political idealism, accepts him. But, in the meanwhile, a change has been passing over Midstoke. It is no longer popular there to prophesy of peace, and Mr. Broser is of Midstoke body and soul. If Midstoke will not follow where he leads, then he will lead where Midstoke will follow. But a certain time is needed for the change, and the interval supposed to elapse after Allegra's marriage affords space for the necessary evolution.

When the story is resumed, war with Nova Barba is again imminent. Sir Donald Bagnell, the great company promoter, has schemes of annexation: he has acquired organs in the press, and a new virus swells in John Bull's veins :

'He itches for a second Nova Barbese war, to repair his magnanimity in not having annexed the whole country after the first. Ah, the mob! It is a barrel-organ into which any air may be inserted. What tunes have I not heard it grinding out in Italy, in Germany, and France, unconscious of the politician turning the handle! Bagnell has made Britain resound with martial melodies.' The speaker is Raphael Dominick, poet and philosopher, who comes into the blank of Allegra's disillusioned existence. He is the person created to be the mouthpiece of Mr. Zangwill's sentiments concerning the change in England's national temper, and concerning the man who, in his opinion, incarnates that change. It is he who explains to Allegra the philosophy of the process by which the transformation had been effected under her very eyes, and yet without a moment at which she could make a stand and say: Here you become a renegade.'

"The Greek sophists used to ask when was a heap a heap? They added pebble to pebble till you said it was a heap, then they took the last pebble away and asked you to explain why it had ceased to be a heap. The change in your husband was subtle, gradual. There was no moment in which you could cry convincingly Soros!' Every time you remonstrated he said that you didn't understand the world, that in politics you had to give little in order to get more-that the line of

advance was up a spiral staircase."

'As he spoke Allegra's mind was taking a bird's-eye view of her husband's political career, so prematurely successful in the face of so many obstacles. How apt that sophistic image! At no moment had Broser deserted his principles. Never in her frequent passionate protests had she been able to outfence his skilled repartee. And yet here he was at his own antipodes on the political globe. Broser would have said that the globe revolved, not he.'

There he is, at all events, the champion now of the aristocracy, although the aristocracy as embodied in

Allegra's aunt, the Duchess of Dalesbury, will not admit the fact. When Allegra presses the point, the duchess only shifts her ear-trumpet; and Broser is definitely engaged now in engineering preparations for the war in concert with Bagnell :

"On what protest?" (Allegra asks him).

"Protests we have always with us-like the poor."

"Yes, poor protests-the wolf's to the lamb."

"Not at all. We don't desire to eat 'em; only to civilise 'em." "To shear 'em, you mean."

'He shrugged his shoulders.

"They're dirty, and too lazy to develop their own country. The dark places of the earth must be

lit up."

That the electric light companies may make a profit."

"Why not? If I add Nova Barba to the Empire I shall ultimately become premier."

""Granted; but all the same it is the march of civilisation."'

to us.

One is bound to admit that Mr. Broser's logic is a logic that the press and platform have rendered extremely familiar The gospel of strenuousness which has been so unceasingly preached is at times difficult to distinguish from the gospel of grab, although, as Mr. Zangwill has the insight to discern, it may be preached in perfect sincerity:-

'John Bull, on his island, never sees the people he oppresses or the campaigns he conducts. It all comes to him idealised, almost as art. He truly believes he is spreading righteousness, and the best, nay, the only possible, Constitution. Hence an unjust war produces as great a moral glow as a just, much as a false coin does the work of a true one, so long as everybody is taken in.'

And Broser is John Bull for good as well as bad-Raphael Dominick admits that :

'I catch curious twists in him, yearnings to do big things for the masses, for the Empire. If Nature has given him a thick skin it is because she intends him for tough work.'

What is the conclusion? Mr. Zangwill has been reading Nietzsche, and is inclined to believe that success is to the 'blond beast,' the Beyond-man' who transcends sentimental weaknesses. To the plea that war reacts for good on the 'temper of the race,' Allegra may answer that these arguments' put forward the compensations of a righteous war as 'the reasons for a wicked war.' But is it proved that an unrighteous war will not in the end profit the race that makes it? The Englishman salves his conscience more and more with the plea that every extension of our Empire is for the

good of humanity-and is there not some truth in Mr. Zangwill's summing up of the new England'?

"A woman We are stagnant,

"England needs a war," Broser retorted obstinately. cannot feel that we have all grown womanish.

infected with literary and artistic corruptions. The national fibre needs renewing. A war will shake up all classes." "And shake you up to the top."

"Somebody has got to be at the top. Can you name anybody stronger?"

Allegra was silent. She felt his was the voice of the new England; not of the new England as he had hastily misconceived it in his first gropings, taking for the onward flood a backwash of the eighteenthcentury optimism, but of the new England generated by the throbbing screws and pistons of the age of machinery, emerging through an exotic green-sickness of Socialistic sentimentalism to a native gospel of strenuousness and slang, welcome to the primordial brute latent underneath the nebulous spiritual gains of civilisation. Broser's was this

dynamic energy, this acceptance of brute facts, this Cockney manliness, this disdain of subtleties, this pagan joy of life; it had underlain his championship of the poor, and was honestly available in the service of the rich.'

No one who has lived in London for the last two years will fail to recognise how completely Mr. Zangwill has expressed the feelings bred in many minds by the debauch of martial and patriotic sentiment, by the manifestations of that jolly music-hall public,' with whom Broser was as popular as the great Vance; by the drunken and indecent orgies which did duty for national rejoicings when the Volunteers returned to the City; by the brutal craving for details of carnage, the ungenerous exultation over a defeated enemy, the dishonourable imputations of dishonour, and, most of all, by the temper which condones all this effervescence of unwholesome gases in the hope that the public in this enthusiasm for war will cheerfully foot the biggest bill. The book undoubtedly makes us feel more than ever that the Jew is an alien, exempt by his birth from the national ardours and failings. In the sketch of Broser's career, owing to the violent prejudices of Mr. Zangwill, it is true that fictitious politics have often usurped the place of political fiction. But there is no mistaking the quality and the penetration of the author's satire, and one may regret the more that he has alloyed his clean steel with baser metal. A love story is no doubt essential in a novel. But there are many scenes in the book where the satirist does not play fair, and they are the things which mar it. When Allegra's husband and her would-be lover quarr el in

her presence, the husband's vulgarity seems almost gentlemanlike beside the intolerable things which Raphael Dominick is made to say and do; and in the concluding chapter, the art of the satirist confounds itself in details that might have been gleaned from the account of a social function in one of the inferior 'society' papers.

Political satire is legitimate and sometimes salutary; the satire which involves a suggestio falsi is bad both in art and morals. This consideration tempers our admiration of Mr. Zangwill, but it cannot hinder us from seeing that he has made a remarkable contribution in a somewhat sparsely occupied province of our literature.

ART. VIII.-1. The Correspondence of M. Tullius Cicero, arranged according to its chronological order, with a revision of the text, a commentary, and introductory essays. By ROBERT YELVERTON TYRRELL, Litt.D., and LOUIS CLAUDE PURSER, Litt.D., Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin. 2. The Letters of Cicero. The whole correspondence in chronological order. Translated into English by E. S. SHUCKBURGH, M.A. In 4 vols. 1899-1901. London: George Bell & Sons.

SE

ELF-REVELATION, when conscious and deliberate, is seldom complete or successful. When it is instinctive, as it is in some minds, the result is of the highest interest to the student of man. In literature it has taken various forms, the two most common being the Journal and Letters. The readers of Samuel Pepys can judge how this revelation may be made in a journal to the last degree of nakedness which is not ashamed. Collections of letters in which character is revealed with more or less completeness are almost beyond count. If we think of some of the best known of such collections, such as those of Madame de Sévigné, Horace Walpole, Johnson, Gray, Cowper, Byron, we may observe that some are important because they deal with important persons or things, some because they give a genuine picture of character. The correspondence of Cicero, to a very large extent, combines both these advantages. Unlike those of Walpole, these letters were written for the most part without any idea of publication, while, unlike some of the collections named, they refer to subjects of the most exciting historical interest, and are by the hands of men actively engaged in the most important political affairs. Of course they are not all equally candid or spontaneous. Some of them are in fact State-papers deliberately composed to create a particular impression. The long letter to Lentulus Spinther is an apologia for Cicero's surrender to the policy of the triumvirs after the conference of Luca (B.c. 56), written two years later. So, too, his despatches from Cilicia to the Senate and magistrates,† and to Cato,‡ are elaborate compositions setting forth his services in the province, and seeking to establish his claim to a triumph or at least to a supplicatio. There are other letters more private in form, such as those to Appius Claudius and Varro, which lack the ‡ Ibid. xv. 4.

* Ad Fam. i. 9.

+Ibid. xv. 2.