ever, to pass by the public on its blind side: and for the critic of whom the same may be said there is no excuse. He has taken all literature to be his province: it is his business to be familiar with all kinds and classes of books, that he may judge each one according to its kind; it is his business to keep himself delicately alive to all possible beauties and defects. Though he suffer in the process, he should keep abreast of the best sellers, even those which sell for nickel or copper, that he may comprehend contemporary influences. If he is educated out of his natural taste for those simplicities which please the people, he must recover them, at least intellectually. For he can direct popular taste only by himself possessing it as the foundation of his own; and that culture is spurious and without foundation which thrusts the ladder from beneath it as it ascends.

Of course, we have now many who combine a truly catholic taste with a truly critical intelligence; yet even these are likely to judge an individual case from one standpoint or the other, adopting for the occasion either the popular attitude or the academic. We have a few who have gained culture with no loss of natural intuition, in whom the two work as one. And we need very many more. For the sake of literature and our human selves, we need such a critical consensus as can only come through teaching the critics feeling and the people intelligence. Popular appreciation will never be improved by calling the people names for despising what they cannot understand. And the only way to widen their understanding is by calling their attention to better work of the same kind which they already enjoy. They will discard the worse as fast as they see the better; for they take the best within reach so eagerly that good art with the elements of popularity becomes hackneyed to the point of offence. Träumerei and Trovatore are made a weariness to the flesh; the Venus of Melos is multiplied like a microbe; and Poe's Raven will nevermore take his everlasting beak from out our hearts. Critical appreciation likewise will never be improved by sneering at Art or by pretending that great artists wrought in ignorance of their own tools. No condemnation is too bitter for those artists who cynically pander to popular fallacy and those critics who join in the hue and cry against critical laws. For treason is not catholicity, nor is it conciliatory to be venal. We do not want the arts uplifted or popularized. We want a criticism which can be human without losing its head, a public who can be intelligent without losing their hearts. The people must see the sense of criticism and the academicians must hear the divinity in the popular voice, if we are to make reason and the will of God prevail.

Brian Hooker.

A FRENCH DEFENCE OF VIOLENCE

BY ERNEST DIMNET

FEW names have been repeated so often, during the postal strike in Paris, as that of M. Georges Sorel. It was not unknown altogether; you heard it occasionally in social discussions, and it was always mentioned respectfully-but there was something mysterious in it. The man was supposed to be a Socialist of quite an exceptional description, and when the lay reader is told of a learned original sociologist, he immediately thinks of Marx and meditates a prompt departure. So it was that M. Sorel remained for years little more than a name. But the postal strike made a great many things clear to the least attentive, and the theorist of Syndicalism came out of the fog with the rest. His doctrine appeared lucid to a degree, and his personality soon became familiar to every man interested in the social progress of France.

M. Sorel, only a few years ago, was a civil engineer. He left the École Polytechnique, like so many others, with a heavy provision of mathematical lore, which he supplemented, as he went on, with observation and experience. He believes in engineers more than in professors and in mechanics more than in either. He naturally was an interested observer of economic conditions, and took to Marx rather than to the Communists, because Marx assumed all the facts in his daily experience. He also read history; curiously enough, the history of Greece and of the origins of Christianity occupied him more than any other, and his first books were a study of Socratics and a long and thorough examination of the historical system of Renan. When he retired, about 1902-he took a small house in a suburb and read more than ever, "cleansing," as he puts it, his mind of numberless false ideas deposited in it by education and current prejudice. His books are the plain summary of his meditations. He writes a great deal and on a great variety of subjects, but with uniform sobriety and directness, as if he really wrote for himself.

This style is delightfully refreshing, and the powerful thinker appears constantly in striking illustrations from history or life, but the partly self-taught writer is unfortunately discernible too. M. Sorel is so accustomed to think that he goes on thinking even when he writes, and the result is defective composition. He frequently gives his books or his chapters titles only vaguely corresponding to their contents; he thinks nothing of transitions and will occasionally fall into loose writing just because the paragraph he is at work upon is less interesting to him than that which is coming next. He could not be vulgar, if he tried, but there

is in him, as in every combative writer, a certain roughness which his disdain of conventionalities only makes the more visible. He never prefixes a name with the polite "Mr." When the individual he mentions is neither great enough nor despicable enough to appear in this naked condition he just remembers his first name and says Alfred Fouillée or Melchior de Vogue. He seldom refrains from alluding to the clergy in the popular phrase les curés. He will not look bookish and he hates whatever bears the least resemblance to affectation. I am not quite sure that he is entirely devoid of the solitary's peculiar form of conceit: certainly he might leave a few things unsaid about himself which he tells with evident complacency.

However, in spite of these little faults, and no matter what judgment one passes on his theories, he appears as a good man and a strong, lucid intellect. His way of always approaching men by their moral aspect and of fearlessly attacking the most famous philosophies is admirable in these days of snobbish admission of the established and fahionable. While most of our contemporaries are elegant and passionless, he can be best described by his loves and hatreds. Let me add that in spite of this realism-which is sure to please the Anglo-Saxon sense of the concrete-his wonderful faith in ideas stamps him with the most distinct French characteristic.

M. Sorel's intellectual antipathies are as strong as his moral dislikes and contribute not a little to give him a disdainful, supercilious manner. He hates pretenders and parrots and would-be philosophers of every kind; he hates prejudice and narrowness and stupidity. Twothirds of his volumes are scornful denunciations of intellectual attitudes based on insufficiently tested philosophies. As an engineer, a historian, and a Marxist, he has developed a native inclination toward the matter of fact, the palpable and verifiable, while shallow assumptions provoke him exceedingly. He has written a whole volume, Les Illusions du Progrès, against the empty doctrines which, one after the other, have filtered down from the philosopher to the politician and gradually to the man in the street who is their last and most unfortunate victim. He thinks, like Brunetière, that the influence of the salons has been fatal to the development of French literature and ultimately of the French mind. Lucidity for mere lucidity's sake seems to him a craving not of the thinker but of the talker, the professional conversationalist who has been the ideal of French culture for eight or ten generations. He puts down to that need the thin subjectivism of Descartes and of the theorists of clear ideas; the beautifully rational air-castles of the Encyclopædists with their belief in inevitable mechanically obtained progress; the Revo

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lutionary rush of 1789 and 1793 after impossible rights founded on an absurd conviction of the fundamental goodness of man; the opias of the Communists, and lastly, the self-satisfied, ignorant materialism which has provided the Third Republic with all its academic principles, until it found its shocking crystallization under the Combes government.

M. Sorel holds these poor philosophies responsible for the rather stupid confidence of the eighteenth century and the no less stupid and bewildered disappointment of the end of the nineteenth. He bears a special grudge against the mole-eyed theorists who mistake evolution for progress and have accustomed French politicians as well as the French. electorate to trust to the morrow for redeeming the promises of to-day. Modern enervation seems to him the immediate offspring of the supremacy of the intellect over the will in the Cartesian and the Materialist view of the universe, and he is never tired of pointing out the relationship between them.

I cannot remember that he ever praises or admires anybody, but a few men escape his censure, and the reason of this comparative sympathy appears clearly enough when one has mastered his ruling principles. He has undoubtedly been deeply influenced by M. Bergson's philosophy insomuch as it is a continual snub to intellectual arrogance and a warning against the confusion of evolution with progress. He keenly enjoys Renan's intelligence and his submission to the realities of history; the sense of mystery so habitual to Pascal, and his fearless critical attitude, endear the Pensées to him, and the Catholicism permeating the book seems to give him no offence. He has little esteem for the curés, their press, their politics, and what he calls their low doctrine of probability, but the vitality of Christianity and the very existence of the Church appear to him as colossal facts beside which the critics look like gnawing mice. Clearly the Christian solution, rightly propounded, would appeal to him much more than intellectual subtleties. But it should be worded in the language of Newman-whom he seems to have read pretty extensively and not in that of the clerical newspapers.

It is hardly necessary to add that M. Sorel's industrial experience and his Marxist tendencies in political economy have gone far to confirm him in his mistrust of theories and his respect for facts and realities. So much for his intellectual equipment and standpoint. Disdain of the philistine belief in the power of science to explain and lead a universe of facts characterizes it, and the man is pre-eminently a critic. Disdain is also the keynote of his moral appreciation of our contemporaries. He thinks them as cowardly, selfish and time-serving as they are short-sighted. The quiet little rentier has evidently been highly inter

ested by the political dramas of the last thirty years, and he must have been often behind the scenes and nearer the actors than one might suppose. He speaks in the tone of one who has long been accustomed to judge acts from the point of view of intentions, and the cleverest posing does not deceive him. His books are full of pregnant epithets serenely appended to the most famous if not the most respected names. I will not attempt to make a list.

All his scorn for the hopelessly low moral standard of modern civilization is embodied in one ever recurring word which he writes on every page. Bourgeois, bourgeoisie, bourgeoisisme: he repeats the disdainful syllables with all the combined contempt of the aristocrat and the working man. The middle class was useful as long as it was active, that is to say, until the French Revolution: the bourgeois of those days was pretty well exemplified in Boileau, a pattern of intellectual honesty and of all the virtues of his class. After the Revolution, they became rich and allpowerful, and they gradually lost their primitive energy. Industrialism called out some of their old qualities, but the sons of captains of industry have mostly sunk into mere capitalists, and they are now regular drones in the hive, living in continual longing for pleasure and incessant terror of being dispossessed. They avoid thinking of the growing consciousness and rising force of the proletariate, and when they do think of it, it is not to repress it-they have lost the necessary stamina-it is only to look to the State and to cry for measures which they themselves would never dare to take. So, all the working energies of France have little by little been absorbed by the State, and every responsibility lies with that anonymous tyrant. This is what is called parliamentarism or democ

racy.

The latter word has completely lost its original meaning. The fallacy that political parties represent the country has developed into the worse fallacy that the Chamber represents the political parties, and the result is an absolute disproportion and estrangement between the country and its Parliament which is at the same time its Government. There is nothing in common, neither interests nor aspirations, between the prolétaires who compose nine-tenths of the electorate, and the lawyers, doctors and suchlike bourgeois who are supposed to represent them. The wonder would be that such a state of things did not produce the corruption of which we have had so many examples during the last twenty years. Politicians are in clover while their constituents starve.

All this is practically admitted by everybody, including the French Parliament itself. But the reader who has not learned to distinguish between the words Socialism and Syndicalism is rather startled to find that