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knight errant, into a Christian hero, garbed him in spiritual armor, and sent him out to war against the world, the flesh, and the devil, religious equivalents of the giants and monsters of the

romances.

He himself was this hero. Just as in his boyhood his play instincts had found expression in acting out the adventures of Bevis and St. George with his companions, in conducting gallant assaults on cottage castles and winning eternal renown in barnyard tournaments, in his later days as a Puritan preacher he gratified the same instincts in a manner but slightly different. As he launched controversial attacks on the Anglicans and the Quakers, as he faced his judges at the time of his trial, as he struggled with temptations in his own heart, and above all as he dreamed, he thought fondly of himself as acting the part of Amadis or Lancelot. By imagination, he made his own life a romance. Christian and Greatheart, in Pilgrim's Progress, are projections of Bunyan's own personality; their adventures against giants and enchantments are his vicarious experiences, the substance of his dreams. Bunyan indulged his natural interests, sinful as they were, in and through his religion; and that, I imagine, is what most Puritans manage to do, by one hook or crook or another.

The real John Bunyan is an exceptionally attractive figure. There are hints in a contemporary portrait of him, as "tall of stature, strong boned, somewhat of ruddy face, with sparkling eyes", that show what manner of man lived under the Geneva cloak of his Puritan principles. In his own way, Bunyan was a man like Bayard or Sidney, a knight sans peur et sans reproche, a representative of a chivalrous order that most contemporaries had outgrown. In the days of Monk, Charles the Second, and Wycherley, he rode on his pilgrimage with the cleareyed zest of Chaucer's Squire. He was a Puritan, and yet a dreamer and eternally a child. He was a hypocrite, because only through hypocrisy could he be at the same time a Puritan and John Bunyan.

HAROLD GOLDER.

CHARLES MAURRAS

BY ARNOLD WHITRIDGE

DURING the last few years Democracy has been subjected to a veritable drum fire of criticism. Making the world safe for democracy was all very well during the War, but for the moment the crusading spirit in all countries is at a low ebb. It will probably be a long time before the world accepts Montesquieu's comforting conviction that "republics live by virtue just as monarchies live by honor". To dispassionate observers the laws of economics play a more conspicuous part in the conduct of international affairs than either virtue or honor. After the Napoleonic wars it fell to the lot of Wellington and Castlereagh to prevent the dismemberment of France at the hands of Germany. Even the most devoted admirers of Wellington and Castlereagh would not suggest that they were actuated by any other motive than expediency. They knew that Europe wanted peace and that there could be no peace if France were humiliated. If the people of Germany or Austria or England, inflamed by the twenty years' struggle against Napoleon, had been allowed to express an opinion at the Congress of Vienna, would France have escaped as lightly? In other words, is it fair to assume that democracies are more far-sighted or more forgiving than Tory diplomats? In America we are in the habit of silencing all criticism of democracy by the one word education. We have experienced no other form of government, and though we are prepared to admit its imperfections our imagination refuses to conceive of alternatives. Whenever democracy fails we lay the blame not on the system, but on the insufficient education of the electorate. In France and England, where democracy has been slowly and painfully evolved instead of suddenly springing into existence, the consideration of other theories of government is more possible. Today one of the ablest men in France is dedicating his life to the overthrow of the republican régime. That man is Charles

Maurras, the intellectual leader of the Royalist party. Day by day Maurras expounds his doctrine of continuity in government and of union between Church and State in the columns of the Action Française. Started as a weekly review in 1900, the Action Française under the editorship of Maurras and Léon Daudet has become an extraordinarily successful daily paper. The policy of the editors has never wavered. Without deliberately catering to the aristocracy they attack all Jews, Freemasons and Radicals indiscriminately. Maurras is by far the greater thinker of the two, but Daudet has a certain talent for abuse that has proved effective in keeping the Action Française in the limelight. Maurras actually succeeded in arousing genuine enthusiasm for the late Duke of Orleans, "Philippe VIII", as he preferred to call him. It would be pleasant to picture him as a twentieth century Jacobite, faithful to a lost cause, blind to the changes of history, imbued with a spirit of passionate, unreasoning loyalty. Such a portrait would bear no resemblance to the original. To Maurras the very word romance, associated as it is with everything that is exuberant and disorderly in literature and politics, is anathema. There is nothing romantic in his attachment to the monarchy. If he were a Breton we might assume that his forefathers had followed the standard of La Rochejacquelein and that he had been brought up to revere the ill-starred loyalty of the Vendeans, but as it happens M. Maurras comes of Provençal bourgeois stock. He was born and bred in a district that has no royalist affiliations. His political opinions are founded on his own reading and observation rather than upon any inherited doctrine of the divine right of kings. Far from ignoring the history of the last fifty years, precisely because he has studied it so carefully, Maurras is convinced that France can never thrive as a republic.

The most serious charge that he makes against democracy is that it is incapable of a stable foreign policy. Between the years 1870 and 1895 there were thirty-five ministries in France. Is it to be wondered at, asks Maurras, that during that period of incessant change the Third Republic became a mere pawn in the game between Germany and England? This trend of thought is developed in great detail in his Kiel and Tangier, a study of French policy under Hanotaux and Delcassé. Starting with

1895, the year in which the French and Russian fleets came together to fraternize with Germany in the waters of the Kiel Canal, Maurras shows how France embarked on a series of foreign adventures that led to one humiliation after another. A foray into Egypt inspired by the Germanophile ministry of Hanotaux ended ingloriously at Fashoda. The fiasco of Tangier, 1905, indicated that M. Delcassé's Anglophile policy was equally ineffective. At a word from the Kaiser, Delcassé, the brilliant architect of the Entente Cordiale, was compelled to resign. Never had national prestige been so flouted. In the heyday of peace, without deigning to discuss the question, Germany had dictated the resignation of a French Cabinet Minister.

Maurras is unsparing in his denouncement of both Hanotaux and Delcassé. Either policy might have been successful under a monarchy, neither could possibly come to fruition under a republic. Theoretically a good case might be made out for a policy of reconciliation with Germany on the understanding that the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine should be recovered in the shape of British colonies. An even better case might be put forward for an alliance with Great Britain, appealing as it would to the strong sentiment of revanche. In either contingency, however, France should be a partner and not a vassal of her ally. Unfortunately French prestige was so low that neither Germany nor England felt compelled to recognize the obligations of any alliance. At Fashoda and again at Tangier she was left to extricate herself as best she could. As long as colonial expansion remained at the mercy of the English, owing to the hopeless inferiority of the French Navy, it was better to have the English for friends than for enemies. The great mistake consisted in ever embarking on colonial ventures without first assuring the means of communication. Hanotaux and Delcassé were equally wrong because they both initiated a foreign policy that was bound to lead to war with one of the great European Powers. For such a war France was hopelessly ill prepared. The Dreyfus case, the Panama scandal, and the feud between Church and State, had so weakened national morale that a vigorous foreign policy was out of the question. Undignified bickering at home had made France a pusillanimous figure abroad; and such it will always be,

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