but would be offered as powers to be obtained by registration under a new Act. The motive which would, it might be hoped, influence trade associations to register would be the desire to acquire power to enter into agreements of a more solid and binding kind than heretofore. This might be sufficient in the case of an increasing number of the trade associations.

This recommendation of the majority of the Labour Commission, that the incorporation of the unions should not be made compulsory, I believe to be wise. To attempt to compel the hundreds of trade unions of both employers and employed to suddenly take upon themselves a new and little understood capacity would, I am sure, arouse from both sides an opposition embittered and irresistible.

I think, further, that it would be well if any contemplated legislation seeking to attach corporate capacity to the unions were framed upon the dual lines suggested by the Labour Commission. Let it, on the one hand, remove the anomalous effects of the Taff Vale decision, by re-enacting what the majority of the Labour Commission understood to be the intention of the Trade Union Act, 1871. That is to say, let it declare that those unions, whether of employers or employed, who desire it may become associations of a purely voluntary character. Then, on the other hand, let it provide that those associations who so desire may clothe themselves with the fullest legal personality of a corporation. Such a form of legislation, if accompanied by a straightening out of the doubtful law of strikes, would, I feel sure, not excite the active enmity of the men's unions. And from the representative signatures which are appended to the Majority Report of the Labour Commission we may gather that it would not be displeasing to the employers.

Let me briefly recapitulate. We have seen that several previous discussions have taken place upon the proposal to incorporate trade unions. In these discussions the employers have favoured, and the workmen have opposed, incorporation. We have seen that the Taff Vale decision has, by its far-reaching effects, entirely changed the conditions of the controversy. It has involuntarily imposed upon workmen's unions certain incidents of incorporation which they had resolutely declined to incur voluntarily. We have seen that the probable effects of that decision, in conjunction with the present law of strikes, seriously menace the usefulness of the unions, and that under the best circumstances the judgment leaves them in a condition of doubt, which is hurtful and harassing in the highest degree. We believe, in face of public opinion, that it is not possible for the unions to escape from this intolerable state of things by seeking fresh legislation merely to take them all back to the state of irresponsibility hitherto understood to exist under the Act of 1871. We have, therefore, discussed the incidents of incorporation, and, as a result, urge the legislative adoption of certain specific proposals of reform. We suggest a new Trade Union Act which shall provide for two

categories of unions: (1) Those who wish to be voluntary associations, and (2) those who desire to be clothed with all the attributes and capacities of corporations. And, finally, we urge just, clear, and comprehensive amendments of the present anomalous law of strikes.

These proposals are put forth, not as the only sovereign remedy, but suggestively, in the belief that they offer one possible way out of the present dilemma, a way which is alike in the interest of the great trade union movement and for the benefit of the common wellbeing, which, after all, is the highest concern of every good citizen.

CLEMENT EDWARDS.

ART AND ECCENTRICITY

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IN that treasury of useful knowledge, the Diary of Sir Mountstuart Grant-Duff, will be found a letter from the late Lord Coleridge, the most scholarly of lawyers, complaining that Aristotle's Poetics were too technical to be interesting. As a general and sweeping criticism, which is perhaps all one can expect from a Chief Justice, I do not take exception to this remark. What made iambics suitable for lampoons, and why a picture should be less than a thousand miles long, are not questions which much concern us. But Aristotle was so great a man that he could not write the most technical treatise without clothing profound truths in picturesque language. He remains to this day the best critic of Homer, though it never occurred to him to doubt Homer's existence. In a passage singular depth and beauty he says that poetry is a more serious and a more philosophical thing than history. For poetry, he says, deals with the general, and history with the particular. I do not stop to inquire whether Aristotle does justice to history, especially to Thucydides, who was in the highest sense of the term a philosophical historian. What is more important, and quite as important now as when Aristotle wrote, is the conception of poetry which he here expresses. For what he says of poetry is true of fiction, and indeed the 'Mimes,' or prose dialogues, which he distinguishes elsewhere in this work from the Socratic Dialogues on the one hand, from the drama on the other, are the germ of the novel. The difference between the poet and the historian is not, says Aristotle, that one employs verse, and the other prose. You may turn Herodotus into metre, and he will still be an historian. He might have added that the Persians of Eschylus is history. What, then, is the function of the poet? It is not to tell us what actually happened, but what might happen, and what is possible according to likelihood and necessity.' I wish Professor Butcher, who has made such an excellent translation of the Poetics, had furnished us with a commentary also. For his note on these remarkable words would have been most instructive. Not that they are really obscure, but that they require to be amplified and illustrated.

Aristotle is of all the Greeks the most modern. Plato is a

mystery. We cannot tell how much of what he puts into the mouth of Socrates is his own. He himself is hidden behind an impenetrable veil. Dante's master of them that know' is still a useful and practical guide in literary matters, and I suppose, so far as method goes, even in scientific. What he says about poetry applies to fiction, and to all imaginative work. The test of truth in fiction is not fact but probability, consistency, and verisimilitude. It is indeed. probable, as Aristotle himself says, on the authority of Agathon, that many improbable things will happen. But if they are made to happen so often as to disturb one's sense of the normal, the reader becomes incredulous, and interest departs with credulity. The bishop who read through Gulliver's Travels, and said he did not believe a word of them, has been held up to ridicule again and again. Taken literally his remark is absurd enough, and perhaps he meant it to be literally taken. But if, on the other hand, he intended to convey that the book did not produce the illusion while he was reading it, his critical principle was sound, though one may demur to his particular application of it. Swift's genius is so wonderful, and his gravity so imperturbable, that Liliput and Brobdingnag do become real for the moment. But then, of course, there is the inner and secondary meaning, the satire upon human nature, without which Swift would be far inferior to Andersen or Grimm.

The whole of the realistic school flies in the face of Aristotle's maxim. It is enough for them that a thing has happened. Mean, ugly, disgusting, or rare, it becomes thereupon a legitimate element in fiction. Some of the famous men whom Aristotle recognised as models were not by any means squeamish. The speech which Browning puts into the mouth of Balaustion after she had seen the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, whether or not it be appropriate to a Greek lady of those times, is certainly what a modern and decent woman would feel if she saw that astonishing piece. But the Lysistrata is perfectly natural, and only too human. On the score of delicacy and propriety everything may be said against it; on the score of truth, in Aristotle's sense, nothing. And it is undoubtedly amusing, which M. Zola never is. Charles Lamb defended the comic dramatists of the Reformation and the Revolution on the ground that the life of the stage was a totally different thing from the life of the world. Macaulay, who took up the cause of Jeremy Collier with a warmth almost equal to his own, replied that this would not hold, because society in Dryden's time, and in Congreve's, was as corrupt as the characters in their comedies. The court of Charles the Second cannot be called moral. But in Congreve's time things were different, and Queen Anne cannot be accused of debauching the nation. Apart, however, from the question of fact, Lamb was surely right. A novel is not a law report, a play is not a series of interviews. They describe, or ought to describe, và SUVATà KATÀ TÌ

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εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον, which has been translated so often that I need not translate it again. One instance of the contrary may suffice. 'Pray, Mr. Puff, how came Sir Christopher Hatton never to ask that question before?' 'What, before the play began? How the plague could he?'

We have lately been introduced to a legless baronet. The exceedingly clever and accomplished lady who calls herself Lucas Malet has done her best to make Sir Richard Calmady repulsively attractive. But we cannot all be expected to love him because he is horrible, as Helen does. Brainless knights are much commoner than legless baronets, much less disgusting, and quite as well adapted to the purposes of fiction. There will never be wanting a due supply of them, unless (which God forbid) the Fountain of Honour should run dry. No doubt there have been men born without legs. There have been Two-headed Nightingales and Siamese Twins. There must have been cannibals who eat their grandmothers. But it is not the function of an artist to depict such monsters. Physical deformity in real life excites pity; deformity invented for the novel or the stage excites only disgust. In the last generation there was an Irish member of parliament who had neither legs nor arms. He rode and drove. People forgot his deformity, or took it for granted, though they admired his pluck and skill. If his biography had been written, it would have been futile affectation to ignore his defects. Sir Richard Calmady's leglessness is never for an instant forgotten. That is the difference, the Aristotelian and the real difference, between history and art.

In that marvellous scene between the Duke of Gloucester and the Lady Anne, which only Shakespeare could have written, which only Shakespeare would have been allowed to write, there is but a passing reference to the Duke's physical malformation. It is his crimes, not his hump-back, that the widow of his victim throws in his teeth. Richard, moreover, was deformed, or at least Shakespeare believed him to have been so, and Richard the Third is an historical play. The same may be said of Cyrano de Bergerac, which is founded on history. Still, with all my admiration for that eloquent and beautiful drama, set off by M. Coquelin's unrivalled acting, the nose does appear to me unworthy of M. Rostand's genius, and I am quite sure that M. Rostand would not, on the strength of the most authentic evidence, have taken a hero who had no nose at all.

What did Aristotle mean by probability or necessity? Necessity must be probable. Probability need not be necessary. About necessity there need not be much dispute. Aristotle was thinking of what was inevitable, of what a man whose character was known would do in a definite and ascertained set of circumstances. Othello was as sure to kill Desdemona when he was convinced of her infidelity as Hamlet was to hesitate after his conversation with his father's