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Human beings ought surely to be worth more to us than dogs. Yet here in England-and I do not know in what "civilised" country any different order prevails--we gather together all our physical and moral defectives, we bring them into our Workhouses to have babies, under the superintendence of Boards of Guardians, and every one knows that these babies are born in the image of their parents, and will perpetuate the same cycle of misery. Yet, so far as I know, not one of these "Guardians" ever so much as attempts to make clear to those hapless mothers why and how they should avoid having other children. And no one proposes to shut up as dangerous lunatics these precious Guardians of Private Misery and Public Incapacity!

We look down with lofty moral superiority on our ancestors in these islands who were accustomed to eat their fellow-creatures. We do not eat them. We only torture them. That is what we call Progress. At all events we are laying up a bountiful supply of moral superiority for our own descendants. It is not probable that they will be able to read in their newspaper as we can in ours: "At an inquest at Dudley yesterday on a woman who was fatally scalded whilst in a fit, it was stated that she had been an epileptic for years, and that her seven children had all been epileptics, and all had died when young."

Yesterday Lord Curzon delivered an address at the Mansion House on the Beautiful London of the Future. He dwelt eloquently on its noble buildings and its long embankments, and its wide streets and its finely placed statues. But of the smoke which nullifies and destroys all these things, not a word! Yet, as he was speaking, outside the Mansion House the people of London were almost feeling their way about, scarce knowing where they were, timidly crawling across motor-infested roads with their hearts in their mouths, all the time permanently ingraining their lungs with black filth. An able man, Lord Curzon, skilful to gauge the British Idealist, ever so absorbed in his own dream of comfort or of cash that he is even blind to the world he lives in, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane" in another sense than the poet intended.

If we were mediaeval monks, who spent our time chanting the rhyme of Bernard of Morlaix, there might seem to be a reason in our madness. To make a Hell of earth is doubtless a useful method of rendering more joyous the transition to Heaven, and less overwhelming the transition to Purgatory. Yet the mediaeval monks burnt no coal and were careful to live in beautiful sites and fine air. The prospect of Purgatory made them epicures in the fine things of Earth. Now we, apparently, care not a snap for any Hereafter. It is therefore a curious psychological problem why we should have chosen to take up our cross in this peculiarly repulsive shape. Apparently our traditions are too strong for us, we cannot dispense with Hell; if robbed of it in the future we must have it Here and Now.

Le vent qui vient ? travers la montagne Me rendra fou.

Lo, at once a new Heaven and a new Earth and a new People. A sky that is ever soft and radiant; a land on which strange and fragrant plants flourish, and lakes of crimson poppies glimmer afar; men and women into whose veins seems to have passed something of the lazy sunshine of their sky, something of the rich colour of their earth. Then at last the great city of Barcelona, where work and play are mingled as nowhere else so harmoniously in the whole European world; and, beyond, the sacred height of Montserrat; and, beyond that, all the magic of Spain at my feet.

I am reminded of it now when Strindberg's fame has grown so great in England.

So I experience some amusement when I see to-day the solemn statement in an American journal which claims--I do not say with no reason--to be portentously clever and superior, that Strindberg is destined to become in America the voice of the masculine reaction in favour of "the corrective influence of a matter-of-fact attitude towards woman." One wonders by what strange fatality Strindberg-the most fantastic genius that ever lived--can appeal to an American as "matter-of-fact." And one wonders why Americans, anyway, should go to this distinguished Swede for such a "corrective," when in their own country, to mention but a single name, they have a writer like Robert Herrick, whose novels are surely so admirably subtle and profound an analysis of the position of womanhood in America, and quite reasonably sane. But it is still true, as Jesus sighed two thousand years ago, that a prophet is no prophet in his own country.

Milton is one of the "great" things in English life and literature, and his admirers dwell on his great achievements. These achievements often leave me a little cold, intellectually acquiescent, nothing more. But when I hear of these olives which the blind old scholar-poet was wont to eat for supper I am at once brought nearer to him. I intuitively divine what they meant to him.

Olives are not the most obvious food for an English Puritan of the seventeenth century, though olive-oil is said to have been used here even in the fourteenth century. Milton might more naturally, one supposes, like his arch-Puritanic foe, Prynne, have "refocillated" his brain with ale and bread, and indeed he was still too English, and perhaps too wise, to disdain either.

But Milton had lived in Italy. There the most brilliant and happy days of his life had been spent. All the rest of his real and inner life was but an echo of the music he had heard in Italy. For Milton was only on one side of his nature the austere Latin secretary of Cromwell and the ferocious opponent of Salmasius. He was also the champion of the tardy English Renaissance, the grave and beautiful youth whose every fibre thrilled to the magic of Italy. For two rich months he had lived in Florence, then the most attractive of Italian cities, with Gaddi, Dati, Coltellini, and the rest for his friends. He had visited Galileo, then just grown blind, as he was himself destined to be. His inner sight always preserved the old visions he had garnered

At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno.

Now at last, in the company of sour and ignorant Puritans who counted him one of themselves, while a new generation grew up which ignored him and which he disdained, in this sulphurous atmosphere of London which sickened and drove away his secretary Ellwood, Milton ate a handful of olives. And all Italy came to him in those olives.

"What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea?" "Oh no, no, no!" said Blake, "I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host." And these dull green exotic fruits which the blind Milton ate bedwards were the heralds of dreams diviner than he freighted with magnificent verse.

One may very well add that in this matter Life follows the same law as Art. It is the common fate of all creative work . Whoso lives well, as whoso writes well, cannot fail to convey an alarming impression of novelty, precisely because he is in accurate personal adjustment to the facts of his own time. So he is counted immoral and criminal, as Nietzsche delighted to explain. Has not Nietzsche himself been counted, in his own playful phrase, an "immoralist"? Yet the path of life that Nietzsche proposed to follow was just the same ancient, old-fashioned, in the true sense trivial path which all the world has trodden. Only his sensitive feet felt that path so keenly, with such a new grip of the toes on the asperities of it, that the mob cried: Why, this man cannot possibly be on our good old well-worn comfortable highway; he must have set off on some new path, no doubt a very bad and wicked path, where trespassers must be prosecuted. And it was just the same venerable path that all humanity has travelled, the path that Adam and Eve scuttled over, in hairy nakedness, through the jungle of the Garden of Eden!

That is one of the reasons--and there are many of them--why the social ideal of Herbert Spencer, in which the adjustment of life is so perfect that friction is impossible, can never be attained. Putting aside the question of the desirability of such an ideal it is impossible to see how it could be achieved, either along the line of working at Heredity, or along the line of working at the Environment. Even the most keenly intellectual people that ever existed, the most amorous of novelty, the most supple-minded, could not permit Socrates to live, though all the time Socrates was going their own way, his feet pressing the same path; they still could not understand his prosaic way of looking intently where his feet fell. It must always happen so, and it always means conflict. Even a flower cannot burst into bloom without conflict, the balance of forces can never be quite equal and opposite, there must be a breaking down somewhere, there must always be conflict. We may regulate and harmonise the conditions, we cannot abolish the conflict. For Conflict is implicit in Life.

So the sight of the Cornish coast, the prospect of seeing it, the very thought of its existence, has the exhilaration of a rapturous prayer. There--sometimes, at all events--the earth is exquisitely clean, the bright sea bubbles like champagne, and its mere mists are rainbow-hued dreams; the sky has flung off its dingy robe and is naked, beautiful, alive. Profoundly alien to me as I always feel this land of Cornwall to be, it is much to feel there something of that elemental reality of which men count God the symbol. Here the city-stained soul may become the sacramental agent of a Divine Transubstantiation of the elements of earth, of air, of water, of fire.

All great thinkers are great masters of metaphor because all thinking of any kind must be by analogy. It may often be a misleading guide, but it remains the only guide. To say that thinking is by metaphor is merely the same thing as to say that the world is an infinite series of analogies enclosed one within another in a succession of Chinese boxes. Even the crowd recognises this. The story that Newton first saw the gravitation of the earth in the fall of an apple in the orchard, which Voltaire has transmitted to us from a fairly good source, has no first-hand authority. But the crowd has always accepted it as a gospel truth, and by a sound instinct. The Milky Way itself is pictured by its latest investigators as a vague spiral scarcely to be distinguished from the ascending smoke of a cigarette.

That is all. But this training and this discipline, the ability to be oneself and to impart graciously to others the utmost that they have any right to demand--is not that the whole Art of Living and the entire Code of Morality?

We are all of us using these counters; they are convenient for the ordinary purposes of life, whenever the search for beauty and rarity and expressiveness may seem uncalled for. Even the master of style uses them unquestioned, so long as he uses them consciously, deliberately, of set purpose, with a sense of their just value for his purpose. When they are used, as sometimes happens, heedlessly and helplessly, by writers who are dealing with beautiful and expressive things, they become jarring vulgarisms which set the teeth on edge. Even a poet of real inspiration, like Francis Thompson, may seek to carry, "hiddenly," as he would express it, beneath the cloak of his rapture, all sorts of absurd archaisms, awkwardly conventional inversions, hideous neologisms like false antiques, all mere counters. A born writer with a personal instinct for expression, like Arthur Symons, is not apt to resort to the use of counters, even when he is seemingly careless; a carefully trained artist in the use of words, like Stevenson, evidently rejects counters immediately; the man who is not a writer, born or made, sometimes uses nothing but counters.

A casual acquaintance once presented to me an epic he had written in rhymed couplets, extending to many cantos. He was a man of bright and vigorous mind, but no poet. So when he set himself to write verse it is clear that he instinctively tested every word or phrase, and rejected those that failed to sound smooth, familiar, "poetic," to his reminiscent ear. The result is that the whole of his book is made up of counters, and every epithet is studiously obvious. The hero is "dauntless," and his "steed" is "noble," and the sky at night is a "spangled vault," and "spicy perfumes load the balmy air." It is thirty years since that epic was placed in my hands, and I have often since had occasion to think that it might profitably be used by any teacher of English literature as a text for an ever needed lesson on the counter. "There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion." Or, as Aristotle had said long before, there must be "a certain admixture of unfamiliarity," a continual slight novelty.

That is the Law of Beauty in Art because it is the Law of Morality in Life. Our acts so easily become defaced and conventionalised, mere uniform counters that have been used a thousand times before and rarely with any special applicability--often, indeed, a flagrant inapplicability--to the case in hand. The demand upon us in Life is to fling away counters, to react vitally to the vital circumstances of the situation. All the teachers of Excellent Beauty in the Moral Life bear witness to the truth of Bacon's saying. Look at the Sermon on the Mount: no doubt about the "Strangeness in the Proportion" there! Socrates and Jesus, unlike as they were, so far as we are able to discern, were yet both marked by the same horror of counters. Sooner than employ them they would die. And indeed, if the Moral Life could be reduced to the simplicity of a slot-machine, it would still be necessary to put real pennies in.

Whenever I read of the chance discovery of fossils or human remains, of buried cities in Yucatan or Roman pavements beneath Gloucestershire meadows, or beautiful statues fished out of the Tiber, or mediaeval treasures dug from below old castles, it grows an ever greater wonder to me that no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole earth beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a marvellous onion, a series of encapsuled worlds, each successive foliation preserving the intimate secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man the Baby, neglecting the wonderful Earth he crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon! All science has begun with the stars, and Early Man seemed to himself merely the by-play of a great cosmic process. God was first, and Man who had created Him--out of less than dust--was nowhere. Even in mediaeval days we knew much more about Heaven and Hell than about Earth. The Earth comes last into man's view,--even after Heaven and Hell and Purgatory,--but it will surely be a puzzle for our successors that after a million years, even in our present little era, we had still not begun to scratch up systematically the soil we stand on and could scarcely so much as uncover Pompeii. For though the under-world is not all a buried Pompeii, it is a vast treasure-house. One cannot so much as put a spade into the garden-mould of one's cottage-garden without now and then finding ancient coins and shards of strange pottery; and for all that you know, the clue to some mystery that has puzzled mankind for ages may at this moment lie a few inches below your feet.

It would be the task of an International Exfodiation Commission to dig up the whole earth systematically, leaving no inch of it untouched except on definitely determined grounds, the depth explored in each region being duly determined by experts. One might make a beginning with the banks of the Nile where the task is comparatively easy, and Nature has packed such fragile treasures in such antiseptic sand. Italy with its soil laden with marvellous things could be investigated at the same time, with all the shores of the Mediterranean. The work would take many centuries to complete and would cost vast sums of money. But when the nations are no longer engaged in the task of building warships which are obsolete a few weeks after they are launched, if not before, how vast a sum of money will be saved! The money which is wasted on the armies and navies of Europe alone during a single century would furnish a very respectable credit for the International Exfodiation Commission to begin work with. At the same time the men now employed in laboriously learning the trade of war, which they are seldom or never called upon to exercise, could be given something useful to do. In the meanwhile Exfodiation must wait until what an old English writer called "the essential oil of democracy" is poured over the stormy waves of human society. You doubt whether that oil will calm the waves? But if your essential oil of democracy fails to possess that elementary property of oil it is hardly worth while to manufacture it.

Once achieved, whenever or however it is achieved, the task will be achieved for ever. It would be the greatest task man has ever attempted, and the most inspiring. He would for the first time become fully conscious of himself. He would know all that he once was, and all that he has ever accomplished so far as its record survives. He would read clearly in the earth for the first time the title-deeds that make him the owner of the world. All that is involved is Exfodiation.

I call this process Exfodiation, because if our descendants happen to be at all like us they would much rather Exfodiate than Dig. As for us, we dare not so much as call our bodily organs and functions by their beautifully common names, and to Dig we are even more ashamed than to Beg.

Children are more than murmuring streams, and women are more than fragrant flowers, and men are more than walking trees. But on one side they are all part of the vision and music of Nature, not merely the creators of pictures and melodies, but even yet more fundamentally themselves the music and the vision. We cannot too often remember that not only is the art of man an art that Nature makes, but that Man himself is Nature. Accordingly as we cherish that faith, and seek to live by it, we vindicate our right to the Earth, and preserve our sane and vital relations to the Earth's life. The poets love to see human emotions in the procession of cosmic phenomena. But we have also to see the force of the sun and the dust of the earth in the dance of the blood through the veins of Man.

Civilisation and Morals may seem to hold us apart from Nature. Yet the world has, even literally, been set in our hearts. We are of the Stuff of the Universe. In comparison with that fact Morals and Civilisation sink into Nothingness.

Shakespeare is for the stage. But what stage? We were cut off for ever from the Shakesperian tradition in the very generation after Shakespeare died, and have not acquired a sound new tradition even yet. The device of substituting drapery for scenery and relying exclusively on the gorgeous flow of words for decorative purposes fails to satisfy us, and we fall back on the foolish trick of submerging Shakespeare in upholstery and limelight.

One sees the whole-hearted enthusiasm of both the suffragette and the dancer. Unwise, no doubt, unable to discern the perspective of life, or to measure the inevitable social reactions of their time. Yet idealists, even martyrs, for Art or for Justice, exposed in the arena of the world, as the Perpetuas and Blandinas of old were exposed out of love for Jesus, all moved by the Spirit of Life, though, as the ages pass, the Excuses for Life differ. Many Masks, but one Face and one Arena.

For the Mob, huddled like sheep around this Arena of Life, and with no vital instinct to play therein any part of their own, it is not for these to cast contumely. Let them be well content that for a brief moment it is theirs to gaze at the Spectacle of Divine Gaiety and then be thrust into outer Darkness.

We may even go a step further. It has to be remembered that the Actors of Life, interesting as they are, exist for the audience, and not the audience for the Actors. The Actors are the abnormal and exceptional people, born out of due time, at variance with the environment; that is why they are Actors. This vast inert mass of people, with no definite individualities of their own, they are normal and healthy Humanity, born to consume the Earth's fruits, even when these fruits happen to be dancers and suffragettes. It is thus that harmony is established between Actors and Spectators; neither could exist without the other. Both are needed in any Cosmic Arena.

Then the tide began to ebb. That fine equilibrium of all the elements of speech could not be maintained indefinitely. Its poise and equability began to grow trivial, its exalted familiarity to become mere vulgarity. So violent reactions became necessary. Johnson and Johnsonese swept heavily over the retreating tide and killed what natural grace and vivacity might have been left in Goldsmith or in Graves. But even had there been no Johnson the reaction was inevitable. Every great writer began to be an isolated grandee who lost the art of familiarity, for he had no one to be familiar with. Consider Gibbon, in his own domain supreme, but the magnificent fall of his cadences, however fit for his subject, was fit for no other; and look at Landor, the last great writer of English, though even he never quite scoured off the lingering dross of Johnsonese, and at the best has the air of a giant conversing with pigmies.

Then we come to the nineteenth century, where we find writing that is bad, indifferent, good, rarely perfect save now and again for a brief moment, as in Lamb, who incarnated again the old familiar touch on great things and little things alike, and into that was only driven, likely enough, by the scourge of madness. Then there was Pater, who was exquisite, even a magician, yet scarcely great. And there was Stevenson,--prototype of a vast band of accomplished writers of to-day,--the hollow image of a great writer, a man who, having laboriously taught himself to write after the best copybook models, found that he had nothing to say and duly said it at length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her mirror beautiful?

Our writers waver between vulgarity on the one hand, artificiality or eccentricity on the other. It is an alternation of evils. The best writing must always possess both Dignity and Familiarity, otherwise it can never touch at once the high things and the low things of life, or appeal simply to the complete human person. That is well illustrated by Cervantes, who thereby becomes, for all his carelessness, one of the supremely great writers. There, again, is Brant?me, not a supremely great writer, or even a writer who set out to be great. But he has in him the roots of great style. He possesses in an incomparable degree this High Familiarity. His voice is so exquisitely pitched that he can describe with equal simplicity and charm the secrets of monarchs' hearts or the intimate peculiarities of maids of honour. He knows that, as a fine critic has said, everything is serious and at the same time frivolous. He makes us feel that the ambitions of monarchs may be frivolous, and the intimate secrets of maids of honour of serious interest.

It ought to be a satisfaction to us to feel that we could not well sink lower. There is nothing left for us but to rise. The tide turns at low water as well as at high.

Behold a Republic, one is hereby at once impelled to continue, where suspected evildoers are soaked in oil and roasted, where the rulings of judges override the law, a Republic where the shadow of morality is preferred to the substance, and a great man is driven out of the land because he has failed to conform to that order of things, a Republic where those who sit in darkness are permitted to finance crime. It would not be difficult to continue Mr. Bryan's rhapsody in the same vein.

Now one has no wish to allude to these things. Moreover, it is easy to set forth definitely splendid achievements on the other side of the account, restoring the statement to balance and sanity. It is the glare of rhapsodical eulogy which instinctively and automatically evokes the complementary colours and afterimages. For, as Keble rightly thought, it is a dangerous exploit to

wind ourselves too high For sinful man beneath the sky.

The spectacle of his hinder parts thus presented to the world may be quite other than the winder intended.

All Civilisation depends on the Intelligence, Sympathy, and Mutual Trust of the persons who wrought that Civilisation. It was not so in barbaric days to anything like the same degree. Then a man's house was his castle. He could shut himself up with his family and his retainers and be independent of society, even laugh at its impotent rage. No man's house is his castle now. He is at the mercy of every imbecile and every fanatic. His whole life is regulated by delicate mechanisms which can be put out of gear by a touch. There is nothing so fragile as civilisation, and no high civilisation has long withstood the manifold risks it is exposed to. Nowadays any naughty grown-up child can say to Society: Give me the sugar-stick I want or I'll make your life intolerable. And for a brief moment he makes it intolerable.

Nature herself in her most exquisite moods has shared the same fate at the hands of Civilised Man. If there is anything anywhere in the world that is rare and wild and wonderful, singular in the perfection of its beauty, Civilised Man sweeps it out of existence. It is the fate everywhere of lyre-birds, of humming-birds, of birds of Paradise, marvellous things that Man may destroy and can never create. They make poor parlour ornaments and but ugly adornments for silly women. The world is the poorer and we none the richer. The same fate is overtaking all the loveliest spots on the earth. There are rare places which Primitive Man only approaches on special occasions, with sacred awe, counting their beauty inviolable and the animals living in them as gods. Such places have existed in the heart of Africa unto to-day. Civilised man arrives, disperses the awe, shoots the animals, if possible turns them into cash. Eventually he turns the scenery into cash, covering it with dear hotels and cheap advertisements. In Europe the process has long been systematised. Lake Leman was once a spot which inspired poets with a new feeling for romantic landscape. What Rousseau or Byron could find inspiration on that lake to-day? The Pacific once hid in its wilderness a multitude of little islands upon which, as the first voyagers and missionaries bore witness, Primitive Man, protected by Nature from the larger world, had developed a rarely beautiful culture, wild and fierce and voluptuous, and yet in the highest degree humane. Civilised man arrived, armed with Alcohol and Syphilis and Trousers and the Bible, and in a few years only a sordid and ridiculous shadow was left of that uniquely wonderful life. People talk with horror of "Sabotage." Naturally enough. Yet they do not see that they themselves are morally supporting, and financially paying for, and even religiously praying for, a gigantic system of world-wide "Sabotage" which for centuries has been recklessly destroying things that are infinitely more lovely and irreparable than any that Syndicalists may have injured.

If we consider poets as critics in the field of art generally, where their aesthetic judgment might be less biassed, they show no better. Think of the lovely little poem in which Tennyson eulogised the incongruous fa?ade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate or altogether inferior: Abt Vogler, Galuppi, Guercino, Andr?a del Sarto, and the rest. One might hesitate indeed to call Filippo Lippi inferior, but the Evil Genius still stands by, and from Browning's hands Lippi escapes a very poor creature.

Baudelaire stands apart as a great poet who was an equally great critic, as intuitive, as daring, as decisively and immediately right in aesthetic judgment as an artistic creation. And even with Baudelaire as one's guide one sometimes needs to walk by faith. In the baroque church of St. Loup in Namur he admired so greatly--the church wherein he was in the end stricken by paralysis--I have wandered and hesitated a little between the great critic's insight into a strange beauty and the great artist's acceptance of so frigidly artificial a model.

Why indeed should one expect a great poet to be a great critic? The fine critic must be sensitive, but he must also be clear-eyed, calm, judicial. The poet must be swept by emotion, carried out of himself, strung to high tension. How can he be sure to hold the critical balance even? He must indeed be a critic, and an exquisite critic, in the embodiment of his own dream, the technique of his own verse. But do not expect him to be a critic outside his own work. Do not expect to find the bee an authority on ant-hills or the ant a critic of honeycomb.

March 22.--Hendrik Andersen sends from Rome the latest news of that proposed World City he is working towards with so much sanguine ardour, the City which is to be the internationally social Embodiment of the World Conscience, though its site--Tervueren, Berne, the Hague, Paris, Fr?jus, San Stefano, Rome, Lakewood--still remains undetermined. So far the City is a fairy tale, but in that shape it has secured influential support and been worked out in detail by some forty architects, engineers, sculptors, and painters, under the direction of H?brard. It covers some ten square miles of ground. In its simple dignity, in its magnificent design, in its unrivalled sanitation, it is unique. The International Centres represented fall into three groups: Physical Culture, Science, Art. The Art centres are closely connected with the Physical Culture Centres by gardens devoted to floriculture, natural history, zoology, and botany. It is all very well.

So far I only know of one World City. But Rome was the creation of a special and powerful race, endowed with great qualities, and with the defects of those qualities, and, moreover, it was the World City of a small world. Who are to be the creators of this new World City? If it is not to be left in the hands of a few long-haired men and short-haired women, it will need a solid basis of ordinary people, including no doubt English, such as Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C.

Now I know Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C., their admirable virtues, their prim conventions, their little private weaknesses, their ingrained prejudices, their mutual suspicion of one another. Little people may fittingly rule a little village. But these little people would dominate the huge Natatorium, the wonderful Bureau of Anthropological Records, and the Temple of Religions.

On the whole I would rather work towards the creation of Great People than of World Centres. Before creating a World Conscience let us have bodies and souls for its reception. I am not enthusiastic about a World Conscience which will be enshrined in Mr. A., and Mrs. B., and Miss C. Excellent people, I know, but--a World Conscience?

All the great artists, in whatever medium, take so rare a delight, now and again, in interpreting some unutterable emotion, some ineffable vision, in mere terms of technique. In Chopin, in Rodin, in Besnard, in Rossetti,--indeed in any supreme artist,--again and again I have noted this. Great simple souls for the most part, inarticulate except through an endless power over the medium of their own art, they all love to take some insignificant little lump of that medium, to work at that little lump, with all their subtlest skill and power, in the production of what seemingly may be some absolutely trivial object or detail, and yet, not by what it obviously represents, but by the technique put into it, has become a reality, a secret of the soul, and an embodiment of a vision never before seen on earth.

Many years ago I realised this over Rossetti's poem "Cloud Confines." It is made out of a little lump of tawdry material which says nothing, is, indeed, mere twaddle. Yet it is wrought with so marvellous a technique that we seem to catch in it a far-away echo of voices that were heard when the morning stars sang together, and it clings tremulously to the memory for ever.

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