anomalies, and social forms of injustice. Many of our novelists
are really pamphleteers, reformers masquerading as story-tellers, earnest
sociologists seeking to mend as well as to mirror life.

The book is certainly characteristic of an age so practical and so
literary as ours, an age in which all social reforms have been preceded
and have been largely influenced by fiction.

Mr. Stopford Brooke said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic
spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would
widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision, and would
touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been
silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold. What Art
gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a
problem that is not easy to solve. It is, however, certain that
Socialism starts well equipped. She has her poets and her painters, her
art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her
clever writers. If she fails it will not be for lack of expression. If
she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force.

Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammelled by any hard and
fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula. She welcomes many
and multiform natures. She rejects none and has room for all. She has
the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one
and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred and injustice,
and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by
his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past. And
all of this is well. For, to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make
Socialism human is a great thing.

The Reformation gained much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the
Socialists seem determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon
the people. However, they must not be too sanguine about the result.
The walls of Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very
dull city indeed.

We really must protest against Mr. Matthews' efforts to confuse the
poetry of Piccadilly with the poetry of Parnassus. To tell us, for
instance, that Mr. Austin Dobson's verse 'has not the condensed clearness
nor the incisive vigor of Mr. Locker's' is really too bad even for
Transatlantic criticism. Nobody who lays claim to the slightest
knowledge of literature and the