We are told that the first qualification of anyone who aspires to success in modern journalism is the instinct to know what the public wants; and what the reading public is said to want nowadays is sensational news with a strong human appeal. The news may be trivial, like the publicity accorded to the Prime Minister’s ubiquitous pipe, or tremendous, like the declaration of a world-war. But in every case it must be news that touches in some way the fringe of human life, and it must be presented in a way that people can grasp at once, without any strain being put upon their thinking intelligence and without anything being left to their imagination. And it must be presented in this tabloid form because the demands of modern life leave little or no time for quiet thought, so that people want their thinking done for them and their opinions readymade for them by the press. That is why we have the short leader, the snappy article, and the scare headline. Metaphorically, this is an age of the automatic machine and the penny in the slot. In America it is possible to get a meal by inserting a coin and pulling a handle. The same principle is said to operate to-day with regard to the reading public, which insists on being able to assimilate the maximum amount of news with the minimum of effort; which, by inserting its penny in the slot-machine of journalism, can extract its thoughts and opinions without personal trouble or inconvenience.

The growing revolt against British supremacy, political and commercial, among oriental peoples from Egypt to China is causing grave disquietude and anxiety to many people in this country while it rejoices our enemies. .To some of us, however, things are not so black as they seem, notwithstanding the fact that a certain knowledge of the East makes us fully conscious of the grave implications of this revolt. We believe that there is a silver lining e£en to this dark cloud; unless we are greatly mistaken, England is going to gain much more than certain citizens of England (by no means all Englishmen) are going to lose on account of this movement in Egypt, India and China. England stands to win by the success of this movement. Let us not be fooled by the outcry against the supposed Bolshevist instigators of the revolt: it is only injuring our own interests. The Bolshevists are delighted to see themselves saddled with the blame and thus thrown into the arms of these people who consider themselves oppressed. But the revolt is not due to Bolshevist inspiration : it is far too noble in its principles for that, as we shall try to show. It is an endeavour on the part of these oriental peoples to prevent their own civilisation from being swamped by Western civilisation at its worst, namely, commercial industrialism.

The endless wail of the daily press that the Chinese riots are centred in a boycott of British manufactures fails to depress us: but it is symbolic of what lies behind the movement since England is the author of the industrial system.

It is not easy to find the word descriptive of that hold which the external can exercise in favourable conditions through the senses upon man’s spirit. There might be a successful plea that this influence is more real than is supposed, necessary to men if human dignity is to be upheld; such is not here advanced; but rather one or two practical questions, modestly constructed, are submitted with deference, as : Is not the vague, unnamed, very real relation between man and his inanimate correspondent subject to all the varieties and discriminations allowed to ‘taste’? Again, in discourse of this matter the word beauty must sooner or later be used; very well, but man is beautiful, though this is only a memory. Regrettez vous le temps oh le ciel sur la terre marchait et respirait dans un peuple de dieux? The little we can say at present is : man might harmonize with the created beauty external to himself; but the fact is that his presence is seldom tolerable and yery rarely acceptable. Shrinking, he has lost a function; he is reduced to a spectator, and can no longer be wedded to bosquet and glade except in spirit, Walt Whitman’s endeavours and other’s non-obstant. It is by chance that man and his are not feyesorrow, distraction, hindrance, scandal, discord among the elements where he might have wonted place.

That the scandalgiver is man sometimes seems to justify impatience and abandonment of the enterprise; but to close our eyes is to relinquish our only true external inheritance, and that is the last sacrifice. Remains for the beholder to accommodate his desires to facts, accept inevitable dilution and look with discretion.

It is a common-place that, thanks to Boswell, we know Dr. Johnson more intimately than any other Englishman who has ever lived. It is just as true that, thanks to himself and his wonderful gift for letterwriting, we know Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, almost as well. Moreover, beneath all Walpole’s affectation, his assumed cynicism, his mask of cold indifference, his anxiety never to be thought serious or in earnest, those who have read with understanding his Letters have found a heart as tender as that of the Sage of Fleet Street whom he always so frankly detested, and have recognized in him a like devoted love of country, a similar filial piety, the same wish to help the poor and the outcast, and an equally passionate devotion to those who showed that they cared for him. In the light of our fuller knowledge to-day, Macaulay’s harsh and bitter judgment on Walpole would be wholeheartedly endorsed by very few.

Walpole’s pseudo-Gothic castle of Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, was one of the show-places of the eighteenth century. No foreigner of distinction came to these shores without visiting it. From the Royal Family downwards, every member of English society had been received there. The art centres of Europe had been ransacked to provide its treasures. The productions of its printing-press were eagerly sought after. Contemporary literature is full of allusions to it. It has been admired or laughed at by each subsequent generation. Stripped of its collections these eighty years and more, it still stands lovingly tended and carefully restored by its successive possessors, as

quaint, as odd, as grotesque as ever, but mellowed and softened by time.

In the harbour of Honolulu, aboard the

American Battleship ‘Pennsylvania,’ en route to Australia.

June 30.

History has a slovenly way of beginning a new question before she has cleared up half-a-dozen old ones. Here we are with the Russian problem as great a problem as ever, and with no definite settlement of the Franco-German difficulties arrived at, yet, lo and behold, there is an inexplicable turmoil in China, and the cruise of the American Fleet to Australia and New Zealand reminds us that there is a Pacific question.

‘Yes,’ says the Labourite, ‘there is a Pacific question solely because Washington will not let sleeping dogs lie, but must needs arouse them by letting off her big guns all around the Hawaiian Islands. America has created the Pacific question about which you speak.’

Alas, that question existed before the joint manoeuvres began; and to blame America for holding these manoeuvres would lead, logically, to the prohibition of manoeuvres anywhere. America has as much right to hold naval manoeuvres among her own Hawaiian islands as Great Britain has to hold naval manoeuvres off Minorca, which she did some years ago. Moreover, war would not cease if America withdrew from the Pacific altogether and left Honolulu defenceless. Such a scuttle would make war inevitable within a few years unless Washington refused to regard as an unfriendly act the seizure of the Philippines and the Hawaiian islands by Japan. It takes two to make peace, as well as to make a quarrel.

In the Light of the Chronicles

In the popular mind Poetry is synonymous with anything but exact and definite truth. ‘People,’ says Thomas MacDonagh, ‘simply refuse to take words in Poetry at their face value.’ And when we find that Dante, in his great poem the Divina Corn-media, has painted for St. Dominic a character almost mythically splendid, one cannot wonder that the picture is often considered with a little incredulity, until the perfection of the original has been gauged by the standards at one’s disposal—that is, principally, by the Chronicles of St. Dominic’s life. Measured by these standards, however, Dante’s picture of the Saint does not lose any of that brightness with which it has been painted by the Poet; on the contrary, one finds that he has limned it with such exquisite fidelity that one is inclined to postulate for him a connection with the Order even closer than that claimed for him by his Dominican admirers. Dante’s appreciation of Dominic is to be found chiefly in Canto XII of the Paradiso, where he naturally begins by describing the birthplace, the coming and the infancy of the Saint, whose soul was

‘Do we not feel,’ says Mother Francis Raphael Drane, ‘that someone greater than the herd of common men is drawing near us, when the Great Poet prepares us for his coming with these few low tones of sweetest harmony which he draws from his lyre when he speaks of the founder of the Friars Preachers’? And Dante, continuing, says

In all the welter of film production one can hardly fail to be struck by the paganism of the average film entertainment: that is, if ever one pauses to think about such things. I do not, of course, refer to topical or interest films, but to the average dramatic photoplay. I see pictures six days a week, and I am frequently reminded of the words in the Catechism which tell us that we are prone to evil from our very childhood. I think film producers must have read this too; at any rate, they are sufficiently studious of human nature to realise that this is so—and to realise the commercial possibilities underlying the exploitation of this proneness. Knowing that there is a universal latent curiosity—an inquisitive interest—in the lower manifestations of human nature, the seamy side of life is depicted in such a manner as to pander to this, often in a very emphatic manner. The resultant atmosphere of the picture is called ‘entertainment value.’ Crime as depicted in order to impart ‘punch’ to the production. The film play is supposed to depict life in all its shades; probably it does — particularly the shades. Easy divorce is a commonplace on the screen, and in this respect the average film-maker displays a strange lack of consistency, for while on the one hand divorce is used as an easy and laudable way out of all manner of difficulties, both matrimonial and of the plot, on the other hand marriage is usually presented as the crowning act of a woman’s life, to be treated with greater seriousness, one would think, and given a fairer chance than is usually evidenced by the ease and even flippancy with which film characters are made to break their vows and start afresh—usually with the one who should obviously have been their first choice. Obvious, that is, to the audience; love in the film studio is very blind.