significant, perhaps, and certainly none greater in stature than Singleton, the oldest seaman in the 'Narcissus,' 'who had sailed to the southward since the age of twelve.' Quotation, however long, cannot do justice to such a magnificent and sustained piece of character-drawing, still less to old Singleton himself. It has to be attempted, however, for in Singleton we come nearest to the measure of Conrad's philosophy and his achievement.

Singleton stood at the door with his face to the light and his back to the darkness. And alone in the dim emptiness of the sleeping forecastle he appeared bigger, colossal, very old; old as Father Time himself, who should have come into this place, as quiet as a sepulchre, to contemplate with patient eyes the short victory of sleep, the consoler. Yet he was only a child of time, a lonely relic of a devoured and forgotten generation. He stood, still strong, as ever unthinking; a ready man with a vast empty past and with no future, with his childlike impulses and his man's passions already dead within his tattooed breast' (p. 33).

seas.

Yet, in the fierce gale, it was he who stuck to the wheel for more than thirty hours, keeping the ship steady, dodging her along before the wind and overwhelming "Steers... like a little boat," he said at last with hoarse tenderness.' But it was his ancient sea-knowledge, his skill at the wheel and his feel of the ship, that steered her; his ancient endurance that saved her. Relieved from the wheel, he fell headlong and stiff in the act of reaching out for a lighted clay pipe.

'There was a swift rush. Men pushed, crying: "He's done!" ... “Turn him over!" ... "Stand clear there!" Under a crowd of startled faces bending over him he lay on his back, staring upwards in a continuous and intolerable manner. In the breathless silence of a general consternation he said in a grating murmur: "I am all right," and clutched with his hands. They helped him up. He mumbled despondently, "I am getting old . . . old." "Not you," cried Belfast, with ready tact. Supported on all sides, he hung his head. "Are you better?" they asked. He glared at them from under his eyebrows with large black eyes, spreading over his chest the bushy whiteness of a beard long and thick. "Old! old!" he repeated sternly. Helped along, he reached his bunk. There was in it a slimy, soft heap of something that smelt as does at dead low water a muddy foreshore. It was his soaked

straw bed. With a convulsive effort he pitched himself on it, and in the darkness of the narrow place could be heard growling angrily, like an irritated and savage animal uneasy in its den: "Bit of a breeze.. small thing. . . can't stand up old!" He slept at last. . . . Men conversed about him in quiet concerned whispers. This'll break him up"... “ Strong as a "Aye. But he ain't

what he used to be "

horse"

.

66

In sad murmurs they gave

him up. Yet at midnight he turned out to duty as if nothing had been the matter, and answered to his name with a mournful "Here!" He brooded alone more than ever, in an impenetrable silence and with a saddened face. For many years he had heard himself called "Old Singleton," and had serenely accepted the qualification, taking it as a tribute of respect due to a man who through half a century had measured his strength against the favours and the rages of the sea. He had never given a thought to his mortal self. He lived unscathed, as though he had been indestructible, surrendering to all the temptations, weathering many gales. He had panted in sunshine, shivered in the cold; suffered hunger, thirst, debauch; passed through many trials, known all the furies. Old! It seemed to him he was broken at last. And, like a man bound treacherously while he sleeps, he woke up fettered by the long chain of disregarded years' (p. 144).

The minute realism of that passage is no less wonderful than its scope and flight. With the character of Singleton, Conrad has done in modern literature what hitherto only the pictorial arts have achieved. Millet's peasants, Meunier's Débardeur,' and the like, are great in themselves, per se; they stand on the earth monumentally, with a greatness which depends only on their intimate association with that earth and their large share in the life that it sustains. But literature has always treated such figures with at least a spice of patronage, because they have failed to reach the minor, non-essential standards of the life whose point of view it takes. They are humorous or quaint, they are picturesque or pathetic, but still they have always been looked at in literature not with level eyes, but slightly de haut en bas. It is as if a man, having ascended in a lift the flimsy Eiffel Tower, should look down on the wide earth-from which, indeed, the iron of the tower has been dug and to which it will some day return-with an air of superiority. About the drawing of Singleton there are no such pretensions, nor,

in an effort to idealise him cheaply, is there any unwillingness to face the squalider facts of his life. He is statuesque, great in presence, a man for whom his shipmates express reverence in their own fashion. Ignorant of many things and childlike in others, he is of a 'com. pleted wisdom' in things that matter, in the knowledge that saves the ship-a man to look up to, not to look down at. Above all-and Conrad makes one know it without arguing it out-he is a man well to have been. Even by the storm-driven sea he is not dwarfed, for his greatness, like the sea's, is not accidental or relative, but elemental.

Singletons go about the world, unrecognised by eyes that are fixed on prettier but more urgent things; uncomprehended by codes of moral, physical and social deportment too narrow to hold them; until, perhaps, some crisis, some storm, arises which only by their help can be weathered. Then they are revealed in what they do. Just so, the passengers in a liner rather look down on the common seamen, until the ship is in danger, when they pay a high respect to the men whose seamanship alone can save them. Substitute civilisation for the 'Narcissus,' and the implications of Singleton's character are plain. Doubtless it is not a primary function of the novel to teach lessons, unless by opening men's eyes. The significance of such as Singleton is, indeed, a lesson not to be taught at all except by the mingled emotional and intellectual method of fiction; and it is in the proper manner, by an enlargement and extension of vision, that Conrad enforces it. Having taken the novel to sea, he has brought back in it the sea's contribution to a finer and deeper and honester philosophy of life.

STEPHEN REYNOLDS.

Art. 9.-EXCOMMUNICATION.

1. Banister and wife v. Thompson. Law Reports (Probate), 1908, p. 362.

2. The King v. Dibdin. Law Reports (Probate), 1910, p. 57, and Times,' June 21, 1912.

THE case of Banister v. Thompson, which raised the issue whether a clergyman is entitled to refuse the Holy Communion to a man who has married his deceased wife's sister, has at last been brought to an end; or rather the attempt to reopen the decision of the case arrived at in the Court of Arches just four years ago has definitely failed. The English Church Union, which has made itself the real litigant, has appealed to one civil court after another, with monotonous ill-success, until at length the furthest possible limit has been reached. The Divisional Court, the Court of Appeal, and now the House of Lords, have successively been invited to issue a Prohibition to the Court of Arches, the effect of which would have been to annul the whole proceedings in that court. The only justifiable ground for prohibition, though by no means the only one urged, was that the Dean of the Arches had based his decision on a wrong interpretation of the Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act, 1907. These tribunals, one and all, have come to the conclusion, and, with the exception of a single judge in the Divisional Court out of eleven Judges, Lords Justices and Law Lords, have come to it unanimously, that no mistake has been made, and that the Act has been correctly construed. The secular courts have therefore refused to prohibit the Court of Arches. A great deal of time-these abortive proceedings have lasted nearly four years-and a very large sum of money-the English Church Union appealed in 1910 for 1000l., in 1911 for 1500l., and in 1912 for 1000l. to defray the costs-have thus been somewhat fruitlessly expended. It will not be surprising if the faithful, as they make their offerings towards payment of the inevitable bill, think a little wistfully of former times when Prohibition was a word of happy omen in 'Catholic' circles, and provided the field for many a notable victory. The mere form of proceeding is the same, but the men behind and the results are very different. If this were all, the

public need be little concerned; but the fact is that very important issues, which Churchmen cannot afford to ignore, and which all this pathetic blundering has done a great deal to confuse, are involved in the Banister case.

It has been plain for many years past that divergence between Church and State in England is growing, and that the occasions of collision are not merely actual schemes for Disestablishment and Disendowment. A nearer and perhaps deeper peril lies in the possibility of such alterations in the law of the land as are so out of harmony with the teaching and beliefs of the Church of England as to make the present relations of the two impossible-impossible, that is, for a Church which believes in its divine origin and has a conscience, and for a State which refuses to see its laws flouted by the officers of an established Church. It is difficult to define the limits of this area of possible conflict, but there are some matters on the border-line between morals and mere legal regulation which clearly lie within it. Of these, marriage is, we may safely say, the most momentous. Who may and who may not marry; what (if any) ceremony or act is necessary to effect a marriage; and whether, when established, marriage is or is not essentially monogamous and indissoluble these are the main subdivisions of this great subject, and both the Church and the State have an intimate connexion with all of them. It is obvious that the State is deeply concerned in this, the most important of all social relations; and the Church has, as a matter of historical fact, controlled and administered marriage law not only in England but throughout Europe for a great part of the last nineteen centuries.

How far the Church of England is bound by fidelity to the Christian Faith and Revelation to claim a voice in the matter or, in other words, to have a marriage law of its own at all, is a difficult question. It may be argued that the Christian Church had marriage jurisdiction forced upon it, in the first instance, by the condition of society in the later Roman Empire; and that it corresponds to no essential part of the Church's duty, but properly belongs to civil government. It will hardly be claimed, even by the most rigid of ecclesiastical purists, that the judicial settlement of all marriage questions (e.g. suits for declaration of nullity of marriage) is an