the indignity of seeing his work slashed and cut to conform to the most fantastic of standards, it is not likely that his second manuscript will challenge the accepted values. The author goes under, too, and we arrive at the stage in America where the few men and women who know how to write and care about the art of fiction, are concerned only with the most bloodless of human creatures, and gloss over sex (the great offender) as if its existence were an offence to the better nature of our superior race. Our fictional reports of life are true in the diaries of suicides, in the Sunday papers, in the terrible chaos of Theodore Dreiser's fumblings with words and ideas, but not in the work of those who can pretend to the divine dignity of the creative imagination.
We are not living in an age of religious fanaticism. The persecutors of art are not enthusiasts for God. Although the Deity is invoked a little more frequently and a little more vulgarly of late—a sign on Fifth Avenue suggests that the Almighty was the first believer in the open shop and a leaflet begging funds ends with the stern assurance that "God expects every Baptist to do his duty"—the principle of toleration maintains itself. The zeal of the Puritan we can understand; he cannot bear that his eyes should be distracted from the single, blinding contemplation of the face of God. It is not Puritanism which blights our artistic production now; it is Philistinism, of which the first essential is the hatred of beauty.
We are inclined to sympathize with this hatred which begins in fear and selfishness. It is only by hating beauty, wherever it is found, that the dreariness and banality of common life are made tolerable. If one loved beauty and had to live for ever in the day of small things! If one loved the sea and choked for ever in a rather foul-smelling dungeon! We can bear the beauties of nature with some fortitude; but that the work of man's hands should have power to move us is an attack upon our self-esteem too bitter to be borne. We satisfy the instinctive desire for creation by silly substitutes, and the bad and successful art of every age is the consolation we have for the wounds which beauty inflicts upon us. There is no place for beauty in the life of man unless there is place for nothing but beauty. And in the dilemma the artist for ever finds himself.
We have seen The Gardens of Italy which Charles Scribner's Sons publish in this country with a sharp feeling of satisfaction, because
