rectory among the hills, in waste places by Shepherd's Bush, in gloomy Great Russell Street, where the ghosts of dead, disappointed authors go sighing to and fro? For the fate of the little literary man there is no articulate speech that is sufficient; one must fall back upon aoi, or oimoi, or alas, or some such vague lament of unutterable woe.

It is a pity that no one competent to do so has ever made a study, historically and pathologically, of the cacoethes scribendi. If ever such a study is made, Mr. Machen's two volumes, Things Near and Far and Far Off Things, should be consulted. He has gone into the facts of his own case with painstaking thoroughness, and has reached certain conclusions that need to be tested in the light of wider evidence. For example: like Samuel Butler he kept a careful record of his returns from the sale of his books. He runs through the list of these books, written between 1880 and 1922, and finds that there are eighteen titles. His total receipts for these eighteen volumes, which cost him fortytwo years of toil, amounted to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five pounds; in other words, for nearly half a century of labor, he had been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings per annum. 'It seems clear,' he adds, 'that my literary activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of mere greed and moneygrubbing.' Then he wonders what the motive, or motives, can be that induce men to devote their lives to literature - why it is that so many writers are willing to endure horrible poverty, disappointment, mortification, and despair for such slender rewards, for no reward, in fact, that could be adequate. And his conclusion is this: that life, if looked at honestly, without shrinking, is intolerable, and that men will do anything to hide from the serious facts of life, 'follow

any track, however desperate, trivial, perilous, or painful, if only these serious facts can be evaded and forgotten, though it be but for a few hours.' To write books is one method of escape of hard escape, to be sure, but offering advantages over other methods to certain types of men.

I question the validity of this conclusion, not in individual instances, but as a general statement of the case. Life is not so horrible as all this comes to. Rabelais, Cervantes, Charles Dickens, the three artists whom Mr. Machen loves and reveres above all others, relished life keenly, and their enormous capacity for loving it as men was the measure of their greatness as artists. The writing of books was no attempt to escape on their part. Their purpose was, rather, to convince others of the foolishness of wanting to escape, by showing them the value of the gift of life, whether considered as a stirring adventure or a fascinating spectacle. I doubt whether any sweeping statement can be made with respect to the causes of cacoethes scribendi. They seem to be as many and varied as its victims.

One of the most eminent of these victims, Joseph Conrad, would have been the last, surely, to have agreed with Mr. Machen that a literary career offers a means of escape from the keener sufferings of life. His recently published letters, many of them written in the midst of his work, reveal a man suffering, as an artist, the torments of the damned. There were, to be sure, contributory causes: ill health, worry about money, and the like, but these by no means account for such anguish of mind and spirit. No one familiar with Conrad's work could have been unprepared for the revelations of the letters, such tales as

Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Victory,
Under Western Eyes,
Under Western Eyes, foreshadowed

For twenty months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this earth, I had, like the

prophet of old, 'wrestled with the Lord' for

my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile. These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterize otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn.

It would be an excellent thing if this extract, suitably printed and framed, were to be hung on the walls of classrooms wherever English literature is studied and the art of writing professedly taught. It is reasonable to suppose that students, reading and rereading it day after day, would eventually not only remember the words, but would have a conception, at least, of what they mean of the difficulties of the tasks confronting the serious artist, of the nature of the gifts necessary to conquer them, and of the peine forte et dure which is his portion in life. If, as a

result, some of them were to be deterred from undertaking literary careers, what a blessing that would be, both to themselves and to the public at large.

For there is no doubt that cacoethes scribendi is becoming all too common a malady in these days. All of us journeymen scribblers are out of the discussion, of course. We are merely artisans, like blacksmiths, or carpenters, or bricklayers, and profess to be nothing more. But the countless host of contemporary novelists, dramatists, poets, make no such modest claims to modest merit. They demand to be taken seriously; and every year larger and yet larger numbers of young men and women join the ranks of this army, which threatens, eventually, to include the whole of our adult and adolescent population. Most of them are wholly lacking in gifts for their high calling, save only, occasionally, in that of dogged persistence. The importance of this quality becomes grossly exaggerated in their eyes. They believe it to be half the battle, when in reality it is not one quarter of it. They are misled, too, by the doctrine, so persistently preached at them in an era of cheaply won material success, that any man can achieve what he wills to achieve, if only he wills it hard enough. 'Lives of great men all remind us ...' That faith is as widely disseminated and, I venture to say, as widely held to-day as it was half a century ago, when Longfellow so unhappily implanted it in every schoolboy's heart.

I sometimes think that liberty to aspire supposed to be among the crowning glories of our democratic age

is really the most doubtful of its blessings. Certainly it is responsible for a great deal of needless misery. Consider this army of would-be artists, so many of whom are trying to stretch meagre gifts to the limit of their aspirations; or worse, creating

gifts for themselves out of pure imagination. If they were denied the opportunity, how much happier they would be. There is a definition of art, to be found in Mr. Santayana's Dialogues in Limbo, which, I think, should also be printed and framed for hanging in classrooms. It is this: 'Art, which is action guided by knowledge, is the principle of benefit, and without art, the freer a man is the more miserable

he must become.' Action guided by knowledge, particularly by self-knowledge, is precisely the kind of action so many of us know nothing about, and that is why we lead such inartistic lives why, for example, we think we are authentic sufferers from cacoethes scribendi when in reality our complaint no more resembles this glorious malady than 'Little Birdie in a Tree' resembles Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale.'

'WE are the oldest government in Europe,' remarked Chicherin in 1923, during the residence of the present writer in Moscow. This droll comment of the Bolshevist Commissar for Foreign Affairs was historically correct then, more so to-day, if by government that astute diplomat understood a given cabinet or a sovnarkom exercising supreme power and performing the customary administrative functions. The parliamentary system which requires sporadically a vote of confidence in support of the dominant political party, failing which the cabinet is expected to resign, has indeed occasioned a bewildering succession of ministries upon the stage of European politics since November 7, 1917. The Moscow system, on the contrary, provides, antecedently, for the liquidation of any menacing opposition by the

simple device of eliminating the opposers. Those who attempted serious political resistance found themselves either in the execution chamber of the Loubyanka or on their way to freezing exile in the convict camps on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.

To be sure, during the decade just ended, there have been notable losses and substitutions in the higher ranks of the Soviet hierarchy. Sverdlov, Volodarsky, and Uritsky, all active leaders, were assassinated in the early days of the Revolution. Lenin, the flaming torch that fired the Russian masses and sought to fire the world, the creator of the Soviet state and founder of the Third International, died the thousand living deaths of a deranged paralytic before his actual demise in 1924. Vorovsky, able propagandist and first Soviet representative to Italy,

was murdered in Switzerland in 1923 and lies buried outside the Kremlin walls, close to the grave of John Reed. On the afternoon of Vorovsky's funeral the author of these articles wandered through Red Square and meditated on the significance of the strange fellowship that could so unite in common burial a Russian revolutionist and the brilliant but erratic Harvard graduate.

Krassin, easily distinguishable among the other commissars as brains temporizing with victorious passions, recently succumbed to a mortal illness while Soviet Ambassador to England. Dzerzhinsky, chief of the dreaded secret police, the Cheka, executioner of 1,800,000 victims, the man with the eyes of a gazelle and the soul of a FouquierTinville, expired suddenly and mysteriously in 1926 after an impassioned impassioned speech of protest against certain heterodox tendencies of his colleagues. Voikov, who signed the death warrant of Tsar Nicholas II and the imperial family, was himself murdered in Warsaw on June 7, 1927, falling victim to the vengeance of an exiled Russian youth not twenty years of age.

But after each casualty the ranks closed tighter. Internal dissension is met by stern domestic discipline. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev dispute the supremacy of Stalin, Bucharin, and Rykov. They pay the penalty of schism by relegation to obscure posts within the Party. Thus the essential dictatorship of ten men, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, persists unchallenged over 140,000,000 Russians. With unshaken confidence, Moscow is celebrating its tenth year in continuous control of approximately one seventh of the habitable surface of the earth.

If history may be conceived as philosophy teaching by example, may it not be time, even as early as the

tenth year after the event, to seek a helpful interpretation of the Russian experiment?

For Russia not only presents a story that will engage the best historians of the world for generations to come; it is an actual, insistent fact of the present. Bolshevism is an international reality which only the hopelessly intransigent can ignore. If the World War did not entirely destroy modern organized society, it assuredly did bring civilization to the crossroads. The victors of the second Russian revolution, that of November 1917, frankly and brutally took the road to the extreme left, driving a weakened, demoralized Russia before them, calling on stronger nations to follow. That way madness lies, as they have now learned and reluctantly admitted, taught by the inexorable laws of nature operating through economic pressure. But it is my deliberate judgment, based on six years' close observation of European and Russian affairs, that no lasting peace is possible in Europe or Asia until the breach between Russia and the West is securely bridged. For that difference, that breach, is not a chasm dug by national hatred, by historic feud or racial antipathy. One or other of such specific motives made Greeks the natural enemies of Turks, made France distrust Germany, and set Celt against Saxon. But the issue created by the second Russian revolution strikes at the very concept of human society as now organized and proposes an entirely new civilization.

It was not merely a revolution in the accepted sense as historically understood, that is, a re-allocation of sovereignty, but revolution in the domain of economics, religion, art, literature, science, education, and all other human activities. It sought to create a new archetype of humanity, the 'collective man,' and a new culture

adapted to the impersonal 'mass man who should displace forever 'the soulencumbered individual man.' It was meant, and so proclaimed by its protagonists, to be a challenge to the modern State as constituted, not merely in Imperial Russia, but throughout the entire civilized world. It was philosophic materialism in arms, the most radical school of thought that has ever come upon the stage of human affairs.

The leaders of Bolshevism deliberately identified and confused, in the estimation of the masses, all civilization with the particular Russian form detested by the peasants because of their economic serfdom under it and hated by the liberals because of the savage repression of all their efforts for the enlargement of human liberty through constitutional reform. Interpreting all life, therefore, in terms of their own memories of Siberia, the Bolsheviki generalized savagely, and, of course, erroneously. Lenin registered his bitter oath of universal revenge on the day his brother Alexander Ulianov was executed by the Tsarist Government in 1887 for attempted regicide. Lenin was wrong. But the Tsars were equally wrong in obstinately refusing to modify an insupportable autocracy that drove men to such desperation.

II

The Russian problem derives its hugeness and its complexity from the very soil that gave it birth, inheriting these characteristics as legitimately and historically as the Russian peasant does his wise simplicity and his naïve mysticism. To be sure, such of the intelligentsia as escaped the Cheka during the Terror often begged us foreigners to consider Bolshevism, not as Russian in character and origin at all, but as a distinctly foreign invention, imported into Russia by the

German High Staff during the war as a purely military manœuvre to destroy the morale of the Russian people and cripple the army. Both objectives were achieved with characteristic efficiency, even though the Frankenstein monster thus created almost destroyed its sponsor when Bolshevist revolutionary propaganda nearly triumphed in Germany in 1923.

In substantiation of their protests, it was often pointed out to us by native Russians that the anti-individualistic character of Soviet institutions is as far removed from the dreamy idealism of Slav peasantry as it is from the avowed aspirations of typical revolutionary leaders like Alexander Herzen, Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Chernov, Martov, Spiridonova, Milyukov, Pitirim, Sorokin, and Grandmother Breshkovskaya. This reservation must, however, be interpreted as their criticism of Bolshevism's impracticable, unworkable answer to Russia's century-long struggle for political freedom and economic independence. It does not, I think, invalidate my contention that Russia's present fate was clearly Russia's destiny, self-imposed, foreseen through decades, and inescapable, granted the policy pursued by the Russian Government for the thirtyseven years that elapsed between the assassination of Alexander II and the murder of Nicholas II.

Time, before whose impartial tribunal all men and institutions pass for judgment, is gradually furnishing the perspective indispensable for an objective and unobstructed view of that sinister record of blunder, Asiatic callousness, reaction, and Byzantine haughtiness. The unfolding panorama of Russian history from 1613 - when young Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch Philaret, mounted the throne

until the last of the Romanovs perished in the hideous massacre of