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slight differences of method, their slightly varying merit, are identical in effect, if we look closely enough into them. 'Paolo and Francesca,' which seems at first sight to be more nearly a work of art than Ulysses,' because it has nothing quite so bad as the prologue in heaven, and because it has a certain neatness of movement, a certain prettiness of verse, has the same essential insincerity, with an even more faulty human logic. Ulysses' is frankly a spectacle; Herod' is almost frankly a melodrama; but 'Paolo and Francesca,' in which so much that is melodramatic is woven so softly into so much that is spectacular, comes to us as if in disguise, plausibly, begging a welcome. What remains with us, when the three are over? First, the tumult and glitter of the spectacle; next, the qualities of the acting; lastly, a few separate lines, not essential to the play as a whole, or to the revelation of any one of the characters, but interesting in themselves for their idea or for their expression. The canvas is stretched and threadbare, the pattern indistinct; here and there a colour asserts itself, coming self-consciously out of the pattern.

We have now examined Mr Phillips' work from the point of view of poetry, and from the point of view of drama; we have indicated why it seems to us that this work is neither original as poetry nor genuine as drama. We have indicated why the poetry has been praised by the critics; it remains to consider why the drama has been accepted by the public.

First of all, the public wants, or has been trained to want, spectacle at the theatre; and Mr Phillips provides them with spectacle, on which they can repose their eyes without troubling their minds by any further considerations. An enthusiastic admirer of Ulysses,' advising a friend to go and see the most beautiful play he had ever seen, and being answered, ' But I have read the play, and do not care for it,' exclaimed with conviction, 'Oh, you won't hear the words!' Yet there are those who wish to hear the words, and to whom the words seem full of beauty. These are the people into whose hands modern education has put all the great books of the world, all 'the treasures of all the arts, and whom it has not taught to discriminate between what is good and what is secondrate. Ignorance has its felicities; the peasant who has

read nothing but his Bible has at least not been trained in the wrong direction. But there is one thing more fatal than most other things in the world: the education which gives facts without reasons, opinions without thoughts. mental results without the long meditation through which they should have come into the mind. There is something which education, as we see it in our time, violently and ignorantly at work upon ignorance, can do; it can persuade the public that the middle class in literature is a fine form of intellectual democracy; it can change the patterns of our wall-papers into less aggressive patterns; it can exclude the antimacassar from the back of the chair on which we rest our head, and the mental image of the antimacassar from the head which rests on the back of the chair. But the change in the furniture, the vague consciousness that a certain piece of furniture is ugly or unseemly, has not turned an inartistic mind into an artistic mind; it has merely changed the model on the blackboard for a slightly better model. The taste for melodrama stark naked has faded a little in the public favour; we must have our melodrama clothed, and clothed elegantly. The verse which seemed good enough for poetical plays ten years ago is not good enough for us any longer; we were in the third standard' then, we are in the fourth standard' now.

In the Cornhill Magazine' for March Mr Yeats has pointed out, with unquestionable truth, that

what we call popular poetry never came from the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs Hemans, and Macaulay in his Lays, and Scott in his longer poems, are the poets of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been established upon the unwritten.'

'There is only one kind of good poetry,' he reminds us; 'for the poetry of the coteries, which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition.'

We live in a time when the middle class rules, and will have its say, even in art. The judgments of the crowd are accepted by the crowd; there are, alas, no longer tyrants.

No man any longer admits that he is ignorant of anything; the gentleman who has made his money in South Africa talks art with the gentleman who has made his money on the Stock Exchange. Once he was content to buy; now he must criticise as well. The gambler from abroad takes the opinion of the gambler at home; between them they make opinion for their fellows. And they will have their popular poetry, their popular drama. They, and the shopkeeper, and the young man brought up at the board-school, form a solid phalanx. They hold together, they thrust in the same direction. The theatres exist for them; they have made the theatres what they are. They will pay their money for nothing on which money has not been squandered. A poetical play must not be given unless it can be mounted at a cost of at least 20007.; so much money cannot be risked unless there is a probability that the play will draw the crowd: is it not inevitable that the taste of the crowd should be consulted humbly, should be followed blindly? Commercialism rules the theatre, as it rules elsewhere than in the theatre. It is all a simple business matter, a question of demand and supply. A particular kind of article is in demand at the theatre: who will meet that demand? Mr Phillips comes forward with plays which seem to have been made expressly for the purpose. Their defects help them hardly more than their merits. They have just enough poetical feeling, just enough action, just enough spectacle; they give to the middle-class mind the illusion of an art 'dealing greatly with great passions'; they give to that mind the illusion of being for once in touch with an art dealing greatly with great passions. They rouse no disquieting reflections; they challenge no accepted beliefs. They seem to make the art of the drama easy, and to reduce poetry at last to the general level.

Art. IX.-ENGLAND

VIEWED THROUGH FRENCH

SPECTACLES.

1. Essai d'une Psychologie Politique du Peuple Anglais au XIX Siècle. Par Emile Boutmy. Paris, 1901.

2. L'Angleterre et l'Impérialisme. Colin et Cie: Paris, 1900.

3. Les Anglais aux Indes et en Armand Colin: Paris, 1900.

Armand Colin:

Par Victor Bérard.

Égypte. Par Eugène Aubin.

4. L'Anglais est-il un Juif? Par Louis Martin. A. Savine: Paris, 1895.

5. Études Anglaises. Par André Chevrillon. Hachette et Cie Paris, 1901.

6. Les Nouvelles Sociétés Anglo-Saxonnes.

Par Pierre

Leroy-Beaulieu. Armand Colin: Paris, 1901.

We have never been able to make up our minds whether the fulfilment of Burns's aspiration,

'O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!'

would benefit either individuals or humanity. There is, we fancy, a sounder philosophy in the old saying that in every John there are three Johns-John as he sees himself, John as his neighbour sees him, and John as his maker sees him. The last of these three points of view is manifestly the only correct one; but, as the estimate of omniscience can never be known to us, in this life at any rate, we have to form our judgment of John from a comparison between his own estimate of himself and that placed upon him by the outside world; and these two estimates will, as a rule, differ very widely. What is true of men in this respect is also true of nations, with this difference, that since nations, generally speaking, know each other less, and dislike each other more, than individuals do, the average estimate formed by one nation of another is likely to be less favourable than that formed of a man by his neighbours.

Englishmen are fairly conscious of the defects, as well as the virtues, of their national character. They are prone to oscillate between fits of humility and fits of self-glorification; but, on the whole, they have no need to utter the

prayer, 'Lord, give us a good conceit of ourselves.' As to the views of our neighbours, we have long been aware that we were not exactly popular on the Continent; but, until lately, we had no idea that we were universally detested. It is easy, therefore, to understand the astonishment with which our countrymen have recently been made acquainted with the opinion entertained of England by her neighbours. If ever a nation had an opportunity for seeing herself as others see her, we are that nation.

Since the commencement of our quarrel with the Boer Republics we have been told from well-nigh every quarter of the civilised world that not only is the war a wicked, cruel, and unjust attack upon a feeble and unaggressive power, but that it is a signal illustration of our national character. We are informed day by day that throughout our existence we have been a compound of bully and hypocrite; that our policy has been directed steadily and wilfully to undermining the strength and prosperity of our neighbours; and that the British Empire is the creation of a system of perfidious intrigue, of brutal disregard of every one's interest but our own, of culpable mendacity, and of an unreasoning jealousy against every power, whether great or small, whose existence places any obstacle in the way of our own aggrandisement. Our claims to morality, to benevolence, to fair-dealing, to ordinary humanity, to patriotism, and even to brute courage, have been held up to ridicule in the parliaments and in the press of the Continent. Every defeat we have sustained throughout a very arduous campaign has been hailed with delight, and that less as a gain for the Boers than as a triumph for Europe. Every victory we have won has been ascribed to the weakness of our opponents, or has been declared unworthy of belief because it was vouched for only by British bulletins. Our methods of conducting the war have been denounced as a disgrace to humanity, and a violation of the military code recognised by the law of nations. Our army has been held up to infamy as a horde of mercenaries actuated by cruelty, lust, and greed of plunder; and this crusade against the army which in bygone years drove the French out of Spain, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and by so doing secured the safety and peace of Europe, has actually been carried to such lengths that the German Chancellor did