But the 1870 was bad, the Act of 1881 is worse, but we cannot go back upon them.' This is a counsel of despair, and the sooner it is abandoned the better. We must go back on this legislation. We must repudiate it; we must admit that it was legislation for the hour and the emergency only, not for the daily life and the ordinary needs of a civilised people. If we do not, the penalty is certain. In Ireland the reign of the attorney will be for ever prolonged; litigation is already becoming the only profitable industry; it bids fair to survive all others. The ill feeling between classes, which it is our professed object to remove, will and must continue, if it does not become aggravated. The weary task of fixing sham values by the aid of sham courts, which we are beginning over again, will have to be renewed, at ever-shortening intervals, in sæcula sæculorum. The infinite series of additional land bills with which we are threatened will engage and waste the time of the Imperial Parliament. mischief which will be done in Ireland will be insignificant in comparison to that which will assuredly be inflicted upon Great Britain. Once admit that the principles and the practice of the Irish land laws are anything but rules for a state of siege, hasty expedients to meet an emergency, and we thereupon accept them as reasonable bases for the laws of a civilised community. Every departure from common honesty and from true economy which the Irish Land Code contains will be cited here, and justly cited, as the foundation for new claims and new methods, not in regard to land only, but in regard to every other form of property. The English members, who with such a light heart have given carte blanche to successive governments to play the mischief in Ireland and in Ireland only, will find to their cost that the principles to which they have so wantonly given their adherence will come back and will grow with a vigour which will astonish them in English soil. It is, therefore, not only desirable, it is essential, that the whole system of Irish land tenure as it now exists should be destroyed. Dual ownership must cease to exist. The land courts must be abolished and men once more allowed to earn their living with some confidence in the future. Purchasethe one and only method by which we can escape from our present difficulty-must be made easy, universal, and just. Sir William Harcourt pretends to be shocked at the idea of purchase being proposed by those who are supporters of the Union and the cause of law. To buy out the landlords is to buy out the English garrison. But to keep a garrison in an enemy's town after you have deprived that garrison of its leaders, of its arms, and its organisation, is a folly which should be apparent even to an enemy like Sir William Harcourt. PURCHASE Moreover, there is no reason whatever why an honest scheme of purchase should not give the same facilities to the landlord to become VOL. XL-No. 235 BB the purchaser of the tenant's interest as are now accorded to the tenant who wishes to purchase the interest of his landlord. Lastly, there must be no more Land Acts of the pattern of 1887 and 1896, Acts which in themselves are makeshifts of the poorest kind, which solve no problem, which bring us to no goal, and which, above all, are calculated not to facilitate but to postpone that extension of purchase to which, and to which alone, we can look for a real remedy for some of the troubles of Ireland. As to how purchase shall be effected, that is another matter. There are various ways in which the object can be accomplished; but, whatever method be selected, success can only be hoped for if certain essential features of the situation are recognised at the outset. It must be recognised that the only justification for such a step is a national emergency. If the measure be attempted in a petty spirit of animosity against any particular class, and be made the opportunity for giving effect to the prejudices and the hatreds of one section of the community, it will fail, and it will deserve to fail. Sir George Trevelyan, Mr. Byles, late of the Shipley Division, and others of their way of thinking, have announced that though the skies may fall they will never give a penny to the Irish landlords.' That is the language of spite, not of statesmanship. To begin with, whatever the Irish landlord has done or left undone, he has acted in strict accordance with the laws which the Imperial Parliament, it may almost be said the Parliament of England, has enacted. Every law up to a comparatively recent date has been made in the supposed interests of England, and the landlords have done precisely what every other British subject would do under similar circumstances, lived and acted under the law as he found it; some wisely and well, some ill and unwisely. The basis of purchase must be a generous recognition of the landlords' rights, and an admission of the iniquity of atoning for the errors of a nation by the sacrifice of individuals. There is good reason to believe that not even the most extreme members of the Separatist party in Ireland are anxious to ruin the landlords, provided that purchase can be effected; the opposition to a reasonable scheme will not come from them. ULSTER AND THE NEW LAND ACT There is, moreover, a special reason why the terms of purchase should be generous. It is one of the many blessings of our Irish land legislation that it has invariably rewarded bad men, and inflicted special disabilities on good men. The murderer, the perjurer, the boycotter have found their respective professions pay. The rogue can point with satisfaction to the indisputable truth that roguery has proved to be the best policy. And now in Ulster, and to a limited. extent in other parts of Ireland, we are face to face with the fact that tenants are being denied the benefits of the purchase clauses simply because they have been honest, industrious men, who have earned and paid their rents. Landlords who by their forbearance, their good sense, and their enterprise have made their properties valuable, are threatened with confiscation because other men, less provident and less well behaved, have brought down prices in the South and West. Indeed, the condition of affairs in Ulster is the only real excuse for the Bill of the present Session. The Bill itself is full of the most patent absurdities. It is part of a system which is replete with injustice and pregnant with failure. But certain rough considerations of equity seemed to require its passage. If after the storming of Badajoz the Duke of Wellington had given permission to the Portuguese troops and to the King's German Legion' to sack the city, but had forbidden the British troops to take part in the operation, there would have been a certain amount of injustice in the prohibition. There would have been something to be said for allowing the British soldier to 'go in' with his comrades. But even that would not have furnished a good argument for sacking towns as a general principle; still less for plundering a city which happened to be occupied by your friends. It is permissible to claim that the provisions of the Land Acts should be extended to Ulster without admitting that the Land Acts are either wise, just, or expedient. But to return to the question of purchase. The terms on which compulsory purchase is based must be sufficiently generous to prevent gross injustice. If necessary, the State, which hopes to reap the benefit, must bear at least a portion of the cost. To the tenant should be given the first option, or rather to him should be transferred the fee of his holding subject to the rent-charge. But facilities should also be given to the landlord, and he should be encouraged and enabled to purchase their tenant-rights from his tenants by agreement. To achieve this object money should be advanced to the landlord on the same terms as to the tenant; the security will be as great, probably greater, and the Exchequer cannot suffer. If it does suffer, the loss will not be comparable to the expenditure past and future upon the paraphernalia of land courts, land commissions, and all the complications and miseries which have followed in their train. Purchase once made universal, what will follow? Not necessarily peace, not necessarily prosperity; but, at any rate, the chance, the possibility of peace and prosperity. We cannot produce either of those blessings by Act of Parliament, but we can refrain from making their attainment impossible. Is it not at least worth while to try the experiment? H. O. ARNOLD-FORSTER. THE INFLUENCE OF BAYREUTH SOME years ago, in the earlier days of Bayreuth as a centre of Wagnerian music, an appalling amount of literature used to be published in which various German philosophers or quasi-philosophers were wont to discuss the tendency and true inwardness of Wagner's art, and of the institution founded by the munificence of the King of Bavaria. One of these pamphlets, which were formerly hawked about Bayreuth at the time of the summer festivals there, bore for its partial title the words, 'Was soll Bayreuth?' which might be interpreted, 'What is the intended function of the undertaking, or of the Wagner Theatre, or Wagner's works as a whole?' (for all these meanings have been for a good many years implied in the utterance of the sacred word 'Bayreuth' by the initiated). Now that the twentieth anniversary of the first performance in the Wagner Theatre at Bayreuth has been celebrated (the 13th of August is the exact day) by a revival of the Nibelungen cycle in the theatre specially built for it, it may not be out of place to review the progress of all that is meant by the mystic word. Has the influence of Wagner himself, of the ideal theatre which he made an accomplished fact, and of the festival performances that are visited by pilgrims from all parts of the world, been a good influence for his own art, for the art of dramatic music in general? or is the astounding statement true, which appeared at the beginning of an article in this Review some years ago, 'The Wagner bubble has burst'? That statement seems to have been a little premature, and for a bubble, the creations of Wagner have shown a remarkable unwillingness to vanish. The world in general has accepted Wagner, and the case of the professed anti-Wagnerians is more hopeless than ever. In respect of the permanence of Wagner there seems no room for question; things which, at first received with doubt, if not actual obloquy, live down the prejudices of the world, and increase in general appreciation for many decades, as Wagner's works have done, do not belong to the class of productions which are merely transitory, and have been buoyed up by fashion or the interested admiration of partisans. But it is not simply the popularity of Wagner's music as a whole that need be discussed, but the working of that great plan of his which included something like the artistic regeneration of German operatic tradition. The central fact of the scheme is, of course, the building itself, that wonderful theatre which proves Wagner to have been as great an architect as he was a poet, a composer, or a designer of pictorial effect. This was not all, however. The master's own home, Wahnfried, was to become the social centre of all that was worthiest in that artistic world which should visit the Bavarian town, and in some sort a school of instruction in the traditions he wished to establish. In addition to this, an actual school was instituted, the first products of which were this year allowed to try their skill in important parts. Bayreuth, in fact, was to be the hub of the universe' as far as the new dramatic music was concerned, and the choice of this dull town, with the departed fragrance of its little Court, and its fast-fading souvenirs of Jean Paul Richter, was eminently a wise one. The difficulty of getting there by train was not the only advantage it presented from Wagner's point of view: it is true that he wished to make it more or less hard of access, in order to keep away the average holiday-seeker, and in some measure to make sure that those who came thither should be distracted from the main object of their journey by no rival excitements or dissipations, such as in a large capital must always divert the mind from serious study of an artistic creation, more especially when that artistic creation requires for its embodiment a theatre, with its associations of frivolous pleasure. These objects have been fulfilled to a degree that Wagner himself can never have anticipated; and the vogue of Bayreuth has increased with every succeeding festival year. At the same time it has not lost its pleasantly primitive character, nor has the tide of fashion converted the town into a mere pleasure-resort of the usual kind. There are, as there must always be, a certain amount of people who go to Bayreuth mainly out of curiosity, but these form but a very small part of the crowd, and among them there are many who come to gape and remain to admire. The revolution worked in stage illusion by the various ingenious devices that the Bayreuth theatre has been the first to exhibit has had an influence that may be described as world-wide, and although no great theatre has yet been built on the exact model of the Wagner Theatre, yet scarcely a theatre in the world has failed to feel its influence in some degree. In lighting generally, and more particularly in effects of cloud and storm, this stage can still produce pictures altogether beyond the attainment of its rivals; this is in great part owing to the arrangement of the auditorium, which of itself removes many difficulties of ordinary stage perspective. In theatres of the usual shape the scene can only be perfectly illusory to those who sit at a certain distance and look at the stage from a certain angle; generally the front of the dress-circle, or the dividing-line between the pit and the stalls, is the point at which everything falls into its proper place. As a certain amount of |