Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review

with every opportunity for education and culture, with its university, its museums of everything, its places of public resort and amusement, its fields and buildings for sport and entertainment. Wealth is no doubt essential to the production of such a result, but not, strictly speaking, great wealth. There is more wealth wasted annually in most towns on foolish and unenjoyable expenditure than, if rightly invested, would suffice to make them in process of time into perfect abodes for civilised communities. But it takes, and must take, time; nor can an approximation to a perfect result be attained while the process of a city's growth is in an early or even a transitional stage.

The best statisticians estimate that in the year 1941 London will contain over eleven millions of inhabitants. People say, 'How appalling!' To me the prospect seems full of hope. What an agreeable life one might live in such a city, if a fair proportion of its population were even moderately civilised! There would be a public for every kind of art. Every sort of theatre might flourish, every kind of concert might be daily given. There would be practically no limit to the variety of opportunities that each individual might enjoy in the midst of such a vast assemblage. But it would take long for them to settle down. To begin with, London would have to be rebuilt. Its streets are not wide enough for the traffic of any such multitude; they would have to be widened. For every line of rails coming into London there would have to be three lines. number of steamers coming to our ports would need to be more than trebled. Practically none of our present arrangements would suffice. Everything would have to be organised afresh. I need not enlarge upon such considerations; they are obvious. It is only when the growth has attained its maximum, and the town has reached its final form and has been adapted in all essential matters to be the home of the multitude that must live within it-it is only then that the Art of Living, with all that it implies, can be fully cultivated.

The

The sun of science which rose about a century ago has not yet reached its meridian. The immediate future may have great developments in store. Perhaps water power and electricity may supplant coal and steam; perhaps aerial locomotion may revolutionise communications, and, by substituting the Command of the Air for the Command of the Sea, may upset the present balance of power among the kingdoms of the earth. But whatever surprises the future may have in store, this one thing is sure: the age of science will have its culmination and will have its decline, just as all previous epochs of civilisation have culminated and declined; for it is decreed that all things which have a beginning shall likewise have an end. When the culmination takes place, whether in the coming century or in one more remotely hidden in the deep of futurity, the series of great changes of human environment will pause for a while, and there must swiftly follow such a consequent development of art as the

world has never beheld-a development not merely of some one art, such as painting or sculpture, but of all the arts that together in their variety and their fulness form the supreme and transcendent Art of Living.

It is not to be expected, nor indeed to be desired, that the twentieth century should behold the culmination of the epoch of civilisation, whose beginnings we now witness; for if a culmination is to be great and to last long it must be slow in coming. Culminations are like the weather, 'long foretold long last.' The time of transition is as yet perhaps only in its earlier stages. Science is only now conquering the fringe of its future domain. We still live in a very empirical manner, trusting to luck rather than to reason, founding action upon guess-work and hope instead of upon patient research. Slowly, it may be, but quite surely how slowly soever, science will make its way, and this revolution in the Art of Living will be rounded out. When that has happened, the great days that we now but dimly foresee will come, and all the fine arts will flourish and culminate together.

MARTIN CONWAY.

MR. GLADSTONE AS A CONTRIBUTOR TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY'

It is impossible for me, at this moment and in this place, to refrain from some expression, however brief, of grateful and affectionate respect and regret for so great a contributor to this Review as Mr. Gladstone. It was my great good fortune to receive his encouragement and support from the foundation of the Nineteenth Century, and also the privilege of a closer personal acquaintance with him than I should otherwise have been likely to enjoy. To-day and henceforth his works do follow him,' and I desire to add to the immense procession of them which attends him to the tomb those which he wrought in these pages and of which I append a catalogue.

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He was a model contributor. He was one of those whose every word was eagerly waited for and listened to; and he was trustworthy to the uttermost in punctually fulfilling all that he undertook to do. He never once failed to keep his promises, to the letter and to the instant. However overwhelmed he might be with other cares, if he had given his word, his editor might have comfortably slept until the appointed hour, so sure he was to make his word good.

His personal modesty about his contributions was extreme, and almost abashed one, so sincerely anxious was he for editorial suggestion and criticism. Nothing in him was more remarkable than this absolutely genuine personal modesty in the presence of his own unrivalled gifts. The frequent conversations and consultations which were necessary about proposed articles were always full of the liveliest possible interest to me, and many a magnificent and glowing speech, which would have moved the House and the Country, has been lavished, with the prodigality of genius, upon one solitary listener. The charm of such talks it is impossible to exaggerate. When once he had taken to a subject, it presently took possession of him, to the exclusion of everything else; and then the overwhelming enthusiasm which filled him infected his auditor until it was difficult to preserve an independent and critical standpoint. But whenever this was preserved, his earnest endeavour was to grasp and follow and appreciate any adverse view, and to give every weight to it,

insomuch that sometimes when high matters were concerned, the critic almost trembled lest his crude comments might wrongly affect the final utterance of the oracle. Before coming to a decision upon a moot point, he would inform himself to the uttermost, from every source of information, from every kind of evidence, by no means excluding the newspapers. He would always declare that nothing ought to be kept back in discussion-everything ought to be said right out, so that the trial should be exhaustive and complete. To be with him and to see him at times of such trial was wonderful. One was magnetised-hypnotised-as by a great actor, and compelled for the time to feel as he felt. He could make one see air-drawn daggers,' or whatever else he himself saw; for he was in truth, as I have told him to his face, the greatest actor I ever knew, that greatest of all actors-the actor who does not play his parts, but is them, and who carries his audience away with him by the superior force of his own vitality whether they will or no.

A great personage and a violent political adversary of his once said to me: 'I have just been meeting Mr. Gladstone at dinner, and I assure you that the magnetism of the man is such that whatever he'd told me to say or to do, I'd have done it: if he had told me to go out into the street and stand on my head, I'd have done it.'

While he was personally so absolutely modest and diffident, he was 'officially' entirely the reverse. No pope, indeed, was ever more infallibly certain and immovable than Mr. Gladstone when once he had become convinced that such or such a course was right and true. It was then 'borne in upon him' as a duty. As the chosen and official leader, for instance, of a free people, he felt that he was the appointed instrument of heaven, and would act as if ordained to an arch-priesthood which nothing earthly could shake.

The contrast between his personal modesty and his 'officially' imperious certitude had one very happy consequence. He allowed those who honestly differed from his conclusions to retain their places in his personal friendship and regard-even though they politically resisted him to the uttermost. He was much too great to resent personally conscientious convictions opposed to his own.

An editorial anxiety would sometimes arise during the consultations about an article, from his habit of entire absorption in one subject at a time and his power of mental detachment and concentration-a faculty which he told me was by no means wholly inborn in him, but which he had carefully cultivated and strengthened all his life. This habit necessitated great care in opening the conversation, lest some accidental allusion to a topic of interest should lead him quite away from the editor's object and purpose. If this happened, it was almost utterly hopeless to get him to listen to

a word about anything else in the world until he had talked the other subject out.

But of all his faculties, his unlimited youthfulness was perhaps the most wonderful-with a freshness and a sweetness, and a kindly and noble courtesy upon which no touch of age seemed to gather, at any rate in all the quarter of a century during which I was privileged to know him.

The flame of an unquenchable youth shone over him almost to the very last, and seemed at times to transfigure him into the image of his own great Homeric hero, under the guardianship of the heavenly wisdom, when

'Sheer astounded were the charioteers

To see the dread unweariable fire

That always o'er the great Peleion's head

Burn'd-for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn.'

The following catalogue bears witness to the force-the grace and versatility of the man,' yet of course does not represent a tithe or a twentieth of his contributions to his generation and the world.