when they cross the Atlantic are the guests and prey of just that small body of rich men and women, especially of the banking interest, which the mass of Americans most suspect. Our politicians, received and patronized by such families, appear to Americans as the hangers-on of money-dealers; they are suspect from the hour they land. American millionaires who find in England that position which in their own country money cannot give complete the ruin. Anything done for England in America through such agency is bitterly resented there and works sharply against us. It would pay us to subsidize the silence of such men with large annuities charged to the consolidated fund and terminable for each on the day when any one of them wrote or spoke in public upon the common interests of our country in which they are tolerated and of theirs - in which they are despised.

There is only one way to approach America successfully with the request for aid and support. That way is to approach her for the foreign Power she is: as a Great Power and as an alien Great Power, which is to be persuaded of its interests in the combination and treated throughout as a completely separate party in it; to speak frankly

of hostility when we feel hostility, not to parade an enthusiasm for international ideals which the mass of our people hate. That may at last obtain us the Alliance which I still believe would be to our hurt, but to which, many say, necessity at present compels us. Nothing short of that will do it. Our terms must be as precise as they are now vague and our appeal as clearly political and practical as it is now sentimental and popular.

As a practical recommendation let me end with this. Let every envoy or public pleader for the Alliance prepare himself by traveling to the States in a slow and very cheap boat. Once landed let him proceed at once to the Middle West, staying in the chief hotel of one country town after another for a month and never more than a couple of nights in any. Let him meanwhile talk to men of all ranks and origins and read every paper he comes across. Let him listen also to sermons in chapels. Next let him walk for another month back across the Divide to the east coast and spend the remainder of these months in cities of the seaboard, one after another, on not more than $7 a day. After such a brief experience even a Westminster politician might approach the American problem with caution.

FROM time to time we are solemnly warned that in the hands of modern writers language has fallen into a morbid state. It has become degenerate, if not, indeed, the victim of 'senile ataxia' or 'general paralysis.' Certainly it is well that our monitors should seek to arouse in us the wholesome spirit of self-criticism. Whether we write ill or well, we can never be too seriously concerned with what it is that we are attempting to do. We may always be grateful to those who stimulate us to a more wakeful activity in pursuing a task which can never be carried to perfection.

Yet these monitors seldom fail at the same time to arouse a deep revolt in our minds. We are not only impressed by the critic's own inability to write any better than those he criticizes. We are moved to question the validity of nearly all the rules he lays down for our guidance. We are inclined to dispute altogether the soundness of the premises from which he starts. Of these three terms of our revolt, covering comprehensively the whole ground, the first may be put aside - since the ancient retort is always ineffective and it helps the patient not at all to bid the physician heal himself - and we may take the last first. Men are always apt to bow down before the superior might of their ancestors. It has been so always and everywhere. Even the author of the once well-known book of Genesis believed that 'there were giants in the earth in those days,' the mighty men

which were of old, the men of renown, and still to-day among ourselves no plaint is more common than that concerning the physical degeneracy of modern men as compared to our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Now and then, indeed, there comes along a man of science, like Professor Parsons who has measured the bones from the remains of the ancestors we still see piled up in the crypt at Hythe, and finds that - however fine the occasional exceptions the average height of those men and women was decidedly less than that of their present-day descend

ants.

Fortunately for the vitality of tradition, we cherish a wholesome distrust of science. And so it is with our average literary stature. The academic critic regards himself as the special depository of the accepted tradition, and far be it from him to condescend to any mere scientific inquiry into the actual facts. He half awakens from slumber to murmur the expected denunciation of his own time, and therewith returns to slumber. He usually seems unaware that even two centuries ago, in the finest period of English prose, Swift, certainly himself a supreme master, was already lamenting 'the corruption of our style.'

If it is asserted that the average writer of to-day has not equaled the supreme writer of some earlier age there are but one or two in any agewe can only ejaculate: 'Strange if he had!' Yet that is all that the academic critic usually seems to mean. If he

would take the trouble to compare the average prose-writer of to-day with the average writer of even so great an age as the Elizabethan he might easily convince himself that the former, whatever his imperfections, need not fear the comparison.

Whether or not progress in general may be described as 'the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance,' it is certainly so with the progress of style, and the imperfections of our average everyday writing are balanced by the quite other imperfections of our forefathers' writing. What, for instance, need we envy in the literary methods of that great and miscellaneous band of writers whom Hakluyt brought together in those admirable volumes which are truly great and really fascinating only for reasons that have nothing to do with style? Raleigh himself here shows no distinction in his narrative of that discreditable episode - as he clearly and rightly felt it to be the loss of the Revenge by the willful Grenville.

Most of them are bald, savorless, monotonous, stating the obvious facts in the obvious way, but hopelessly failing to make clear, when rarely they attempt it, anything that is not obvious. They have none of the little unconscious tricks of manner which worry the critic to-day. But their whole manner is one commonplace trick from which they never escape. They are relieved only by its simplicity and by the novelty which comes through age.

We have to remember that all mediocrity is impersonal, and that when we encourage its manifestations on printed pages we merely make mediocrity more conspicuous. Nor can that be remedied by teaching the mediocre to cultivate tricks of fashion or of vanity. There is more personality in Claude Bernard's Leçons de Physiologie Expérimentale, a great critic of life and letters has pointed

out, Remy de Gourmont, than in Musset's Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle. For personality is not something that can be sought; it is a radiance that is diffused spontaneously. It may even be most manifest when most avoided, and no writer the remark has doubtless often been made before — can be more personal than Flaubert, who had made almost a gospel of impersonality. But the absence of research for personality, however meritorious, will not suffice to bring personality out of mediocrity.

Moreover, the obvious fact seems often to be overlooked by the critic, that a vastly larger proportion of the population now write, and see their writing printed. We live in what we call a democratic age in which all are compulsorily taught how to make pothooks and hangers on paper. So that every nincompoop-in the attenuated sense of the term - as soon as he puts a pen in ink feels that he has become, like M. Jourdain, a writer of prose. That feeling is justified only in a very limited sense; and if we wish to compare the condition of things to-day with that in an age when people wrote at the bidding of some urgent stimulus from without or from within, we have at the outset to delete certainly over ninety-five per cent of our modern socalled writers before we institute any comparison.

The writers thus struck out, it may be added, cannot fail to include many persons of much note in the world. There are all sorts of people to-day who write from all sorts of motives other than a genuine aptitude for writing.

To suppose that there can be any comparison at this point of the present with the past, and to dodder over the decay of our language, would seem a senile proceeding if we do not happen to know that it occurs in all ages, and that, even at the time when our prose speech was as near to perfection as it is

ever likely to be, its critics were bemoaning its corruption, lamenting, for instance, the indolent new practice of increasing sibilation by changing 'arriveth' into 'arrives' and pronouncing 'walkèd' as 'walkd,' sometimes in their criticisms showing no more knowledge of the history and methods of growth of English than our academic critics show to-day.

For we know what to-day they tell us; it is not hard to know, their exhortations, though few, are repeated in so psittaceous a manner. One thinks, for instance, of that solemn warning against the enormity of the split infinitive which has done so much to aggravate the pharisaism of the bad writers who scrupulously avoid it. This superstition seems to have had its origin in a false analogy with Latin, in which the infinitive is never split for the good reason that it is impossible to split. In the greater freedom of English it is possible and has been done for at least the last five hundred years by the greatest masters of English; only the good writer never uses this form helplessly and involuntarily but with a definite object, and that is the only rule to observe. An absolute prohibition in this matter is the mark of those who are too ignorant, or else too unintelligent, to recognize a usage which is of the essence of English speech. It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of the expert — as in C. T. Onions, Advanced English Syntax is entirely reasonable.

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One may perhaps refer, again, to those who lay down that every sentence must end on a significant word, never on a preposition, and who reprobate what has been technically termed the posthabited prefix. They are the same worthy and would-be old-fashioned people who think that a piece of music

must always end monotonously on a banging chord. Only here they have not, any more than in music, even the virtue if such it be of old fashion, for the final so-called preposition is in the genius of the English language and associated with the Scandinavian in the wider ancient sense Danish strain of English, one of the finest strains it owns, imparting much of the plastic force which renders it flexible, the element which helped to save it from the strait-laced tendency of AngloSaxon and the awkward formality of Latin and French influence. The foolish prejudice we are here concerned with seems to date from a period when the example of French, in which the final preposition is impossible, happened to be dominant. Its use in English is associated with the informal grace and simplicity, the variety of tender cadence, which our tongue admits.

In such matters as the 'split infinitive' and the 'posthabited preposition,' there should never have been any doubt as to the complete validity and authority of the questioned usages. But there are other points at which some even good critics may be tempted to accept the condemnation of the literary grammarians. It is sufficient to mention one: the nominative use of the pronoun 'me.' Yet surely anyone who considers social practice as well as psychological necessity should not fail to see that we must recognize a double use of 'me' in English. The French, who in such matters seem to have possessed a finer social and psychological tact, have realized that ‘je' cannot be the sole nominative of the first person and have supplemented it by 'moi' ('mi' from 'mihi'). The Frenchman, when asked who is there, does not reply 'Je!' But the would-be English purist is supposed to be reduced to replying 'I!' Royal Cleopatra asks the

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Messenger: 'Is she as tall as me?' The would-be purist, no doubt, transmutes this as he reads into: 'Is she as tall as I?' We need not envy him.

Such an example indicates how independent the free and wholesome life of language is of grammatical rules. This is not to diminish the importance of the grammarian's task but simply to define it, as the formulator, and not the lawgiver, of usage. His rules are useful, not merely in order to know how best to keep them, but in order to know how best to break them. Without them freedom might become license. Yet even license, we have to recognize, is the necessary off scouring of speech in its supreme manifestations of vitality and force. English speech was never more syntactically licentious than in the sixteenth century, but it was never more alive, never more fitly the material for a great artist to mould.

So it is that in the sixteenth century we find Shakespeare. In post-Dryden days though Dryden was an excellent writer and engaged on an admirable task a supreme artist in English speech became impossible, and if a Shakespeare were to appear all his strength would have been wasted in a vain struggle with the grammarians. French speech has run a similar and almost synchronous course with English. There was a magnificently natural force and wealth in sixteenth-century French; in Rabelais it became even extravagantly exuberant; in Montaigne it is still flexible and various-ondoyant et divers and still full of natural delight and freedom.

But after Malherbe and his fellows, French speech acquired orderliness, precision, and formality; they were excellent qualities, no doubt, but had to be paid for by some degree of thinness and primness, even some stiffening of the joints. Rousseau came and poured fresh blood from Switzerland into the

language and a new ineffable grace that was all his own; so that if we now hesitate to say, with Landor, that he excels all the moderns for harmony, it is only because they have learned what he taught; and later the romantics, under the banner of Hugo, imparted color and brilliance. Yet all the great artists who have wrestled with French speech for a century have never been able to restore the scent and the savor and the substance which Villon and Montaigne without visible effort could once find within its borders. In this as in other matters what we call progress means the discovery of new desirable qualities, and therewith the loss of other qualities that were at least equally desirable.

Then there is yet another warning which, especially in recent times, is issued at frequent intervals, and that is against the use of verbal counters, of worn or even worn-out phrases, of what we commonly fall back on modern French to call clichés. We mean thereby the use of old stereotyped phrases to save the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning. The word cliché is thus typographic, though, it so happens, it is derived from an old French word of phonetic meaning, cliqueter or cliquer (related to the German klatschen), which we already have in English as to click or to clack, in a sense which well supplements its more modern technical sense for this literary end.

Yet the warning against clichés is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive and craves speech that is vivid, as clichés never are, instinctively avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed clichés, falls into the most deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so anxious to avoid clichés that he acquired the habit