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later, after sweeping the hills viously a hunting-ground for opposite with his glasses. the Boohe gunners. At least "Can you see them?" a dozen British dead lay at intervals huddled against the sides of the road. One of them looked to be an artillery officer, judged by his fieldboots and spurs. But the top part of him was covered by a rainproof coat, and I saw no cap.

I made out what did appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I could see nothing of our infantry. The shelling went on, but time pressed, and the colonel, packing up his glasses, led us eastwards again, down to a light railway junction, and through a quaint little ravine lined with willowtrees. Many German dead lay here. One young soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect expression of peace and rest. Up another ascending sunken road. The Boche guns seemed to have switched, and half a dozen shells skimmed the top of the road, causing us to wait. We looked again at the fight being waged on the slopes behind the village. Our barrage had lifted, but we saw no sign of advancing infantry.

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The colonel turned to me suddenly and said, "I'm going to select positions about thousand yards south of where we are at this moment-along the valley. Wilde will come with me. You go back and pick up the horses, and meet us at Q- Farm. I expect we shall be there almost as soon as you."

I followed the direct road to return to B. A few shells dropped on either side of the road, which was ob

Q- Farm was a farm only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon. The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest of the Boche mustard-gas shells.

I went on leave next morning, and got a motor-car lift from Peronne as far as Amiens. Before reaching Villers-Bretonneux, of glorious fearful memories, we passed through Warfusee-Abancourt, a shell of its former self, a brick heap, a monument of devastation. An aged man and a slim whitefaced girl were standing by the farm cart that had brought them there, the first civilians I had seen since August. The place was deserted save for them. In sad bereavement they looked at the cruel desolation around them.

"My God," said my companion, interpreting my inmost thought, "what a home-coming!'

(To be concluded.)

GEORGE MEREDITH AND OTHERS.

It is not easy to understand the meaning and purpose of Mr S. M. Ellis's book about George Meredith,1 Mr Ellis seems to have no other qualification for the work which he undertakes but consanguinity. He is George Meredith's second cousin, and if that relationship should be a proper cause of biography, then another terror is added to death. Moreover, George Meredith demands in oritio or biographer something more than the accident of common blood. He is not the easiest writer in the world to understand, and it is clear from his performances that Mr Ellis is all untrained in the art of letters. One advantage he possesses: he knows to a hair the pedigree of his victim. But that is a doubtful advantage, and when the "exclusive information" is used as Mr Ellis uses it, it serves only to oreate prejudice, to cast a shadow upon the novelist's talent.

The great secret which Mr Ellis has to impart to the world is that Meredith's father was a tailor at Portsmouth, and that the Great Mel, who being dead yet overtops the living personages of Evan Harrington, was Meredith's grandfather. The secret was already shared by thousands before ever Mr Ellis pat pen to paper. Readers of

Marryat's novels might have been aware, if they chose, of the portentous truth, and being aware of it might have let it rest. Mr Ellis cannot let it rest. He turns it over and mumbles it with a kind of ghoulish interest. He leaves no irrelevant detail undiscussed. He presents us with a pioture of the shop, and describes, with the air of one who has spared no research, the bow-windowed parlour in which the handsome daughters of Melchizedek Meredith were wont to sit, and tells us precisely how far the tailoring workshop extended towards the back.

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And Mr Ellis, having set forth a vast deal of tittletattle, which in no way concerns the public, proceeds to lecture Meredith upon the sin of holding his tongue. "Whatever the causes that prompted Meredith's reticence on subject of his origin," says the biographer, "he was singularly ill-advised in preserving that silence to the end." What nonsense! It was no part of Meredith's business to indulge the public curiosity. Why should he have obtruded the story of his birth and youth upon those who had never professed a great interest in him or his works, until he was taken up, as copy, by the journalists? The poet and novelist might

1 George Meredith. His Life and Friends in Relation to his Work. By S. M. Ellis. London: Grant Richards, Ltd.

weave into the warp of his work as much or or as little autobiography as he chose, He could not be asked to satisfy the craving for inapposite gossip of every Paul Pry who was at the pains to oall upon him.

The truth is that Mr Ellis's book is a direct encouragement to the snobbishness which is always rampant in a demooratio country. The democracy dislikes greatness of any kind, even while it marvels at it, and is never so happy as when it can belittle those who stand above it. In this act of belittling it shows neither justice nor consistency. If a man is of noble lineage, the demoorat is down upon him at once, asserting that he must be judged only by what he is. On the other hand, he who makes his own name and fame is asked insolently whence he came, lest he reach too lofty a point of arrogance. He must not be allowed all the oredit for what he has achieved, and if snobbishness can in any way besmirch him it will not lose the chance.

Suppose for a moment that Meredith had been the son of a duke. Had he breathed the horrid secret to the newspapers, he would have lain for ever under the democrat's ban. Under the ban he still lies, because he does not appear to have given out from his house-top the simple truth, equally inapposite, that he was a tailor's son. The natural result of Mr Ellis's book has been that more than one pious Radioal, falling into the trap,

has denounced Meredith for a snob, without perceiving that the charge recoils upon his own head. But, indeed, it is all a barren quest. Nothing that Mr Ellis tells us in his book adds to our real knowledge of Meredith. A poet is his own sufficient biographer, and we may find in Meredith's writings all the knowledge of the man himself which he chose to give us. Whatever he was, he was no snob. The child of romance, he had a perfect right to seek the place of his origin, if he would, among the hills of Wales. And Mr Ellis, by laying a foolish stress upon that which does not matter, proves himself an accomplice in the general conspiracy to misunderstand the novelist's works.

Moreover, Mr Ellis is at great trouble to explain the dignity of his own descent. Though his grandmother was a daughter of the great Melchizedek, he is linked to the shop only by the female line, and he tells us with pride that wherever England's need was sorest there was an Ellis ready to fight her battle for her. A noted orusader in the service of Richard I., a gallant soldier who served under Earl Warrenne against the Scots at Dunbar, a distinguished Cavalier who defended Rose Castle against the Parliament, a captain who fought at Oudenarde, and & commander who was at Quebec when Wolfe fell these are some of his ancestors. It is plain, therefore, that he can look

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upon his unfortunate cousinship without remorse. But why, oh why, in the name of all that is irrelevant, does he drag his own august pedigree into a life of George Meredith?

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He reminds me of a zealous cab driver at Stratford-onAvon, who having driven me to the house in which Shakespeare was born, presently pointed out to me with all the pride of a rival his own respectable birthplace.

Mr Ellis is not merely irrelevant. He treats his distinguished cousin sometimes with a kind of patronage, sometimes with an injustice, for which there is no excuse. He seems to think that a novelist is always on oath, that if he introduces a character from real life into fiction, he must not deviate a hair'sbreadth from the literal facts. For instance, he assumes that Major Strike, in 'Evan Harrington,' was suggested by his grandfather, and is a definite and purposed libel upon that gentleman. "It may be pertinently asked," he says, "in what way Sir S. B. Ellis offended George Meredith that he should be the victim of such a bitter attack." Such a question may not be asked, even impertinently. A novelist chooses his personages as he will, and as his work demands, and therefore there is no attack at all. It was neoessary to the story of Evan Harrington that Evan's sister Caroline should be ill-matched by a martinet of a husband. Whether she was or was not thus matched in life is

wholly beside the point. And Mr Ellis, in imputing to Meredith a superfluous piece of spite, does little justice either to his viotim's character or to his own intelligence.

These indiscretions are bad enough. It is bad enough also that Mr Ellis should drag painfully to the light Meredith's work done ungratefully and perforce for this journal or that. We have no right to judge an artist by articles which he has forgotten and suppressed. But Mr Ellis is far worse than indiscreet when he tries, after his clumsy fashion, to discuss the relations of Meredith with his first wife and with his son Arthur. Matters of such delicacy as this cannot but elude his understanding, and we have not the slightest warrant that the facts are as he states them. Who is he that he should explain Meredith's refusal to see his wife by a "horror of illness and the oiroumstances of death"? Who is he that he should grant to Meredith or withhold from him any exouse "in mitigation of censure"? Nor does his treatment of Meredith and his son Arthur show any finer taot. He blunders monstrously where good-feeling demands that he should walk warily, and attempts to atone for his necessary ignorance by a dogmatio statement of thoughts and sentiments, about which only two men, both of them dead, have any right to speak. Surely the supposed injury of Major Strike is magnificently avenged!

Mr E. B. Osborn's book, New Elizabethans, and truly "The New Elizabethans' (Lon- they have many points in don: John Lane), is at once common with their ancestors of tragic and glorious. It com- the sixteenth century. Like memorates a generation, wise, them, they were skilled in arts strong, and brave, which has as in arms. Like them, they saorificed itself to the cause looked for the promise of their of England. Now that the curiosity in all that life held war is over, we can count of knowledge and adventure. something of our cost with Like them, they did not hold that sad tranquillity which back an hour when their peace has brought us. We country asked their help. know at last what we are But nevertheless they were asked to pay for victory. essentially modern EnglishThe generation is gone which men, who owed what they would have shaped by its were and what they thought achievements and its counsel to the training which school the world we live in. It is and university had given gone, with all its hopes and them. They were, many of its courage and its under them, deeper in scholarship standing. It is not gone in than the Elizabethans, and vain, and, happily for us who perhaps less inclined to ruffle are left, its high deeds are it bombastically. In style, also, accomplished, and some at they were more modest than least of its songs are not their forerunners. They wrote unsung. English with a finer economy of words, if with less force, and betrayed in their works a delicate self-conscious artistry of which many of the true Elizabethans were incapable. Walter Raleigh, great poet as he was, fashioned his verses as though his hand were more apt for sword than pen. Those whom Mr Osborn calls the New Elizabethans went forth from their homes to fight the Germans with the happy nonchalance of poets. If we would find a name for them, I think it would befit them more closely to be called the New Athenians. As I read Mr Osborn's vivid sketches, as there was set before me the cheerful resolution of this heroic generation, the famous oration of Pericles came

We knew but dimly what a treasure was ours before we lost it. Perhaps, had not the war interrupted our lightheartedness, we should never have known its real worth. With 8 noble, unconscious serenity these men left their books and their crafts and their sports, and in the glad spirit of youth went forth to save for their country the priceless gifts of happiness and security which they alone cannot enjoy. If we are saved by their sacrifice, the poorest return we can make is to keep their names enshrined always in our hearts, and to remember rather the glory and valour of their deeds than the tragedy of our loss.

Mr Osborn calls them the
VOL. CCV.-NO. MCCXLII.

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