opprobrium belonging to too much learning, he seldom read the writings of asthetes, and, if he did, probably found that "emotions regarded as ends in themselves was a notion typically absurd. He had never in his life had an emotion which ended in itself. Every emotion modified his way of thinking, if nothing else. Home and mother made him a good son and husband, Jack Cornwall or Earl Haig made him a patriot every time he thought of them. He tried art in the balance of his very balanced brain and found it wanting, though he might admit that, for so foolish a thing, art has lasted a long time on earth and moulded ideas strangely, from Aurignacian days or earlier.

And now art is getting back at him. Artists are planning out his towns. Great roads are being made, and made beautifully, with flowers and trees. Smoke is being challenged, so is coal. Jerry-builders are feeling peeved, since municipalities seem to expect more than the limit of specifications. It is ceasing to be manly to defend ugliness, and to be a lowbrow is nearly as foolish as to be a highbrow, since both are examples of half-thinking.

But "improvements" do not always improve, and drastic change requires criticism, lest it be for the worse rather than for the bettering of conditions. The old world went down in chaos in 1914. The new world is inclined to iconoclasm. Strange things have happened in housing, for example, resulting sometimes in houses without kitchens, or any adequate pretence of walls. Efficiency is not always effective. Anxiety to be imaginative sometimes takes the place of any real imagination. It is a little breath-taking for life to meet art, and also a little breath-taking for the artists to meet life. The philistine still wants to instruct the artist, the artist to scorn the philistine We are all mortal. We are also a conservative nation, not without reason. Northern England is being expected to think to-day what some Americans thought yesterday, and is not quite happy about it. She is still inclined to defer to London. As she went there for her pictures, so she likes to go there for her posters and designs. And people will not even let her do this in peace. They say that men on the spot might know something about textile designing. Men on the spot, mere home-trained nonentities. It is all very difficult to humble-minded people who know that London knows, and would rather not have to know personally. The humility before London in matters of art on the part of many who grow truculent at the mention of

1

London in commerce is very amusing, and shows that art's importance is still a new idea.

In all the foregoing discussion one has, by the very nature of the case, been giving a view of the northern people which is less than kind. One has been touching them on one of their weakest spots. The only hope is that here, in their exhibition of their weakness, they have also, to some extent at least, shown their strength. Because they believed, vaguely, that they ought to do it, they spent money in attempting those parks, despite the smoke, those art galleries which seemed mere luxuries, that training for the future of young persons who, incomprehensibly, wanted to be artists. They spent money, the object of their endeavours, generously and altruistically. The curious contrast between the alderman talking art at home and the same alderman bowing humbly before metropolitan opinion shows that his bombast is only half-hearted, and that in his innermost soul he is humble, deferential to those who know, or, at least, those who appear to him to know. Finally, what about the about the northern attitude towards

æsthetics?

Once more let it be emphasized that all Northerners are not philistines. Violent statements and erratic actions, denoting ignorance, are not universal, though conspicuous. And, considering the rows of hideous streets, the dirt, the sordidness of much of their surroundings, allowance should be made for the worst blindness. Yet the main instincts deserve thought. These people make art, if anything, a servant of life, a contributor of ideas, feelings, and emotions. These emotions are definite, life moulding, not ending only in emotion. For this æsthetes might call them sentimental. Sir Walter Raleigh, speaking of "feeling which became sentiment," says, "this I take to be feeling for its own sake, feeling reckless of all but itself." This seems to make the æsthetes sentimentalists rather than the philistines of the North. There is something strong in the view of art as servant. Was anything ever a master that was not first a servant? Is that which does not serve of much account? To love the hymns of the gods and the praises of worthy actions is to have Plato for support. There is, however, no support anywhere, save in ignorance, for the notion that art is unmanly, since "art" means the exercise of the creative and constructive powers, without which man had fallen a prey to physically stronger animals, or had remained a thing much like an ape. The North may say that such lack of thought is not found only north of the Severn, and

speak truth. But where contact with knowledge is general, discretion forbids exultation in ignorance, to some extent at least.

The brain of man, throughout the world, having failed as yet to reach its highest capacity, brains concentrated on one subject become lopsided about other things. This applies equally to æsthetes and cotton manufacturers. More constructive and creative exercise may in time bring broader thought.

The North, facing the task of undoing the evils of conditions which came with the good of industrial endeavour, is still generous, active, courageous. If it is still rather unpractical, slightly stubborn, not fully civilized, it makes effort marvellously and continuously. What more can be required of it? Only still greater effort.

JESSICA WALKER STEPHENS

ent

THE SETTLER
I

He was a post-war product. Being too young to have had the opportunity to die nobly in the Great War for civilization, he had floundered ignobly into manhood amongst the wreckage of what remained after the frenzied salvage of that civilization had ceased. There were hundreds like him to whom normal times were only a period of boyish memories, his schooldays a period of rationing and restrictions with old, time-honoured traditions dying gamely.

Now he found life among the shattered, jagged fragments of the old order an unsatisfying existence. Unlike many of his age who had never known clearly any other state of affairs, he did not rail at things as he found them, although life presented a whole lot of unanswerable questions. To him it seemed useless to rail, as it would be useless to rail at some stained-glass window that had been smashed into a myriad pieces. The design might once have depicted some beautiful picture-but he had never known it as it was. To-day, the broken pieces were meaningless to him, a problem in reconstruction beyond him, and others, too.

For the old, grey-headed ones, the leaders of the old régime, just mumbled incoherently and went their way, the same old way. Those who were of the war, separated by that great gulf that must always divide those who were and those who were not, looked for the new ideals that they hoped to find among the shattered fragments of the old design, but looked in vain. But he had no such illusions; instead, he looked beyond his present chaotic circumstances for something in the nature of a new background. He did not give his thoughts the foregoing symbolical articulation, but it expresses his outlook at the time when he suddenly found himself an orphan, without any personal ties, and with no definite opportunities in the work he was doing, and no special qualifications except good health and good nature.

The whole world lay before him, the uprooting would be a painless process, as he had no heart-strings to tear asunder. He thought of going abroad, but where? He wanted a place where he could put out fresh roots, where there was room to grow.

Good fortune brought him into contact with some people whose business it is to interest themselves in those who want to go to South Africa, but know very little of what they are going to. Provided that the applicants are not leaving their

country for their country's good, they take them under their wing and endeavour, as far as is humanly possible, to safeguard them from the snares and pitfalls that attract the tenderfoot in any country.

One dreary afternoon at the end of a wet week he made up his mind to go in search of the sun, and a few weeks later he sailed for South Africa. He left Southampton in the mist, like one sailing out into the unknown; but it was landward, not seaward, that he looked until the outline of his motherland faded into oblivion.

At Madeira he found the sun, that henceforward shone daily in a sky of intense blue. The voyage was too short with the board-ship sports and games. He heard much of South Africa on the boat from those he talked to who were returning, much that he subsequently disproved; but all were glad to return, he noticed, to their particular portion of it, which in every case was the finest part of the country in their own eyes. He learnt, also, his first words of the Dutch language that everyone picks up before they land: "Wacht en bietje, als sall recht kommen,"* though at present he had not learnt the appropriateness of its sentiments; for, in a land of feast or famine, its meaning is: "Trust the country, the land will pull you through."

At last Cape Town-the impressive, slow gliding into the harbour under the brooding majesty of Table Mountain; behind those mighty rocks waited Africa with its secrets, and there his future lay.

A couple of days at Cape Town provided him with only a tantalizing glimpse of the city and its picturesque surroundings. It struck him as a wonderful mixture of history and progress, with its fine old houses sitting sleepily in the shade of age-old oak- and gum-trees and its modern bungalows by the sea. It was all so strange, with its many peoplesEnglish, Dutch, Cape coloured, Indian, Malay, and native; and yet it was not a foreign country, for among its many tongues he heard the preponderance of English everywhere.

From Cape Town the guardians of his destiny sent him up-country into the hands of a man on the spot who knew the local conditions of his district. Then came the long train journey which provided him with new experiences, one of which was the novelty of sitting outside the carriage on the little balconies at either end of the corridor. As he talked with his fellow-passengers he became conscious that these South Africans were different: why, he did not know. What was the difference? They spoke the same language, talked

** 'Wait a little, it will all come right."