I

every state of the Republic held banquets of rejoicing. They thrust on us the greatest superstition the world has ever known-the Catholic Church. They ought to be killed for that alone. I consider we are being very generous with them."

According to press dispatches the Constitutionalist governor and commander of the State of Nuevo Laredo, Antonio I. Villareal, has issued a Catholic decree regulating Roman churches and schools "in the interest of public health, morality and justice," declaring that "the Church has been a pernicious factor in disruption and discord and has entirely forgotten the spiritual mission." The decree expels all foreign Roman Catholic priests and Jesuits and requires priestly abstention from politics, prohibits confession, requires official supervision of schools, and allows ringing of church

bells only to celebrate fiestas in honor of the country or for triumphs of the Constitutionalist army!

At a recent session of representatives of Protestant mission boards in Cincinnati a repartition of mission fields in Mexico was agreed upon by Congregationalists, Baptists, Disciples, Friends, Southern Presbyterians, Methodists, Associated Reformed Presbyterians, and Presbyterians North. Consolidation of theological schools around Mexico City and of publications, redistribution of high schools, and the establishment of a college that shall provide classes for women were recommended to the various denominational boards. The combined appellation of "The Evangelical Church," with the denominational name in brackets following, for Mexican churches, was approved, similar to the Philippine missionary policy.

S IT true that tolerance is a sign of decaying standards of belief and thought? Assuming that tolerance grows out of a sense of uncertainty regarding truth, in

tolerance comes in as the constructive

force. For example, decadent Roman civilization tolerated every sort of morals, philosophy, religion. The rise of that civilization which succeeded it was heralded by the intolerant persecution of Christianity, itself an intolerant movement. Thus argues nard Iddings Bell, in the Atlantic Monthly, in pointing out "The Danger of Tolerance in Religion." Constructive thinking in regard to marriage and the problems of sex has become intolerant; in politics, education, literature, "we are gradually and hopefully emerging from an age of good

natured tolerance into one of contradictory and frankly clashing ideas and ideals." But "the very same man who is a healthy bigot on sex-relationship, politics, economics, and what not else, imagines that in religion he is bound,

if he would be in accord with the Zeitgeist, to be tolerant of all kinds of religious belief or disbelief." Mr. Bell proceeds:

"Of course, part of this attitude is due to the impression, not now so prevalent as once it was, that truth is truth demonstrable physically, and that religion, which is incapable of such demonstration, is a thing in which uncertainty is inevitable. (Of course such an assumption is quite unscientific.) The main reason for it, however, is the unthinking or superficially thinking assumption that mankind has developed religiously from intolerance into tolerance, and that tolerance, complete, unquestioned, is the highest point yet reached in the development of religion. Students

In the popular campaigns for "Church Unity," Mr. Bell notices that what is to unite is never defined, tho pulpits and compliments may be exchanged. "If this was the sort of thing Christ wanted," Mr. Bell asks, "why did He not practise this modern, tolerant method when He was on earth?"

"Why did He not seek to conciliate, on a basis of mutual toleration, the Sadof denouncing them both for differing ducees and Pharisees, for instance, instead from his own conception of religion? Why did He preach things so definite as to alienate most of the people whom He came to earth to save? Why did He die? Apparently it was because He uttered such definite and positive teaching as to force, by his very intolerance, the reflex intolerance of those opposed to that teaching. It is apparent to any one who reads the Gospels that Christ stood for definiteness in religion, that He himself died rather than tolerate the religious ideas of most of his contemporaries, and that He earnestly urged his followers to imitate the steadfastness of his example. He prayed, it is true, that all the world might become united; but He must have meant united on the positive and definite platform on which He himself stood. Any other interpretation would stultify not merely His words but His whole life."

Our present efforts to be tolerant in religion, as analyzed by the Atlantic essayist, are based upon the presupposition that there is no such thing as objective religious truth:

for a human being must correlate all his "This is to say that, in the thing which theory of life, his religion, there is no other thought and activity,-namely his objective reality at all, toward which he may approximate. This is to deny that there is anything which may rightly be called fundamental truth. It is to exalt peace at any price into the throne of ultimate reality. It is to destroy the search for that reality. It is to glorify intellectual cowardice and inefficiency. It is morals; it is, in the end, to destroy a not merely to destroy a rational basis for rational basis for thinking as a whole.

"To prohibit men from attempting to lift themselves up toward the realities of eternity, to compel them to abandon the mighty gropings which have ever characterized the seers- - intolerant because to substitute for these a unified 'religion' they were seers and not politicians-and consisting of platitudes about being good ities to do this would be a dire calamity to one's grandmother and similar banalto the generation and to the race."

Better the bitter intolerance of those who believe too much and too strongly, concludes Mr. Bell, than the easy complaisance of those who believe too little. "Better the Inquisition and the rack than the drugging of those who else might seek for God. Better that we live and die slaves to a half-truth, or a millionth-truth, than that we refuse to look for truth at all. even that in religion a man should live and die believing with all his soul in a lie, than that he should merely exist, believing in nothing."

Better

W

Taking the Future Out of Futurism.

HEN Joaquin Miller, wearing a white velvet jacket and a red sombrero, or something of the sort, went to London he was enthusiastically received by London society. Here, said the veterans of a thousand teas, is a real American Poet! How picturesque and exotic and entertaining! And when Mr. Marinetti failed to convert his native Italy to Futurism, he, too, went to London. And in that city he and his

fantastic "movement" found a welcome. Futurism produces some pictures compared with which the famous "Nude Descending the Stairs" is almost photographic. It produces prose or verse (no one knows which it is) compared with which Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons: Things, Food, Objects" is lucid and coherent. But the London counterparts of Hermione and her "little group of serious thinkers" have "taken up" Mr. Marinetti and Futurism. There has been a Futurist exhibition and Mr. Marinetti's lectures have been well attended. Some English critics have praised Futurism, some have condemned it. All who have discussed it have taken it seriously except Mr. Gilbert Keith Chesterton. But Mr. Chesterton's

favorite method of attack is to refuse to take things seriously. An effective method it is, as Mr. Joseph McCabe and many another of his adversaries know to their cost. His Homeric laughter has blown many a sham into oblivion, and in a recent issue of T. P.'s Weekly (which now, by the way, is edited by Mr. Holbrook Jackson, author of "The Eighteen Nineties") he subjects Futurism to the batteries of his destructive mirth. In the first place, he tells us, he rather likes Mr. Marinetti. This vivacious revolutionary's praise of the literary value of calamities and violence, he thinks, is only a dithyrambic and transcendental way of praising the oldfashioned practical joke. Mr. Chesterton then gives the following cruelly practical parody of the Futurist spirit:

"Thus, you or I might say, in the

hooked fingers; he shall find the impossible postures.'

"Or, suppose you or I were giving hospitality to some princess or peeress, we might say, in our hospitable mood: 'Let's make her an apple-pie bed.' It might awaken her silvery laughter-or our silvery laughter, anyhow. But Mr. Marinetti would not be content with laughter; he would want seriousness as well. He would say (speaking of the apple-pie bed): Sleep is our foe! We have abolished Night! We affirm to Italy, London, and the Suburbs that every bed is a

grave! The Futurist Bed, which, we an

CHESTERTON SAYS THAT FUTURISM

6

IS A POOR PRACTICAL JOKE nounce, refuses admission to the abject suppliant who asks from it the old repose. What exploded drama can compare with the vigilance and vigor with which the Bed baffles and eludes the statuesque wrestlings of the Man! This seriousness is all that Mr. Marinetti has added to the good old Christian practical joke. But, when all is said, there is a certain Latin lightness of touch in the way he does it, that makes it very hard for me to believe that he takes such seriousness seriously."

Futurism as an Evil Asceticism.

casual course of our social custom: 'Let's make a butter-slide for the bishop.' But Mr. Marinetti would say: 'The Priest, laden with the age-long fatness and slowness of a blind and swinish Past, shall suddenly change his plodding tread for R. CHESTERTON refuses to one mad moment of the Glory of Speed. consider Mr. Marinetti except His legs shall aviate with an insane as a joker or a joke. But smoothness; he shall claw the air with when he discusses the philosophy of

M

Futurism, if it may be called a philosophy, he is grave enough. This and similar esthetic schools, he says, are but the toilsome and rather tired resurrection of something with which the early and medieval Church was ceaselessly at war-the heresy of evil asceticism. The paradox of Futurism is that it has no future, it is sterile and suicidal. Therefore, so far as there is any principle in it at all, it is that principle of death which was in the ancient heresies, the wrong kind of asceticism. Futurism, he says, combines asceticism with anarchy and bases both on a kind of pessimism. He finds a striking resemblance between the Gnostics and Manichees and the Futurists, who despise the separate senses and the strong arts that have He been built on the separate senses. says in conclusion:

"Yet the creed that is now reproached as ascetic has in all ages fought this strange and horrible decorum. The deepest of all indecencies is to strip the soul of its body. It is blasphemy to despise the forms of things; to have eyes and see not, to have ears and hear not; to have only an imprisoned mind. This is something worse than bodily murder that banishes the soul and leaves a dead body. This is spiritual_murder that banishes the body, and leaves a dead soul."

Τ

A Counter Revolution to
Futurism.

HE Futurists have other troubles than those due to Mr. Chesterton's attack. They have lately suffered a secession from their ranks. From the press of the John Lane Company, strange to say, comes Blast, an illustrated quarterly which is described. on the title page as "The Organ of the Great English Vortex." Vorticism, we learn, is a revolutionary movement which has arisen among London painters, sculptors and writers, and it is to supplant Futurism. Mr. Wyndham Lewis is the leader of the Vorticists and the editor of Blast. He contributes to his magazine several unintelligible drawings and a composition entitled "The Enemy of the Stars," which is said to be a play. All that a non-Vorticist can understand of this play is that the names of the two characters are Arghol and Hanp. Ezra Pound, who is an American, contributes several specimens of the sort of verse he has been writing since he stopped making poetry, and endeavors to show that all Vorticist poets must be Imagistes.

There are an ultra-naturalistic short story by Rebecca West, an instalment of a harmless novel by Ford Madox Hueffer, and pictures by several men, including Edward Wadsworth and Jacob Epstein, who made the notorious monument to Oscar Wilde. The publishers claim that Blast expresses the artistic spirit of to-day as "The Yellow Book" expressed that of the eighteen-nineties. Mr. Wyndham Lewis says that Vorticism gives a death-blow to Impressionism and Futurism and "all the refuse of naif science." And Mr. Ezra Pound exclaims, "Marinetti is a corpse!" The truth of the matter seems to be that the literary revolutionists of London resent the popularity of Marinetti and his Italian Futurism. Therefore they have made for themselves a movement more extreme than Futurism, and they urge the public to be patriotic and encourage only British insanity. As a writer in the New York Times points out, the Vorticists have at any rate succeeded in reducing Futurism to its ultimate absurdity; it is impossible for the public to endure any further "progress" in this direction. Vorticism has killed Futurism; but its own life is a risk which no wise insurance company will accept. The issuance of a second number of Blast is about as probable as a Jacobite uprising.

A Reactionary Realist. N ENGLISH critic once stated

A

that the public never could take seriously a writer with such a name as Higginson. The years passed and Thomas Wentworth of that ilk succeeded in attaining high place in the world of letters. Now Mr, Oliver Onions is busily engaged in living down his name, or, rather, in making his readers associate it with vivid portrayals of life and forceful expression of interesting ideas. His "Gray Youth" (George H. Doran Company), which was published in England in two volumes bearing the titles "The Two Kisses" and "A Crooked Mile," is as graphically realistic as his remarkable novel "In Accordance with the Evidence," and it has the further interest of being an attack on most of the economic literary and artistic fads of the day. Cosimo Pratt is a dilettante in art. Amory Towers is a painter who becomes famous through a picture which she dedicates to the Feminist

cause.

times gets the better of his sense of humor and of his sense of reality, and that his anxiety not to overlook any folly of a foolish age interferes with

These two young people are in love with each other, but a queer modern perversity makes them try to repress the impulses and instincts of sex. At last nature triumphs, they are conventionally married, and Amory has twins. They are surrounded by a company of young Feminists, Futurists and other "ists" whose eccentricities give Mr. Onions an opportunity to exercize his powers of satire. The Nation thinks that Mr. Onions' indignation at

"Mr. Onions has taken a careful look around the social horizon, and, having accurately located the position of the various windmills, has conscientiously broken a lance against each one in turn. There are a great many things and more ideas in the world of to-day that Mr. Onions dislikes very intensely-most of them beginning with F, like Feminism and Futurism and Free Love and so with a diabolic cunning he has written a book that brings in every ism of his parthat the slaying may be done within a ticular detestation, to the end, presumably, conveniently compact area. Unfortunately, tho one may sympathize fully with many of Mr. Onions' prejudices against windmills, it is impossible to commend his unscientific method of attacking them."

A

The Happy Ending Unashamed.

.

ters, and Meenie Weston, actress. Lingham rescues Meenie from her sordid life at the Cabaret de l'Homme and marries her. Mr. Merrick's ruthless account of their poverty and unhappiness may cause the reader of the first few chapters to fear that he has before him a new "A Mummer's Wife." But he is soon undeceived. Meenie is forced to go back to the stage to earn a living and she meets with success. But Lingham will not live upon her money. They quarrel and separate. But Mr. Merrick is old-fashioned enough not to leave them in this tragic situation. Meenie becomes a famous musical comedy actress and induces her manager to produce a play written by her husband in the first days of their marriage. The manager reads the play and produces it. It is a great success. Lingham and Meenie, both now famous and wealthy, are reunited and live happily ever after. The New York Evening Post remarks that in less skilful hands the story might have been absurd or commonplace, and adds the rather curious comment, "it is gratefully lacking in the surface brilliancy which annoys the quiet reader in many current novels."

CCORDING to Mr. J. Walter Smith, who supplies the Boston Evening Transcript with its London literary news, Mr. Leonard Merrick is soon to see his novels published in a uniform edition. And an extraordinary edition it will be. Each of the twelve volumes will have an introduction by an illustrious author. Among them will be Sir James M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, W. J. Locke, Maurice Hewlett, W. D. Howells, Sir A. W. Pinero, Granville Barker and Neil Munro. This would seem to be sufficiently good fortune for any novelist. But, in addition, Mr. Merrick's realistic romance, "When Love Flies Out O' the Window" (Mitchell Kennerley), is winning high praise from American critics. This is the love story of Ralph Lingham, man of let

pists," by Robert Tressall.

Incandescent Short Stories.

HORT stories that live up to their

excellence? Thomas Hardy easily headed the poll as the greatest living novelist, obtaining three times as many votes as H. G. Wells, who had second place. It is interesting to note that

Charles Garvice and Marie Corelli are more popular than William De Morgan with a class presumably so cultured as that which reads the New Weekly. Also the omission of Hall Caine's name from a list containing those of Charles Garvice and Marie Corelli is surprising. The order of names was: Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Arnold Bennett, George Moore, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Garvice, Marie Corelli, William De Morgan. Of English novelists of the past, Dickens was the favorite, followed by Thackeray, Meredith, Fielding, Scott and Defoe.

Twenty-one titles were mentioned in answer to the fourth question. Only one American novelist appears on the list, Jack London. All but two or three of the books selected have been successful in the United States as well as in England, but it is likely that a poll of American readers would produce a decidedly different result. Here is the list; the books are named in the order of their popularity:

-"Chance," by Joseph Conrad. 2-"The World Set Free," by H. G. Wells.

3-"When Ghost Meets Ghost," by W. de Morgan.

S

definition-what Professor Bran

der Matthews, using a hyphen,

are rarer

would call "short-stories" now than they were twenty years ago.

Mr. Montagu Glass and Miss Edna Ferber give us admirable type studies. The hosts that find shelter under the capacious mantle of the late O. Henry

HIS NAME SUGGESTS COLONIAL DAYS But Gouverneur Morris writes of very modern people.

J. D. Beresford.

5-"The Making of an Englishman," by W. L. George.

6-"Children of the Dead End," by Patrick McGill. 7-"The Duchess of Wrexe," by Hugh Walpole.

real short stories are by no means numerous. This makes Mr. Gouverneur Morris's "The Incandescent Lily and Other Stories" (Charles Scribner's Sons) especially welcome. Of course, there are critics like "G. M. W.," of the Chicago Evening Post, who write

Locke.

10-"Quinneys," by H. A. Vachell. II-"Old Mole," by Gilbert Cannan. 12 "Time and Thomas Waring," by Morley Roberts.

13-"The Flying Inn," by G. K. Chester

ton.

14-"On the Staircase," by Frank Swin

nerton.

15-"A Lady and Her Husband," by Amber Reeves.

16 "Dodo the Second," by E. F. Benson. 17-"The Making of a Bigot," by Rose Macaulay. 18-"Roding Rectory," by Archibald Mar

shall.

19 "Modern Lovers," by Viola Meynell. 20-"The Valley of the Moon," by Jack London.

ence to traditional forms this collection of stories will be very acceptable," and shake their heads over Mr. Morris's observance of the rules of his craft. But from the press in general the book has received a cordial greeting. His obvious conviction, shared with not a few illustrious makers of literature, that the chief function of art is to entertain, does not keep his book free from moral problems. One of his best stories, called "You Can't Get Away With It." has as its theme the inevitability of punishment for violation of the moral law. In fact, "You Can't Get Away With It" is a modernization of the saying, true in spite of its age, "The wages of sin is

197

death." The story from which the book takes its name describes the adventures of a young Boston botanist who goes to China to find a sacred lily which glows as if on fire and blooms only in a deep valley almost impossible of approach. The princess who rules this valley falls in love with the bota

nist. The situation is complicated by

the fact that the young man's chief reason for lily-hunting is to make enough money to marry the sweetheart he has left behind in New England.

NLY a few days before her death, Baroness Bettina von Suttner's novel, "When Thoughts Will Soar," was published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. Its issuance on the very eve of a tremendous international conflict gives this contribution to peace propaganda an ironic timeliness. The Baroness tells of an annual "Festival of the Rose" instituted at Lucerne by the American multi millionaire whose name is most closely associated with Pacificism. To it come the great statesmen, writers and scientists of the world, to celebrate the establishment of peace and to consider the future of warless mankind. Feminism is made to play its part, strangely enough, in the uplift of humanity and numerous living great men, including ex-President Roosevelt, are introduced into the action of the story. In the course of a sympathetic critique, the New York Tribune gives its estimate of the place of Baroness von Suttner among Pacificist novelists. She added, the writer of the critique believes, thousands upon thousands to the ranks of the workers for universal peace, and of her famous book, "Ground Arms," he says, "If ever fiction with a mission was justified and glorified by its results, it was Bettina von Suttner's novel." He continues:

"Her death places on the onward path a milestone whence one can look back upon the road traversed. And what strikes one most in the retrospect, at least so far as the fictional peace propaganda is concerned, is the measure of organization already attained, what may be called the 'standardization' of its arguments, means and ends. This new story of Frau von Suttner, for instance, is strikingly in agreement in its general argument with, to name only the foremost of them all, the recent forecasts of Mr. Wells. Like him, she sees in the conquest of the air the most potent promise of world peace. When the dirigible and the aeroplane first became practicable, she points out with burning indignation, the thoughts of the leaders of men in Europe turned at once to its possibilities not as a servant of the pursuits of peace but as a new engine of war and destruction.

"It was in order to teach men's minds to soar with their bodies to higher things, to truer interests, that Frau von Suttner wrote this masque of peace."

I

T IS becoming dangerous to use "newspaper" as a depreciatory epithet. We sneered at "newspaper verse" and were suddenly confronted a few years ago with such a specimen of it as Edwin Markham's "The Man with the Hoe," or more recently with the important anthology to which Mr. Wallace Rice has, rather unfortunately, given the name "The Humbler Poets." We sneer at "newspaper prose" and the New York Evening Post answers us by publishing, in its Saturday Magazine, the admirable essays of Mr. Simeon Strunsky.

A volume of these essays called "Post-Impressions" (Dodd, Mead & Company) has greatly increased Mr. Strunsky's reputation as a shrewd and humorous critic of American life and letters. "He reminds us," says the Boston Transcript, in the course of an appreciative review, "of the truism. that in order to see things clearly we must see them from a slightly wrong focus." This does not mean that Mr. Strunsky is merely a maker of paradoxes. His method of attacking a popular folly is, as a rule, to overstate humorously the case for it; to set down, in merciless simplicity, the arguments of its adherents in such an order that the absurdity of the unstated conclusion is obvious. He gets his effects indirectly, suggestively, impressionistically; the name of the present volume has more than its pun to justify it.

For instance, in "Alma Mater Broadway," he ridicules the fashion, prevalent last winter, of dramatizing the life of the Tenderloin's disorderly resorts. He does not directly state that this procedure is unethical, undramatic and absurd. Instead, he tells us that a man came into his office and discussed the present condition of the stage. He records the conversation. The visitor

says:

"Last night I attended the first performance of A. B. Johnson's powerful four-act drama entitled 'H2O.' It was a remorseless exposure of the phenomena attending the condensation of steam. In the old days before the theater became perfectly free the general public knew nothing of the consequences that ensue when you bring water to a temperature of 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The public didn't know and didn't care. Those who did know kept the secret to themselves. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was a conspiracy of silence on the subject. A play like 'H.O' would have been impossible. The public would not have tolerated such thorogoing realism as Johnson employs in his first act, for instance. With absolute fidelity to things as they are he puts before us a miniature

In this play, Mr. Strunsky tells us, the third act was laid in the reception-room of a Tenderloin resort. He describes another play, designed to demonstrate the difference between the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Law and the Underwood Law, item by item. One of the truths revealed in it is that under the Underwood Law the duty on formaldehyde is reduced from 25 per cent. to one cent a pound. The third act of this play, too, is laid in the reception-room of a Tenderloin resort.

sus

One of the most entertaining of the essays in this book is that which deals with the teaching of English in universities. It is called "Rhetoric 21." Mr. Strunsky is describing his experiences with a Daily Theme course in a university situated, it may be pected, not far from Morningside Heights. These take place at the beginning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the realistic form of undergraduate style. Instead of writing about what they had read in De Quincy or Matthew Arnold, the pupils

were asked to write about what they had seen on the Elevated or on the Campus. They wrote not about patriotism or Shakespeare's use of contrast, but about football, the management of the lunch-room, the need of more call-boys in the library. And the instructors discomfited them by comparing their compositions on these commonplace subjects with the greatest and most impassioned utterances in English literature. Mr. Strunsky says:

"When I wrote that 'the new improvements that have been made in the new gymnasium that has just been inaugurated are all that are necessary," my instructor would pick up the Gettysburg address and read out aloud: 'But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.' . . . Sometimes he would read from Keat's 'Grecian Urn,' or ask me, by implication, why I could not frame a concrete image like, 'Looked at each other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien.' There still are English instructors who might profitably read this essay. Thus does Mr. Strunsky reveal the secret history of a Daily Theme course:

"Even then I labored under a sense of injustice. I could not help thinking that the comparison would have been more fair if I had had a chance to speak at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln had had to write about the new gymnasium. I thought how the red ink would have splashed if I had ended a sentence with a comma like Job, or had said 'kings and counsellors which.' Are there still sophomores whom they drill in writing about the prospects of the hockey team and to whom they read 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' as an example of what can be done with the English language? And do some of them do what some of us, in desperation, used to do? We cheated. We worked ourselves up into ecstasies of false emotion over the hockey team or pretended to see things in Central Park which we never saw. I always think of Central Park with bitterness. We were to write a description of what we saw we stood on the Belvedere looking north. I wrote a faithful catalog of what I saw, and the instructor picked up 'Les Misérables' and read me the story of the last charge over the sunken road at Waterloo. I should have done what one of the other men did. He never went to Central Park. He stayed at home and, looking straight north from the Belvedere, he saw the sun setting in the west, and Mr. Carnegie's new mansion to the east, and the towers of St. Patrick directly behind him. He saw it all so vividly, so harmoniously, that they marked him A. I got C. Is it any wonder that I cannot even now read the Gettysburg Address without a twinge of resentment?"

as