith-Hybrows' strenuous season of J. M. Synge drama, undertaken with the laudable intention of familiarizing the suburb with the real Irish temperament and the works of the dramatist in question.

Mrs. Smith-Hybrow is seated at the breakfast table, her head buried behind the coffee urn. She is opening her letters and 'keening' softly as she rocks in her chair.

Mrs. Smith-Hybrow (scanning a letter). Will I be helping them with the sale of work? It's little enough the

like of me will be doing for them the way I was treated at the last Bazaar, when Mrs. McGupperty and Mrs. Glyn-Jones were after destroying me with the cutting of the sandwiches. And was I not there for three days, from the rising of the blessed sun to the shining of the blessed stars, cutting and cutting, and never a soul to bear witness to the destroying labor of it, and the two legs of me like to give way with the great weariness? (keens) I'll have no call this year to be giving in to their prayers and beseechings, and I won't care the way the Curate will be after trying to come round me, with his eyes looking at me the way the moon kisses the drops of dew on the hedgerows when the road is white.

[Opens another letter, keening the while in a slightly higher key. Enter Gertrude Smith-Hybrow. She crosses to the window and stares out.

Gertrude. There are black clouds in the sky, and the wind is breaking in the west and making a great stir with the trees, and they are hitting one on the other. And there is rain falling, falling from the clouds, and the roads be wet. Mrs. S.-H. It is your mackintosh you will be wanting when you are after going to the Stores.

Gertrude (coming to the table and speaking with dull resentment). And why should I be going to the Stores the way I have enough to do with a meeting of the League for Brighter Homes and a luncheon of the Cubist Encouragement Society? Is n't it a queer hard thing that Dora cannot be going to the Stores, and her with time enough on her hands surely?

[Sits in her place and begins keening. While she has been speaking Dora has entered hurriedly, but

toning her jumper.

Dora (vigorously). And is it you, Gertrude Smith-Hybrow, that will be

talking about me having time on my hands? May the saints forgive you for the hard words, and me having to cycle this blessed day to Mrs. Montgomery's lecture on the Dadaist Dramatists, and the meringues and the American creams to be made for to-night's Tchekoff Conversazione. Is it not enough for a girl to be destroyed with the play-acting, and the wind like to be in my face the whole way and the rain falling, falling?

[Sits in her place and keens. Mrs. S.-H. (after an interval of keening). Is it your father that will be missing his train this morning, Dora SmithHybrow?

Dora (rousing herself and selecting an egg). It is my father that will be missing his train entirely, and it is his son that would this minute be sleeping the blessed daylight away had I not let fall upon him a sponge that I had picked out of the cold, cold water.

Gertrude. It is a flapper you are, Dora Smith-Hybrow.

Dora. It is a flapper you will never be again, Gertrude Smith-Hybrow, though you be after doing your queer best to look like one.

Mrs. S.-H. Whist! Is it the time for loose talk, with the wind rising, rising, and the rain falling, falling, and the price of butter up another threepence this blessed morning?

[They all three recommence keening. Enter Mr. Smith-Hybrow followed by Cyril.

Mr. S.-H. (staunching a gash in his chin). Is it not a hard thing for a man to be late for his breakfast and the rain falling, falling, and the wind rising, rising. It's destroyed I am with the loss of blood and no food in my stomach would keep the life in a flea.

[Sits in his place and opens his letters savagely. Cyril, a cadaverous youth, stares gloomily into the depths of the marmalade.