and the sense of personal responsibility lacks sharpness of edge. The souls of men have become void. Into the void have entered in triumph the seven devils of secularity." What is the remedy? Not, as the timourous urge, hiding the light and allowing error to persist for its usefulness's sake. To the contention that "for the mass of men . . use and wont, prejudices, superstitions-however erroneous in themselves-are the only safe guardians of the common virtues", Morley replies that though the mass may walk in little light, “whatever impairs the brightness of such light as a man has is not useful but hurtful". To hold error is to make the intelligence less and less ready to receive truth. Moreover, to associate virtue with error, as for instance to threaten little children with hell fire, is to risk the associated virtue directly they discover the baselessness of the threat. No, none are more deeply interested in upholding a high ideal of conduct than "those who no longer place their highest faith in powers above and beyond men". To these the "cherishing the integrity and worthiness of man himself" must be a supreme object. Matthew Arnold expressed the same truth in his fine sonnet, The Better Part: Hath man no second life? Pitch this one high. It By sinning against intellectual honesty, more than by anything else, man can make his own hell. "We do not find out until it is too late that the intellect has its sensitiveness. loses its colour and potency and finer fragrance in an atmosphere of mean purpose. Those who deliberately and knowingly sell their intellectual birthright for a mess of pottage have a hell of their own; words can add no bitterness to it." Such self-deception is Plato's "lie in the soul", the Gospels' "sin against the Holy Ghost", "and it is not any more shocking to the most devout believer than it is to people who doubt whether there be any Holy Ghost or not". It is impossible to read many pages of Morley without seeing. how deeply he and his generation had been imbued by their early training in the Scriptures. It is not only the language but the very thought of the Hebrew Bible. Is this as true now? Will it be true at all of the next generation? And if not, will not thought, as well as its manner of expression, have suffered a grievous loss? But to turn from John Morley the preacher to John Morley the publicist, soon to become the great parliamentarian. For the last three years of his editorship of The Fortnightly, he also edited The Pall Mall Gazette and made of that daily evening paper a stalwart champion of Liberalism. W. T. Stead was associated with him, and took over the editorship in 1883 when Morley stood successfully for Parliament, being elected Liberal member for Newcastle-on-Tyne. Under Stead the paper continued its Liberalism and its championship of social reform with equal zeal and more daring but less balanced judgment. Morley meanwhile was associated in the House of Commons, as he had been previously in The Fortnightly, with Joseph Chamberlain, whose articles on the New Radicalism had terrified country parsonages in the middle 'seventies. Their paths were later to diverge, Morley going with his leader, Gladstone, whole-heartedly in his Irish policy, whilst Chamberlain reverted to Unionism, even to Imperialism and Protectionism, views at the opposite poles to Morley's most cherished convictions. We are here concerned, however, rather with Morley the man of letters than with Morley the statesman, the Irish Secretary of Gladstone's Government, or the Secretary for India under Mr. Asquith. He had very early sat at the feet of John Stuart Mill, and from him imbibed the spirit of the English Utilitarian philosophers. He owed also to that same influence his abiding interest in French thought, especially the thought of the philosophers immediately preceding the French Revolution. That Revolution, its intellectual origins and its results, could not but fascinate a man of Morley's humanitarian sympathies, and no disciple of Comte could fail to find in it the roots of the Positive philosophy. Moreover Carlyle's book on the subject, owing much as it did to Mill, though diverging under German influences into a glorification of German culture as against that of France, had attracted the attention of all England at the time. One of Morley's earliest studies of French thought, his life of Voltaire, published in 1872, tried to redress the balance. Carlyle had sought to discrown Voltaire and to put Goethe on the throne. He had treated Diderot and the Encyclopædists with contempt. He had spoken of the French Revolution as though it were little more than a tragic farce without any deep-lying causes or any lasting results. Such a view was impossible to a disciple of Mill and a believer in the Historic Method. Morley sought to show that Voltaire was not, as Carlyle had said, the incarnation of scepticism. On the contrary, he was an unwearied seeker after knowledge, insisting that we must criticize, discuss, bring all things into question-not so as to leave them in uncertainty but rather to lead up to some positive conclusion. And so with the other French thinkers, Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau. They were seekers after light, they tried, one and all, to bring all things to the test of reason, and to find in that reason which Robespierre and the revolutionary enthusiasts afterwards deified, a sure guide in human affairs. On the side of English philosophy, Morley based himself upon Mill, who in his turn was the descendant of Locke and Hume, and the inspirer of Herbert Spencer. Knowledge was a slow acquisition of facts learned in experience and leading up to generalizations, valid only in so far as they could be tested at every link in the chain. Ultimate verities cannot be so tested; our attitude to them, therefore, must be one not of denial but of nescience. Positivism, the third stage, according to Comte, in mental development, when men no longer ascribe events to the Deity as first cause, or to any metaphysical entities, but study phenomena as they present themselves, is the creed for rational men. Positivism tinged deeply with humanitarianism, working itself out in striving for social reform-that was Morley's creed, and it expressed itself in his life no less than in his writings. Hence his deep interest in character and his profoundly interesting studies of men of action such as Cobden, Cromwell, Walpole, Burke, and last of all Gladstone. But behind the biographer, the publicist, the statesman, remained always the preacher and prophet, the thinker, who, though as far as possible removed from a mystic, himself lived the inner life of thought, which gave him the key to the mystical and the spiritual. Writing of Thomas à Kempis, and discussing the Imitatio, he says: Is not the sphere of these famous meditations the spiritual rather than the moral life, and their aim the attainment of holiness rather than moral excellence? By holiness do we not mean something different from virtue? It is not the same as duty: still less is it the same as religious belief. It is a name for an inner grace of nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though knowing of earthly appetites and worldly passions, the spirit, purifying itself of these, and independent of all reason, argument, and the fierce struggles of the will, dwells in living, patient, and confident communion with the seen and the unseen Good. In this region, not in ethics, moves the Imitatio. And in this region must at times have moved, though he rarely expressed it, the spirit of John Morley. W. L. AND JANET E. COURTNEY. DUSE BY STARK YOUNG Of all the artists in the theatre of the world there is none that so illustrates the nature of art as Duse does. Not that she is the greatest actress necessarily, not that; such argument is beside the point. But that Duse exemplifies what lies behind every art and the quality of every artist and his relation to life. So that in a sense it might be said that the history of one's perception and understanding of Duse is a history of the growth of one's understanding of art in general and of life and art as they embody and complete one another. I saw Duse first in Rome, soon after I left college. She was playing Magda. I had heard her name, of course, a name spoken romantically and with the breath of her D'Annunzio affair nearly always upon it. But I had never heard of her as I had heard of Bernhardt, for example, whose splendours had long since dazzled the public world of men, and whose art had, in addition to its magnificent power and sonorous eloquence, something about it that was easily detected as art, or at least accomplishment, by the average person. Bernhardt's genius was essentially public in its character; and there was no wit so slow or so untutored, and no eye so dull, as not to know that when she played, the universal elements were shaken and passions that might have been domesticated and blurred by now became suddenly glamourous and superbly mythical. With Duse there was no such thing. Artists over Europe were drawn to her almost unendurable tenderness and truth; in Italy her audiences alternately worshipped and railed at her. With her there was nothing audacious and spectacular, nothing violent, seductive or world-wide. I remember Duse when she first came on the stage that night. She was past her prime then, of course, or what is called an actress's prime; at any rate she was no longer young and her body no longer slight like a girl's. Her voice seemed so natural and |