"should be to find out what one really and whole-heartedly likes and wants." Beware, then, "the tyranny of the best," the "old, unregenerate cult of the best." Of the art museum, with "its official show-women and its masterpieces of proprietary genius," he prophesies mournfully. "My New Jersey school," he writes, "convinced me that these vestal virgins were guarding a decaying fane. . . . I was shown some wallpaper designs made in a class of the youngest children. . . . The teacher told me that she had pinned all the designs on the wall, and, without any suggestion to the children, had asked them to choose which they liked best." Here you perhaps pause to wonder where our critic has been Rip-Van-Winkling all these years, not to know that this excellent choose-choose exercise is really an old story in art-teaching and by no means a new and singular hope. But Mr. Bourne apparently hails it as a corner-stone for a national education in taste. Sensible people will agree with him in refusing to consider a child as a sort of magic container into which a teacher daily pours information and from which, by turning the question-faucet, guesswork-pumped answers will gush forth like water.. Most of us know very well by this time that teaching is not a put-in-and-take-out process, like banking or dentistry, and we can understand that a child is not a child if he is a jar. But we know, too, that there are moments when children, like grown-ups, should be told, with entire firmness, what is good and what is bad in art, and should be shown good examples. If children are to be sheltered from all information and all standards of taste save those of their own choice or creation, we shall soon find their minds clogged with first-hand misinformation and firsthand bad taste. Heavier even than the handicap of mere ignorance is the handicap of knowledge that isn't so.

"Suppose," continues our scorner of the best, "suppose a child were brought up from his earliest years in every-day contact with forms and colors, without its ever being hinted to him that some were 'good' and others 'bad.' Suppose the child were urged to choose and to express his like and dislikes, not giving his reasons but merely telling as he could what he saw or heard. . . . Would not something like taste evolve out of it all?" A wistful question, full of

faith in the short cut; and the answer is, I think, a straightforward no. In my opinion, the "something" which would evolve" would be more smoke-stacks. No, kind theorist. You are planting thorns in the child garden; you will not gather grapes from them; the sacramental wine of that national good taste you dream of will not be pressed. What optimism to assume that the untutored choice will somehow have a happy ending! Day and night you safeguard your young child in his choices in the material world. When he would choose the bright-red candied cherries, artificially colored, you pass him instead the sober and salutary prunes. He asks sirup, you offer a cereal. How, then, does it happen that you dare give him a free hand in his spiritual choices? From that fancied tyranny of the best let us not be delivered into the real tyranny of the worst, the tyranny of a self-complacency refusing expert advice.

The pioneer in the wilderness is the only man who may well rise superior to the cult of the best. His is the cult of the most serviceable. A stout log cabin which will save him and his family from the elements, the beasts, and the savages will serve him better than the most exquisitely wrought pergola or pagoda in the history of art. But, the wilderness once conquered, man more than ever needs his best in art to tell his epic tale. As shown by the efforts of Washington, Jefferson, and Major L'Enfant in planning our national capital, our fathers were well aware that a people emerging from the pioneer state degrades itself into a provincial state if it rejects the expert in æsthetics.

To-day, since much of the highest imagination in our land is being devoted to money-breeding, much of our outdoor contemplation of art is cut short by the appeals of big business. Our advertisements overtop our cathedrals. We create beauty, and then, rough riders to riches, we neglect it. We even deface it. A pamphlet against the billboard nuisance in the city of New York tells of "a costly and magnificent railway terminal made ridiculous; a noble library disgraced; splendid parkways and beautiful vistas ruined!" These flippant, slapdash ways of ours are in sharp contrast with the spirit in which our fathers brought to the New World their strong, fine craftsmanship in the minor arts, as well as their

excellent ideals in architecture. Coming hither to build a new civilization, they held fast to whatever beauty or dignity of life was within their grasp.

Art as a material asset in a nation's accounts has often been demonstrated, with France as the modern instance. Art as a spiritual possession is no less needed, if only to bring home to men's minds an ideal of joy in the job as a citizen's best daily gift toward his country's welfare. With the passing of the apprentice system we have lost something of our joy and pride in mastering a craft and its secrets. The apprentice is gone, but the artist is still here, and his delight in work is a spiritual condition perceived by his public. Paul Manship and Hans Holbein are centuries apart, yet they are alike in telling us how much they love to do their work. The creative zest of such men does not watch the clock, or look on work as a curse to be escaped by the shortest possible cut.

Among the fantastic banners flung abroad by the Futurists three years ago was one calling down ruin upon all museums and cathedrals. That was the short cut with a vengeance! The Futurists gave themselves out as very defiant young dogs, but there was more bark than bite in them; no one has yet published Signor Marinetti's actual comment after the actual fact of Reims in ruins. Psychiatry will, perhaps, find a name and a balm for that exasperated melancholy in human beings unable to endure the stress of masterpieces. The disease is a real one and signifies something moribund in man; even the divine Michelangelo himself had his touch of it, when in old age neither painting nor sculpture could solace him.

Our American museum-hater, special byproduct of our civilization, is often of the "cerebral type," busy with half-truths. He is little brother to the scorner of public libraries and the railer upon religions. He is that perturbing phenomenon of democracy, the superindividualist. For him, whatever is organized is anathema; he is anti-Academy, automatically, and froths at the mouth at the idea of federations, whether of art or science. Sometimes, on a bright Sunday afternoon, he will flock by himself at the Metropolitan Museum, bringing his own twilight with him; he sees the statues as Stygian shades, and the snuff

boxes as a fourfold vanity, showing up at once owners and donors, exhibitors and visitors. Masterpieces of painting augment his gloom; in his altruistic moments he makes a point of warning people off the masterpieces. An individual who needs but few masterpieces for his own happiness, he forgets that there are other individuals with other needs. Sensibility can sympathize with him, but common sense cannot accept his views.

Emerson, in the "Days," sings of man in his pleached garden, whereto come the daughters of time, offering him

"gifts after his will, Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky That holds them all."

yet man forgot his "morning wishes, hastily "Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day Turned and departed silent.""

Perhaps this strangely beautiful poem, curt with unshed tears, is only an imagist's variant upon the old tale of the birthright and the mess of pottage. To me it has always seemed a very profound and searching diagnosis of one of our most heartrending maladies of the soul, the malady of inhibitions, of futile choices. Why should our age be disquieted by its long inheritance of glory? To reject the responsibility of such an inheritance is a weakness like that of some one who, having at great cost reached a great height, recoils, and would hurl himself downward. The world's art has had of late its staggering recoils, its incredibly futile choices. Come, we said, let us be naïve and negroid in our sculpture, childish and cavemanly in our painting. In the noon of time let us recapture the dark! But the art or the nation which seeks to advance does not deliberately plan backward paths; on the contrary, it turns its eyes toward higher realizations.

In our own country, institutions which seem to be poles apart may yet rest upon ideals shared in common. The new workplay-study school in elementary genera! education will be called democratic, while our American Academy in Rome will, perhaps, be assumed to be aristocratic. Yet the faith of each looks toward those good new times, which are to bring with them the richest possible fulfilment of both individual and national promise.

ADELINE ADAMS.

NUMER

UMEROUS signs have indicated that the third year of the European war will make up a very different chapter, both of military and diplomatic history, from the years which preceded it. Such recent episodes as the powerful attack simultaneously on all four sides of the enemy's territory, the partial military collapse of Austria, and Rumania's entry into the war, clearly marked a new phase of the conflict. That these new campaigns would lead to an early peace has not, however, appeared to be the prevalent belief. All the Allies adjusted their military and economic programme, as autumn began, on the apparent presumption of much longer fighting. There has probably been no occasion, since the beginning of hostilities, when Kitchener's prediction of a three-years' war was more generally accepted.

Perhaps for that very reason, the reaching of the second anniversary of the war directed the public mind to study of the new experiences and unexpected results which had character

preconceptions regarding national character. The world's surprise at the unexpected fighting power of the North in our Civil War, and at the superb organized military genius which the French people displayed, only a few years after the anarchy of the Revolutionary régime, was at least as great as its surprise over the new conception of the present European belligerents. Yet nations are supposed to be studied more intelligently nowadays; a fact which has added to the profound impression made when England, whose military capacity was believed to be paralyzed by absorption in money-making, endured without complaint the heaviest taxes ever known and put into the field one of the most formidable armies in history; when the French, so often classed by the outside world as frivolous and decadent, emerged from the very first test of war as brilliant soldiers and resolute patriots, modest in success and undiscouraged in defeat; and when Germany, whose peaceful achievements of the past four decades had gained the world's respectful admiration, projected into modern history the picture of a military hegemony whose methods swept ruthlessly aside the restraints of humane civilization.

marked in the art of war itself.

the new artillery, until at Verdun they were actually abandoned as a factor in defense. The new conThe Art of War ditions put an end to army Transmanœuvres which had been formed an inseparable part of previous campaigns, while on the other hand the "Greek fire," the hand-grenade, and the "poison gas" were revived from military epochs that were almost legendary.

Military events had equally unfolded a series of surprises. Great Britain's instantaneous mastery of the seas, as against the half-dozen years of uncertain conflict which preceded Trafalgar, was one. The military prowess of Russia, after her ignominious experiences in the Manchurian war of the preceding decade, was another. The battle of the Marne was itself something new in war; so much so that the world at large is even now unable to satisfy its mind as to just what caused a defeat which will undoubtedly rank among the really decisive conflicts of history, with Gettysburg, Leipsic, Saratoga, Blenheim, and Tours.

debts, and (in the case of England) the amazing increase of the annual revenue from taxation, were of themselves sufficient to confuse the financial mind.

Those aspects of recent economic history, however, were of a kind for which the history of other great wars might sufficiently have prepared the public mind. That the debt of the four great belligerents, already very large before this war began, should have increased nearly one and a half times in the first two years of the conflict-from less than $20,000,000,000 to considerably over $45,000,000,000was no doubt impressive. Great Britain's public debt alone was more than three times as large in August, 1916, as in August, 1914, whereas the increase of the same public debt in the two years after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens had opened the new war with Napoleon was barely 10 per cent. England was spending in one month of this year as much as $30,000,000 a day for war (including advances to her allies) and the present average is $25,000,000, whereas two or three millions a day was the highest outlay reached by any belligerent in any previous war. Such contrasts undoubtedly mark the nature of the new economic situation, and so does the very extraordinary increase in England's annual tax levy, whereby the total revenue was raised from the $990,000,000 of the fiscal year just before the war, to the $2,400,000,ooo estimated for the pending fiscal twelvemonth.

Yet phenomena quite as astonishing, when the circumstances of the day are kept in mind, have occurred in that field of finance during other wars. The United States Government increased its interest-bearing debt nearly eight times over in the first two years of the Civil War. Its annual expen