room.' I must admit, for my part, without the
slightest shame, that I have found a great many very excellent things in
drawing-rooms. For example, I found Mr. Masterman in a drawing-room. But
I merely mention this purely ethical attack in order to state, in as few
sentences as possible, my difference from the theory of optimism and
progress therein enunciated. At first sight it would seem that the
pessimist encourages improvement. But in reality it is a singular truth
that the era in which pessimism has been cried from the house-tops is
also that in which almost all reform has stagnated and fallen into
decay. The reason of this is not difficult to discover. No man ever did,
and no man ever can, create or desire to make a bad thing good or an
ugly thing beautiful. There must be some germ of good to be loved, some
fragment of beauty to be admired. The mother washes and decks out the
dirty or careless child, but no one can ask her to wash and deck out a
goblin with a heart like hell. No one can kill the fatted calf for
Mephistopheles. The cause which is blocking all progress today is the
subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not
good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are
revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These
essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet
ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be
loved first and improved afterwards.

G. K. C_.

* * * * *

THE DEFENDANT

INTRODUCTION

In certain endless uplands, uplands like great flats gone dizzy, slopes
that seem to contradict the idea that there is even such a thing as a
level, and make us all realize that we live on a planet with a sloping
roof, you will come from time to time upon whole valleys filled with
loose rocks and boulders, so big as to be like mountains broken loose.
The whole might be an experimental creation shattered and cast away. It
is often difficult to believe that such cosmic refuse can have come
together except by human means. The mildest and most cockney imagination
conceives the place to be the scene of some war of giants. To me it is
always associated with one idea, recurrent and at last instinctive. The
scene was the scene of the stoning of some prehistoric prophet, a
prophet as much more gigantic than after-prophets as the boulders are
more gigantic than the pebbles. He spoke some wo