to specify their limitations. The consideration of evil is a main part of the business known as life; its disclosure is inevitable and wise. What is wrong is the separation of the message from the hope, faith, and courage which impel us rationally to know the worse that we may seek the better. A brave man, in communicating disaster, communicates bravery, and the trembling balance is not wholly lost. Mrs. Wharton's A Son at the Front is a signal instance of sound equipoise; if the weight of the accumulated suffering is mountainous, the book is invincible in its hold on the faith that removes (or shoulders) mountains. M. Brieux is sunny even in his Tartarus. Mr. Galsworthy's objects are high; what is less helpful is the acrimony of his sorrow.

Again, the strongest distinction should be drawn between the facts that aid the will by the offer of new directions or new instigations to conduct, and the facts-alleged or actual-that palsy or congeal the will. Everybody knows that evil abounds in the world, and the location and specification of that evil is a good. If an enemy exists, the man who tells you where the enemy is, and how many guns he has, is a friend; but he is not a friend who tells you that the enemy is invincible unless he purposes by that assertion to prevent the fight. Views which depreciate the worth of life and man have no pertinence as guides to conduct; they look to no remedial endeavor; they fail to voice even a resolute and purposeful despair. Let art play its little game with such pieces as its hand and eye approve-let it play its game of bowls with death's heads if it please-but let it be told roundly that its game is a game, and is no part of the tutelage or pilotage of a straining race in its grapple with unparalleled adversity.

V

Let us briefly summarize the argument. Realistic fiction is art; as art, its place is high, valid, and secure. It may employ truth as much as it will, provided that it employs truth for art's sake. But the moment it employs truth for truth's sake it is on doubtful ground, for truth, in the broad sense, cannot be effectually served by any agency that looks to other ends than truth. Truth is hard to reach when truth is the sole object; what hope can there be in the results of a divided purpose? The com

bination of truth with untruth in a fabric whose end is unconcerned with truth is perfectly legitimate; the combination of the purpose of truth with any other purpose is unsound. The words beauty and goodness have no place in the vocabulary of science. The attempt to be true and moral, or to be true and immoral, warps the truth; the attempt to be true and artistic, to be true and beautiful, to be true and interesting, warps the truth. The things may coalesce, but the purposes cannot mingle. Realistic fiction, if we put aside its art, is pseudo-science, and its place in the twentieth century is a place cheek by jowl with alchemy and astrology. Nevertheless so strange are the vagaries of a scientific age-it exercises as teacher a great and a totally irresponsible power, and it uses that power to a large extent for the emasculation of the race at an hour when the demands upon its manhood are superlative.

O. W. FIRKINS.

THE MERITRITZKY CONCERTO

BY SIEGFRIED SASSOON

My train arrived at Milan toward the end of a drizzling grey afternoon. Having arranged to break my journey there and go on to Florence next morning, I had wired for a room at the Hotel Mazzini, which had been recommended to me as quiet and comfortable. The Mazzini was more than quiet and comfortable; it was an exemplary "family hotel" which had, apparently, preserved its traditions; it had an air of being ready to receive a German Grand-Duke at a moment's notice without the least embarrassment.

As I sat in the lounge hall half-an-hour before dinner, I watched an assortment of slightly dowdy people emerging from the lift or entering it. None of them seemed likely to resent the absence of a jazz band. A few of them were sitting, as I was, in austerely upholstered chairs; most of them, myself among them, perused vaguely the pages of obsolete illustrated papers. The one which I had selected was the American Musical News, a periodical which made no pretence of being anything but a vehicle for the advertisement of world-famous virtuosos and those innumerable products of conservatoires who aspire to equal or excel them. My eyes rested on a paragraph about Paderewski, who, it seemed, had recently roused the music-lovers of Milwaukee to rapturous enthusiasm, after creating his customary furore in Chicago. While I was absorbing this information I became aware that someone was emulating Paderewski in an apartment overhead. This muffled music impressed itself on my critical faculty as having more historical than æsthetic value. It was a floridly efficient concert work composed somewhat in the manner of Mendelssohn. Is it a pianola? I wondered, until the repetition of an awkward octave passage revealed the humanity of the executant. The octave bravados were followed by tempestuous arpeggios, and the fleshy allegro concluded with a crash of

complacent chords. A shamelessly sentimental cantabile movement conducted me to the dining room where I lost touch with the performance. Over my soup I speculated on the identity of the composer-it sounded like a concerto, possibly by Hummel or Rubinstein.

After a prolonged and satisfactory dinner I returned to the illustrated papers. My thoughts were an indolent procession of automatic images evoked by photographs of pugilists, prime ministers, cinema actresses, and other public characters. After a while I ceased my casual inspection of their facial variations; and turned my attention to the hotel interior and its food-flushed occupants. After sorting them out according to their nationalities I ceased to expect any further entertainment. Specimens of mediocrity, they seemed, as they sipped their coffee and puffed their cigars and eyed each other with neutral tolerance or transient curiosity. Not far away from me sat an undersized, middle aged, shabby man with a straggling grey moustache. He was alone; and he was, I observed, reading the American musical magazine with an engrossed, rather worried look on his constricted face. Perhaps he is reading about Paderewski at Milwaukee, I thought-remembering the energetic musician overhead and wondering whether that enthusiast would be returning to the instrument during the evening.

A self-possessed man came down the steps from the dining room—rather a dashing sort of man-crisp black hair tinged with grey-the hero of a young lady's first novel (in the days before psychoanalysis came into its own, when fiction presented the passions with romantic simplicity). With large liquid brown eyes he scanned the assembly; then he steered a debonair course in my direction. A chair was overturned somewhere near me, and I glanced round to see the negligible reader of the musical news, who had risen with a clumsy movement; a dim, astonished recognition animated his countenance. His apparent diffidence had vanished, and he was actually signalling to the black eyebrowed hero, who advanced, greeted him urbanely, and sat down opposite him. I was unable to overhear their conversation, but I watched them with some interest, thinking what a queerly contrasted couple they were. After a few minutes they made for

the lift, and were conveyed upward. Almost immediately the anonymous concerto broke out overhead with renewed vigor and authority. . Could it be connected with the two men who had so recently ascended in the lift? I became more and more certain that the black haired swell was the executant of that old-fashioned composition. I imagined the lift of his fine eyes, the ostentatious sweep of his fluent fingers, the emotion with which he would slide into the cantabile passages. With such a "compelling" presence, he might well have enjoyed considerable success on the concert platform. While I was thus formulating his career, the music stopped, as if through some interruption. After a while I became more or less absorbed in a book. By eleven o'clock most of the people had gone upstairs, and I was about to do so myself when the dark stranger emerged from the lift with a perturbed expression on his face. He glanced round the lofty room, ordered a drink from a weary-faced waiter, and came to a little table close to my corner. A large brandy and soda seemed to embolden him; he lit a cigarette; his eyes veered in my direction as if in quest of conversation. And then he did indeed cross the space that divided us. Fingering his neat moustache, he sat beside me. He spoke in exactly the ingratiating baritone that I had expected. He began with polite and perfunctory remarks. Had I heard Toscanini conduct at the Scala? Extremely comfortable hotel, the Mazzini, wasn't it? I responded suitably. Would I have a drink? I thanked him and more brandy was brought to us. It was after his second brandy and soda that he became communicative.

He asked if I would be so very kind as to do him the favor of listening to a most extraordinary story. I replied that an extraordinary story would put me under an obligation to him. Nothing would give me greater pleasure.

"Well," he began, "it's really a most painful affair, most painful. That poor chap I was talking to just now—the man I went upstairs with-I hadn't set eyes on him for twenty-five years. In those days we were, both of us, studying the piano in London. Afterwards I went to Leipsic and he came here. A short time