the desires of the people of one state in respect to a law which 'they deem necessary for the betterment of social and industrial conditions'? The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have not hitherto received such unanimous popular approval, either before or since the Dred Scott case, as to give it a clear, popular advantage over the state courts.

Even a somewhat casual examination of the decisions of the Supreme Court will, we believe, indicate a strong probability that its opinions will not be markedly different from those of the courts of the larger and more important states. It is not apparently disposed to be so much more liberal in its interpretation of the scope of the police power, or of due process of law, as to make it a genuine haven of refuge for the more ardent advocates of socalled 'social justice.' It is not many years since its decision in the Bakeshops case (Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45), decided in 1905, incurred displeasure which was as vigorously expressed as that which is now directed at the Ives case. Reflection, we believe, will convince one that the margin of advantage is likely to prove so narrow as to make it improbable that there will be any very substantial increase in popular satisfaction. We shall then, no doubt, observe the active discussion of various proposals for remaking or radically amending the Federal Con

stitution. All such programmes are, however, definitely disclaimed at the present time by the advocates of the Recall of Decisions.

Viewed, therefore, entirely from the standpoint of practical and effective reform, the Recall of Judicial Decisions is, in almost every important respect, superior to the Recall of Judges. It does not, however, promise in any very substantial degree to smooth the path of social workers and philanthropists. The longing for a more paternal government, and for more charitable laws, requires some more effective weapon. This proposal merely renders our state constitutions almost as readily changeable as are our statutes, by making it possible and easy to amend the state constitution to fit any statute which is popularly approved. It is not a revolutionary proposal. By making constitutional amendment somewhat easier, it will tend to decrease the weight and serious effect of those fundamental laws. It does not, however, provide any means for upholding the statutes against the Federal Constitution which they may often, if not always, be obliged to encounter. Whether the Recall of Decisions should be adopted, is, like most other political questions, purely one of expediency. To enter upon the discussion of that phase of the question would lead us too far afield into the region of partisan political controversy.

I

For those who have cultivated a conscience in such matters, the reading of modern books has become a perilous pastime. So great have the exactions of taste become, that many have come to abjure its obligations entirely, and have given themselves frankly to the enjoyment of the adventure of the moment. It is not merely that between ourselves and the past a great gulf has been fixed, so that it is with difficulty that we return. That indeed is something. But still more disconcerting are the untimely compulsions of an unknown and unknowable future, that drive us on from a present that we have not yet had time to realize and to make our own.

Compelling the modern spirit certainly is, and the very essence of its compulsions seems to be the denial of all those reticences, the spurning of all the indirections, that have hitherto been counted the signs of good taste.

'Down with Reticence, down with Reverence!

-forward-naked — let them stare.1

Thus Davidson has phrased the modern mood, and has not hesitated to call it great. Whether great or not, it is at least breezy, if one may apply so light a phrase to so weighty a matter. Surely Mr. Wells's Ann Veronica is breezy enough. She is in the van of that whole rout of breezy heroines 1 In one of his essays, John Davidson takes this as his own, assuming that every reader would recognize Tennyson's line. - THE AUTHOR.

which, like some band of bacchantes of old, has with its shouts of 'Evoe' broken in upon the quiet, sun-lit valleys of our taste. Harsh, indelicate, strident, or merely ridiculous, if they are not the one they are the other. And yet, perhaps, far back in the fastnesses of the soul there lurks the man who loves to have them so. For who are the women that come to men in dreams?

At least, many of us would confess that it is in the current of this mood that we have been caught, and frankly admit our tastelessness. And yet we are not so sure. Sometimes we have a strange sense of a new taste in the making; and that which might easily be set down as license of sense or intellect seems strangely like an obligation of the soul.

Precisely in this matter of what is admirable in woman we are not wholly clear. That it is with a profound, if not wholly articulate, philosophy that the sense of the admirable in woman has always been bound, we are well aware. Man has loved to have her reticent, inscrutable, and indirect in all her thoughts and ways; thus she becomes the palladium of his deeper self, the assurance that desires shall never fail. The grace, the beauty of life! these, it is felt, are bound up with a perfect harmony of impression and expression, of idea and emotion. As instinctive grace of movement or of speech may be thrown into confusion and ugliness by the presence of ideas, so, it is thought, the gracious habits of

the woman of classicism and romanticism cannot survive the direct gaze of the intellect.

Doubtless, it is upon many curious sanctions, both racial and religious, that the conventions of taste mysteriously feed; but their ultimate strength is drawn from a still more mysterious prevision of the dissolvent effect of intellect upon instinct. Instinct knows that it is by nature both indirect and reticent. It knows, or thinks it knows, that by its silences, its waiting, its ignorances, and indirections, it most surely gets what it wants. The direct way is not the shortest way to its goal. The direct gaze, the direct attack on life, mean disillusionment and distaste. Of this, I say, we have been nowhere surer than in all that concerns the relations of men and women. When, therefore, the modern writer seeks to find a new grace and beauty of the soul in the woman who can endure ideas, when he seeks for purity, not in reticence, but in revelation, he has thrown the supreme challenge at the taste of indirection; he has definitely abandoned the philosophy of instinctive silence, with all its most subtle implications of the massive and sullen elements of life.

There can be no doubt that it is here that, consciously or unconsciously, the feeling after new standards of taste has been most persistent. Like a magazine editor of recent fame, you may fail to 'find impressive' a list of names including those of Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Eden Phillpotts, W. J. Locke, Maurice Hewlett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells; yet it remains true, not only that all that is living and original in modern literature is at home in this group, but also that that which makes such a grouping significant is that all are groping after just such standards of taste, seeking for feelings and sentiments that shall express our real convictions.

True, the approach is made in various ways. Thus, to mention but a few of this particular group, Mr. Shaw has this conviction, but he breaks the force of the shock by the katharsis of laughter; Mr. Locke has made use of the device of the simplicity of fools, and of the old story of Madam Truth, spurned by king, philosopher, and priest, finding lodgment at last with the fool. Mr. Hewlett-he has his devices also-not merely, some would say, perhaps, the wisdom of fools, but also the foolishness of preaching. And so with most of them. The truth is, that all these men, however startlingly direct their gaze at times, always make use of certain indirections; all have their own ways of giving 'distance' to their objects.

With Mr. Wells, however, it is another matter. He has ventured something more. thing more. He will be wholly frank with us. What we could formerly endure only in the hyperbole of Whitman, he will make us now endure in sober prose. He will even risk the dire nemesis of the comic. He chooses the laboratory as the mise-en-scène of his romance, where the direct gaze at the facts of life is transferred to the facts of love. He allows the stirrings of love to arise, almost ridiculously, with the sight of the down on the demonstrator's cheeks. He will let his heroine be quite frankly glad of her sex; let her tell him that he is the man she wants. In the mountains they will stand stark, stark before each other and yet, such is the superbness of his faith, the graces of instinct and life are safe, absolutely safe.

I have dwelt thus at length on Mr. Wells because I believe that in one sense at least he is the most significant of them all. It is not that he surpasses the others in his faith in this new and perilous beauty, or in his success in showing it forth. This one could hardly say. Not merely that he is more audacious in seeking it, although his au

dacities are perhaps just a little more flagrant than any we have heretofore known. The New Macchiavelli might perhaps be called the pons asinorum of modernism; but this would simply mean that this pons asinorum that has always existed is now merely a little harder to cross.

What is still more important is that Mr. Wells, of all the moderns, bases his challenge most deeply in a significant philosophy of things; that he expresses more fully the true inwardness of the modern mood by which we are driven on. Indeed, in all this Mr. Wells is more than a bit doctrinaire. He is even somewhat priggish, if that were posssible. He not only violates all the canons of the taste of indirection, that the possibility of a gospel of starkness may be the more abundantly proved; but he also goes out of his way to show the essential pruriency of the souls fat with feeding on indirections. One even smiles at his harping on the point, when he makes his heroine of the direct gaze recoil instinctively from the sentimentalizing of sex in the pictures acclimated to the Victorian parlor, and allows the purblind denizens of this same sordidly respectable parlor to display the essential baseness of their conventional souls.

But if Mr. Wells is a bit doctrinaire, — and, indeed, who of these men is not? it is because his plea for the direct gaze in such matters is by no means merely a matter of taste or sensation, but is in fact in every sense a doctrine, a philosophy of life. If the open gaze can be preserved without blinking, if ideas can be endured without intellectual pruriency, it is merely because all things, life and death, the first things and the last things, are meant to be looked at. If he is willing to risk the nemesis of the comic here, it is because he can say as the conclusion of the whole matter, 'What does

it matter if we are a little harsh, a little indelicate, a little absurd, if these are in the mystery of things?'

II

It is in these last words, if I mistake not, that the true inwardness of the modern mood is to be found, that mood into the current of which many of us have felt ourselves drawn. Indeed, these very words might not inaptly be put into the mouth of any one of these breezy heroines at whose descent upon the silent places of the soul we have taken alarm. Harsh, indelicate, absurd? Yes, we are a little. But what does it matter? — Who of them has not pressed this question home? What does it matter, when it concerns the 'first and last things,' meant to be known and understood; when, indeed, it is in the very mystery of these things? Words of an extravagant tendency, these; but it is just this extravagance, this risk of indelicacy, absurdity, harshness, in short, this note of the spiritual picaresque, with all its enveloping sense of the mystery of things, -that characterizes the mood of the present.

That this is a 'great mood,' either in its mere abandonment of reticence and reverence, as Davidson sees it, or in its affirmations of faith, as Wells conceives it, who shall say? To many, this strong note in our modern taste seems merely the absence of all taste. Strident and willful, its beauties seem restless and unrestful, its sublimities specious and meretricious. To others again, it is a new taste in the making, the sign of an instinct for superhuman truths, a premonition of a new though perhaps perilous beauty. One thing at least is certain: it has its metaphysical implications; implications that extend far beyond those relations of men and women, in the judgment of which it has

been, perhaps, most in evidence. Here, doubtless, the strife of tastes is most piquant. Here the spiritual picaresque, with its willingness to risk the harsh, the indelicate, the ridiculous, challenges reserves that are most sullen and elemental. For this reason, doubtless, also, it is here that the modern spirit finds the crux of the whole matter. Yet sex is not the only thing about which the modern mind revolves. There are life and death, wisdom and destiny, all the first and last things. And be assured, he who is willing to risk harshness, indelicacy, and absurdity, in those intimate matters of feeling where the tender, the delicate, and even the sublime alone, have made them endurable, does so only because he is also willing to risk the irrational, novel, and unpredictable in those more remote issues of thought where hitherto the solemn, the rational, and harmonious have alone been conceivable. Adventures in taste are not unconnected with ventures in thought; and to dare either is possible only in the strength of a renewed conviction, everywhere asserting its power, that these very things which we feel ourselves impelled by unknown forces thus to risk, are themselves in the ultimate mystery of things.

To conceive the crisis in our taste otherwise, is to misunderstand the whole matter. Nor is it less of a misconception to think of it as some light stirring of the surface of things. One is not long in learning that this is no superficial matter of the intellectualist's nerves, no over-stimulation of the delicate antennæ of taste, but a disturbance of the more massive tissues of the soul. Many of the changes in our taste are doubtless superficial, and can be explained by very human, and not too serious, causes. Men find themselves with a taste for realism because they have become tired of sentiment. They

become enthusiastic for impressionism because they have worn out the things. They call themselves futurists because they have a morbid distaste for the past. Indeed, it is these very changes to which we can so readily give a name that need not concern us. Probably most of us are aware of having escaped the temporary intellectualisms of taste, of having passed them by, or lived them through. But underneath them all we are aware of something deeper — nothing less than a profound turning of the Time-Spirit itself.

The current you feel goes through the Man in the Street; the tastelessness to which you confess is but a sublimated vapor from his great unrest. To admit this kinship is, I am inclined to believe, the beginning of wisdom in the matter. It is true, you may not share his savage delight in cruder forms of nudity, but you must confess to your liking for the intellectual unveiling of reality. You may not care for his childish pleasures in mere freedom from fact, 'for adventure and play beyond causality,' but you have a liking for the spiritual picaresque, for the strenuous adventure beyond good and evil. You may be disposed to attack the purveyor of amusement for what he has done to the Man in the Street; and the purveyor of modernity for what he has done for you; at least there is something both thrilling and challenging in the impudent assertion of our common tastelessness. For each in his own way has found out the impossible world in which we live. In the world of sentiments we cannot find support; in the world of mechanism and intellect we cannot find delight. Hard and realistic, picaresque and passionate, the intellectual and the Man in the Street are brothers under their skin.

Now, there are those who like to say that all this is but the last stage of naturalism, that the mood we have been