In the vitriolic first canto of Don Juan Byron has drawn a picture of his hero's mother. It is his portrait of Lady Byron, and may also serve to show the kind of savagery he was capable of uttering. She had that worst error possible,—no female error at all. She was a modern female saint that went like the most regular of clocks. Perfect she was, but insipid as the first twelve hours spent by Adam and Eve before they made things interesting by falling from peace, innocence, and bliss. What a pity that learned virgins should ever wed with persons of no sort of education, or with gentlemen, who though well-born and bred, grow tired of scientific conversation. Then comes the famous— "But-Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,

Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?"

And he sums up his own married life in the lines :

“Don Jóse and the Donna Inez led

For some time an unhappy sort of life,
Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead;
They lived respectably as man and wife,
Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred."

But the aristocrat had trapped the man into a false position, and Byron's conduct ceased to be well-bred. Then the British conscience, which had excused his other offences, took vengeance on him for this one. The fruit of the whole experience was Don Juan.

The position that each individual holds in society is the result, not merely of his own action, but also of those larger forces which have swept him up out of the dark backward and abysm of time. We have here tried to discuss certain of such forces as they have found expression, not in printed laws, but in the conventions of society, or in what we call the British conscience. By so doing we have seen how these two people, attempting to unite in obedience to the habits of their class, found union impossible. This explains more than Byron's marriage, however; it explains Byron. The process of changing social habits is not easy. The business of deciding what, in the order of civilization, is obsolete and what shall be reformed is fraught with pain and conflict. Ideals become applied to life as laws, rules, conventions; thus applied they produce great, often beneficent

changes. The result is a different society; and what produced good out of the old may in the new state come to produce evil. Food that nourished the child into manhood, the man may need to shun. How to see that the law which we have followed to so good an end must at last be given up for another,-how to apply the ideal in a new way,- that is the great agony that repeats itself forever. Between the upper and nether millstones of such an agony, Byron was caught. The grinding was painful, and like all proud spirits he resented pain which he could not understand. Or to shift the figure altogether, Byron was like a child running down hill. For a time the pitch of the slope accelerates his pace for him, and he flies along with thrilling speed. But the same force begins to make his head move faster than his feet, and finally bowls him over. The child is jolted, bruised, scratched, amazed, frightened, enraged by his fall, by the treachery of this unperceived power which now swept him along in the current of his desires, and now hurled him cruelly to the ground. For a time the social forces of his day swept Byron too in the current of his desires. Then suddenly the same forces tripped his heels and laid him low. It was a painful, galling tumble to a proud spirit, but fortunately that spirit had a voice, and perhaps the cry that Byron raised had some effect upon the force that upset him. At any rate those of us who live in human society will sympathize with his rage.

We might pursue this figure even further, and use it to explain that mockery into which his bitterest rages grow. "And if I laugh at any mortal thing," he says, "'tis that I may not weep." So do we tell our little boy, as he picks himself up from the dirt, to be a man and grin and bear it. And so does the child too learn to choke his tears, mocking pain with laughter.

Mr. Paul Elmer More thinks that sympathy with this mood of mockery, which is the essence of Byron's satire, will grow less. He has more confidence than most men in the imminence of the millenium. Burke conceives of the race as never reaching that static bliss, but as never old, never young, never middle-aged, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moving on through the varied tenor of decay, fall, renovation, and progression. If this be true, Byron's appeal will not diminish. For those who

would progress are always liable to fall; what they renew is also sure to decay; and decay and fall are pains which like men we must grin and bear. In homelier terms, as long as our grandmothers frown upon the forward ways of us, their grandchildren, and as long as their frowns spoil any of our sport, we shall continue to read Byron with the old gusto.

Barnard College, Columbia University.

WILLIAM HALLER.

PLATTSBURGH

As many a man with a summer's vacation at his disposal has discovered, it is not every recreation that recreates. Well, it was my lot last summer to find something approaching a real recreation of mind and body and at the same time to learn about a phase of life the importance of which, for good or evil, has recently become obvious to all Americans.

It happens to be the writer's business to cultivate the delicate blossom of literary appreciation in the chill east wind of undergraduate indifference. He stepped from the sleeping-car that dripping August morning as completely ignorant of military matters as a man can well be. For four weeks of hard physical work he looked into no book except drill manuals, and then returned to his home and sixteenth-century letters—after a recreation which made him feel as though he were really created anew. And he formed definite opinions about the worth of even a small amount of military training.

The present is a time when the good and bad of military training deserves all careful consideration. To many it seems a time when it is necessary to make preparations for war while granting that the possibility of war's occurrence is a horrible thing. Admitting that military training may to some extent make for certain brutalizing tendencies, it seems to me that it makes in a greater degree for the compensating virtues of discipline, manliness, and that comradeship in a high common purpose which grows so slack or so segregated in a society governed by purely economic conditions.

No one to-day can fail to see the dangers of over-exalting the military character. "Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barnyard poultry." These words- of course they are semi-humorous—are William James's. One wonders whether, if he were alive to-day, his keen vision would not see the best "moral equivalent of war" in the preparation for war for the purpose of its avoidance.

"Plattsburgh, that hot-bed of militarism." My eyes fall on

these words in a newspaper communication. They strike me as curiously unjustified. Militarism, as I understand it, is a state of society in which undue influence is exercised by a recognized military caste, and in which a country's peace is jeopardized by such influence. I saw no evidence whatever of sympathy with such a state of affairs among the members of the camp or the regular officers commanding it. Colonel Roosevelt's speech was listened to with a genial politeness which did not at all express a general approval of his criticism of the administration. Surely his words would have aroused greater enthusiasm in a hot-bed of militarism—and surely that wise judge of audiences would have chosen stronger words in such a hot-bed.

It was a very sensible crowd. The newspaper laudation and ridicule alike failed to make much impression. Even the Ithuriel spear of the New York Evening Post's subacid mockery-I believe it described us as feeding on cream and caviare and listening all day to lectures-did not make us wince. We were too busy not to be good-natured. If the members of the camp did not know that "trained officers cannot be made in four weeks" it was not because they were not told, but simply because they had ears to hear and heard not. I sounded many as to what, if any, obligation they felt would be imposed in case of war by attending the camp. Apparently the feeling was general—they didn't want to go to war, but they would. This was the time of the Arabic's sinking.

As time passed, one learned the defects of a purely masculine society. Undiluted masculinity suggests a too exclusively nitrogenous diet. It makes finely for warmth and work, but it sits in time heavily on the fastidious social stomach. The boy is perhaps the finest thing in the world in general, but he is about the poorest thing in the world of larger social intercourse, and man deprived of woman reverts to the small boy-the small boy with a larger and coarser vocabulary. One of the older and more staid members was sitting in front of his tent deploring the too-free use of language into which the men had fallen, when he suddenly struck his hand against something and hurt it. Whereupon he exploded and, like Hamlet, "unpacked his heart with words." Although not funny to tell, it was very funny to hear.