namely, that if the Home Government, as the parental Imperial authority, is justified, in defiance of and contrary to white local public opinion, in thus directly interfering to punish, it should also protect. Life, honour, property, white as well as black, must be adequately guarded and protected abroad in these distant Colonies by the strong arm of the law, just as they are at home, if the views and standards of home civilisation and of the stern administration of justice, irrespective of race or colour, are also to be there inflexibly applied. This would appear to mean Imperial police, provided at Imperial expense. We have encouraged our own flesh and blood to settle in distant countries, amid hordes of wild savages who outnumber them thousands to one, have built railways, given them grants of land, a Governor and a Council, courts of justice, and other constitutional paraphernalia. But what is our so-called Pax Britannica worth, and how is the Colony industrially and commercially to prosper, if the first condition of civilisation-namely, the due protection of life, home, and property-is not effectively established? This is one of the practical difficulties of colonial administration, which our good stay-at-home folks do not clearly appreciate, because they have never lived and done business on the fringe.

The plain truth is that white settlers are at present inadequately protected in British East Africa by the arm of Colonial law. No complaint is made of this. It is a necessity of the case. The country is too large and new, its revenues and white population too small, and its communications as yet not sufficiently developed for the purpose. There are no police-stations in the bush or on the veld. The white settler's chief protection lies in the fact that he is a white man, and generally of that able-bodied, energetic, and self-reliant class who open up and settle our new Colonies, and are well qualified, in emergency, to look after themselves.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in exceptional circumstances and under extreme provocation this kind of man, in protection of life, home or property, occasionally takes the law into his own hands, especially when he finds that local legal processes are unequal to the occasion. For this he must stand his trial, and rightly so, before a jury of his fellow-colonists, who are the best and only true judges of the provocation, aye, and the danger, when a white woman is insulted, or-a difference only of degreeproperty is stolen by native blacks. But if our paternal Government intervenes and sets local procedure at naught, then, clearly, it is also incumbent upon them adequately to police the Colony; and, as a minor, but not unimportant detail, to find the money required for the purpose. They draft Metropolitan police into Wales when industrial riots occur. Are they prepared on

occasion to do the same for British East Africa? But this is the measure and the test of the responsibilities they would apparently

assume.

Finally, there is the native point of view. As I have already indicated earlier in this article, while we have rescued the native from slavery and from tribal warfare, he remains a savage still. Many generations must pass away before we can elevate his character, and instil into his nature the mere rudiments of any moral sense. At present he is absolutely incapable of appreciating our high standards of justice and equity, or our methods of procedure. Generosity, or even fairness, often appear to him as weakness or fear.

Take the recent deportation case as an illustration of what is meant. The native argument is this. A white man has been sent away because he shot a native thief; therefore the white men are now afraid to shoot native thieves; therefore it is now fairly safe to steal sheep, and--we will go on stealing. The crime, in fact, has been encouraged. By all means let us treat the native fairly and justly. His misreading of our motives and intentions is part of the white man's burden. But do not let us forget that we also owe something to our own kith and kin, our own race who have to stand the racket on the spot of these little misunderstandings, if and when they occur. It is so easy for stay-at-home philanthropists to be sternly just and unctuously righteous, from a safe distance and at the expense of others.

And there is a possible danger in the situation, extremely remote, no doubt, but still latent. If a sudden native rising did occur where the white Colony is so enormously outnumbered by the black race, it would mean the wiping out of every outlying settler, the outraging of white women, and all the horrors of savagery turned loose before the white man finally reasserted himself.

The moral with which I would conclude is this: Let us be extremely careful how we arbitrarily interfere in the local affairs. of a distant Colony, and, where any possible scintilla of a doubt exists, let us trust to the good sense, the equity, and the manhood of our own race in Greater Britain beyond the seas.

HENRY SETON-KARR:

• Since writing the above I have received a letter, dated November 20, 1911, from a white settler in the Nairobi district of British East Africa, in which he states Stock-thieving (by natives) has been very much on the increase lately, We have also had an attempt of rape on a little girl of five years old by a native; the girl was so badly hurt that she is still in the care of a nurse and the doctors.'

AISCHRO-LATREIA-THE CULT OF THE

FOUL

IN Art, as indeed in not a few other things, a powerful man of genius who invents a new type, is a fatal snare to susceptible youth. He starts a reaction against some current form of which the age has grown weary; and forthwith in art, in books, or music, in collars, games, or slang-the young rush in to imitate the novelty, just as a flock of lambs will follow a bell-wether into a sunk ditch. The watch-word of the twentieth century is Unrest-Journalism, Politics, Literature and Art ring with one cry- All change here!' Not that it is often change for any definite gain. It is change for the sake of a change,' the thirst to get out of our old life, habits, thoughts and pleasures, to get into new lives, new selves. It runs round England, Europe, America, Asia, and the World, like the dancing mania in the Middle Ages. We are all whirled along, thrust onward by the vast restless crowd, ever calling out for something fresh 'something up-to-date '-for the last thing out!' eodem cogimur.'

Even in former ages, before the universal thirst for change set in, the impulse of a potent genius often had a disastrous effect on his own art. What academic mannerism followed the ideal compositions and bewitching poses of Raphael. As I write there stands before my eyes-it has stood so continuously since 1850Volpato's fine engraving of Raphael's School of Athens' in the Vatican Stanze. It has always been to me the perfect type of artful grouping of grand figures-the symbolic Olympus of antique thought—and yet by its very grace, by its symmetry, its severe dignity, equal to a drama of Sophocles, it heralds a long era of vapid elegance.

Michael Angelo, a far greater mind and a bigger nature, had an even more ruinous effect upon those who tried to obtain his power by copying his exaggeration. It took the French stage a century and a half to shake off the tragic traditions of Corneille and Racine; as it took English verse a century to recover from Pope and English prose fifty years to recover from Johnson and Gibbon. Victor Hugo's sensationalism ran to seed in Monte

Christo, and Walter Scott's glorious romances led on to Bulwer and James. In music we got so cloyed with Mozart's melodies and Chopin's dulcimer tones that many flew to Wagner's crashing discords, as if robustious recitatives were a new avatar of Blood and Iron. Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray were voted to be both slow and longwinded; and then the smart world would read nothing but short stories about adultery and gold-bugs, or, it might be, a scrambling trip in a new Panhard. Quisque suos patimur Manes '-i.e. every great man brings his bogey with him.

6

The new craze under which we are now suffering is the Cult of the Foul, or, to put it in Greek, it may be dubbed Aischrolatreia-worship or admiration of the Ugly, the Nasty, the Brutal. Poetry, Romance, Drama, Painting, Sculpture, Music, Manners, even Dress, are now recast to suit popular taste by adopting forms which hitherto have been regarded as unpleasing, gross, or actually loathsome. To be refined is to be 'goody-goody'; gutter slang is so 'actual'; if a ruffian tramp knifes his pal, it is so strong '; and, if on the stage his ragged paramour bites off a rival's ear, the halfpenny press screams with delight. Painters are warned against anything pretty,' so they dab on bright tints to look like a linoleum pattern, or they go for subjects to a thieves' kitchen. The one aim in life, as in Art, is to shock one's grandmother. And when the Society woman dances in bare legs, the up-to-date girl can dress herself like a stable-lad.

A debasement so general and so violent must needs have an originating cause; and this will be found in two reasons-first, in the legitimate reaction against mawkish conventions; secondly, in the imitation of powerful examples. Both of these exist in a high degree. It is true that for about the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century, the dominant tone retained a strain of dull convention. It is ridiculous to call it Victorianbecause it was more or less common to Europe and America, and in literature, drama, painting, sculpture, music, and certainly in dress, it was rather more French than English. The good lady who stiffly declined to be fast,' or even smart,' in anything, had very little to do with it. Things were decorous, refined, and conventional, because it was an age of serious, decent, unimaginative men and women with a turn for science, social reform, and making things comfortable.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century several men of original genius made their influence felt over Europe-all of them more or less anarchic souls. About two generations after the death of Scott and of Goethe in 1832, the world of literature and art began to be stirred by Ibsen, Tolstoi, Zola, Gorkhi, Wagner, Doré, Björnstjerne Björnson, d'Annunzio. All repudiated conventions and drove their scapels deep down into the vitals of

humanity. The Scandinavian and Mongol imagination revels in horrors, unnatural crimes, de-sexed women, and depraved and abnormal degenerates. The Latin races tend more to obscenity and gore. The world agrees that all those just named above were men of powerful genius, who have enriched their age with permanent masterpieces. The question remains if they have not encouraged weaker imitators to drag the type of Art down to the world of the crude, the cruel, the morbid, and the loathsome. Foremost among the men of genius who are creating a new school in Europe stands Augustin Rodin, the author of that wonderful invention-Impressionist Sculpture. Rodin is a man of original genius, and most judges would call him the greatest living sculptor in Europe, and he is the leader of the most popular school of sculpture. He has certainly produced some works of marvellous power. His courage, his originality, his intelligence make him the idol of the younger artists, who see in him a new Michael Angelo. Not only do we note his influence in every art gallery in Europe, but he has formulated his canons. of art in dogmatic and literary form. Like Leonardo, Buonarroti, and Cellini, he is not only a great artist, but a writer of distinction, at least his utterances are now embodied in books. One of these is L'Art, interviews recorded by Paul Gsell-a fine quarto volume with numerous photographs.1

Without attempting to offer any opinion about M. Rodin's fantasies in marble, as one of the plain people who cannot always grasp the mysticism under these veiled ébauches in plaster or stone, I can quite follow the doctrines laid down in the trenchant words of L'Art; for Rodin, who so often carves men and women as if they were seen in a fog, or behind a semi-transparent curtain, speaks with a clear and masterful voice which all can understand. The book altogether is exceedingly interesting, full of true and striking maxims, rich with apposite illustrations, and alive throughout with daring paradox. It enables us to know the man as well as his creations. And if it shows him to be a man of great original power, it explains the source of his gross extravagances, his caricatures which are called portraits, his love-dreams, and the crapulous nightmares he sometimes eternises in solid

stone.

In the first chapter of L'Art Rodin expounds the key of his system. He opens with true and forcible protests against all kind of academic pose. He simply seizes a spontaneous movement which he sees in his model. He does not place him or dictate any set altitude. Very good, but not quite true; for the Danaid, the Last Appeal, and the Ugolino (pp. 29, 32, 209) are certainly not casual and spontaneous attitudes. He goes on to

1 Paris, B. Grasset, 1911.