had attracted the attention of all England at the time. One of Morley's earliest studies of French thought, his life of Voltaire, published in 1872, tried to redress the balance. Carlyle had sought to discrown Voltaire and to put Goethe on the throne. He had treated Diderot and the Encyclopædists with contempt. He had spoken of the French Revolution as though it were little more than a tragic farce without any deep-lying causes or any lasting results.

Such a view was impossible to a disciple of Mill and a believer in the Historic Method. Morley sought to show that Voltaire was not, as Carlyle had said, the incarnation of scepticism. On the contrary, he was an unwearied seeker after knowledge, insisting that we must criticize, discuss, bring all things into question-not so as to leave them in uncertainty but rather to lead up to some positive conclusion. And so with the other French thinkers, Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau. They were seekers after light, they tried, one and all, to bring all things to the test of reason, and to find in that reason which Robespierre and the revolutionary enthusiasts afterwards deified, a sure guide in human affairs. On the side of English philosophy, Morley based himself upon Mill, who in his turn was the descendant of Locke and Hume, and the inspirer of Herbert Spencer. Knowledge was a slow acquisition of facts learned in experience and leading up to generalizations, valid only in so far as they could be tested at every link in the chain. Ultimate verities cannot be so tested; our attitude to them, therefore, must be one not of denial but of nescience. Positivism, the third stage, according to Comte, in mental development, when men no longer ascribe events to the Deity as first cause, or to any metaphysical entities, but study phenomena as they present themselves, is the creed for rational men. Positivism tinged deeply with humanitarianism, working itself out in striving for social reform—that was Morley's creed, and it expressed itself in his life no less than in his writings.

Hence his deep interest in character and his profoundly interesting studies of men of action such as Cobden, Cromwell, Walpole, Burke, and last of all Gladstone. But behind the biographer, the publicist, the statesman, remained always the preacher

and prophet, the thinker, who, though as far as possible removed from a mystic, himself lived the inner life of thought, which gave him the key to the mystical and the spiritual. Writing of Thomas à Kempis, and discussing the Imitatio, he says:

Is not the sphere of these famous meditations the spiritual rather than the moral life, and their aim the attainment of holiness rather than moral excellence? By holiness do we not mean something different from virtue? It is not the same as duty: still less is it the same as religious belief. It is a name for an inner grace of nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though knowing of earthly appetites and worldly passions, the spirit, purifying itself of these, and independent of all reason, argument, and the fierce struggles of the will, dwells in living, patient, and confident communion with the seen and the unseen Good. In this region, not in ethics, moves the Imitatio.

And in this region must at times have moved, though he rarely expressed it, the spirit of John Morley.

W. L. AND JANET E. COURTNEY.

DUSE

BY STARK YOUNG

Of all the artists in the theatre of the world there is none that so illustrates the nature of art as Duse does. Not that she is the greatest actress necessarily, not that; such argument is beside the point. But that Duse exemplifies what lies behind every art and the quality of every artist and his relation to life. So that in a sense it might be said that the history of one's perception and understanding of Duse is a history of the growth of one's understanding of art in general and of life and art as they embody and complete one another.

I saw Duse first in Rome, soon after I left college. She was playing Magda. I had heard her name, of course, a name spoken romantically and with the breath of her D'Annunzio affair nearly always upon it. But I had never heard of her as I had heard of Bernhardt, for example, whose splendours had long since dazzled the public world of men, and whose art had, in addition to its magnificent power and sonorous eloquence, something about it that was easily detected as art, or at least accomplishment, by the average person. Bernhardt's genius was essentially public in its character; and there was no wit so slow or so untutored, and no eye so dull, as not to know that when she played, the universal elements were shaken and passions that might have been domesticated and blurred by now became suddenly glamourous and superbly mythical. With Duse there was no such thing. Artists over Europe were drawn to her almost unendurable tenderness and truth; in Italy her audiences alternately worshipped and railed at her. With her there was nothing audacious and spectacular, nothing violent, seductive or world-wide.

I remember Duse when she first came on the stage that night. She was past her prime then, of course, or what is called an actress's prime; at any rate she was no longer young and her body no longer slight like a girl's. Her voice seemed so natural and

expressive that its quality almost eluded me; I think I must have taken it for granted, or I should have done so but for a few upper tones, quietly and poignantly said; they had something in them that all next day kept moving in one's thoughts. Her face seemed to me to disappear with the words she said and the thing she felt. I did not think of it as a beautiful face; at that age a more regular line might have seemed to me more beautiful. Perhaps youth runs to types in beauty as it runs instinctively to forms and patterns in general ideas. Her body and all her movements I seemed not to see till after several days were past.

At that time everyone was talking about modern drama and we were all busy learning how the thing was done. There was a high hope in mere craft, and supreme delight might lie in the detection of skill, artifice and technical intention and economy. We even read Sudermann with some respect and thought of Magda, which various actresses had essayed and even lurid stock companies ventured on successfully, with no little respect as a stirring piece of theatre and, it might be, a serious study of provincialism, art and revolt against parental authority. I remember that Duse in Magda had me taking it all for granted. I forgot the effective high lights of this old piece of theatrical dexterity; I forgot entirely that there was supposed to be a matter of a modern problem play in Magda. I saw only a woman's life there on the stage being twisted through a series of events that wounded and revealed her to me; otherwise what happened seemed extraneous and imposed. I had learned already a technical sense of acting, and to rejoice in the exercise of acting as a craft. But here in Duse there was nothing to rejoice in, nothing technical that I could youthfully extricate and set aside to itself as a means, a studied piece of skill; there was no eloquence, no recitation, no arrangement or technical economy or evident accomplishment. I was to have no academic pleasure in this acting there on the stage before me; I was to take it for its truth and was to forget that art could ever be dissected or separated from the thing it conveyed.

A few days later I saw Duse in Francesca da Rimini, and after that in La Gioconda, La Citta Morta―she insisted those days on playing D'Annunzio, often at great expense in popularity and

receipts and Goldoni's La Locandiera. It was the same. Tragedy or comedy, life in them was tragic or comic; and the history of the soul that Duse gave me with each impersonation seemed merely that. And yet it seemed always the history of her soul, too, and the history of mine, simply that; and I took it for granted, no doubt, as youth can take true things for granted, not knowing what ardour and pain and skill must go to the expression of any kind of truth. The day following this series of performances, I remember, I suddenly felt the meaning of them rush over me. I could see the likeness in them to what I had felt in great poetry and music and deep feeling. And with that reservation and that settlement of Duse as a part of one's own, inner, secret reality, I passed on; for there were a great many things arising full of zest.

After that I came back to America and Duse meant nothing further to me, nothing added to this quiet accepted place she had in me, until a few years later, in the country at the beginning of summer, when I began to read for the first time Dante in Italian. It was the first seven cantos in the Inferno that amazed me. I had read English poetry well, Spenser and Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, but never any poetry quite like this, poetry as great or, if you like, greater, but never this peculiar realism and poetry together, never anything that seemed so close and poignant and exact. Nowhere as in Dante can the lines, the verbal medium, quiver and disappear into the intense life expressed and yet remain with a certain music and beauty of their own. In the garden as I read, I can recall, Dante's images and the things he said seemed to have an immediacy like light, a reality like trees. With the life that Dante expressed in his poetry I recognized the same thing that I had felt always in all deep emotion, a sense of terrible pressure and privacy and individual distress, and at the same time a feeling of participation for the moment in some universal and eternal force among men. And out of this the beautiful in Dante arose, the beauty of a passionate, sorrowful precision of understanding and of an infinite response to life. And all this, which is the poet in Dante, runs side by side with an immensity of cerebral activity that is astounding, a study of letters and history and the government of