people. For these reasons I have advocated the institution of a national system of family records. At first sight it might appear as if the difficulties in the way of any such scheme were insurmountable; but, as I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, not only is this not the case, but the suggestion is a perfectly practical one. Already notification is compulsory in the case of many details bearing upon health and physical and mental conditions; a Central Register office exists where some of these data are utilised for statistical purposes. A development of these two branches of the public service would supply all the necessary facts, and enable them to be tabulated in a form whereby the biological fitness or unfitness of every person in the community could readily be ascertained. In this way there would be gradually built up a record of the condition of the people which would be of incalculable value in gauging its biological efficiency, which would throw a flood of light upon the incidence and causation of disease, would solve many questions regarding hereditary transmission, and, after the lapse of a few generations, would supply the legislature with trustworthy data upon which to formulate marriage regulations and so bring about national and racial progress. Marriage regulations of some kind or other are now in force in many civilised countries; and the time will certainly come when every State, in its own interest, will have to exercise some control over the condition, not only of its present, but of its future citizens. If this control is not exercised, and if social science does not keep pace with humanitarian sentiment and the undoubted tendencies which exist to aid the survival of the degenerate, the decay and extinction of the nation that neglects it is inevitable.

In this connexion it is of interest to note that the first International Congress on Eugenics will shortly be held at the University of London. This congress has been arranged by the Eugenics Education Society, which has already done most valuable work; and the list of vice-presidents and of eminent scientific men who will be present from both hemispheres is itself sufficient evidence of the importance with which the subject is now coming to be regarded. It seems probable that this congress will mark an epoch in the history of civilisation.

In conclusion, let me emphasise the fact that Eugenics is no fad. Like most new truths when first enunciated, it has not escaped the cheap ridicule of the prejudiced, the shallow and the ignorant. It is true that the knowledge necessary for the wholesale application of its principles may still be wanting. Between those who, from a eugenic point of view, are now known to be unfit and those who are known to be fit, there is a large group which cannot be classed without much further research. But the principles of Eugenics are absolutely sound and admit of no dispute. They are the principles which have guided all racial and national progress in the past, and which must continue to guide it in the future. Whether it meets with our approbation or not, life on this planet is so constituted that it can only progress by the survival and propagation of the biologically fit and the elimination of the unfit. In the course of man's evolution a stage has been reached at which this process has been reversed, with the result that the race merely marks time, while successive nations ebb to and fro in a ceaseless rise and fall. I believe that this is but a phase, and that the time will certainly come when the antidote of Eugenics will be applied, and man will continue his progress; and I have no hesitation in saying that the nation which first grasps and applies this principle will thereby secure such an advantage in increased efficiency that it will rapidly become the predominant power. Whether that nation will be the British or some other, time alone will reveal. It has been said, 'Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat'; it is certainly a fact that while those responsible for the welfare of our country have not been backward in promulgating schemes for the improvement of the community, they have hitherto shown a most extraordinary and lamentable failure to grasp the fundamental principles upon which all real improvement and progress. must depend.

A. F. TREDGOLD.

Art. 4.-THE NOVEL IN THE RING AND THE BOOK.' IF on such an occasion as this-even with our natural impulse to shake ourselves free of reserves-some sharp choice between the dozen different aspects of one of the most copious of our poets becomes a prime necessity, though remaining at the same time a great difficulty, so in respect to the most voluminous of his works the admirer is promptly held up, as we have come to call it ; finds himself almost baffled by alternatives. The Ring and the Book' is so vast and so essentially Gothic a structure, spreading and soaring and branching at such a rate, covering such ground, putting forth such pinnacles and towers and brave excrescences, planting its transepts and chapels and porticoes, its clustered hugeness or inordinate muchness, that with any first approach we but walk vaguely and slowly, rather bewilderedly, round and round it, wondering at what point we had best attempt such entrance as will save our steps and light our uncertainty, most enable us to reach our personal chair, our indicated chapel or shrine, when once within. For it is to be granted that to this inner view the likeness of the literary monument to one of the great religious gives way a little, sustains itself less than in the first, the affronting mass; unless we simply figure ourselves, under the great roof, looking about us through a splendid thickness and dimness of air, an accumulation of spiritual presences or unprofaned mysteries, that makes our impression heavily general-general only—and leaves us helpless for reporting on particulars. The particulars for our purpose have thus their identity much rather in certain features of the twenty faces-either of one or of another of these that the structure turns to the outer day, and that we can, as it were, sit down before and consider at our comparative ease. I say comparative advisedly, for I cling to the dear old tradition that Browning is 'difficult'—which we were all brought up on and which I think we should, especially on a rich retrospective day like this, with the atmosphere of his great

* Address delivered before the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature in Commemoration of the Centenary of Robert Browning, May 7, 1912.

career settling upon us as much as possible, feel it a shock to see break down in too many places at once. Selecting my ground, by your kind invitation, for sticking in and planting before you, to flourish so far as it shall, my little sprig of bay, I have of course tried to measure the quantity of ease with which our material may on that noted spot allow itself to be treated. There are innumerable things in 'The Ring and the Book'-as the comprehensive image I began with makes it needless I should say; and I have been above all appealed to by the possibility that one of these, pursued for a while through the labyrinth, but at last overtaken and then more or less confessing its identity, might have yielded up its best essence as a grateful theme, under some fine strong economy of prose treatment. So here you have me talking at once of prose and seeking that connexion to help out my case.

From far back, from my first reading of these volumes, which took place at the time of their disclosure to the world, when I was a fairly young person, the sense, almost the pang, of the novel they might have constituted, sprang sharply from them; so that I was to go on through the years almost irreverently, all but quite profanely, if you will, thinking of the great loose and uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction of the so-called historic type, that is, as a suggested study of the manners and conditions from which our own have more or less traceably issued, just tragically spoiled-or as a work of art, in other words, smothered in the producing. To which I hasten to add my consciousness of the scant degree in which such a fresh start from our author's documents, such a re-projection of them, wonderful documents as they can only have been, may claim a critical basis. Conceive me as simply astride of my different fancy, my other dream, of the matter-which bolted with me, as I have said, at the first alarm.

Browning worked, in this connexion, literally upon documents; no page of his long story is more vivid and splendid than that of his find of the Book in the litter of a market-stall in Florence and the swoop of practised perception with which he caught up in it a treasure. Here was a subject stated to the last ounce of its weight,

a living and breathing record of facts pitiful and terrible, a mass of matter bristling with revelations and yet at the same time wrapped over with layer upon layer of contemporary appreciation; which appreciation, in its turn, was a part of the wealth to be appreciated. What our great master saw was his situation founded, seated there in positively packed and congested significance, though by just so much as it was charged with meanings and values were those things undeveloped and unexpressed. They looked up at him, even at that first flush and from their market-stall, and said to him, in their compressed compass, as with the muffled rumble of a slow-coming earthquake, 'Express us, express us, immortalise us as we'll immortalise you!'-so that the terms of the understanding were so far cogent and clear. It was an understanding, on their side, with the poet; and, since that poet had produced 'Men and Women,'' Dramatic Lyrics,' Dramatis Personæ' and sundry plays-we needn't even foist on him 'Sordello' he could but understand in his own way. That way would have had to be quite some other, we fully see, had he been by habit and profession, not just the lyric, epic, dramatic commentator, the extractor, to whatever essential potency and redundancy, of the moral of the fable, but the very fabulist himself, the inventor and projector, layer down of the postulate and digger of the foundation. I doubt if we have a precedent for this energy of appropriation of a deposit of stated matter, a block of sense already in position and requiring not to be shaped and squared and caused any further to solidify, but rather to suffer disintegration, be pulled apart, melted down, hammered, by the most characteristic of the poet's processes, to powder-dust of gold and silver, let us say! He was to apply to it his favourite system-that of looking at his subject from the point of view of a curiosity almost sublime in its freedom, yet almost homely in its method, and of smuggling as many more points of view together into that one as the fancy might take him to smuggle, on a scale on which even he had never before applied it; this with a courage and a confidence that, in presence of all the conditions, conditions many of them arduous and arid and thankless even to defiance, we can only pronounce splendid, and of which the issue was to be of a proportioned monstrous magnificence.