Be this as it may, our present aversion from mere Progress, and preference for Construction, have reinforced the notion (itself a pendulum swing from theological acquiescence and pessimistic fatalism) that wherever there is suffering there must be mismanagement, and that every woe the flesh is, or rather is not, heir to, must be traceable to muddle-headedness. So far as this new attitude answers to the reality of things, enabling us to alter them, we may be glad it has replaced that faith in the decrees of Providence which made oldfashioned parents bury child after child instead of inventing vaccination. But as energetic and highly responsible people are no less muddle-headed than their passive, irresponsible forefathers, this constructive conception of the earthly paradise fosters a fine output of hurry and perfunctoriness, and a loss, not only of temper, but of some of our powers for improvement. For surely Time is an ingredient thereof; and you are wasting a good deal or that in your hustling attempts to dispense with it.

I have called this constructive view that of an earthly paradise. For to hear some of one's friends talk, or rather scold, one would conclude that Man had received the universe in charge on the Eden principle of tenure, but with freedom to eat his fill of knowledgeable apples; whereupon Man -or perhaps some other Man-had gone and muddled the whole business. I notice that the critic accepts only a slight collective share in this mismanagement, while showing, by his shrewd and fearless criticism, how little he shirks putting his own best brains and activity into setting things right again. Now, although the very existence of man, and particularly of man's sensitiveness to inconvenience and distress, is proof of the universe not being entirely hostile, but having a

margin, so to speak, of goodwill in man's favor, yet, on the other hand, the existence of human difficulties and miseries shows that the universe is not arranged exclusively for man's benefit and delectation; therefore, that although we may gradually make our situation therein less uncomfortable, we need not scold ourselves, nor even our contemporaries and predecessors, for not having brought it nearer to perfection.

This bad business of the Wages of Hurry has haunted my half-hearted acquiescence and shamefaced silence whenever I have found myself in the presence of such ardent enthusiasm for progress, that, let us say, of Suffragists, Eugenists, and various brands of Socialists. But most particularly whenever I have been confronted by some of my excellent friend, Mr. H. G. Wells's, various philosophical avatars, whether the silk-robed, self-restraining Samurai of his earlier Utopian books, or that more modern and less Puritanic statesman who crossed the floor of the House for the speedier passing of his particular Human Kegeneration Bill. How can you make such energetic enthusiasts understand (even if they wanted to) that disbelief in hurry is not necessarily disbelief in progress, nor scepticism about their construction equivalent to scepticism of the building instincts of the great human beaver-kind? They want your vote or your subscription-at least your active sympathy; it is nothing to them that your belief in the infinitesimally small results of individual effort obliges you to add that infinitesimal contribution to the more and more effectual mass of similar ones. At the moment of reading their books and listening to their words, one is even disquieted by a secret fear: may it not be that I am no better than a futile dilettante, a self-complacent stick-in-the-mud? Perhaps some of

my contemporaries have gone through similar self-searchings; secret, for these painful matters are kept to oneself, lest one be crowed over, or even quoted, by the Retrogrades; or, who knows? lest one blunderingly quench some fine young ardor. It is for the consolation of such silent disbelievers in hustle that I have plucked heart of grace and set the above thoughts upon paper, having suddenly found encouragement in a most unexpected quarter. For this is what I have come across in a brand new novel:

"But it (Life) is ever too much of a scramble yet, and ever too little of a dream. All our world . . . is full of the confusion and wreckage of premature realization. . . Old necessity has driven men so hard that they still rush with a wild urgency, though she

The Nation.

goads no more.

Greed and haste; and if, indeed, we seem to have a moment's breathing space, then the Gawdsaker. . . gets up, wringing his hands and screaming-'For Gawd's sake, let's do something now.'"

It is my friend, Mr. H. G. Wells, who has given that splendid paraphrase, "confusion and wreckage of premature realization" for my poor shamefacedly cherished formula, The Wages of Hurry is Perfunctoriness. And such is the useful, though disconcerting, changeableness and contrariness of the literary temperament, mine and also his, that I feel half-inclined to defend that "Gawdsaker," and to say: Do not be too stern in refusing to do anything now, lest your refusal to do resuit merely in a refusal to feel and to think. Vernon Lee.

We all know that Americans play games, and prepare themselves for them, in a different spirit from our own. They are more serious, more painstaking, more precise, and are more definitely "out to win." They may be right or wrong. Evidently a great many Englishmen think just now that Americans are right, and that the sooner we imitate them the better. The threat held over our heads is that if we do not take care we shall go under at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1916, and that the world will never be the same again. Personally, we are inclined to advocate playing games in the spirit in which we have generally played them. We would count the game well lost if we were beaten by men for whom the game had fallen hopelessly out of perspective and had become a business instead of a recreation.

But although the difference of the American spirit from our own is ob

vious enough, we have never felt quite sure how far the difference was deliberately thought out and accepted by Americans. It might conceivably be an unconscious difference due simply to some national ethos which lies beyond explanation or analysis. An article by Mr. Heinrich Schmidt (who played admirably in the recent amateur golf championship), in the last number of Country Life, proves that in the case of at least one eminent American intense seriousness is very deliberate. First of all, he brushes away the suggestion that the American competitors lately in England played very slowly in order to tire out or baulk their English opponents. There were special reasons, such as their previous want of prac tice and their unfamiliarity with the course, which caused the Americans to play slower than usual. But when he has said this he frankly admits that American golfers do normally

For instance,

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in every stroke the distance, kind of shot, slope of ground, and the result on the ball after it lands, effect of wind, drag or run on the ball, stance, kind of club, &c., and so on through many more time-taking problems-all must be considered before you really say to yourself when you are following through, 'I have done everything I can to make that shot a success.' If enough time has been taken to solve these problems, one can never say to one's self, 'Well, I could have done better if I had taken time, but I played carelessly and got what I deserved.' One such experience was enough to convince me, and since that time I have attempted to play golf, taking it as a problem and not as a game of luck in which one simply takes a chance of having the ball go just right."

Mr. Schmidt does not say that a golfer must spend a long time in his mathematical cogitations when actually addressing the ball; the golfer can solve most of his problems when walking from one stroke to the next. The

choice of the club with which to play the next shot-to most of us that represents almost the whole problem-is to Mr. Schmidt only an insignificant culmination to a comparatively long period of ambulatory thinking. Solvitur ambulando is evidently his rule. Nevertheless, the mathematics of the whole question cannot be entirely disposed of while you walk. Mr. Schmidt insists on the necessity (to himself, at all events) of a practice swing before his stroke. He says:

"The purpose is simply this: Before I go up to the ball I have made up my mind what the line of play is, what kind of a shot to make and how hard, or rather how far back, I must swing to obtain the desired shot and length. I therefore make a practice swing, not simply to make a stroke to be duplicated on the real stroke, but one which will give me a check on my estimation of the back-swing required. After making the practice stroke, I may say to myself, "That will not be enough; I will have to give it a little more.' But I do not make the stroke over again to make doubly sure to me it seems altogether too cautious and entirely unnecessary. The purpose of the practice stroke is to check one's mental estimate, and this is not a tiresome mental exertion, nor even a physical one."

We suppose that there can be hardly any Englishmen who have made such a mathematical study of the game as this. When they take a practice swing at golf, for instance, they have more profound purpose than to make sure that their shoulders are in a loose and supple condition for swinging and that their feet have settled into a comfortable stance.

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It would be highly interesting to know for certain whether Mr. Schmidt's very deliberate mental attitude towards games is typical of that of most Americans. We should know exactly where we stand in relation to them, and be able to say more easily

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whether it would be worth while to imitate them. For our own part, we should shrink from these mental labors among the sand dunes. Although Mr. Schmidt says they are not tiresome, we fear we should find them exhausting. Of course, many games which are truly recreative, such as billiards and bridge, are a kind of mathematical problem. If one of them is chiefly a question of angles, the other is largely a tax on the memory. But these games recreate tired men because they are professedly change of mental occupation. Change is always in a sense rest. But billiards and bridge are not played in the open air; they are not physical recreations. True, billiards requires a certain amount of walking round the table, but probably the exercise is not more than just enough to prolong the lives of people who would otherwise fall into the fatal habit of going to sleep after dinner. Games in the open air require a proper balance between the physical exertion and the mental application. The latter must be sufficiently firm to amount to a strong incentive-without that any game would be boring beyond words-but it does not exclude the possibility of observing the weather and the scenery, of acting on brilliant impulses, or even of chaffing one's opponent.

An American athlete or player of games is seldom "a good all-round man." He is a specialist. We should ourselves much prefer to be good enough at several different games to be a competent and useful opponent. That is enough for enjoyment. Versatility is the secret of pleasure, for it continually happens in life that one has opportunities of playing one game in one place and another game in another place. The difference between the English idea and the American may be roughly expressed by the difference between games and athletics.

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The more esteemed English games, such as cricket and football, are cooperative; they succeed or fail according to the success with which a side combines. Running, jumping, and so on, are opportunities for the more selfcentred aims of the specialist, and it is in these that Americans shine. training of an eminent American athlete is a period of complete constraint. He is dominated by his trainer, who orders every moment of his life. The question arises whether the means does not obscure the end. This, we fear, is the modern tendency, and it is perhaps inevitably encouraged by the Olympic games. We hardly see yet whither we shall be led. But it may be necessary before long to these questions: Is it good enough? Has the game become merged in the business? Have the joy and the relaxation given place to a new tax upon nervous energy? English horsemen, to take an illustration, have shown that they can school their horses to the highly technical art of jumping in the show ring, but they are quite right, we think, to care less for scoring marks at exhibitions than for the more careless and exhilarating jumping of cross-country riding. Again, every man, it is said, can become a "strong man" by assiduous training of his muscles and make his calves stand out "like penny buns," as Stevenson says of the statue of Hercules in "The Wrong Box"; but most of us would rather be supple and apt at popular games than be able to lift a cart-horse. Ultimately, in a more perfect world than promises itself at present, it may be admitted that it is after all a fine and happier thing to know how to play a game than how to win a game. Byron tells that as a boy he held that

"Actium lost for Cleopatra's eyes Outbalanced all the Caesar's victories." Defeat at the Olympic Games

through playing the game,-playing like its lovers rather than its slaves, like freemen rather than pieces of machinery-would be much more gloriThe Spectator.

ous than a mechanic victory. Drudgery is not the soil in which an olive fit to crown athletes will ever deign to grow.

There are few themes more beautiful for literature than a tribute to a peasant mother by a scholar son. In "My Lady of the Chimney Corner" Alexander Irvine gives a portrait of his Irish mother almost perfect in its blending of tenderness and humor. His "Anna" is, in many respects, fit to place beside Barrie's "Jess" of "The Window in Thrums" and "Margaret Ogilvie," or "Margaret" of "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush." Poverty in its extremest form is the setting for this rarely spiritual woman who placed in her small son's hands the "handles of God's plow," and here is brought home to us with poignancy the poetry of humble life. This is a book to read and re-read, for its beauty and its wit, for the quaint figures of "Anna's" neighbors, who flit continuously in and out of the narrative, and for the richness of its English touched with Celtic glamor. There is no striving after effect, no forced sentimentality, no device to win a possibly indifferent reader, but rather the directness and perfect simplicity which make the author's words almost a flawless vehicle for his thought. The Century Company.

Those qualities, good and bad, which have made Hall Caine's novels attract so many readers are all present in "The Woman Thou Gavest Me." It tells of the life of Mary O'Neill, who as an innocent, convent-bred girl, was married against her wishes to a profligate. Later she met and loved Martin Conrad, an Antarctic explorer. but was un

able, by the laws of her church, to obtain a divorce from her husband, or if one should be granted, to marry Martin. Hall Caine does not solve the problem. He points out evils about which the reader may draw his own conclusions, but the novelist comes to the rescue of the thinker and allows Mary O'Neill to die with the threads of her life still tangled. The greatest power of the book lies in its ability to present two sides of the question. Sometimes it seems that Mary O'Neill must be justified in following the lead of her impulses, and at other times the reader's sympathies are with the conventional standpoint of the world. It is this power which gives Hall Caine distinction in the company of sensational novelists. J. B. Lippincott Company.

Gene Stratton-Porter's "Laddie" is supposed to be told by Little Sister, the youngest of twelve children, regarded as altogether an undesirable possession by all her elders, and created with an insatiable desire to have a finger in every pie and a word in every bargain. She has a most uncanny gift of foreseeing both words and actions, and nothing but her unselfishness prevents her from being altogether unlovely. As she is, she enjoys every minute of her life, and tells the love story of her favorite brother, very prettily. The book is curiously like "The Ffolliots of Red Marley" in many things and especially in the imp of mischief who plays Puck for the torment of all the lovers in the story.