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looked up to him almost like undergraduates to men who have made their mark. His modesty was invariable and irresistible; and yet, like all people who have firm hold of the true values in life, he could surprise one on occasion and put mighty men to unexpected and ignominious flight. In his industry we had an incessant example of patriotism, for between the supervision of the 'Quarterly' and of the department he kept, I think, no single hour to himself all day long, How much use was made in the highest quarters of the hundred and fifty or more handbooks of compressed historical, geographical, and economic information which were compiled at short notice under his general editorship for the use of the negotiators at Versailles, I do not know; but he certainly spared neither time nor health to make them sound in substance and fair in spirit, and I have reason to believe that important people found in them what they wanted. His efforts, at any rate, were recognised by his nomination as Historical Adviser to the Foreign Office during the Conference and subsequently by his receiving a K.B.E. There were, of course, those who felt this honour to be inadequate, and who would have liked to see some less newly instituted Order conferred upon a man of so many old academic distinctions; and such may prefer to recall the fact that, as was generally understood, he had, at an earlier date, been offered the Provostship of King's. There are to adapt an old dictum-many members of the Order of the British Empire, but there is but one head of a great Cambridge College.

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For private reasons, but regretfully, the Provostship was declined. Perhaps the decision was happier than it seemed. Residence in London and the editorship of the Quarterly' enabled Dr Prothero to keep in touch with and to influence the intellectual life of the time in a way that must have proved impossible with Cambridge for a home, and undergraduates for a preoccupation. It is needless to add that he spared no effort to make this 'Review' worthy of its long tradition as an organ of English prose. The beautiful handwriting in which his criticisms were conveyed was in itself evidence of his fastidious care; and his theory of punctuation was precise. If he had an editorial fault, indeed, it lay in

the direction of a too meticulous attention to small points of style, or even of spelling-such as the use of 'while' rather than whilst '-which experienced writers were sometimes a little apt to resent. But it is not worth while to dwell upon such technicalities. Every editor has his own way of doing things; and, if there were some contributors who thought Dr Prothero, as he was himself aware, a little too rigid in his supervision, there were others, as he has told me, who were grateful to him for his vigilant attention to detail.

It would be too grave an omission if I were to say nothing of the charm of Sir George's hospitality; and yet here we begin to trench upon sacred intimacies which it is rash to touch. Those of us who had the constant privilege of sitting at his and Lady Prothero's table will never forget the happy combination of wisdom and vivacity that ran from one end to the other of it. Conversation at 24, Bedford Square was never futile and was never dull, but tolerant, telling, and a real clearinghouse of ideas. Sir George had, as it was said of his friend Henry Bradshaw, 'a courtesy of thought quite beyond and surpassing that of manner.' As in the 'Review' he edited, as in his own mind, so in the house he inhabited history and politics had the first place, literature the second; and on these and kindred topics he would talk with that modesty and moderation which is the perfect grace of social intercourse. The company was of the best-a circle of men and women who had found life interesting; just such a circle as befitted the spacious eighteenth-century house with its suggestion of good talk and cultivated leisure. Busy as he was, the serenity of the perfect host never seemed to fail him. He was at the disposal of all his guests; a model of that traditional English gentleman who survives the epitaphs pronounced upon him by recurring generations and ever renews his youth as his successive embodiments reach old age and complete the education of life. In Sir George's case, it is true, the serenity sometimes seemed to touch the confines of resignation. The note of melancholy in his disposition became more insistent with the War and the over-work it brought him; and at moments he could not altogether conceal the sadness of his spirit. I remember his saying to me on the

occasion of the Armistice, when the world was ringing its bells and making as merry as it might, that, though it was a glad thing to have finished the War, yet that the day seemed to him a sad one for all that. He had had no children to lose, but his heart had gone out to a generation that had suffered griefs innumerable and unutterable. Thus it was that, as the shadows of his evening deepened, his unselfishness, his delicate consideration, his lovableness seemed to grow stronger; and perhaps there were some who may have felt that they were witnessing the passage of a fine character through its last adversity towards a full perfection. Of the deepest things, indeed, in life and death he was not accustomed to speak; and it would be an impertinence to seek to tear aside the veil of his reserve. Yet we, for whom that veil had become transparent, were not in doubt that we perceived behind it the likeness of a soul that was naturally Christian.

A. C.

Art. 2.-ULYSSES.

Ulysses. By James Joyce. Shakespeare: Paris, 1922. WHEN a massive volume, whose resemblance in size and colour to the London Telephone Book must make it a danger to the unsuspecting, is written by a well-known Dublin author, printed at Dijon, and published in Paris at an excessive price, it is liable to escape the dignity of general notice unless for particular reasons. 'Ulysses,' however, has achieved the success of a scandal behind the scenes. In the first place, it has been brought out in a limited edition, and in the second the author has passed all limits of restraint or convention. It is not the kind of book readily to be met with on Messrs. W. H. Smith's ubiquitous stalls or obtained from the most obliging of lending libraries. It is doubtful if the British Museum possesses a copy, as the book apparently could not be printed in England, and no copy could fall by law to the great national collection. Whether a copy will ever be procured by purchase may be left to the taste of the Trustees of the future. The rulers of the National Library of Ireland will have the more difficult task of deciding whether to house the largest book composed by an Irish author since the publication of the Annals of the Four Masters,' a book, moreover, which is most intimately bound up with the daily life of Dublin twenty years ago. For while it contains some gruesome and realistic pictures of low life in Dublin, which would duly form part of the sociological history of the Irish capital, it also contains passages fantastically opposed to all ideas of good taste and morality.

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As a whole, the book must remain impossible to read, and in general undesirable to quote. It is possible for the fairly intelligent to fail to obtain any intelligible glimmer even from a prolonged perusal. It is an Odyssey no doubt; but divided into twenty-four hours instead of books. Apparently anything that can happen, every thought that might occur to the mind, and anything that could be said in conversation during a twenty-four hours of Dublin life, has been crowded upon this colossal canvas; and yet the conscious conscientiousness required in trying to secure and enscroll for ever a day out of the past, down to its lowest detail and most remote

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allusion, has failed, as the Tower of Babel failed, of very topheaviness as well as of antitheistic endeavour, and the writer ceases to be comprehensible, possibly even to himself. Of whole passages he can only feel as Browning did of some of his verses that however well God may have known their meaning the writer, at least, had forgotten. To a fair bulk of 'Ulysses' no adequate meaning can be attached at first reading, and for this reason the book, which is an assault upon Divine Decency as well as on human intelligence, will fail of its purpose, if purpose it has to grip and corrupt either the reading public or the impressionable race of contemporary scribes.

Our own opinion is that a gigantic effort has been made to fool the world of readers and even the Pretorian guard of critics. Of the latter a number have fallen both in France and England, and the greatness of their fall has been in proportion to their inability to understand what perhaps they cannot have been intended to understand. For the well-meaning but open-mouthed critics in France, who have seriously accepted'Ulysses' as a pendant to Shakespeare and as Ireland's contribution to the modern world's reading, we can only feel sympathy. It is vain to say that in 'Ulysses' maius nascitur Iliade.' The great name of Ulysses is horribly profaned. We have only an Odyssey of the sewer. Those critics have been colossally deceived, in the same way that some folk were persuaded that Cubist pictures were great works of art, or as the unfortunate Russian people were deceived by the spurious and God-defying claims of Bolshevism. Here we shall not be far wrong if we describe Mr Joyce's work as literary Bolshevism. It is experimental, anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic, totally unmoral. And it is no less liable to prove the entangling shroud of its author. From it he can never escape. We can well believe that Mr Joyce has put the best years of his life into its pages, toiling during the world's toil and refusing to collapse with the collapse of civilisation. The genius and literary ability of the author of the 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' have always been apparent. They have since been remorselessly pressed and driven into the soul-destroying work of writing entire pages, which alienists might only attribute to one cause. Over

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