Timothy Raeburn was the last of the Artists. He lived in a garret in London, the very last of the garrets. Both he and the garret seemed to exist only by some oversight, in the present almost perfect state of things. A lingering echo of those now distant times when artists had been content to starve to death in such places, just for the mere glory of the thing.

Here he lived entirely alone and unfriended. He was a mystery. Nobody knew how he lived, or what secret force sustained him in his isolation from the world—not even Timothy himself : or by what mysterious power he alone had managed to survive into the new and happier era. How did he maintain this detachment, where one by one the others failed?

Gradually the little band of Timothy’s fellow-artists had dwindled into nothing. The last survivors of the Post neo-Primitives. who had struggled so valiantly with the banner of reaction, had all capitulated in one way or another. For instance, during the past five years no fewer than one hundred and seventy-four cases of suicide had been announced among them. Only a month ago the Trumpet Blast had wasted three lines of a column on the death of Mr. J. A. Yeeke, the leader of the group and believed to be the last of the free-lances, who had last been seen reading a copy of this same Trumpet Blast, and had immediately done away with himself in a fit of sheer boredom.

The experience of the Great War seems so far to have left little mark on French literature, and the reader of current French novels, poetry and drama will often find himself wondering what the cause of this may be. He will discover in French political and social life enough evidence of the fact that France in the last seven years passed through a terrible war and emerged devastated, robbed of hundreds of thousands of her sons, but unbroken and proud. In literature, however, so the observer will often think to himself, all this appears to have changed nothing. On the stage, in fiction and poetry, we might be in 1914, before the shadow of the disaster was to be seen or thought of. England, Italy, Germany even, have, in their imaginative and intellectual life, ‘reacted’ more thoroughly to the war than has France, most terribly stricken of them all.

Without criticising this ‘stationary’ character of contemporary French literature or in any way assuming that it will be permanent, we can readily find a reason for it. More than any other of the belligerents France lost her young intellectuals in the great struggle. The men through whom she speaks to-day, in her art and literature, are very often those who were accepted classics already in 1914, incapable of radical change or departure from the style they have made their own. The young writers who should now be writing alongside of them, and eventually succeed them, are dead.

The art of sculpture as formerly practised by the peoples of India is, in epitome, an exhibition of all that British rule, there, as in England, must inevitably destroy. This may be for many a matter for considerable rejoicing, for, like the Romans in their decline, and for that matter, as it seems, throughout the whole of their history, the British people, though mitigating its appetite for commercial power by a sense of justice and fair play, is almost totally blind to any absolute value in Beauty.

Admirable as it may appear to be in many of its achievements, a civilisation submitting to the widespread and predominant use of mechanical contrivances whose sole claim to existence lies in the fact that by their means things can be made in greater quantity for the same expenditure of time and money is a civilisation wilfully denying itself the possession of things of Beauty, and destroying in itself both the power to produce such things and the ability to recognise them when they are produced.

Those of us who are concerned for the existence of Beauty in the world are often accused, by so-called practical men of business, of a lack of disinterestedness. It is supposed that we desire Beauty because we are artists, and that were we not artists we should be as indifferent in the matter as they are. It is supposed that as the cocoa-manufacturer wages war against the drinking of beer, because he may thus hope to increase the sales of his cocoa, and it is not to be supposed that he can have any other motive, So the artist wages his ‘forlorn hope’ against commercialism because thus he may hope to increase the sales of works of art.

Turkish dominance may have been curbed in Europe by the Great War—we know that it is being allowed to run riot in Asia—but it would be a mistake to think that the canker of Islamism has been removed. The new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes has in its midst approximately one million Sons of the Prophet. Their main stronghold is in Bosnia, together with Herzegovina, where Moslem bigotry and cruelty earned for it a title of which it was proud until yesterday : ‘The Lion that guards Stambul against the West.’ Yet Bosnia was a Christian land five centuries ago, and the story of Bosnian heroism in religious fidelity, after the lapse of its Christian leaders, has not yet been given to the world. The landlords, forebears of the present arrogant and tyrannous Begs, became apostates to Islam for the sake of their lands and titles. Their Christianity had been already undermined at the time of the Turkish invasion by the heretical tenets of the Bogumiles, a sect that had much in common with the Protestantism of later days. English writers are found who excuse the Bosnian chieftains for their preference of the Sultan’s jurisdiction to that of the Pope. The harsh measures meted out to heretics in the Middle Ages were here intensified by rivalry between Bosnian chiefs who denounced each other to the King of Hungary, or the Rulers of Venice and Ragusa, and were perverts or converts as the situation required, now submitting to Rome, next day repudiating submission.

The art of Hawthorne is the most beautiful thing; that has come out of America. Perhaps its fantastic quality of imagination, in which beauty kindles from word to word as colour will in tapestry or in the red glow against the dun background of a Yanina embroidery, picked out here and there with fragmentary touches of gold thread, is due to the fact that his sense of beauty was a changeling and had no father in American soil. His subject is the Puritan conscience, whose fine and rigid quality was reflected in a stern law, the first refuge of frigid men who had entered a strange continent with all the forces of nature arrayed against them. Transplanted into a soil unprepared for them, the pioneers, who had revolted from their original home, identified their foes without with their foes within, so that nature everywhere became the enemy, and life itself sinful. To have been born at all was the first sin to these Puritans,—who suffered from the most dreadful of all human superstitions, expiated by sacrifice. To them repentance meant wearing sackcloth and ashes. But there is an old word not open to this confusion, the word resipiscence. It means, as repentance should be held to mean, change to a better frame of mind. This they neglected. The means were confused with the end; punishment was enjoyed for its own sake, and suffering became a man-eating idol after the manner of Moloch.

Several writers in the recent outburst of Dante literature dwelt on his debt to Ireland, to the legends of St. Fursey and to the literature dealing with the most renowned pilgrimage of the western world, the Purgatory of St. Patrick in Ireland. I call it ‘the most renowned’ because centuries before the birth of the glorious martyr of Canterbury, pilgrims visited the lonely isle in Donegal where tradition says that St. Patrick spent several periods of penance.

Legends grew around the holy spot, and the literature of Europe teems with references to the Purgatory of St. Patrick with its wonderful cave where some penitents saw visions of worlds of sorrow and of joy. From nearly every nation in Europe came pilgrims:

From England came Alfred the Great. From Wales came the Knight Owen about the year 1153. The wonders seen by him in the cave are recorded in the Chronicle of Roger of Wendover. From Italy came Guarino da Durazzo and Godelath (1248). The Royal Library of Turin holds records of the wonders seen and heard by him in the holy spot. From Flanders came Le Sire de Beaujean in 1305. In the weird cave he had a vision of souls in hell, some of whom he recognised. From Hungary in 1353 came George Crissaphan, and his wonderful visions are long to narrate.