remembers. The boats are no longer an enchanted caravan. We cease even to see them. They could not make less impression on us if they were a row of floating lobster-boxes. It is simply that our minds are no longer clear mirrors: some devil has breathed on them. Memory has driven out vision, and we might as well be arguing in a smoking-room as be the privileged spectators of these prisoners let loose into the freedom of the seas. Nor can we even console ourselves with the belief that there is something disinterested in these newspaper memories that disturb us. If we remember things out of the papers too keenly, it is probably not because we are idealists but because we have sat up too late the night before over cards in a blue cloud of excessive tobacco and our nerves are on edge.

We can easily test this by the other things we remember. It is not only world-politics that make us blind to the sea gulls. We lie on the sand at the foot of which a blue channel winds. Beyond it at low tide lies a sand-bank, above which the ruffled top of the sea shows like a tremulous inky scribble. A cormorant, with his neck looking as long as a swan's, bolts from nowhere and settles on the sand, making a careful circle in the air before he alights. He sits for a moment slightly tilted, like a black bottle that floats in the water. Then he flaps his wings, and ultimately stretches them out as though he were about to do gymnastic exercises and got stuck in the attitude. Another cormorant appears and comes circularly to rest within a few feet of him. Then another. Then another. Before long there is a row of these Satans lined up on the sand, each of them with his wings hung out in the breeze like the family washing. Number two gets tired and folds himself into a bottle of stout again. Number

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five follows his example. Number three does the same, at which number two cries 'Copy cat!' shuffles off a few indignant paces, and becomes a tableau vivant of Milton's Satan again.

So long as one can watch the creatures with a mind empty of irrelevant memories, one is as happy as one has any right to be. But, even as one watches them, memory is creeping like a worm through the brain. One begins to remember one's landlady, to remember her vile oil-lamps when one had bargained for electric light, to remember her unswept kitchen-flue that turns the word 'hot' on the bathtap into a bitter mockery on a cold summer morning, to remember her loose window-frames that perform a low stage-thunder in the wind all through the night as surely no windowframes ever did before. Immediately, it is as though someone had taken a sponge and wiped the row of cormorants off the landscape. One shifts one's position and moves over to someone with whom one can share one's thoughts. The air becomes darkened with landlady as one talks. She is a creature darker-winged than any cormorant, a bird of prey, a vulture gnawing one's liver. It is impossible to get away from the thought of her by talking about her.

Psycho-analysts tell us that we have only to face an obsession honestly in order to get rid of it. But one's landlady is proof against psychoanalysis. The conversation must be intensely monotonous to anyone but oneself. It is a sort of recurrent decimal of 'lamps-kitchen-chimney windows bit steep.' It is unchanging as the grumble of cartwheels in the longest and stoniest imaginable country lane. And the worst of it is, it does not make even oneself happy. The longer it goes on the more miserable one becomes. If only one could

forget the lady and look at the cormorants one would be as happy as a sandpiper. But the curse of memory follows us to the shore, and an oil-lamp that gives no light outblazes the light of the sun.

Children are our examples in these matters. They live in the moment and for the moment as though the world had no sack of gloomy yesterdays to hump its back miserably. They pick up a fan-shaped shell, with waves of color, roan, pearl, and orange radiating over its surface, and they forget whether the bath was hot or cold. At sight of the commonest periwinkle, gleaming with wetness, they rejoice as though there were not a landlady in the world. They run their fingers through the sand, and, as the pale ghost of a shrimp emerges into the light, they are in ecstasies. Even the claw of a dead crab is treasure trove. Not that they fail to distinguish between one discovery and another.

To find a cowrie is more glorious than to find a limpet. A razor-shell surpasses a cockle or an oyster. A topshell, with its lustrous hat, is more desirable than a sea-snail. But all are good as they were at the creation of the world. They are all borne home alike in a blue bucket or a red as though they were the precious things in a world in which men dig for gold and dive for pearls. Out from the sandhills a red admiral flutters and seems to make the whole air rich with his contrasted colors. A grayling flutters after, and fills the world, with the happiness of variety. A swallow swoops down low over the water, blue against the blue. Oyster-catchers, pied and red-beaked, hurry at lightning speed from pool to pool. In the shallow waters gray curlews move slowly with their long, crooked, inquisitive bills in search, one supposes, of cockles. There are other

small swift birds that fly always in a

cloud, and as they swerve in the sun gleam for an instant like a company of white butterflies or a fall of snowflakes. Here, too, is the heron on his cloudy wings, and the pied wagtail nervous in the air as a child in deep water, and the wheatear that runs away.

If one could enjoy it all as a kaleidoscope, a scene of brilliant disconnected phenomena, as a child does, then, indeed, one would be on holiday. If one could even absorb oneself in the phenomena in the coherent fashion of a naturalist, that, too, would be holiday enough. But one cannot. That is why one is not a poet. One is merely a realist moodily muttering, even at the moment when the curtain is drawn to reveal the perfect picture of things, 'Lamps-kitchen-chimneywindows bit steep. ..' And now

the rain is coming down in bucketfuls It serves one right.

FOR INTELLECTUAL RECONCILIATION

BY ROBERT BRIDGES

To the Editor of the Times SIR: Your correspondents having directed upon my head the censure of your leading article of October 18, dealing with the letter from Oxford profes sors and others to their fellows in Ger many and Austria, it lies with me to make reply.

I am, of course, aware of the extreme difference of opinion on this subject, but no good can come from one party's misrepresenting the other, and I would plead that, in devotion to your own conviction, you in your leading article obscured the simple significance of the Oxford letter. That letter begin with these words: 'Since there will be many of you,' and those words impl that there are among the professors i

目

Germany (as plainly there are in Engand) two antagonistic parties which nay, without offensive implication, be styled the reconcilables and the irreconcilables; and the letter is written 'rom those on our side whose patriotism has not settled down into indiscrimihate personal suspicion or ill-will, and t appeals confidently to the same class on the other side, with the recognition that we have both of us been provoked to 'animosities' which we desire to put aside.

It is true that in another part of your Oaper you published the full text of the etter; and I may thank you sincerely on behalf of the signatories for the atention that you called to it; but I complain that your article somewhat perverted it, since your quotations were Iressed apart from their context and swallowed up in your grievous words. Now if I could think that it could be your opinion that you were doing any service to this country or to humanity n opposing a good understanding beween men of good will, I should not resent your condemnation, but I cannot believe this. The logic of your attitude seems to be that the German professors are as a united body particularly guilty of the war, and that, until as a body hey withdraw from their position, we should have nothing to do with them. And that, I think, is the feeling of nany of those who refused to sign the

etter.

That circular, let me say, was sent to about one hundred and twenty mempers of the University, whose names were pricked on the register solely for heir position and eminence-heads of houses, chief professors, etc.- and he replies received gave a nearly equal division into Ayes and Noes, the Noes slightly predominating, but a good many of the Noes expressed sympathy with the address, and most of hem declined for one of two reasons:

the commonest objection was that the action was 'premature'― my own feeling being that of shame for having vainly waited so long in deference to political complications, and that shame was intolerably increasing. The other objection was what is conveniently called 'German mentality.' Objectors on that head urged that the address. would be misunderstood in Germany, and that the Germans would say either that it showed that we confessed ourselves to have been throughout in the wrong, or that it was a piece of English hypocrisy; and those who know the Germans best maintained that these would be the honest convictions of some of their 'irreconcilables.' Concerning this, I am sure that most of us were prepared to face symptoms of this 'mentality'; on the other hand, we know well that there are many among the German professors who will welcome our friendly approach, and are indeed waiting for it and expecting it. Time will show how this is to be.

I now return to your objection, and shall be speaking only for myself.

It is absurd to regard the German professoriate as a portentous abstraction which is not composed of human personalities; and it is undiscerning not to see that, at a critical moment of extreme tension, they allowed their passion to get the better of them. The only valid count against them is this: that from the days when Fichte lectured in Berlin they have gradually developed a 'Deutschland über Alles' policy, which naturally found England its chief obstacle; and though some of their leading politicians worked it up into a 'gospel of Hate,' that cannot be made a personal charge against each and every living professor, for many of them were wholly irresponsible; indeed we even know that in the years before the war there were among them minds far-sighted enough to deplore that

policy, and to protest against it, though not numerous enough to resist it; and it has been so discredited by its terrific results that this moderate party must be now greatly increased in numbers.

Your objection therefore must, I think you will admit, be narrowed down to a more definite position, and you must either deny the existence of this moderate party, or contend that it should not be encouraged; and I presume that you must prefer the latter alternative, and that it will be here that we draw apart. I would say that we should not discourage and embitter these honest reconcilables by requiring them to convert their irreconcilables before we will speak to them; and I should probably go further than you here; I should say that, were every one of them feeling enmity against us at heart, we should strive to convert them from their enmity by showing that generous feeling, the absence of which we complain of in them. Unless you wish your enemies to remain your enemies, you must strive to make them more friendly; and I would ask you what other means there is for accomplishing this than good will and forgiveness. Show me the better way, and I will take it.

Moral philosophers have endorsed the wisdom of the Gospel in this matter; but I do not like to seem to be preaching; common sense and Æsop will serve; the fable of the Sua and the North wind delights me still as much as it did in the nursery.

But one of your correspondents called attention to the absence of scientific professors from our list. It is significant, and due mainly (so I am told), to a sentence in the famous manifesto of the ninety-three, which asserted that English science was a negligible thing. Alas! that frenzied calumniation owed all its weight to the seriousness with which it was received; it touched me.

only when I found that our scientific men felt hurt by it. I should have expected them to have been confident of their worth, and to have taken it as our soldiers took the Hymn of Hate; they should have laughed, and asked the Germans to recite it in public. The intransigence of natural science is marked; but the representatives of the 'historic and philosophical' sciences are not inclined to follow the lamentable example of the Royal Society.

German 'mentality' has a great deal to answer for, and will no doubt in the future be scientifically investigated and analyzed by their own moral philosophers. One quality of it seems to be malleability. I should say that if the good King Frederick had lived and his wretched son had died, then German mentality might have been a very good Aristotelian virtuous habit of mind, and we should now be living in mutual peace and security. But compare the phenomena of our mentality! If our commerce and politics cannot bring their interests into harmony with a generous moral standard is not that just the fault which we found with the German professors? Then your leading article imputes hypocrisy to their theologians which is exactly the complaint that they make of ours. Again, you will have no dealings with them until they confess that they have done wrong, while you condemn the like attitude of their irreconcilables toward us; and, last of all, that main distinctive difference between us namely, that we cannot cringe, this distinction you would obliterate by your misinterpretation of our sincere and dignified peacemaking.

This is not pro-German talk. It is merely dispassionate peacemaking. But the mind, if not the heart of the nation, has been corrupted by events, and the Church is sick. People talk as if they would readily 'forgive the Germans,' if

here were nothing to forgive; they do not see that it is our having been so erribly injured that makes our forgiveless so necessary and so powerful. At he beginning of the war I put together book for the reading of those who, when their homes were desolated, and heir hopes shattered, needed a sancuary and the constant companionship of the great minds that have ennobled he world; I foresaw then the inevitable ast trial which we are now facing, and chose Shelley's verses (at the end of his Prometheus) for the climax. It is how that they are applicable, so I will isk you to print some of them here, together with the few words that followed hem to close my book.

speak! thy strong words may never pass away.

Love from its awful throne of patient power
n the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance.
These are the seals of that most firm assurance...
These are the spells by which to reassume

It was a long, luxurious, hospitable sort of room. Its cream-colored walls were hung with a few good etchings and small water-colors. Its furniture was impeccable: a Chippendale bookcase, a Chinese cabinet in black and gold lacquer, ornamented with two peacock's eyes on the leaves of its door, and standing on gilded dragon's claws, a writing bureau from Venice of some dark hard wood, inlaid with ivory that was yellow with age- everything had that indefinable quality of craftsmanship which will harmonize only with its kind. In another small cabinet of satin-wood were a few pieces of exquisite china. A baby grand pianoperhaps the only definite symbol of modernity in the room- occupied one corner; and on a circular table by the Chinese cabinet was a Nankin bowl filled with hothouse roses. An immense Persian carpet, three hundred years old and woven with the mystical pattern of the Tree of Life, whose colors were as vivid as if it was indeed imperishable, covered the entire floor. The easy chairs and the long couch standing obliquely before the hearth were draped in rose brocade, and heavy curtains of the same hue concealed the windows which, at the far end, overlooked the embankment. In the hearth, beneath more old china and a narrow French mirror, a log fire blazed and crackled cheerfully, scenting the air.

As Mrs. Maple Aylsham hesitated for a moment in the doorway, her attitude had something of inquiry and suspicion in it. She seemed almost to be expecting to find some person in the room, although no one, unless it were a servant, was likely to be there. She had thrust open the door, and switched on the lights with a nervous swiftness which might have led one to suspect that, even before turning the handle, she had hesitated, bracing herself for the