they look to the future, which is so uncertain that its contents are as manifold as men are abundant. If the idealist would avoid winging his way up to a private limbo instead of the abodes of reality he must subject his ideal to the test of standards, which may be found, not without labor and pain, in the secular experience of the human race.

Viewed in terms of literature, the foregoing conclusions mean that no worthy achievement can result from our present preoccupation with nature, with the contemporary, and with the future; and that the literature of to-morrow, if it is to equal the literature of the past, must, like that literature, be both humanistic and traditional. From the romantic criticism of Schlegel and Coleridge to the "expressionist" criticism of the disciples of Signor Croce, we have heard a great deal of the organic nature of the work of art, but very little of the organic nature of art itself. As M. Firmin Roz pointed out in a letter the other day (a letter that would have warmed even Matthew Arnold's Victorian heart), the element of the new cannot reach fulfillment save in an already existing organism, which may be called tradition. The rest of the passage is deserving of careful reading:—

"Novelty and tradition are the two principles or elements into which all literary or artistic expression instinct with life is resolvable. And yet, after all, such resolution is impracticable, for the two elements are inextricably if indiscernibly interwoven. A poet or artist who casts aside these laws of the true artistic genius remains a stranger to the highest refinements of the human spirit; and his works, in proportion as he is unable to assimilate the divine secrets of culture, present a surface bruised and deformed by excrescences. The cults exist to sing the praises of these deformities and to proclaim that the most painful of them are the most beautiful."

Here, in these luminous words, is no mechanical gospel of a "return to the past" such as the modern writer quite properly spurns. The war, the peace of Versailles, and the history of the world since that 'peace' will have done much for literature if they have revealed the past, as even the doctrine of biological evolution failed to do, as in the fullest sense present and living,

There is no "dead past" in general history or in the arts, and those who, refusing to perceive this, seek to erect a new social order or a new art, no matter how splendid their powers of imagination, are giving their energies to what is not living, nor even dead (since it never lived), but unreal. In so far as our writers are trying to express the modern and the American while suppressing the past and the human, they are dealing with unrealities and their forms are deformities. One must admire their energy, their creative force; one must deplore their lack of proper data, of sufficient material to work with. Like Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, they do not know enough.

NORMAN FOERSTER.

The University of North Carolina.

FRANCE AND RECONSTRUCTION

One great hindrance that retards reconstruction in France is the lack of confidence. France has not yet really obtained peace. For "peace is not a negative thing, a mere absence of war", as Sir Gilbert Murray well says, "peace is a state of mind, in which persons or nations are free from fear or anxiety or resentment, and can go about their business undisturbed." But this the French feel they are not yet permitted to do. The League of Nations was founded on the belief that the best way to avoid war and to restore mutual confidence is to accustom the nations to meet and to coöperate. Yet so long as even one great nation, such as the United States, stands aloof, there is room for the old vicious balance of power and the rival coalition system. Thus the object of the Covenant is defeated, for that object is to make the trusteeship for peace universal and all-inclusive. The same reasoning would postulate Germany's entrance into the League, and this, too, might be brought about by America's adherence, for we are, on the whole, the most impartial mediators between France and Germany, and therefore best fitted to bring about this rapprochement. The present divergence of interests between France and the Anglo-Saxon nations is perhaps unavoidable. The French consider, not unnaturally, that the Treaty of Versailles, in exchange for which they gave up at the time advantages which are now irrecoverable, compensates them, in some measure at least, for the wrongs inflicted upon them, and gives them some security, such as it is, that German aggression will not be renewed. They believe that a strict execution of the terms of the treaty is their best and perhaps their only chance for rehabilitation, and they cannot understand why their allies and co-signatories should wish to alter the treaty merely because subsequent events have shown that it is to the advantage of Great Britain, or of Italy, or of some other allied power to remit certain obligations to Germany in exchange for German trade. Professor Ralph Barton Perry, of Harvard, in a recent letter from France ironically shows England and the United States "whose safety permits", and whose "national interest

requires a benevolent and charitable attitude towards Germany" reminding France that the Anglo-Saxon countries are suffering from industrial over-production, and need the markets of Central Europe for their goods, and that therefore France, although an agricultural country and needing cash rather than markets, should feel morally bound to unite with them in subordinating every other consideration to the encouragement of international trade. "We cannot promise to help you in case the Germans undertake to evade their obligations, or initiate a war of revenge", America is represented as saying to France, "because, as a matter of principle, we do not intervene in European affairs, nevertheless we urge you to demobilize your army and unite with the other nations of the world in helping Germany and Soviet Russia to their feet."1

Under these circumstances, and in view of America's refusal to enter the League of Nations, although morally pledged to do so through her accredited spokesman, French statesmen feel deeply discouraged, and, worse still, thoroughly sceptical as to the possibility of securing peace by international agreement. France feels that she can count only upon herself to take measures for her security against Germany, and she acts accordingly, for on the other side of the Rhine are five to six million men trained in war, with an industrial organization capable of arming them quickly.

We have spoken of France's interests as diverging from those of her allies. It would be worth while, perhaps, to develop the reasons for this divergence. As was pointed out in our first paper, France's national wealth will always consist chiefly in the products of her wonderful soil, whose yield is not only abundant but of the highest quality and of the greatest diversity. Sixty per cent. of the population still draws a living from the land. Up to the war France had steadily increased her production of wheat, so that she was, unlike England, self-sufficing in her food supply. She was also one of the great stock-raising countries of Europe and exported surplus meat. Accordingly, now that almost the whole of the devastated area is once more under culti

The New York Evening Post, quoted in World Wide (Montreal), April

I, 1922.

vation, the country has again become self-sufficing as to food. If now we consider France's augmented colonies, or spheres of influence, we have, besides the Mother country, a colonial empire of roughly sixty million inhabitants, an empire largely capable of supplying French factories with the raw materials they need-cotton excepted-and increasingly capable of absorbing the surplus output of these factories. Consider, finally, that for years to come no small part of France's manufactured products, particularly those of her metallurgical industries, will have to go to building up her ruined cities, mines and plants, and to carrying out other urgent improvements such as the electrification of her railways-necessitated by lack of coal,-the construction of a great merchant marine, and the adequate equipping of her seaports. As for her remaining national industries, they consist largely of luxury products, such as silks, wines, fashions and furnishings, objects of art, gloves, perfumes, laces and linens, for which there is always a fairly steady market-just because it is limited-at home and abroad. "The result is that France is not nearly so much interested in economic reconstruction as other nations, for instance England, to whom [international] commerce is life blood. . . . To England, Italy, Europe generally, and perhaps America, too, it would be a calamity if Germany went utterly to smash. To a great many Frenchmen it would be cause for genuine rejoicing. It would not hurt us much, they say, and it would take a great load off our minds". What France desires, then, is capital. She produces her own food supply. She has sufficient industrial equipment with which to carry on the work of reconstruction, and she has vast prospective markets within the limits of her own dominions, but funds are lacking, and having exhausted her borrowing capacity abroad, she cannot command credit for obtaining ready money. Each of her budgets since the war shows a deficit of several billions of francs, due in large part to the necessity of advancing an average of sixteen billion francs a year for the rebuilding of the devastated regions or for war pensions. In order to raise these

'French business man, quoted by Walter Duranty in The New York Times, April 9, 1922.