To mention dancing at the moment without a reference to the Tango is impossible. The craze with which we are now overwhelmed is very much like that for the Polka, which carried all before it in the early forties of last century. The Times of those days wrote: Our private letters state politics are 'now for the moment superseded in public regard by the new ' and all-absorbing pursuit, the polka, . . . which embraces ' in its qualities the intimacy of the valse with the vivacity of 'the Irish jig.'

The Tango has had a somewhat mixed reception; its impropriety has been freely demonstrated by accounts of its lowly origin and dreadful associations. But this has really little to do with it; most dances have started from some lowly source before they reach the ballroom. Whatever the Tango may have been in its native haunts, there is little to be said against it as it is now taught and practised. The teachers of dancing have seen to the elimination of all taint of vulgarity, and with its hundred steps reduced to a manageable dozen it is now taking its place as an interesting variety in the society dance. Its source is still a matter of controversy. M. Richepin is reported to have traced it to the earliest times and connected it with the Pyrrhicha Saltatio. Another theory derives it from the Chica, an ancient and particularly unpleasant South American dance said to have come from the negroes. The more popular and likely view sees in the 'Argentine' Tango a variant of the old Spanish Tango danced by the cowboys of Cuba and other States of Latin America.* Thence it was brought to Paris, where it underwent a metamorphosis and emerged purged and purified, fit for the usage of polite society. What is of more interest than its history and origin is its astonishing popularity. A large part of this may fairly be put to the credit of Mme. Pavlova, M. Mordkin, Miss Duncan, Miss Allan, and others who have helped so greatly to bring about the present renaissance of dancing. The growing interest in watching good dancing has not unnaturally produced a desire for performance. The old dances were losing their charm, they were not particularly pleasing to the onlooker, and all life had gone out of the ballroom. Consequently something new was hailed with delight; the renewed interest provided the stimulus

The Times, November 10, 1913.

to undertake the learning of the new steps; ability to perform them aroused the envy of others, and quickly the craze spread. The writer in The Times referred to above makes an interesting and ingenious speculation that the craze for the Tango is part of our new sense of pageantry, and in support of his theory he instances the renewed vogue of fancy-dress balls and their tendency to more elaborate ornateness. No doubt this is but one more of the signs of the times, the tendency to break away from old tradition, to find some new way of doing thingsbetter if possible, original at all costs--whether in painting, music, dancing, politics, social questions, philosophy, or religion. In this stir of feeling there is a chance that art may again get into touch with life and become expressive of general moods and aspirations instead of remaining an empty effort after technical dexterity, where the end is lost sight of in a glorification of the means. This new kind of dancing which we have been discussing is at once an indication of and a stimulus to a fresh means in at least one of the arts. Mr. Crawford Flitch expresses in an ecstatic chapter, at the close of his admirable and discriminating survey of modern dancing, his enthusiastic belief in the future of the dance :

'When the choregrapher of genius arrives, he will think in gestures, as the musician thinks in sound and the painter in mass and colour. And when he has realised the lavish abundance of his material, he will pour into it like a molten fccd all that there is in the brimming life of our day to fire, to madden, to delight and to rive the heart.

Then it will be the time oft he other arts to look wonderingly upon this figure of the Dance, no longer straying timidly into their company, but coming upon divine feet with an assured mien and a mature grace, and each vill borrow something from her untiring ecstasy.'

If we can hardly endorse this glowing forecast, we can at least consider it a healthy sign that the public should care, and care enthusiastically, for so notable an innovation upon lines that promise valuable and interesting developments.

FELIX CLAY.

CURRENT LITERATURE

1. Studies in Modernism. By the Rev. ALFRED FAWKES, M.A. Smith, Elder. 1913.

2. Clio A Muse, and other Essays, Literary and Pedestrian. By GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN. Longmans, Green. 1913. 3. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: A Memoir. By JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY, F.B.A. Oxford University Press. 1913. 4. The Life of Francis Thompson. By EVERARD MEYNELL. Burns and Oates. 1913.

5. Twenty-five Years' Reminiscences.

By KATHARINE TYNAN

(Mrs. H. A. Hinkson). Smith, Elder. 1913.

6. Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. By ELIZABETH MARY WRIGHT. Oxford University Press. 1913.

7. England's Parnassus. Compiled by ROBERT ALLOT, 1600. Edited from the Original Text in the Bodleian Library, and compared with the two copies in the British Museum, by CHARLES CRAWFORD. Oxford University Press. 1913. 8. Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life. By RABINDRANATH TAGORE. Macmillan.

OF

1913.

F the fifteen essays contained in Studies in Modernism,' the larger proportion has appeared in the EDINBURGH REVIEW. Their range is a wide one. They are the outcome of a vast and exhaustive mass of reading, of many years' absorbed study of ideas, tendencies, events, of history in the making. Their composition has proceeded concurrently with a prolonged change of view in the mind of the author, for the earlier papers, he tells us, were written from the standpoint of a Roman Catholic, the later from a position of greater 'freedom.' And their publication occurs when the controversies of which they are a reflexion and explanation have come, as all controversies must, to an apparent pause, when the time is ripe for a consistent survey of loss and gain, of the past in relation to the present, and of the present as a forecast of what may be looked for in the immediate future. Mr. Fawkes's survey extends from Port Royal and its adversary, the Age of Reason, to a consideration of the urgent problems that beset the English Church of to-day. Representative figures

and personalities, Leo XIII. and Pius X., Father Tyrrell and M. Loisy, are submitted to a penetrating portraiture; novelists and men of letters-Zola, M. Faguet, M. Anatole France-whose achievements have directly or indirectly shed. light upon a stormy sea of conflicting aims and ideals, are dissected with a searching precision, and the concluding essay wafts author and reader alike into the comparatively tranquil haven of 'The Ideas of Mrs. Humphry Ward.'

'To look on tempests and be never shaken ' must be the difficult endeavour of a critic whose aim is truth and moderation. To infuse just so much of personal enthusiasm into his discourse as shall prove him human, and give life and edge to his conclusions, is no less essential if his work is to move the hearts as well as to bend the minds of his readers. Mr. Fawkes is a judicious partisan. He is scrupulously fair to the convictions, the virtues, and excellent intentions of his opponents, and so is free to give rein to his zeal on behalf of his own opinions. But justice is hardly more kindly than faint praise. And though Mr. Fawkes is too conscientious a thinker, too wise an apologist, to deal in exaggeration and invective, every page of his book shows clearly on which side he is fighting. David himself went out against Goliath not more convinced of the rightness of his cause than Mr. Fawkes is convinced of the necessity and the rightness of Modernism—a Modernism that is part of the European mind-movement,' not merely a protest against the Pope.

An individual, he remarks, at issue with an institution, civil or religious, seldom appears at his best; and even in these essays occasionally a bias finds sharper expression than is consistent with scrupulous fairness. Newman, as might perhaps have been expected, suffers most in this respect. Mr. Fawkes's instinctive inclination is to allow judgment to blossom into the warmest appreciation of the greatest 'Catholic divine of our generation,' of one of the most consummate advocates who ever lived, of that exquisitely sensitive personality, that master of stately, delicate, and impassioned prose; but duty sternly recalls him. He seems rather to belittle Newman by the very recognition of these great qualities, and at last coldly dismisses him as one of the leaders of a movement essentially sectarian, and the father of them that look back.

Indeed, though when the occasion demands it Mr. Fawkes can himself enjoy the privileges of the advocate, he seldom indulges his own or his reader's sensibilities. The tone of these essays is severely intellectual. They are not clothed in samite, mystic, wonderful.' They have, what Mr. Fawkes finds in Liberalism, a certain aridity. They show an almost fanatical distrust of all extremes. Their plea is for moderation, for flexibility. The days of an insti'tution which can no longer adapt itself to its environ'ment are numbered.' Change and decay are all around us, but they are necessary in a world wherein becoming rather than being is the essential condition of life, wherein perfection of enduring stability is impossible. The 'Church without spot or wrinkle is in heaven, not here.' Compromise, then, must be the watchword of those keensighted enough to see the folly and danger of fighting against terrestrial progress and evolution-compromise, diplomacy, and sound sense. An idealist would be as much out of place in the chair of St. Peter's as an archbishop of excessive saint'liness' would be undesirable at Lambeth. That Leo XIII., 'the cool and calculating tactician,' should have indeed believed himself to be God's representative on earth is nothing but a psychological paradox.' But Mr. Fawkes's sympathy is far rather with one who dreamed of a Rome the arbitrator of the world, than with the man of sentiment, opinionated 'but impulsive,' Pius IX. Mr. Fawkes can, at need, defend the quiet worldliness of the English Church in the eighteenth century. 'There was much less to do.' And the common-sense philanthropy of the Evangelicals seems to him to be a better thing than a Tractarianism more zealous than prudent. The Church is not an army, but mankind viewed from the religious standpoint-such was Loisy's answer to Rome's claim for the subordination of the individual to the community. And that is the standpoint of these essays.

Mr. Fawkes never declaims. His thought is perfectly lucid, sheds light rather than heat. He has one strong prejudiceagainst excess he reiterates one warning-against impulsiveness and blind enthusiasm. His writing proceeds for the most part in a series of generalisations-often epigrammatic in turn-that build up the idea as stones form a turret. What he says of the critic to the manner born, that he deals