he were a sleepless Sultan dreaming awake through the Thousand and One Nights. It will be easier, we think, to fill this hall than to clear it. One hears the audience of children calling imperiously for yet another story, or demanding Grimm when they have heard Hans Andersen, or "Robinson Crusoe" when the "Arabian Nights" is closed. One sees the fortunate lady followed, like the Piper of Hamelin, from street to street through Boston City by hordes of children demanding, again and yet again, the story that they know by heart. One imagines her growing old at her story-teller's trade, overwhelmed by the gratitude of a city, the most popular, the most envied, of all its learned citizens. So does a modern community turn backwards and do by deliberate wisdom what a natural society does by instinct and tradition. You still may see the story-teller plying his art, not for children, but for grown men, when the peasants flock in to market in an Egyptian town. We have seen him in Cairo reciting his ancient tales to an audience which listened to him, lost in the familiar and credible past, an audience which refused, while he held it. to believe that English soldiers were patrolling in the streets, and motoromnibuses running to the iron bridges of the Nile. They would stand spellbound while the dancers and the drums and the pipes entertained them in the market-place beneath the citadel; when they wearied of the dancers' art they would seat themselves with their cups of coffee round the story-teller in the café. No children ever listened more credulous to a tale of wonder. familiar legend can still draw tears from their eyes, and the jest that has survived untold centuries set them rocking with laughter. Sometimes the entertainer will recite an heroic epic that is older than Islam, and the fellahin in their blue gowns will listen as The their fathers have done for ages. Sometimes he will tell them, varying its details by his own skill and deploying all his simple art of words, a tale that may have wandered with medieval caravans from India to Persia, and from Persia to Egypt. It was nothing to them that they grew in their own fields the cotton which makes its swift voyage to Manchester, and returns from the machines and the modernity of Lancashire to clothe them. They cease, while they listen, to be items in the processes of international commerce. They live to hear the wonders of Bagdad. Their loyalty, while the bands are playing in Abdid square, is all for the immortal Caliph. They tremble at the name of Mesroor, and listen entranced to the tale of the young man before whose comeliness all the merchants are confounded, and the lady whose beauty is so overpowering that men swoon and beat their breasts at the sight of her; thrill at their adventures, admire their constancy, and sit in ecstasy until the veracious storyteller assures them that hero and heroine lived ever afterwards in happiness and joy, until they were visited by the terminator of delights and the separator of companions. One cannot watch an audience of fellahin sitting spell-bound before the coffee-house story-teller without asking oneself whether there is among primitive races a sensitiveness to words, an imaginative response to language, which the arts of civilization tend to blunt. If the Arab story-teller, fully equipped with a command of our language and deeply versed in our traditional legends, our ballads, and our more popular fiction, were to attempt to ply his art in a London public-house, with what reception would he meet? We question very much if he would find an audience, and if he did, it would be by narrowing his vocabulary and by coarsening his appeal. There seems to come, whenever the leisured classes of a nation begin to take their imaginative pleasures from books, a degradation of the spoken language, a shamefaced usage which ends by confining the real art of expression to the printed page, until at length the less cultivated mass in every class loses not only the use of powerful and well-chosen speech but almost the understanding of it. The Athenians who voted prizes to Eschylus were certainly not a reading people. If the art of reading and writing was general among them at this time, it must have been confined mainly to utilitarian ends. The use of manuscript books cannot have been frequent or habitual among citizens of moderate means. Their sensitiveness to language was a response to the spoken word, and not the acquired taste of a bookish age. They must still have had the retentive verbal memory which can repeat long poems after a single hearing, partly because its pleasure in them is intense, and partly because it has not been debauched by a dependence on books. The Elizabethan public, though it was in its upper strata a bookish and even a dilettante audience, must have had this same responsiveness to mere words which we have lost. It delighted in plays which made their appeal through elaborate set speeches, delivered like recitations by an actor who ignored the stage while he spoke them, and addressed the benches before him. It was an audience, if one may judge it by its preferences, far less critical than a modern audience would be of plots and probabilities and dramatic propriety and skill in construction, but vastly more ready to feel delight in words. Our stage to-day can make these same beautiful words palatable and endurable only when it overworks their dramatic possibilities, and embroiders them in a setting of costumes and scenery and pageants, and even so it must "cut." The "groundlings" of today ask no words at all. Their theatre is the panoramic show, the dazzling, clattering mechanism of continuous photographs. The crowd flocks to the cinematograph, and when the cinematograph palls, it goes to a dumb drama. These preferences mean that words are losing for us, if not their meaning, at least their emotional power and the vivid associations by which they paint for us a pageant of the fancy in our own brain. A gifted child, however civilized his parentage, starts life with this primitive sensibility to spoken words. He will remember a ballad at a first or second hearing, if his parents have been wise enough to postpone his introduction to books. We know a boy of seven who is as innocent as any savage of his alphabet, but he can recite the "Ancient Mariner" from end to end, and recite it with a passion and a power of dramatic representation which are almost terrifying. Every word has for him its full emotional force. It is not a printed symbol hastily conned, but a picture which has set the unburdened fancy of the child shaping and fashioning its own romantic representations. His sensibility to sights and sounds has been cultivated, while he has been spared the mechanical toil of the spelling lesson. We are tempted, when we hear him recite, to think that no printed poem or tale could ever have meant to him as much as the mythology which entered his eager ear and fermented in his unspoiled memory. A child who has no books makes a library for himself, and as he plays and dreams and talks he is for ever illuminating the romantic manuscript in his brain. The innovation which the Municipality of Boston has inaugurated will give its children the natural opportunity to cultivate a sensibility to words which is the birthright of a primitive race. If the lady who has been named the official story-teller to the city has the genius which her post demands, she may revive a lost art and arrest the The Nation. decay of a human faculty in the process of giving to these children their hours of wonder and joy. THE GREAT USURPATION. BY LORD ROBERT CECIL, M. P. We have now had five months' experience of the Constitution under the Parliament Act, and even the most prejudiced admirers of the present Government must be beginning to realize its revolutionary character. The gloomiest prophecies by opponents of that measure have been surpassed by actual results. Its critics declared that its chief effect would be to destroy the control by the electorate of the Government of the day, that it would enable a Cabinet, however unpopular in the country, to force through Parliament legislation profoundly distasteful to the people, and that the more it became clear that Ministers were losing the support of the constituencies the more eager would be the various groups and cliques of their majority to get their particular nostrums foisted into the Statute-book. Determined optimists laughed at such prognostications. We were told that Ministers would never venture so to abuse their power, and that if they did make any such attempt the House of Commons, sobered by the great increase in its responsibility, would firmly refuse to permit it. As a matter of fact, this sanguine anticipation has been entirely falsified. Not only are the Government preparing in the coming session to use their newly-acquired powers with shameless unrestraint, but even before the provisions of the Parliament Act became directly operative the atmosphere created by its enactment reduced the House of Commons to a condition of unexampled servility. We have seen legislators, in defiance of public opinion, voting themselves four hundred a year and doing it by simple resolution of the House of Commons, so as to avoid any possible reference of the proposal to the electorate. We have also seen a crude mixture of philanthropic aspirations and practical injustice rushed through the House of Commons by every species of guillotine and closure, in spite or rather because of its growing unpopularity. Both of these outrages on Parliamentary propriety have been readily condoned by the various sections of the Coalition since each of them knew that any resistance would imperil the particular proposal which that section favored. The prospect of imposing upon the country Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment, and Manhood Suffrage proved more attractive to the various ministerial groups than any old-fashioned doctrines about freedom of debate or the integrity of the House of Commons. Evil as have been the indirect consequences of the Parliament Act, its direct operation in the coming session promises to be far more calamitous. The Government have announced their intention of passing through the House of Commons this year three measures any one of which might fairly be the chief business of the session. Nor can it be said that any of them has recently had such full discussion as would make extended debate of its provisions unnecessary. Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment were last seriously discussed in the Parliament of 1893-5. Whatever the details of the new Irish proposal may be it must involve many questions of acute controIt must raise complicated eco versy. nomic and fiscal problems, it must touch matters of deep religious differences, it must involve menace to the prosperity and even safety of an important section of our fellow-countrymen. Beyond all this it must affect the very foundations of our Constitution. No one yet knows how the Government propose to deal with the unsolved difficulty of Irish representation in the Imperial Parliament. But whatever solution of that matter is attempted it is safe to say it must open an immense field of necessary debate. It may be thought that Welsh Disestablishment will not require such prolonged consideration. Doubtless it is true that the central injustice of disendowment tends to overshadow the details of this iniquitous measure. Even so there are many aspects of disendowment to be considered-historical, statistical, ethical, and constitutional. And apart from main principles there are matters of Church government, questions as to Church fabrics, and other important details which will require at least as full and prolonged consideration as in the case of the Irish Church. Finally, as to the so-called "Reform" Bill, no one knows what its provisions will be. But of one thing we may be certain. Its main purpose will be so to gerrymander the electorate as to give the greatest possible assistance to the Radical party at the next election. That is not likely to prove noncontroversial; even if the very grave question raised by the growth and seriousness of the movement in favor of Woman's Suffrage could be easily adjusted. Apart, then, from the enormous constitutional importance of the proposed legislation its complexity and controversial character require the fullest and freest discussion. That, however, is clearly impossible if all three measures are to get through the House of Commons this year. Their passage within that period can only be secured by the most ruthless closure, or by the employment of some other device for restricting debate. That the result of such proceedings must be the further degradation of the House of Commons is a matter of indifference to the restless bureaucrats who control the Government. Nor are they likely to be impeded in their work of destruction by any inconvenient manifestation of independence among their followers. Many of these, indeed, are quite aware of the perishing reputation of the representative Chamber. And some feeble bleatings have been actually heard about the mistake of "over-loading" the coming session. But the official reply is uncompromising. The Master of Elibank, in his recent public letter, declares that the "over-loading" is "the inevitable result of the Parliament Act." And he is perfectly right. Unless the three Bills in question pass the House of Commons this year it might well happen that even under our present Constitution they would have to be submitted to the judgment of the electorate. Everyone knows-none better that the Master of Elibank-that to two of them at least such an ordeal would be fatal. Possibly the "Reform" Bill might survive-till its terms are known no one can tell-but the Irish and Welsh Bills would undoubtedly perish. Their only chance of success is that they should be smuggled through behind the backs of the people. We have, then, the ministerial policy openly avowed. The Government propose to force upon the country three measures of vast constitutional importance, certain to arouse the bitterest controversy, by the most unscrupulous use of powers unscrupulously obtained. It is impossible to pretend that they have received any authority from the electors for such action. Even supposing that the country was adequately warned that the Parliament Act of a reformed Second Chamber clothed with adequate powers. Any other course can only be called a fraud on the electors. In short, the policy which was begun by humiliating the Crown and destroying the House of Lords is to be completed by the degradation of the House of Commons and the deception of the people. Whatever steps the leaders of the Unionist party may think it right to recommend for resisting this unparalleled usurpation, no member of the party will criticize them as being too determined or too extreme. was to be employed to pass Home Rule, which is certainly untrue, no such contention can be seriously put forward about the Church in Wales, still less about the gerrymandering of the Franchise. Moreover, the assent of the electorate, so far as it was ever given to the Parliament Act, was given to it as a whole, including the preamble, and the most elementary political honesty required that as soon as the Parliament Act was passed the policy embodied in it should be completed by the creation The Saturday Review. BOOKS AND AUTHORS. Dean Hodges's "Saints and Heroes To the End of the Middle Ages" (Henry Holt & Co.) is a series of brief biographies for young readers, in which are sketched the life-histories of some of the greatest religious leaders, from Cyprian and Athanasius to Wycliffe, Hus and Savonorola. There are twenty of these biographies. Read separately, each of them presents a graphic sketch of a conspicuous figure in Christian history. Read consecutively, they are found to be connected by a thread of historic sequence and to furnish the readers to whom they are addressed a view of the perils and vicissitudes through which the Christian church has passed. The book is illustrated with portraits,-copies of old paintings and statues. "Through the Narrows," a novel by Myrtle Lelbee Roe, has for its theme the secret of an exiled Belgian, strange and mysterious, which involves personages of varying rank and importance, and is essentially romantic. To be made forceful, the theme should have been treated in the romantic manner. Instead the style is inwrought with an unnatural sentimentality, and the char acters are conceived with an idealism which often removes them and their doings from the range of probability. But in spite of the limited power of characterization, there is material in the plot for an absorbing story, had the author only caught the romancer's art of making the impossible seem plausible. Sherman, French & Co. The ancient problems of fate and free will, with which the philosophers of all times have struggled, and the discussions of which would fill a huge library, recur in Professor George H. Palmer's "The Problem of Freedom" (Houghton Mifflin Co.). The volume contains ten chapters, comprising the substance of a course of lectures delivered in 1909 before the Lowell Institute. The lectures have been revised and to some extent rewritten, but they retain the directness and lucidity incident to their original form of popular address. Professor Palmer defines and explains the conflicting theories of determinism and freedom, weighs the arguments in support of each, and indicates their relation to conduct and to life. The lectures are marked by close thinking and clear writing. |