ported by an unequaled password, which I gave with a casual air. The effect was immediate. His face lighted

up.

‘Ah, Valéry Larbaud! How I should like to see him here! What a delightful friend! What agreeable hours we have spent together. You know, I have just received a new book for him in that collection La Phalange, edited by Jean Royère, a work of criticism: Ce vice impuni, la lecture.

'You are a friend of Larbaud's? I'm glad to see you, but please do not put me to "the torture." Of course I know all about Les Nouvelles Littéraires, and I know your book, Une heure avec. I very much enjoy your ferocity as a torturer, but only when you are taking it out on my colleagues. And then, besides, did n't my good and great friend Swinnerton pay for the two of us in your article about him?

'I have nothing to say. I have no ideas. I am not an intellectual. I am a man who spends his life telling little stories. The American and English public is so good as to get some pleasure out of them. Eighteen years ago I began to write reports for the Staffordshire newspapers, and then I came to London and began as a clerk in a lawyer's office. That lasted six years. The law bored me, and at night in my room I used to write. When I was about twenty-six, I escaped via journalism and became editor-in-chief of a weekly magazine, feminine and fashionable, called Woman, where I remained until I was thirty-two. From then on I was a free-lance journalist, selling what I wrote almost everywhere.

'My first book, A Man from the North, was begun about mid-April 1895, and was finished toward May 15, 1896. Here is the manuscript now. But that is not my finest manuscript. Look at this one, of The Old Wives' Tale. It is "the first and last writing"

that is,

the first and last versions of the book. I do all my work in my head. I never begin to write until everything is ready and all is in order. Then I amuse myself with calligraphy. Look here! As you see, I have not blotted a line.'

'Your beautiful manuscripts make me think,' said I, 'of Valéry Larbaud and of his excellent translation of Samuel Butler which I like to see whenever I am in the Rue du CardinalLemoine.'

'Yes,' said Bennett, 'beautiful handwriting is a pleasure to the eye, and that is a pleasure which makes work more agreeable. I write and publish three books a year. To keep up that pace necessitates a good deal of regularity. Every morning at seven o'clock I sit down to my working-table, and do not stop before noon. In the afternoon and in the evening I go out a good deal. I do not often go to the theatre, for I do not very much enjoy it. Just at present there are so few good plays!'

'Well, now - 'I began.

'Yes, I know,' said Bennett hastily, 'you confounded tempter! But I do not want to talk to you about contemporary English literature. It is too ticklish a subject. Enough English writers are burning me in effigy as it is. I do not want to give them a new reason to curse me. However, since I was not able to accompany you yesterday on your pilgrimage to Dorchester and to see the great old man of Max Gate, I wish to say that I regard him as the greatest living English writer and the greatest novelist of the world at present. I may repeat after Swinnerton that I am much surprised that The Dynasts should not yet have been translated into French. You may compare that work to the greatest books that all the ages have left us, and it will not suffer by the comparison. As early as 1908 our farsighted friend Valéry Larbaud

had published an important note on The Dynasts. You will find it in Ce vice impuni, la lecture. Of all his novels the one that I prefer is The Woodlanders. It is perfectly astonishing that Hardy has never received the Nobel Prize.

'French literature has been the great passion of my life, and the chief influence of my literary youth. I can never say enough about what I owe to Stendhal. La Chartreuse de Parme was my bedside book for a long time, and in 1903 I had the luck to buy on the quays in Paris a first edition, in perfect condition, of Le rouge et le noire. The price was one franc. You shall see it presently. I hardly ever go to Paris without wanting to see the quays of the Seine and the boxes of the old booksellers. Something unique in the world. You may complain, if you like, that no one ever digs up anything good there nowadays. I bet you I could still make some finds!

'Ah, what splendid years I had in Paris! Around 1903 there was a year when I used to see Marcel Schwob every day. He was my closest friend. What an amazing talker! I feel sure that he has left us at least one immortal work Le livre de Monelle. That little volume anticipates and contains all the modern things. It was at this time, too, that I met a strange and delightful creature, Paul Léautaud, whose queer yet attractive novel, Le petit ami, an autobiographic study, would have delighted Stendhal. I have with me here Léautaud's Anthologie des poètes, and they write me from Paris lately that he is getting ready to give us the third volume. I am eager to read it.

'I have read Charles-Louis Philippe, of whose books I especially like Bubu de Montparnasse and Croquignole. Mirbeau I find too crude, Balzac is to my mind too sugary and too sentimental. I do not always understand Claudel, but there are magnificent passages in

him. For years I have been a fanatical devotee of Flaubert. I have been the same, and I still am, over that boy of genius, Arthur Rimbaud. Do you want me to mention pell-mell a few of the French books which I reread most gladly: La Parisienne of Henry Becque; Dans les rues of Rosny aîné; Thaïs, the best of Anatole France's books; Le jardin de Bérénice; a few novels by Bourget; the first works of Huysmans; the Poèmes aristophanesques of Tailhade; L'Immoraliste and La porte étroite. Yes, and I own the precious first edition with blue covers of L'Immoraliste, but I must admit that André Gide seems to me a born essayist, but not a novelist, and his master-work may well turn out to be his study of Dostoevskii, which is a really great book. Gide is, above all, an intelligence. One might, moreover, consider Gide's chapters on Dostoevskii his own confessions. Under that title they would constitute an admirable document.

'I should like to take advantage of your visit to send a fraternal greeting to some of the French writers whose books have been a blessing to me these last years. First of all, to one of the great novelists in contemporary France, Roger Martin du Gard. I read his Jean Barois with passionate interest, and I have read and reread the four volumes of Thibault that have appeared. What sureness, what mastery, what variety he shows! If he keeps up this pace to the end, his book will be an immortal work. And then it is a novel, a real novel. What a feeling for background and perspective.

'Among the younger men there is Henry de Montherlant, whose Chant funèbre pour les morts de Verdun I have just been reading. What true greatness, what genuine lyricism! And then there is Marcel Jouhandeau! His Les Pincengrain has been a revelation to me, and in this book there is one story,

'Naturally, I have not discussed de Maupassant with you. Everyone knows the grateful admiration that I feel for him. I have a feeling - I hope it is mistaken- that most writers in France to-day do not give him his true place; but that is of no importance. Let us lose no time on him. Maupassant is a man who can afford to wait. Be very sure that outside France, and especially in England, he is unanimously regarded as one of the most indisputable glòries of your literature. I have not discussed Valéry Larbaud, either. In some eyes my friendship for him may make my opinion suspect, and yet after all what fine books we owe to him: Fermina Marquez, Barnabooth, and that exquisite story inspired by London life, Beauté, mon beau souci. I am always glad to read a new book by Edmond Jaloux, who has done so much to explain English literature to France; and, finally, I am sorry that I

de Lacretelle. His novel, Silbermann, is a strong and delicate work, and highly successful. He points out the way along which to-morrow the young novelists of Europe will strike out. Sobriety seems to me the quality which they esteem most highly. At this moment, I believe, Europe is in a period of transition from all points of view - certainly from the literary point of view. Everywhere I find a feeling for sobriety, for conciseness, for solidity of construction, which reveals the fundamental tendencies of æsthetic youth.

'Yes [this in answer to a question], Russian literature has had an enormous influence upon me though of course it has come to me only through English translations. I have read the stories of Chekhov, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii the last a giant, probably the greatest novelist that has ever appeared in the world. My favorite book is the Brothers Karamazov.'

T

[THE author, though descended from the high nobility of Great Britain, a son of the late General the Right Honorable Sir Henry Ponsonby, and a former diplomat, is a member of the Labor Party, which he represents in Parliament. He is the author of several books of considerable note dealing with public and social questions.]

NOTHING is more pathetic than the confidence with which humanity believes it can master vast forces which are quite obviously beyond human regulation. We think we can control death by medicine and surgery. We are now persuaded we can control birth by propaganda and prescriptions. We pride ourselves on being masters of machinery, while the machines we construct are plunging and whirling us about like toys, entirely altering our lives and playing havoc with our nerves and minds.

But, apart from the great cosmic laws which, in fact, govern life and death, and on which our funny little devices have no effect whatever, there are more restricted fields where again we are confident that we control. Yet all the time we ignore the much larger factors which are operating beyond our reach. For instance, to take what may seem a small and trivial matter human beings controlling agents of fashion in costume?

are

As to women's fashions, I believe there is a sort of consultation committee

of Paris dressmakers who invent and design models. They are said to work partly on artistic but chiefly on commercial lines. As to men, I do not know whether there is a committee of London tailors. If there is, it must be a singularly indolent body, and the members must be entirely lacking in inventive power, judging by the results. But is fashion in costume indeed under the immediate control of any body of individuals? Is there not some overmastering psychological factor which really directs and governs it? I believe that undoubtedly there is, and that in this connection that factor is primarily sex - sex attraction, plumage. Consequently sex waves, sex dislocations, the normal or abnormal relationships of the sexes, are subtly but faithfully reflected in women's fashions in each generation; and the committee of Paris dressmakers, if such a body exists, are not exercising an independent initiative but responding to exterior pressure. When virility is at its height, the female seeks defense in draperies. When virility is at a low ebb the female exposes herself to attract the reluctant male.

Let me give an illustration. In early nineteenth-century days I feel sure the bushy-whiskered majors were simply tremendous from the point of view of virility so tremendous that mere stuff was not sufficient for female defense. The women had to have metal cages the crinoline. If even an ankle were exposed they blushed crimson,

while George Osborne, pulling his luxuriant whiskers, exclaimed, 'Gad, what an ankle!' and was immediately in hot pursuit. All the frustrations of the wire entanglements and festoons only acted as an incentive. There were chaperons too, lock and key, every kind of vigilance, and vapors (purely a female device). These and other obstacles were put up as a protection against these terrific men, and, because frustration is the essence of sexual impulse, the men were only encouraged the more. Their hunting-instinct was developed. So, racially speaking, it worked well. The men were good fathers, and the women had large families and were admirable mothers.

But now what has happened? Cut and quality of material may vary from month to month. This is the only way the commercials can get home, owing to the extremely exiguous amount of material needed. Where yards were wanted inches will now suffice. The word 'petticoat' has become an archæological term, just as the word 'modesty' has dropped out of use. A wisp of stuff I won't venture on the name of it and there you are! Paint does the rest. And the excited major gazing at the little slipper, hoping that the vast cage would lift to expose more, is now replaced by the young man of to-day absently staring at knees and thighs with complete indifference, if not boredom.

Not long ago I saw the last vestiges of the old order swallowed up by the new, not only metaphorically, but actually. It was at a country station in holiday time. Strolling on the platform waiting for the train were two old ladies straight out of the past. They were dressed in very full gowns of blue cotton speckled with white spots, and over their shoulders they wore black dolmans or capes, narrowing down over the front of their gowns in two black stoles. Their snow-white parted hair

was surmounted by small black closefitting bonnets tied under the chin with a bow, and one of them had a veil which reached as far as the tip of her nose. They were self-possessed and cheerful, and their mouths were smiling over their toothless gums. In came the train laden with a holiday crowd consisting chiefly of girls. Out of the windows they leaned, flinging cigarette ends on to the platform, and yelling coarse jokes at one another. Their short hair, painted lips, powdered faces, and mocking expressions presented a vivid picture of modernity as they crowded round the carriage windows. Undismayed, into one of the compartments the old order cheerfully stepped, and were absorbed by the youth of today, not knocking at the door as in Ibsen's time, but howling at the window.

Weininger may have been a mad misogynist, but he was a very shrewd observer of human nature, and I think he was right when he said that sex was not just a matter of anatomy but was an element which, in its twofold nature, could exist in both man and woman. That is to say, a certain amount of the female element could be found in every man, and a certain amount of the male element in every woman. In some cases the balance might be wrongly adjusted, and consequently there were men who were only anatomically males, while all their instincts and impulses were female, and women who had all the instincts of the male although structurally they were female. Natural affinities between the two would occur by a complementary adjustment of the balance.

It would seem as if dislocation of these elements on a large scale had spread like a wave over the present generation. We may not be able to trace all the causes of it, but we can see enough to know that the war and