Menander tends to resemble Shakespeare, who makes a villain like Shylock so convincing that he may even be turned into a hero by another generation. In 'Le Misanthrope' we have the contrast pointed. Molière found life a sham. Even love was bitter. He mocked and suffered. Menander loved life and embraced it, above all he loved women, and there can be no doubt that he enjoyed both life and women. There is probably more resemblance to Menander in the Italian Goldoni than in any other of the modern classic writers. Perhaps someone who can appreciate Goldoni's pictures of life which he has written in the Venetian dialect will carry out the comparison. Certainly we find no one who compares with Menander in feeling until we come to the 18th century. The freshness with which sentiment and common life awoke the interest of the contemporaries of Prévost, Richardson, Diderot, and Lessing is paralleled by the change that came over literature in the fourth century in Greece. Euripides had brought tragedy down to earth, but he dealt always with the abnormal and the romantic, with passions and situations far from common life. The new comedy learned to present real people in ordinary situations. It learned above all to present young men in love, and Menander in particular glorified love, perhaps for the first time in Greek literature. In the 18th century the man of feeling carried his sentiment so far that he became a joke. There was almost certainly some such exaggeration in Greek literature. If the 'Hecyra' of Terence gives anything like a true notion of the work of Apollodorus of Carystus, the latter must have sacrificed sense to sensibility. His women have left earth and soared to heaven. They are perfect angels, even the prostitute. Unfortunately, the men have to be brutal and stupid or the women would have nothing to be angelic about. In any case they are most unconvincing. There are no signs of such morbid development in Menander. His people are not too good to be convincing and his sentiment is not artificial. It is interesting to speculate what difference a knowledge of Menander would have made in the development of the theatre since the Renaissance. Would Molière have used him as Racine did Euripides? However that may be, the modern stage has reached a point where it has little to learn from Menander. Even his affection for women might seem a step backward, for the modern stage ventures to show women as independent agents, creating a life of their own without the help of man. In Menander woman's greatest triumph is to win the devotion of a man. The range of interest in modern drama is vastly greater than in Menander's work, and many plays, even unpretentious ones, charm by their vivid presentation of ordinary people. Such a play may well appeal strongly to one spectator and not at all to another. One man likes his drama abstracted; he wants typical people significantly presented for intellectual analysis. Another enjoys the commonplace so long as it is depicted with vigour and with charm. Judgments of Menander will differ correspondingly. He will disappoint those who seek for the heroic or for the detached analysis of human folly. To those who like people for their individuality and can share the hopes and fears of ordinary humanity he will bring intense satisfaction. It is probable that if we had a dozen complete plays of Menander, his supreme genius would be universally recognised. L. A. PosT. Art. 11.-TURKEY-YESTERDAY AND TO-MORROW. 1. Survey of International Affairs, 1925. Vol. 1. By Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford Press, 1927. 2. The Angora Reform. By Count Ostrorog. of London Press, 1927. University 3. Turkey-Commercial and Industrial Handbook. United States Department of Commerce, 1926. 4. Five Years in Turkey. By General Liman von Sanders. Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1927. 5. Modern Turkey. By Eliot Grinnell Mears. Macmillan, 1924. 6. Constantinople. By George Young. Methuen, 1926. 7. Memoirs of Halidé Edib. John Murray, 1926. THE re-establishment of the Turkish Constitution in the year 1908 resulted from the fact that the atrocities and misgovernment permitted by the Sultan Abdul Hamid had created a state of things intolerable not only to the diverse peoples of the Empire, but also to the more liberal-minded Turks themselves. At that time the Young Turks proclaimed Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality' as their motto, and published their desire to obliterate all differences between the various elements of the population. But the so-called 'Ottomanisation' of the Empire actually meant the Turcification' of the Moslem as well as of the Christian subject races, and, as Count Ostrorog correctly points out, the movement was an evolution rather than a revolution. The power was transferred from the Sultan to a Parliament, but a Sultan Caliph remained on the throne, the religious law continued to run and, whereas the army was the allimportant element in the country, the Young Turks fell back upon the leaders of Islam when they desired to depose Abdul Hamid in April 1909, and when they decided to declare a Jihad or Holy War in November 1914. At first a kind of millennium seemed to have come. Nevertheless, the Committee soon shattered the hopes which it had encouraged and filled the Chamber and the Administration with its nominees. By the end of 1911, when I made an extended tour in Albania and Macedonia, things had gone from bad to worse, and the people, no longer partially protected by the various schemes of European Control, were suffering more than in the days of Abdul Hamid. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Turco-Italian War formed the spark which ignited the local fire. That fire, in the form of the first Balkan War, ended disastrously for Turkey, who thereby lost the whole of her European territory, except the small area situated to the south-east of the Enos-Midia Line. Subsequently, however, and during the second Balkan War, when Bulgaria was fully occupied elsewhere, the Young Turks reoccupied Adrianople and the surrounding country practically without opposition. This success was of far-reaching importance, for it regained for Enver Pasha and the Committee of Union and Progress a great deal of the prestige which they would otherwise have lost as a result of the onerous consequences of their policy. The above-mentioned events were closely bound up with an ever-increasing jealousy between the Great Powers and particularly with a steady growth of Germanic power in the East. From the moment of his accession to the throne the Kaiser worked for the development of his influence in Turkey-an influence which met with a temporary set-back after the reestablishment of the Constitution. But largely as a result of the energy of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein, the long-time German Ambassador in Constantinople, the Young Turks soon returned to the fold of the Central Powers. Austria-Hungary objected to Italy carrying her war against Turkey into the Balkans, and the Kaiser, who did his best to mitigate the consequences of the Tripoli Campaign, found it convenient to remove Baron Marschall to London when the position of that diplomatist had become compromised by an Italian policy over which he had no control. A little later the Triple Alliance endeavoured to save their protégé from the dangers of war by proposing decentralisation for European Turkey, and during and immediately after the Balkan Campaigns, the Kaiser gave his secret if not his avowed support to Turkey, whom he failed to discourage in the reoccupation of Adrianople. In short, Germany, who was not then ready for the world war, used the events of the years Vol. 250.-No. 496. 2 B 1912 and 1913 to improve her position at Constantinople, and to create a state of Balkan unrest likely to be favourable to her when the fateful day came. The opening of the year 1914 saw the beginning of a new internal and external situation. By that time the Committee of Union and Progress had suppressed all opposition, and the Government and the Sultan were more completely in its hands than at any time since the months immediately following the establishment of the Constitution. Equally well and more important still, in December 1913, General Liman von Sanders had been appointed Chief of the German Military Mission, his task being to reform the Turkish Army and to make recommendations for its mobilisation and employment in case of war. This appointment, and especially the command of the First Army Corps, given to General von Sanders, naturally caused great annoyance to the Triple Entente, and particularly to Russia. As a result the Kaiser at once promoted his military representative to the rank of General, which made him a Turkish Marshal, and instead of enjoying a direct command, he became Inspector-General of the Turkish forces. But neither this change nor the fact that the German Embassy gave a cold reception to the Mission made any difference to the facts that there was only one object in sending so distinguished a German soldier to Constantinople; that he worked loyally for the interests of his country, and that the reforms instituted and the rôle played by him before and after the outbreak of hostilities were largely responsible for enabling Turkey to be the means of prolonging the world war by a period the length of which it is still impossible to estimate. Although there is now little that is fresh to be said about Turkey during the great struggle, General Liman von Sanders writes with such obvious impartiality and with such an entire lack of bitterness that his observations and admissions upon many points are worthy of attention. To begin with, whilst Halidé Edib contends that the Young Turks tried hard but in vain to enlist Allied sympathy, and that we wanted Turkish neutrality without paying anything in return, no reader of the General's Five Years in Turkey' will be left with any illusions upon this subject. In the very early days of |