are the literary names of distinguished Irishmen, and we almost see the latter glitter-eyed, his rufous skull close to his green-capped desk lamp . . . bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.' And then

'all these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex. Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom. Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys. The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely, Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy—and has remained so one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One can see him a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.'

Whether it is English literature or not, as Dublin table talk it is living enough, and those parodied or reported have no real cause of complaint. Nor need the ladies of the Cuala Press resent the neat skit on one of their products, 'Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind!'

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Mr Joyce's turn for epigram is keen. He probably looks upon it as an elephant-killer regards the pursuit of sparrows with peas. Here and there stray sayings reveal an ancient sense of humour quite apart from the terrible Comic Force which is his strongest weapon. We smile languidly when we hear that 'the Irishman's house is his coffin,' or that we haven't the chance of a snowball in hell,' unless maybe we go out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.' But these may all be second hand, and indeed epigrams can always be picked like blackberries in Dublin. Two of Arthur Griffith's grim sallies are recorded when he referred to the 'overseas or half-seas-over Empire,' and when he twitted the 'Freeman's Journal' with the woodcut printed over all their leaders as really 'a sunrise to the North West over Parliament building on College Green.' Occasionally we cull a real philosophical fragment, such

as the truth that 'it is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born,' or the insight into Irish feelings that 'people could put up with being bitten by a wolf, but what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep.' There is a real feudalism in that. The Irish peasants never minded paying rent to wicked Earls and Rapparee Chiefs; but they fought shy of the countinghouse agent and the bourgeois planter. We wish there were more texts and phrases of this quality. The huge bulk of the book rushes sewerward but in the great Rabelaisian way and its reading can only be summed in a sentence from the book itself, drawn from the best theology; 'morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this.' We come back to our complaint that without form there cannot be art. Art must be logical, almost mathematical. Its material, its conditions, its effects must be calculable. Windiness, inconsequence and confusion argue the riot of Nature. We will make one more effort to understand the drift of James Joyce, and quote whole his outburst concerning water, which is a presumed parody of Whitman (and there must be two score other authors parodied in different parts of the book). Of water this apparently may be considered:

'Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of three to one over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primæval basin: its luteosfulvous bed; its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downward tending in promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours

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in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lake-contained streams and confluent ocean-flowing rivers with their tributaries and trans-oceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south, equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, water-partings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial horizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air; distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon : its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, iceflows: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or water courses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically if not literally the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 per cent. of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flower-water, stagnant pools in the waning moon.'

Well, that is that, one feels. Such is water, and there is enough and satisfyingly enough said. Time will show what place and influence 'Ulysses' will take in the thought and script of men. In spite of a thin parallelism with the movement of the Odyssey, for the episodes of Circe, Eolus, Nausikaa, are visible amongst others less easily traceable, there has been an abandonment of form and a mad Shelleyan effort to extend the known confines of the English language. Pages without punctuation or paragraph show an attempt to beat up a sustained and

overwhelming orchestral effect.

French and possibly American critics will utter their chorus of praise in proportion to their failure to understand. English critics will be divided and remain in amicable but squabbling disagreement. Ireland's writers, whose own language was legislatively and slowly destroyed by England, will cynically contemplate an attempted Clerkenwell explosion in the well-guarded, well-built, classical prison of English literature. The bomb has exploded, and creeping round Grub Street we have picked up a few fragments by way of curiosity.

We have had some hesitation (bewilderment almost) in noticing Ulysses' in the pages of the 'Quarterly Review,' and would not have done so, had we thought that such notice would lead the prurient-minded to read the book. Coarseness and Vice, it is true, have been introduced into books which have taken their place among the world's classics-from Aristophanes to Swift; but they have been presented with such literary skill, or humour, or reprobation, as to condone if not excuse their portrayal-for example, the Lysistrata' of Aristophanes. The question before the critic of Ulysses' is whether the literary power is a sufficiently extenuating circumstance. All that is unmentionable according to civilised standards has been brought to the light of day without any veil of decency. Our quotations, being chosen for their interest and decency, are intended to give a possible view of the author's literary ability, concerning which there may be as many views as critics. We believe that the cumbrousness of the style in which these things are revealed may prove their most effective screen from prying eyes, for the author has done his best to make his book unreadable and unquotable, and, we must add, unreviewable.

SHANE LESLIE.

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Art. 3.-SAMOA UNDER NEW ZEALAND.

THE Mandate for the administration of German Samoa under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles is expressed as having been conferred upon His Britannic Majesty, to be exercised on his behalf by the Government of the Dominion of New Zealand. Although it provides that the Mandatory shall have full power of administration and of legislation over the territory as an integral portion of the Dominion of New Zealand, and may apply the laws of the Dominion to the territory, subject to such local modifications as circumstances may require, yet it is coupled with conditions which really make New Zealand a trustee to administer the Islands for the benefit of the Samoans. The Mandatory agrees to 'promote to the utmost the material and moral well-being and social progress of the inhabitants of the territory.' It further undertakes that the slave-trade shall be prohibited, the traffic in arms and ammunition controlled, and the supply of intoxicating spirits and beverages prohibited. Finally, the Mandatory is to make to the Council of the League of Nations an annual report, to the satisfaction of the Council, containing full information in regard to the territory, and indicating the measures taken to carry out the obligations incurred.

That it is no light task which has been taken in hand, by a Dominion itself possessing a little over a million of inhabitants, will be realised when one recalls the adventurous past of the Group, and the difficulties into which three Great Powers landed themselves in endeavouring to control its destinies. There was one special difficulty which, at the very outset, confronted New Zealand, as a strongly democratic country, with Labour ever jealous of its rights and interests. This lay in the fact that the Germans had introduced indentured Chinese coolies, for the purpose of working the plantations. It was obvious that strong reasons would have to be shown before Parliament would agree to the continuance of this system. Very wisely, the Government invited members of both Houses to visit the Group, and investigate the problem at first hand for themselves. About forty members of both Chambers