F THE WITCHERY OF SOUND IN NATURE RESULTS OF THE MODERN EFFORT TO CONVERT LANDSCAPE INTO MUSIC OR tonal landscape painting in its finest state, according to that most brilliant of our musical critics, Lawrence Gilman, we must look to the music of the last fifty years. At its best, it is peculiarly a modern art. The marvelous increase in expressional efficiency, which is the most salient result of the last half century of musical progress, has had no more fortunate issue than the disclosure of means whereby the composer of imagination has been enabled to realize his conceptions with a measure of eloquence undreamed of by his predecessors. The harmonic effects which are to-day at the disposal of any graduate from a conservatory class in composition simply did not exist for Schumannnot to speak of Beethoven or Mozartfor in musical art the innovation of yesterday is the platitude of to-day. Mr. Gilman develops this theme in his new volume "Nature in Music" (John Lane Co.). He writes: "The supreme achievements of musical landscape painting are of to-day. We shall find them in the music of four composers of our own time, who, by reason of the power and eloquence of their delineation of the natural world, are without peers in their field. They are the Frenchmen, Claude Debussy and Vincent d'Indy, and the Americans, Charles Martin Loeffler and Edward MacDowell. We shall see these men not only producing Naturemusic of incomparable excellence but approaching their subject matter from new and unprecedented standpoints." In their music, we are told, Nature is made sympathetic and psychical, suffused with subjective emotion. "In short, we are witnessing the outcome of that relationship between the susceptible imagination and an infinitely adaptive and compliant Nature which, in literature, resulted in such various poetry as that of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Whitman, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine." to-day can, by the employment of certain harmonic expedients, produce effects which Beethoven would have bartered his soul to achieve. The harmonic effects with which Debussy is enabled to paint the visionary landscape of his "A Fawn's Afternoon," the wonderful.picture, of nightfall in upland solitudes which is limned by Vincent d'Indy in his tone poem "Summer Day in the Mountain," the malign and dread landscape which forms the background of Charles Martin Loeffler's setting of Verlaine's poem "The Sound," the startlingly vivid chords which enable McDowell to suggest the glittering splendor of his "Wandering Iceberg" these are concrete examples, chosen quite at random, of a utilization of certain means of musical expression which not only were undreamed of by the composers of a century ago but which simply did not exist for their utilization. They are woven out of a totally new tonal stuff, peculiar to our time and use. Whereas the modern music-maker can speak of winds and waters through the forms of utterance that served Beethoven and Schubert and Schumann, he can also-and herein lies the incalculable superiority of his medium -speak of them in terms that are, in essence, absolutely new. He must still, of course, work within the limits of a few dozen tones of varying pitch; but these correspond not to the words of language but to its alphabet. From this tonal alphabet new words-harmonic and melodic forms-are being evolved with a rapidity and profusion for which in no other kind of esthetic language is there any comparison. With Debussy's countryman, Vincent The most uninspired music-wright of d'Indy, whe It will thus be evident why it has been possible for musical landscape painting to achieve an unexampled pitch of expressiveness within the last fifty years and why it is peculiarly a modern art, an art of our own time. Debussy affords Mr. Gilman his first example. a musical recusant, 31 we come upon a tonal landscapist of different caliber. He, too, is a mystic; but, whereas for Debussy the beauty and wonder of the visible earth are merely so many stimuli to his inflammable and transmuting imagination, for d'Indy they are august revelations of the divine. He is deeply devout. Like Vaughan and Wordsworth he is a religious mystic of the purest type. For him the green earth and the majestic canopy of heaven are only, in Wordsworth's phrase, the garment of God, an expression of unseen spiritual realities. The spectacle of external nature in winsome, forbidding or awful guise, calls forth in him reverent and exalted emotions. One can conceive him giving Blake's answer to the questioner who asked: "What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, something like a guinea?" "No. I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.' Charles Maryin Loeffler, an American of Alsatian birth, Franco-German training and French affiliations, is, like Debussy and d'Indy, a landscapist of mystical temper, tho he lacks the blitheness of the one and the austerity of the other. He is primarily a tragedian, with much of Thomas Hardy's feeling for the ominous and the terrible in nature. Indeed, he might not unreasonably be regarded as a living commentary upon that passage of Hardy's concerning Egdon Heath wherein the novelist speaks of those human souls who may come to find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. Loeffler betrays this instinctive sympathy with the tragical in nature. His spiritual brethren are Poe, Baudelaire, .Maeterlinck, Verlaine in their darker and disconsolate hours. In the mood which is most frequent with him he is native to a world oppressed by nameless and immemorial griefs, dolorous with the shadow of death, where the winds are heavy with vague menace. Images of the King of Terrors haunt his imagination-a vast and bitter melancholy encompasses him. We encounter a temperament of a different order in the American, Edward MacDowell. MacDowell was a landscapist who would have compelled the delighted attention of Matthew Arnold had that sensitive gauger of poetic values been as responsive to musical as to literary influences. Dowell was, strangely enough, the only Celt who has ever written music of first-rate quality. Mac SCIENCE AND DISCOVERY D MUST THE SCIENCE OF HEREDITY GET RID URING the last fifty or sixty years the theme of the "natural selection" of favored races has been developed and expounded in writings innumerable. We now go to Darwin, according to Doctor William Bateson, the world's highest authority on heredity, for his incomparable collection of facts only. We would fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of exposition; but to us he speaks no more with philosophical authority. We read his scheme of evolution as we OF DARWINISM? forth to base this faith frankly on the impregnable rock of superstition and to abstain from direct appeals to natural fact... "In physics the age is one of rapid least as high a degree this is true of biprogress and profound skepticism. In at ology, and as a chief characteristic of modern evolutionary thought we must confess also to a deep but irksome humility in presence of great vital problems. Every theory of evolution must be such as to accord with the facts of physics and chemistry, a primary necessity to which our predecessors paid small heed. For them the unknown was a rich mine of pass for new species which have arisen by variation: "But when analysis is applied to this mass of variation the matter wears a different aspect. Closely examined, what is the 'variability' of wild species? What is the natural fact which is denoted by the statement that a given species exhibits much variation? Generally one of two things: either that the individuals collected in one locality differ among themselves; or perhaps more often that samples from separate localities differ from each other. As direct evidence of I would read the schemes of Linnaeus possibilities on which they could freely variation it is clearly to the first of these or Lamarck, delighting in their simplicity and in their courage-but that is all. The practical and experimental study of variation and of heredity has not merely opened a new field. It has given a new point of view and new standards of criticism. Naturalists may still be found expounding systems which would have delighted Doctor Pangloss himself, but at the present time few are misled. The student of genetics knows that the time for the development of theory is not yet. He would prefer to stick to the seed pan and to the incubator. In short, considering what we know of the distribution of variability in nature, the scope claimed for natural selection in determining the fixity of species must be greatly reduced. Doctor Bateson, whose paper we extract from London Nature, adds : draw. For us it is rather an impenetrable mountain out of which the truth can be chipped in rare and isolated fragments. Of the physics and chemistry of life we know next to nothing. Somehow the characters of living things are bound up in properties of colloids, and are largely determined by the chemical powers of enzymes, but the study of these Living things are found by a simple exclasses of matter has only just begun. periment to have powers undreamt of, and who knows what may be behind?" our con It is no time to discuss the origin of mollusca or of dicotyledons when we are not even sure how it comes to pass that a certain plant has in twenty-five years produced abundant new forms almost under our eyes. Knowledge of heredity has so reacted on ceptions of variation in the old sense that very competent men are even "The doctrine of the survival of the denying that variation is an occurrence fittest is undeniable so long as it is apat all. Variation is postulated as the plied to the organism as a whole; but to basis of all evolutionary change. Do attempt by this principle to find value in we then, as a matter of fact, find in all definiteness of parts and functions, the world about us variations occurring and in the name of science to see fitness of such a kind as to warrant faith in everywhere, is mere eighteenth-century optimism. Yet it was in application to a contemporary progressive evolution? the parts, to the details of specific differUntil lately, says Doctor Bateson, would have answered ence, to the spots on the peacock's tail, many of us to the coloring of an orchid flower, and "yes" without misgiving. We should hosts of such examples, that the potency have pointed, as Darwin did, to the of natural selection was urged with the immense range of diversity seen in strongest emphasis. Shorn of these pre- many wild species, so common that the tensions the doctrine of the survival of difficulty is to define the types themfavored races is a truism, helping scarcely selves. Still more conclusive seemed at all to account for the diversity of spe- the profusion of forms in the various cies. Tolerance plays almost as consider- domesticated animals and plants, most able a part. By these admissions almost the last shred of that teleological fustian of them incapable of existing even for with which Victorian philosophy loved to a generation in a wild state and thereclothe the theory of evolution is de- fore fixed unquestionably by human sestroyed. Those who would proclaim that lection. These at least, for certain, are whatever is is right will be wise hence- new forms, often di tenough to phenomena that we must have recourse -the heterogeneity of a population breedThis hetero ing together in one area. geneity may be in any degree, ranging from slight differences that systematists would disregard, to a complex variability such as we find in some moths, where there is an abundance of varieties so distinct that many would be classified as specific forms but for the fact that all are freely breeding together. of these varieties might be bred from "Naturalists formerly supposed that any any of the others. Just as the reader of novels is prepared to find that any kind of parents might have any kind of chil dren in the course of the story, so was the evolutionist ready to believe that any pair of moths might produce any of the varieties included in the species. Genetic analysis has disposed of all these mistakes. We have no longer the smallest doubt that in all these examples the varieties stand in a regular descending order, and that they are simply terms in a series of combinations of factors separately transmitted, of which each may be present or absent. "The appearance of contemporary variability proves to be an illusion. Variation from step to step in the series must occur either by the addition or by the loss of a factor. Now, of the origin of new forms by loss there seems to me to be fairly clear evidence, but of the contemporary acquisition of any new factor I see no satisfactory proof, tho I admit there are rare examples which may be so interpreted. We are left with a picture of variation utterly different from that which we saw at first. Variation now stands out as a definite physiological event. We have done with the notion that Darwin came latterly to favor, that large differences can arise by accumula tion of small differences. Such small differences are often mere ephemeral effects of conditions of life, and as such are not transmissible; but even small differences, when truly genetic, are factorial like the larger ones, and there is not the slightest reason for supposing that they are capable of summation. As to the origin or source of these positive separable factors, we are without any indication or surmise. By their effects we know them to be definite; as definite, say, as the organisms which produce diseases; but how they arise and how they come to take part in the composition of the living creature so that when present they are treated in celldivision as constituents of the germs, we cannot conjecture." As the evidence stands at present, all that can be safely said in amplification of the evolutionary creed may be summed up in the statement that variation occurs as a definite event often producing a sensibly discontinuous result. All that can be said is that the succession of varieties comes to pass by the elevation and establishment of sporadic groups of individuals owing their origin to such isolated events. The change which we see as a nascent variation is often, perhaps always, due to loss. Modern research lends not the smallest encouragement or sanction to WAR IN A NEW LIGHT the view that gradual evolution occurs by the transformation of masses of individuals, altho that fancy has fixed itself in the popular imagination. The isolated events to which variation is 33 think that from such material a fox could be bred in indefinite time, or that dogs could be bred from foxes. "Whether science will hereafter discover that certain groups can by peculdue are evidently changes in the germi-clared to have a prerogative quality justiiarities in their genetic physiology be denal tissues, probably in the manner in which they divide. It is likely that the occurrence of these variations is wholly irregular and as to their causation we are without surmise or even plausible speculation. Distinct types once arisen, no doubt a profusion of the forms called species have been derived from them by crossing and subsequent recombination. "New species may be now in course of creation by this means, but the limits of the process are obviously narrow. On the other hand, we see no changes in progress around us in the contemporary world which we can imagine likely to culminate in the evolution of forms distinct in the larger sense. By intercrossing dogs, jackals and wolves new forms of these types can be made, some of which may be species, but I see no reason to fying their recognition as species in the old sense, and that the differences of others are of such a subordinate degree that they may in contrast be termed varieties, further genetic research alone can show. I myself anticipate that such a discovery will be made, but I cannot defend the opinion with positive conviction. "We are just about where Boyle was in the seventeenth century. We can dispose of alchemy, but we cannot make more than a quasi-chemistry. We are awaiting our Priestley and our Mendeléeff. In truth it is not these wider aspects of genetics that are at present our chief concern. They will come in their time. The great advances of science are made like those of evolution, not by imperceptible mass-improvement, but by the sporadic birth of penetrative genius. The journeymen follow after him, widening and clearing up, as we are doing along the track that Mendel found." HOW THE PHILOSOPHY OF REALITY AFFECTS THE FRENCH SCIENCE OF WAR R EALITY has for the past five years been a potent word in France. The intellectual and practical life of the nation has been conditioned by what is a veritable passion for reality. This explains an extreme insistence upon the mathematical in the abstract. Henri Poincaré, greatest of modern mathematicians, seems most responsible for the contemporary attitude of the French to reality. A ruthless analysis. of emotion characterizes French psychology. The doctrine of the origin of life, with reference to its chemical nature, has been carried to startling extremes in France. In no field, however, has the passion for reality among the French attained so logical an extreme as in the science of warfare. The literature of war flourishes on its philosophical side in France as it does nowhere else, not even in Germany. Hence the whole of the French military organization from top to bottom has concerned itself with certain appreciable major problems upon the solution of which it was bent, and has not only neglected but despised all aids' to that solution which had not immediate, obvious and demonstrable value. In this circumstance must be found an explanation, moreover, of the most striking fact about war as the French understand it-the elimination of "glory." Glory, as the military experts of France in goes with such things, they not only discountenance and exclude from their military organization but actually expel with a sort of moral violence. They direct their whole energy to discovering what sort of boot it is in which a man can march best; what sort of saddle it is which saves the horse best from sores; how best the weight of the pack can be distributed and all details of the kind. They do perpetual violence to those appetites of military pride or vision which seem to them divorced from and inimical to "reality." They carry this excess into the political field and think it their business to produce an army so "real" that it is humiliated when it injects itself into the political field. That famed writer upon both military science and philosophy, Hilaire Belloc, from whose article in The Dublin Review we extract these particulars, thus enlarges : "The main problem was how with inferior numbers to meet the assault of superior numbers. In the solution of that themselves to perfection in fortification and in field artillery, latterly to the increase in the term of military service, to the training of every available man and to an expectation, which I will deal with in a moment at greater length, of initial de fail, but you bring it up half-heartedly and The attitude taken towards the reserve in the German service is almost contradictory. The scheme of its use involves at once action upon the wings and hesitation upon which wing shall use it. But the wings are the opposite extremities of the line. One can not so pick and choose. Now the French conception of the reserve is the opposite of all this. It not only explains much of the present campaign but is a test of the whole modern French philosophy of reality. The French strategical conception, and to some extent the French tactical conception as well, presupposes an ac problem the French perpetually urged quired knowledge of the enemy's plan, which knowledge can only be acquired in practice at some risk of initial reverse. It envisages the possibility and even the probability of such reverse and maintains a large reserve to be directed, when the enemy's plan develops, against whatever point his overexpense of energy may have weakened. feat.. "The contrast here between the French and German, in particular the Prussian temper, with the military advantages as well as disadvantages attaching to the latter, comes out very strongly. Just as the German is attached to a number of invisible and perhaps non-existing things, so he has risked everything in modern war upon a policy that would be a policy of adventure if it were not based upon a conviction of complete superiority. For instance, everything is organized with him for the maximum expense of energy in the first phase of a campaign. You do not do that without risking a corresponding deficit in energy later on if your first stroke fails." This policy in particular diminishes both in strategic and in tactical value the function of a Reserve. It is obvious that a reserve is a waste if you put forward all your strength to win at first, whether such "winning" be on the battlefield or over the course of a campaign. Not that any army can do without reserves, either in a local field of action or in the general con duct of a campaign, but that the way in which you look at the whole psychology of war makes all the difference to the proportionate amount and still more difference to the active use of your reserve. "It is evident that if you are starving your reserve because you have staked everything on the first blow, you are starving it morally as well as physically. Not only have you little to bring up in numbers compared with your opponent if you thusiasm. It might destroy the cohesion of an army under a strain. But such a spirit, when it succeeds, succeeds in a fashion singularly solid in whatever sphere that spirit manifests itself. "I might develop this purely military point at greater length. For instance, it is easy to show that from this same strategical conception would proceed an indifference to initial losses, and the acceptation of retirement as being as much a part of one general plan as the subsequent adThere are many other aspects of the thing, but I hope I have said enough in connection with that point of the Reserve to illustrate what I mean." vance. If such are the consequences of the modern French temper in the field, what are we to expect of it in the results of the war, whether those results begin to point to victory or to defeat? "If they tend towards defeat, if, for instance, in spite of the pressure on the German right, the German center makes good and takes the offensive, cutting the French line in two, the temper of which I speak will prolong the process of defeat indefinitely. Under that temper the French mind even in its civilian activities, still more in its military, has so forced itself to avoid illusion that the commonest and perhaps most necessary enthusiasms for a site or for any other symbol of national life will be repressed. It was already evi dent in the first phase of the war that victory or defeat would not be allowed to spirit of which I speak would be seen in much more than that. It would be seen, for instance, in a very pitiless discipline, and I should not be surprised if English opinion were startled and displeased when it hears of what followed the breakdown of the 15th Division in front of Saarbourg: if indeed it is ever allowed to hear of this in the months to come." For instance, a point of capital im- depend upon the fate of Paris. But the portance in the present campaign was the sudden swerve of the German right wing in front of Paris between the night of September 3d and the morning of September 6th last. It was here that the initial energy of the German advance had been most strained, and it was against this that the French had accumulated their great reserve behind and within the fortified zone of Paris. With that reserve they struck in the evening of September 6th and in the three days' battle of Meaux fought immediately afterwards. Why is this characteristic use of of a reserve goes with a determination "I do not say for a moment that this is Whether upon the whole this straining for reality will or will not strengthen the French in war only the upshot of this campaign can show. But it is certain that nothing has more influenced the French in their preparations for a military struggle. "It is curious to note the ill ease, the very repugnance, excited in the modern Frenchman by all the parade of an armed force. He regards it (too much) as a sign of weakness, and particularly does he think of his chief rival, the Prussian, as having wasted energy here. The Frenchable a moral asset as the regimental feelman has largely abandoned even so valuing, he has completely lost the regional feeling-we all know that he has long ago cast aside the aid of class feeling-in organizing the discipline of his army; and indeed the whole system of the French service is based upon the notion that authority attaches to things connected only with the service and in no way with the accidents of civilian life. It is the one service in which promotion from the ranks is an every-day and understood matter." THOSE MYSTERIOUS GUNS AN ARTILLERIST'S EXPLANATION OF THE IMPROVIZED SIEGE THAT MAKES BATTLE OBSOLETE T HE present war has already been remarkable for the les sons it has taught artillerymen regarding the use of their arm. Ever since the Boer War, artillerists the world over have discussed with animation the extent to which heavy ordnance ought to be brought into the field and whether guns or howitzers would prove most adapted for the sort of struggle they foresaw. These questions seem to have been settled by the experience of the last four months. Heavy artillery has been brought into the field by the Germans with a success for which they have to thank the howitzer and not the gun. For this reason, the London News has deemed it timely to secure from one of the world's greatest expert artillerists, Colonel A. M. Murray, of the British Army, a study of the cause of the German successes with special reference to the possibility of the achievement of equally notable results by the allies. It is first of all necessary, observes Colonel Murray, to differentiate between the gun and the howitzer. The gun is a long-range, high-velocity, man-killing weapon. The higher its velocity, and flatter its trajectory, the longer its range and the greater its man-killing capacity before the enemy can come within striking infantry distance. Range depends upon the weight of the charge and the length of the gun. Big charges require strong chambers to resist their explosive power and long guns in order to allow time for the gas emitted by the charge to have full effect on the projectile before it leaves the muzzle. There are obvious limits to the weight and length of the gun when it is required to maneuver in the field. Designers have always to contend with the natural antagonism between mobility and power, he being the best designer who can get the maximum power out of a gun with a minimum of weight. The howitzer, as distinct from the gun, is a short-range weapon, designed originally to throw a heavy, high-explosive shell with low velocity and high trajectory, so that it may be fired behind cover from an unseen position at the unseen object. The direction of the target is obtained by aiming-posts, and the elevation by an instrument known as the clinometer, which is attached to the howitzer and is graduated in degrees and minutes corresponding to the range. "It will at once be seen that the gun and the howitzer are constructed on different principles. Low velocity requires only a small charge and a short barrel. The "The howitzer was originally conceived for bombarding purposes, and for the destruction of material, but quite recently its use has been extended for man-killing purposes; and field howitzers, light and heavy, are now provided with shrapnel as well as high-explosive shells. When not wanted for howitzer purposes they can now be used as guns for fighting in the open. As the howitzer shrapnel shell reaches its target with a low velocity, in order to increase its man-killing effect, the shell has a high driving charge inside it amounting to as much as three-quarters of a pound or more. This driving charge increases the velocity of the bullets when they are released by the bursting of the shell. It is unnecessary to do this with a shrapnel shell fired from a gun, as the remaining velocity of the shell when it reaches its. target is sufficient to make the bullets effective. The bursting charge of an 18-pounder shrapnel shell is only three ounces, which is just enough to release the bullets, and no more." The introduction of quick-firing field guns, magazine rifles and automatic 35 firing machine guns has enormously increased the man-killing power of modern armies and compelled troops, even when acting on the offensive, to take refuge behind cover. This is the only way to save themselves from rapid annihilation, so deadly is the modern weapon of war. The consequence is that battles now take the form of improvized sieges rather than of the open battles which characterized war in the past. One side entrenches in order to hold a position while the other side counter-entrenches in order to take it. This is where the howitzer comes in: "Entrenchments when scientifically constructed with overhead cover are practically immune against gun-fire, and can only be demolished by howitzers dropping explosive shells at high angles of descent on to the top of them. They can do this from their concealed positions with complete immunity to themselves, except from. hostile howitzer fire. "This was soon apparent when the allies reached the Aisne river after the Ger man retreat from the Marne. By a stroke of good fortune Maubeuge fell on the 7th of September; releasing the German siege howitzers, which were brought down to the Aisne and used with great effect to harass the, allied troops while sapping up to the enemy's entrenchments north of the river. On discovering this, Sir John French telegraphed home for four batteries of 6-inch howitzers, which properly belong to the siege train, but were brought |