Meuse)-which offers so tempting and probably, in the result, so irresistible an inducement to convert them into the battleground for the next European war. That state of defencelessness is a typical instance of the remissness or improvidence with which the Belgians fail to attend to the vital question of their own national security.

As a matter of fact, the Belgian Government has always required stimulating by its friends to keep it up to the level of its responsibilities in military matters. The French Government has been somewhat backward in respect of friendly remonstrances at Brussels, believing, perhaps too implicitly, that the sympathies of the Belgian people were wholly with France, and that an incursion on the part of the Germans would only entail the adhesion of the Belgians en masse to her side. Since the declaration of the Entente Cordiale, too, the French Government, out of pure delicacy of feeling towards this country, has been more than ever averse to remonstrate at Brussels as to Belgian neglect. in taking proper precautions. It assumes that this is primarily a matter for England, who is pledged to the lips to maintain Belgian independence. But, unfortunately, English advice and English remonstrances do not carry the great weight which ought to attach to them at Brussels, where there is a deep and spreading feeling of resentment at the English treatment of the Congo question. I say it with regret that English advice there at this juncture produces rather the opposite effect to what it aims at accomplishing. Instead of leading the Belgian authorities to undertake or sanction what is recommended, it seemingly confirms their inaction, and even sometimes impels them to take action of a contradictory order. France, therefore, is leaning on a broken reed if she thinks that English influence at Brussels, which I declare to be nil, and for the moment a figment of the imagination based on tradition, will avail to induce the Belgian authorities to organise their defence as against Germany. France still has influence there, although it is waning as the consequence of her political association with England, and she will be wise to use it without delay and without reference to London, so as to secure a more equitable distribution of the Belgian garrisons, and a more effective system of defending the roads across the Ardennes, and especially the great main route through Gouvy, Libramont, and Bertrix, which leads to the undefended northern section of the French frontier, the Achilles-heel of France.

Without believing in the literal accuracy of the statement that a secret offensive and defensive treaty has for some time existed between Belgium and Germany, I have reason to know that the relations between the Governments of the little State and the

big Power have long been most cordial, and I do not think it would require twenty-four hours to conclude and sign a treaty of that purport, not secretly, but openly. Nothing, in my opinion, can avert this contingency but prompt and energetic steps by the French Government in Brussels and also in London to bring about a clearing of the cloudy atmosphere in Anglo-Belgian relations. France may well see good ground for anxiety in the almost ostentatious neglect of Belgium to provide against the menace of Elsenborn. But if that neglect is not merely ostentatious, but intentional, how much more reason is there for French statesmanship to be vigorously self-assertive, and is there not some good reason for thinking that this may be the case in the truly extraordinary plan for diverting the main railway from Germany from its existing track through Verviers and Liége to a new route leading directly west from Welkenraedt, and passing to the north of Liége? It is certainly true that the proposed track would be more or less under the fire of one or two of the forts on the northern side of the Liége perimeter, but the existing line is so completely at the mercy of Fort Chaudfontaine (which is practically impregnable) that it could never be utilised by an invading force. To place improved railway facilities, as will be done by the Welkenraedt-Louvain direct line, at the disposal of the conjectural invader, for whom, by neglect to improvise a proper defence, the whole of the Ardennes has been left alluringly open, is certainly an indication of how the wind blows at Brussels. While our God-granted statesmen have been indulging in free denunciations of the Belgian King and his officials. with regard to the Congo question, there is too much reason in my mind to apprehend that by way of revenge that King and his Government are laying the seeds of a cordial alliance with Germany which will exercise a profound and durable influence on the fate of Western Europe, and it can only be one to the detriment of France as well as of England.

Y.

THE POSE OF MR. ARTHUR SYMONS.

THE word "pose" is used without any unfriendly intention, and, indeed, almost as photographers use it. Everybody poses more or less; everybody, that is to say, has some attitude in which he prefers to challenge public attention, whether because he finds it most effective, or because he considers it most characteristic. The differences are mainly of degree, and the great dividing difference is between the writers who pose principally for the gallery, and the writers who pose principally for themselves.

In the former class it is perhaps Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Hall Caine who take the prizes. At the close of the most effective passages in their writings they always seem to wave a signal to the claque. When Mr. Chesterton protests that only quite incredible propositions can be quite true, when Mr. Shaw recognises in the increasing popularity of divorce a healthy token of a great moral awakening, and when Mr. Hall Caine re-discovers the Christian religion one reads between the lines an implied Nunc plaudite as a sort of stage direction. The manner of these writers, if not their matter, is that of the stump orator or the popular entertainer. Not slow self-realisation, but the production of an immediately stunning effect upon a startled and gaping audience appears to be the end in view.

The pose of Mr. Arthur Symons is the other kind of pose. That applause is absolutely a matter of indifference to him, one must not venture to affirm. Knowing that there is a great deal of human nature in people, one would hesitate to say as much as that of anyone. But it certainly is not his first consideration; he does not seek it by compromises or over-emphasis, and has, indeed, the air of being much too self-satisfied to do so. In some of his prefaces he has stated, almost in so many words, that critics who fail to appreciate his work give the measure of their own incapacity. If they do not understand, so much the worse for them. He knows what he means, and has his point of view-his "system of æsthetics" and his philosophy of life. His apparent enthusiasm for non-morality is an integral portion of a comprehensive scheme-one of the irrefragable links in the chain that binds art and life together. The scheme is of more consequence than the world's opinion of it. So is the manifestation of it through his personality. Gaining the whole world is a poor thing beside gaining one's own soul. He will seek that first, whether the rest be added unto him or not. Of course, a man cannot do it without posing. Therefore, he poses. But he

poses chiefly for himself, and the pose is not easily distinguishable from self-realisation.

It is a pose which has one suspicious feature-a certain air of æsthetic omniscience which does not always quite carry conviction, the pose, in fact, of a man extremely sensitive in every tentacle, with each tentacle separately laying intelligent hold upon a separate art. Mr. Symons writes poetry, fiction, and criticism. He criticises not literature only, but also painting, music, and the drama. He pronounces judgment not on one literature only, but on three: the English, the French, and the Italian. His range extends from the Elizabethans to the Decadents. It is true that he is continually saying luminous things on all of these very various subjects, but the circumstance remains suspicious all the same. It is incredible, to adapt a well-worn saying, that any man ever was quite so æsthetically omniscient as Mr. Arthur Symons appears to be. The closest parallel is perhaps to be found in the case of the brothers de Goncourt, and there is an obvious point at which that parallel breaks down. There were two brothers de Goncourt, and there is only one Mr. Arthur Symons to bear the undivided burden of universal knowledge.

After all, however, it is not the knowledge, but the pose, that is the really interesting thing. That, if it were not interesting in itself, would still be interesting, because it is so well sustained, and, at the same time, so well defined. Whatever may be the precise nature of the literary movement with which Mr. Symons is connected-a matter to which we will come presently-he stands towards it in a curiously double relation. He expounds it as well as illustrating it; he is its Sainte-Beuve as well as its Victor Hugo. The true inwardness of Mr, W. B. Yeats may be obscure except to the initiated; there is never any doubt as to the true inwardness of Mr. Symons. He is both artist and critic, and the critic lays the artist's soul upon the table, at once, as it were, inviting and defying ribaldry. He presents æstheticism at once in its latest and its most articulate phase, and the historical origin of the point of view and frame of mind which it expresses is worth inquiring into.

Its ultimate source should probably be sought in pre-Raphaelitism. At all events, it is not worth while to go further back than that reaction against the Philistinism and general ugliness of early and mid-Victorian life. It established a new religion of beauty, albeit on what must have seemed to the Philistines a somewhat doleful basis. It lacked laughter. The enemies of Philistinism who laughed, as Matthew Arnold did, were not preRaphaelites. The pre-Raphaelites themselves were perhaps a

little too conscious that the overthrow of Philistinism was no laughing matter. Ecstasy was perhaps their substitute for hilarity. It was a disposition to a sort of æsthetic ecstasy which they bequeathed to their Oxford successors, specifically known as Esthetes, who had first Walter Pater and then Oscar Wilde for their prophets.

Plenty of Oxford men not yet middle-aged can well remember that Esthetic Movement and the strange jargon talked by its illuminés. They were "utter," they said; they were 'too too"; they were "all but." And no doubt the boast that they were "all but" was the best founded, and received the most ironical justification. They had not, that is to say, the sincerity of conviction which could enable them to stand firm in the day of persecution, and that day of persecution came upon them with the suddenness of a thunder-clap.

What happened, to be precise, was this: Towards the end of a certain summer term, and in the midst of the season of bump suppers, a certain Esthete of some notoriety brought forward a resolution at the Union proposing that the Society should discontinue its subscription to Punch, because that journal was ridiculing the "New Renaissance." The proposal was rejected, but the end of the matter was not in the Debating Hall, but at the Esthete's college, where a party of boating men were convivially celebrating their success upon the river. The harmony of the evening ended in an attack upon the Esthete. His collection of blue china was thrown out of his window, and he himself was put under the college pump. It was threatened that the same. measures would be taken with other Esthetes in other colleges, and in the panic that ensued the Esthetic Movement perished. The leading Esthetes hurried as one man to the barber's to get their hair cut, and to the haberdasher's to buy high collars. Men who, on the previous day, had resembled owls staring out of ivy bushes, now cultivated the appearance of timid cows shyly peeping over white walls; and all the available enthusiasm-since Oxford must always have an enthusiasm of some sort--was transferred. to Canon Barnett's scheme for conveying the higher life to the lower orders through the medium of University Settlements.

That is the true story of the great Philistine revolt against the tyranny of æstheticism-but it was only a local insurrection. Estheticism was expelled from Oxford, but was not extinguished. Only its exterior affectations were killed by the ridicule of Patience and The Colonel. If not the mantle, at least a double portion of the spirit of the Oxford Esthetes was inherited by the London Decadents, who, to a certain extent, altered the character of the movement.