action
and adventure. This is right and proper in its place, and a good
antidote to the tedious moralising of the past generation.

The influence of Nietzsche upon the spiritual plane, and that of the
war upon the emotional plane, have thrown us violently out of the
sphere of aesthetic receptivity into the sphere of heroic and laconic
wrestling.

Short stories, short poems, short speeches, short questions, short
answers, short pity and short shrift, are the order of the day. Far and
far have we been tossed from the dreamy purlieus of his "great good
place," with its long sunny hours under misty trees, and its
interminable conversations upon smooth-cut lawns! The sweet
psychology of terrace-walks is scattered, and the noise of the
chariots and the horsemen breaks the magical stillness where lovers
philosophised and philosophers loved.

But let none of the strenuous gentlemen, whose abrupt ways seem
encouraged by this earthquake, congratulate themselves that
refinement and beauty and distinction and toleration have left the
world forever, for them to "bustle in." It is not for long. The sun
does not stop shining or the dew cease falling or the fountains of
rain dry up because of the cruelty of men. It is not for long. The
"humanism" of Henry James, with its "still small voice," is bound to
return. The stars in their courses fight for it. It is the pleasure of the
consciousness of life itself; of the life that, whether with Washington
Square, or Kensington Park, or the rosy campaniles of the Giudecca,
or the minarets of Sacre-Coeur, or the roofs of Montmartre, or the
herbaceous borders and shadowy terraces of English gardens, as its
background, must flow and flow and flow, with its tender
equivocations and its suppliance of wistful mystery, as long as men
and women have any leisure to love or any intelligence to analyse
their love!

He is an aristocrat, and he writes--better than any--of the aristocracy;
and yet, in the long result, is it of his well-bred levities and of his
pleasantly-housed, lightly-living people, that one comes to think? Is
it not rather of those tragic and faded figures, figures of sensitive
men and sensitive women for whom the world has no place, and of
whom few--even among artists--speak or care to speak, with
sympathy and understanding?

He has, just here, and in his own way, something of that sheer
human pity for desolate and derelict spirits which breaks forth so
savagely sometimes, and w