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FEW years ago two well known personalities arrived in London from opposite ends of the earth. The one, Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, and educator, was the greatest living exponent of the quality and tradition of his own Bengali people and of the India of which they are beginning to form a conscious part. The other, Mary Pickford, needs no introduction to American readers. Walking quietly along the Strand shortly after his arrival, the Hindu found his way blocked by a large and tumultuous crowd. It had come to It had come to pay homage to the movie star in front of her hotel, while true greatness was jostled in the gutter.

There could hardly be a more striking contrast than that between Mary Pickford in her balcony and the Indian philosopher below. The screen actress represents the uniformities of modern large-scale life in their most insidious and disintegrating form. She is a Martha posturing in the guise of Mary, a cog in the vast mechanism of a business that is usurping and prostituting the name of art. American by birth and no doubt also by sentiment, what does she bring of the spirit of America to her admirers in five continents? What is she doing to break down the inveterate European prejudice according to which to be American is to be less than human and "Americanism" is used to

signify a mechanical hustle and bustle rather than a true and deep-felt expression of national life and personality? Featuring for millions in an empty studio cold imitation of an art that is remote from life, what passion, what individuality and nationality, can she convey through the camera to those who flock to her ghost for stimulus or relief for their jaded spirits?

The cinema is indeed the most conspicuous example in our modern society of power and intellect misapplied, of gifts that belong as of natural right to the realm of Mary cheapened and degraded by exposure in the market-places of the world, of the application of the ruthless processes of standardization to the intimacies of personality. And just because it has coarsened the methods and blunted the sensibilities of its human instruments for the sake of a world-wide popular market, it has sacrificed the power which all true art exercises over men's souls and become a devitalizing element among us, a mere drug and narcotic.

For if the things of Martha are rooted in the common life of man in society, the "better things" that Mary cared for are rooted in the inner life of the human soul. And the chief characteristic of the human soul, what constitutes its humanity, is its individuality. Certain popular cars have common measurements, and

screen close-ups are devised according to a common pattern; but no two trees are alike, no two dogs or horses are alike, and still less are two human beings alike. This hoary platitude, with which stone-age man was already familiar, would not be worth repeating were it not constantly being ignored in practice. But in a society which "tests" human beings as though they were standard pieces of mechanism, which loves to create frames and pigeon-holes and then to fit its human material into them, which has constructed for the use of its citizens sets of orthodox trappings for use in this or that walk or groove of life and is indignant when men and women prefer to walk along God's highway of earthly existence in the gait and guise that pleases them, it is well worth while to emphasize the glory of human uniqueness.

If men and women cannot be made to a pattern, neither can nations. If diversity is the glory of human beings as human beings, it is also the glory of nations as nations. The greatest men that the world has seen were also the most completely individual, the most different from all other men. Jesus was a Jew, and every one who knows the Jewish soul can recognize the Jewish quality in his personality. But he achieved his supremacy not by remaining true to the Jewish type, but by being himself, by becoming himself. The same is true of all the greatest human figures. "What really interests me in Plato," a distinguished philosopher once told me, "is that part of his work for the understanding of which no knowledge of Greek civilization is required." The remark The remark scandalized me at the time, entangled as I still was in excessive preoccupation

with externalities; but now I understand that its paradox conceals an element of vital truth. True, my friend, who had been brought up on the classics, did not realize how his own knowledge of Greece enabled him to rise with Plato above the general Hellenic level to the philosophic altitudes above. You cannot think away something that you have never thought. Really to understand Plato, you must begin your journey by the olives of the Ilissus and among the inquisitive crowd of the Athenian market-place, and work steadily upward, past the shepherds' huts and the mountain pastures, till you emerge on the high peak, with its serene survey over land and sea. But the mountain itself, like the spirit of those who win their way thither, is far above the common life below. Plato is an Athenian transfigured; Shakspere an Englishman, and yet more than an Englishman; Goethe a German, yet not a typical German; Dante an Italian, yet a miracle of human power and passion for all time. Their greatness is built up on their nationality and cannot be disjoined from it; but it is distinct and unique in itself. Of all the four it may indeed be said that every line that they have left us is pure autobiography. They had so completely individualized themselves that every outpouring of their spirit has the same personal note.

And the same, if in a lesser degree, is true of the achievement of nations. If Athens and Florence, England, France, and Flanders, have won international fame for the production of their national cultures, it is not because they strove to be national, to drill their people according to a

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standardized preconception of the time, but because they gave Athenians and Florentines, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Flemings, the occasion and inspiration to be themselves. The nationality in their work which we now admire springs straight out of their personality, and it is this nationality which has made their work international and immortal. according to an international pattern, it would have been lifeless; devised according to a national pattern, it would have remained on a common conventional level. Allowed to spring up out of the uniqueness of individual living and thinking, it has become a permanent power in the civilization of mankind. If America is disappointed with her national culture and its representatives, it is not to systems and programs that she must look for her salvation.

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Let us now set side by side and contrast the two kinds of forces of influences with which we have been dealing in this and the foregoing article. On the one hand we have the realm of Martha, the world of politics or common affairs, a world of public spirit and efficiency, of organization and standardization, always tending to a larger and larger scale, and now becoming increasingly international. On the other we have the realm of Mary, the world of the individual human soul, a world personal and intimate, intense in its feelings and attachments, and capable of inspiring not the duty-bound activities of public spirit, but by the all-pervading and integrating passion, alike unreasonable and unfathomable, which we call love.

If men realized the difference between these two realms and between the motives and impulses which operate within them, half the political problems of the world would be quickly solved. For the greater part of these so-called "problems," including those which seem most hopeless and intractable, arises simply from an overlapping of the two realms and from a failure on each side to realize that the two parties are dwelling on different planes and speaking different languages. All strictly political problems are relatively easy to solve: they are simply problems in applied science, whether it be economics or medicine or engineering or political science in the narrower sense of the term. As Sidney Well, that prince in the study of externalities, once remarked, "patriotism is simply a problem of administrative areas." If it were, if this were all that the statesman was concerned with in Ireland and India, in Haiti, Liberia, or east-central Europe, his task would be simple. Draw scientific frontiers, establish an efficient government within them, with or without a show of democracy, and man in his threefold character, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb see him, man the producer, man the consumer, and man the citizen and defender of his home, will be duly satisfied.

But, unfortunately, men and women are not fashioned on this simple threefold pattern, nor are they gifted, as a rule, with a power of analysis enabling them to distinguish between the various elements in their thought about nations and commonwealths. And it is just from this confused thinking, this entanglement between the common and the individual, between the outer and the inner, that

the most obstinate political and national problems arise. The Irish question is a good example. In its essence it was a struggle between the advocates of the two different realms, between the English, the political people par excellence, who sought to "politicize" it, as against the Irish, for whom the mystical Ireland of the heart is so much nearer and more real than the visible island, with its highways and railroads, its creameries and fisheries, as an object of government. The English solution of the Irish question was to kill Irish nationality with kindness; in other words, with good government. To the Englishman, dwelling in the realm of Martha, the break-up of the United Kingdom seems, or seemed until he was harried out of his common-sense habits, a crime against the uniformities which make for prosperity and good government. "Was there ever such lunacy proposed by anybody?" cried Mr. Lloyd George at Carnarvon in October, 1920, in reference to the details of a dominion home-rule scheme for Ireland; and the solution which the same statesman later carried through pushed the lunacy still further, because it partitioned the island and built up a customs barrier through her green lands from sea to sea. To a British audience the inconveniences of separate industrial legislation, separate rates of taxation, a separate fiscal system, seemed unanswerable arguments for the maintenance of the union. But the Irishman, dwelling in another realm, never saw these arguments, still less tried to meet them. For him it was enough to know that the union, and the English garrison, maintained in his beloved

country an element disturbing to his spiritual peace; and having decided to be "free," and that inner freedom was dependent upon certain external arrangements, he faced the practical consequences with unflinching patriotic faith, but without the businesslike calculation of statesmanship. Now that the free state is in being, Irishmen in their turn are facing the responsibilities of Martha, and when they heed the scriptural injunction as to the duty to Cæsar and the duty to God, they must sometimes ruefully reflect that the wisest of all teachers left it to each group of His pupils, in each particular case, to decide how much of duty and devotion should be apportioned to each sphere.

There is indeed only one solution of the Irish question, as of the many other questions in which the two realms overlap. It is to draw them asunder and set each on its proper plane. It is to depoliticize nationality and to de-emotionalize politics, to take nationality and its intimacies clean out of the world of state-housekeeping and efficiency, and to rescue politics, in its turn, from the rhetoric and rhodomontade, the emotional suggestions and confusions which impede the exercise of the statesman's sober judgment and public spirit. When politics become reasonable, and when men become as responsible in the discussion of political issues as in dealing with their own practical private concerns, we can look forward to a world set free from the fear of war. But just so long as passion runs riot on public issues, whether it be the sentimentalism of the pacifist, the so-called loyalty of the patriot, or the sheer emotional debauchery of the demagogue, conflict will be an ever

present possibility. For emotions do not confer: they collide, and under the impact of a collision they are apt to turn into their opposites. How often have we seen the peace fanatic in one cause become the war fanatic in another! There is no room in politics for emotion unballasted by reason, and it is one of the peculiar dangers of modern democracy that it affords an avenue to cheap success for men who, discontented, maybe, in their own intimate life, seek emotional relief in impassioned appeals to mass prejudice. The affairs of the republic are not a narcotic or an anodyne, to be turned to in the stress of dissatisfaction and malaise; still less a spectacle or a pastime, a contest in which victory goes to the quickest wits or the readiest tongue.

Americans seem, to the outside observer at any rate, to be particularly susceptible to the temptation unduly to emotionalize their politics. American history originates from the victory of a political dogma which has now almost become an inherited mode of feeling, and thus reason seems to find less easy an entry into the world of American political discussion than in communities where an older tradition and a wider background afford more emotional outlets in other directions. But as America comes of age and as Americans grow into their environment and imprint their own intimate and integrated personality upon it, this difficulty will diminish; and it should not be long before the mood evoked by the stars and stripes becomes predominantly one not simply of buoyant enthusiasm and almost mystical reverence, but also of serious and meditative responsibility.

If the Irish question is an example of Mary impinging on the realm of Martha, there are other current controversies in which we can plainly watch the opposite process. A typical instance is that of the struggle for survival among languages. The tendency of the present-day world is to concentrate human intercourse more and more upon relatively few world media and to allow the large-scale forces of modern life to crush the less widely spoken languages, what are called in India the vernaculars, out of existence. Some have even gone so far as to construct new languages in the name of progress, tongues fit to be spoken by the Robots of "R. U. R.” Yet every student of literature and every lover of human nature must realize that language is the magic casket of nationality and that a people which has lost or bartered away the tongue of its ancestors has surrendered with it a large part of its soul. Only the strongest peoples, such as the Scotch, can win their way to self-expression in an alien medium, adapting it to their nature rather than being adapted by it.

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Here, too, it is a question of how much is to be rendered to Cæsar. That all Welshmen and Irishmen should speak English is a necessary concession to Martha, but it is too often forgotten that bilingualism, the ability to speak two languages currently and fluently, is not an inconvenience, but an enrichment. Nor need the older ancestral language be relegated to Sunday and to sacred and traditional usages. No one who has ever seen a Welshman converse in English, and then, turning to a