vinov, as Lenine has. Litvinov-Val- he knows that he is charged with lakh Meer, according to the Okhrana record-was born in Bielostok. He was imprisoned for selling socialist literature, escaped, and went abroad. In 1908 he was arrested in Paris on charges brought by the Russian authorities, and was deported. He went to England, where he worked in a bank and married Ivy Low, the young novelist, niece of Sir Maurice Low. When the Revolution came, he served as soviet representative in England until he was deported. I like Litvinov, though in our chance meetings he always snubbed me. He is what they call in the army "hardboiled," and has served his Government well by just that quality. Those who saw him at Brest-Litovsk report that he did the snarling while Joffe, who now heads the delegation negotiating with the Japanese, did the soothing. Even those Russians who dislike Litvinov, and they are not a few, seem pleased that the lean and mild Chicherin has this burly alternate, whom no one can exhibit as an aristocrat among Bolsheviks. He works tremendously hard, though I always resented it when Gai, his assistant, took up the Moscow chant about his chief's eighteen hours a day. It is true that most Russian commissars are the hardest working men I have ever seen, but it is also true that the country would fare better if they got more rest and would delegate power to loyal secretaries. I should have thought Litvinov would be popular in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, for he is a witty and experienced man. But he is not popular, and he knows it. He has said too many sharp things about the follies of some of his colleagues. Litvinov knows this, and "ambition," and he watches his step accordingly. It is reported that the copy of Arthur Ransome's "Russia in 1919" in the Foreign Office library is burned on one page as though by an inadvertent cigarette. An inquisitive reader who sought another copy of the book found that the deleted passage contained Litvinov's reference to certain of his fellow-workers as "those idiots." Such a frank expression of honest opinion might make an uncomfortable moment if read at a party meeting. Karl Radek is not destined to be a "boss," but always a cross between a search-light and a glow-worm, lighting the way of some big chief. More laughter can be heard in the little office on the Mockavia where Radek studies newspapers in nine languages than in any other spot in Moscow. He is a Polish Jew, whose real name is Sobelson, much of whose revolutionary training was got in the editorial room of the "Leipziger Volks-Zeitung." When he wears side-burns, these and his heavy glasses make him look like a Galician war refugee. When he is clean shaved, as he was in honor of being sent by Lenine to help mancuver the Rapallo treaty in Berlin last spring, he has the engaging appearance of an Arthur Rackham gnome. Nobody of any consequence, from the farthest ends of Russia, ever comes to Moscow without stopping in to swap yarns with Radek. Before he discovered that I understood German, he used to let me read the Literary Review of the New York "Evening Post," which was always on his desk, while he dictated letters to his friends abroad. What a list of friends! Personal, political, extreme left, biggest business, journalists, clergymen. What letters! Ribald, gay, politically searching. The Germans with whom Radek has most to do know him thoroughly, ad "Barbarossa" mire him, and distrust him. They used to arrest him when he slipped into Germany during the early days of the Revolution; now they negotiate with him and invite him to dinner. "Those dinners!" he complained to me. "The poor devils in the German Foreign Office get so little to eat that any Bolshevik is good enough excuse for an official banquet on the state expense account." He is a genius, but with a mind two-graded, one grade brilliant, one grade trite. He is an expert politician, conspires capably, lies freely, analyses with profound perception, and works incessantly. His job in Moscow is to make an objective survey of world politics. He has many personal agents outside Russia who post him on inside stuff. His general opinions have great weight both with Lenine, who makes the foreign policy, and with Chicherin, who conducts its diplomacy. One could go on thus for days, turning the pages of the Bolshevik family album. There is Kraznicheckov, a lawyer from Chicago, who invented a sort of Graustark realm, the Far Eastern Republic, patterned to woo recognition from President Wilson. They were all for pleasing America in those days. The whole of Kamchatka, the Transsiberian railroad-no one will ever know what prizes the United States could not have had for "recognition." Then there is Bucharin, the brilliant editor of "Pravda," with his gay face. He is a sort of beloved little brother to Lenine, the only one who dares to be seriously saucy to the old man at party conferences. And poor dear Lunacharsky, commissar of education, who can't give half an hour's speech under two eloquent hours and who has to soothe the Bolshoi Theater ballet when they threaten to mob Isadora Duncan; dear Lunacharsky, who has n't any executive ability and is the most sympathetic man in Moscow, finding homes for poets from the provinces, trying to get slates and books for children, and a Red Army ration for his schoolteachers. And Zinoviev, who keeps his native bailiwick of Petrograd still a revolutionary city where the factory workers enjoy free theaters and remain stiff-necked toward the old middle classes, long after Moscow has lost its red flare and the speculators crowd the proletariat out of the boxes. Krylenko, who nearly lost his party ticket last year because he took his hunting dogs out in a government automobile, which was said to be unworthy a "communist and gentleman." Hunting the face of the next leader is only a game. It is not the outstanding fact to be studied in Moscow today. "What gets you," as one of the American correspondents kept repeating, "is the Communist party machine." In the country that was the most feudal in Europe, where the age of mechanics has only just dawned, the Bolsheviks have made a governing machine that runs, though it bumps and rattles and may some day break. What the leaders lead is an aggregate of party members held together by a cohesive formula that keeps the Communist party a unit. In action the party is a giant not divided against itself, though in conference its leaders and members may have wrangled for weeks over clashing views of tactics and administration. The machine is forever being looked over, the mud washed off, the motor oiled. Last year two hundred thousand members were thrown out of the party because of graft, abuse of power, bureaucracy, passivity, careerism, counter-revolutionary aims, and other deadly sins that kept the machine from moving on its patrol of the peasant nation. Now that the revolutionary movement has subsided, and the coöperative commonwealth has not sprung fullsheathed from the Revolution's head, but seems nearly as far away as ever, communists will tend to be more and more like the politicians and civil servants bred elsewhere. But as long as their periodic cleansings manage to keep the membership above the Russian average in honesty and energy, and party discipline keeps the communists united, the leader of the Russian state will be one of the old Bolshevik group, schooled as Krassin, Chicherin, and Stalin have been in the revolutionary movement. Quarrel By ELINOR WYLIE Let us quarrel for these reasons: I love truth, and so do you. Tell me, is it truly true? Are the Artists Going Mad? BY GILBERT K. CHESTERTON T is curious that while the word it is obvious that camouflage was one I"camouflage" is in cessantly used in of the newest and most curious of the numberless and needless applications, the thing itself finds no further use and is hardly applied at all. The term is a tag of journalese; some social or scientific movement is called camouflage, as if our noble language needed to search for a French word for humbug; or some great statesman is called a master of camouflage, when it would satisfy all our simple human needs to call him a liar. In this, perhaps, there is something of a national note, despite all the talk about the practicality of the British nation. In fact, no people is so easily fed with words instead of things, and with a sort of poetical justice instead of practical justice. For no people is satire so much a substitute for reform, instead of a spur to reform. Bumbledom has passed into a proverb without by any means passing out of a practice. And we gave Kaiser Bill, that noisy war-dog, a bad name instead of hanging him. arts of war; and it seems odd that it has not been adopted as one of the arts of peace. To paint things with invisibility would seem to be a military miracle almost as suggestive as the miracles of the latest surgery. It would be almost as humane an act to remove certain features in a landscape as to restore certain features in a face. Many of our large buildings, our public monuments, and even the statues of our great men might often with advantage be made to melt into a confused twilight of distance, so that their lines were indistinguishable. For that matter, whole cities in the wealthiest, most bustling, and businesslike districts of the British Empire seem to call for the subtle brush that would make them look like something else; that would enable the traveler to walk through a commercial high street with the illusion of one walking through a wild woodland glade; and to wander But in the lighter aspects, at least, in Sheffield as if it were Sherwood. Nor, indeed, is there any reason why the new kind of painting should not be applied to the old kind of painting. The entire exhibition of the Royal Academy might be painted in so subtle a manner that the pictures themselves were invisible. Outside landscapepainting and portrait-painting, there are forms of the pictorial art in which such an intervention would be highly interesting. The one school of painting in which the modern world certainly excels, at any rate in enthusiasm and energy, is the painting of the female face. It would be disrespectful to suggest that we often desire the face to be camouflaged, in the sense of completely conjured away and evaporated. But there are composed and even complacent human countenances, of gentlemen and even of ladies, which would be more soothing if they appeared to fade into a pattern like a portion of the wall-paper; or if they could be mistaken at the first glance for a bedpost or a sofa-cushion. These are, perhaps, ideals too high and remote to be realized; but they serve to introduce a real question about the technical condition of such arts to-day. It does appear strange that the galleries of advanced art have not shown us a camouflaged school along with the Cubist school or the Futurist or Vorticist schools. The conception of the next step in esthetic progress being an invisible art is very much in line with the others, or even with the very names of the others. A vortex is in its nature the empty center of something tending to vanish; and if, as humanity in its simplicity has hitherto supposed, the future is hidden from us, the thing after the future is presumably more invisible still. And as for Cubism, there is nothing beyond the cube unless there be a fourth dimension; and pictures in the fourth dimension would be happily beyond our vision. Well, let us suppose that this fact smooths a path for the fashionable triumph of the camouflage school of art. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that some practical joker has left the walls of Burlington House entirely bare, and then invited all society to the private view. Suppose he explains that the pictures of the new school are painted with such superb skill that they mix themselves with the atmosphere, that they are absorbed into the air and the environment, that they dissolve by their very sympathy with daylight, or, in short, that they create the delicate illusion of not being there at all. I wonder how many people in such a society crowd would submit to the new situation, and profess an understanding of the new metaphysic and the new technic. I wonder if any would have the moral courage to say of the academy walls what the child alone had courage to say about the emperor. For the first thing to face about the progress of the arts at present is that, whatever the rights and wrongs of it otherwise, it is supported by masses of social hypocrisy. Of the artists themselves, of those of them that can really be called artists, of such motives and meanings as can really be traced to a true artistic source, I shall try to take account in all fairness later on. But even if it be in originality and courage that they are admirable, it is in servility and cowardice that they are admired. Merely to wish for advanced art is not anarchism; it is simply snobbishness, and snobbishness more vulgar than |