of Goethe. This also is why his art is plastic, not pictorial. Form meant more to him than colour.

Yet Foscolo seems to have known and cared little for works of art. He has not a word to say of the pictures or statues of Florence. Perhaps this very limitation accounts for his success. There is no archæology or scholarship in his poems. All that remains of his immense reading, which comes out in his notes, are the visions it helped to feed. His learning, like his passion, has been absorbed in them. They are his own, as is the plastic form they took in his mind. He needed no models. This is why he can not only make the world of his day plastic, but also breathe life into it.

Foscolo finds his counterpart in Canova, the sculptor of the neo-classical revival, to whom he dedicates 'Le Grazie,' since he was then at work on a group of the Graces. Canova's art was, of course, but another reincarnation of the old mythology, which appealed to him as strongly as to Foscolo, through his own temperament. But it lacks the serenity of Foscolo's vision. This is unclouded by Canova's melancholy, nor does it bear any trace of his veiled sensuality, of the conscious nudity, as in the Venus emerging from her Bath, which had just been placed in the Pitti and to which Foscolo here refers. 'Dei Sepolcri' is Foscolo's most nearly perfect long poem. The idea of death, which to him meant annihilation, haunted him continually. 'He refuses to believe in any religion, yet shows his intense desire for faith in a vague, indefinite religiousness which hovers over the tombs without having the strength to rise to God.'

'All'ombra de' cipressi e dentro l'urne
Confortate di pianto è forse il sonno
Della morte men duro?'

6

Here we have the cold truth for Foscolo, but, as he has shown in Ortis,' we must turn our backs upon it if we are to have poetry or even happiness. There is no need to kill the illusion before its time. Fame he wants and a grave not unhonoured, and throughout the rest of this splendid poem we move among the illusions. Foscolo is in a state of poetic exaltation which enables him to soar far above the logic of his beliefs. Here he

finds the inspiring faith he needs. Sdegno il verso che suona e che non crea,' he says. The charge of emptiness is the last that can be brought against this work; but it also possesses the music of all great poetry. In the most famous passage, the key of the whole poem, he describes the effect produced upon him by the sight of the tombs of the mighty dead in S. Croce at Florence, among whom he now rests:

'A egregie cose il forte animo accendono
L'urne de' forti, o Pindemonte; e bella
E santa fanno al peregrin la terra

Che le ricetta.'

Here again it is in the visions, in the descriptive passages, that Foscolo is at his best, in pictures such as that of the ghosts fighting at Marathon or the prophecy of Cassandra at the end. But these visions do not stand alone. Behind them we are conscious of the poet's unsatisfied melancholy transforming them into a whole that is the bone of his bone. It is in its illogicality, in its truth to Foscolo himself with all his contradictions, that the greatness of the poem lies. In the beautiful sonnet Alla Sera' we have the quiet, resigned acceptance that Foscolo was to know only for a moment on rare occasions:

Forse perchè della fatal quiete

Tu sei l'imago, a me si cara vieni

O sera! ..

E mentre io guardo la tua pace, dorme
Quello spirito guerrier ch'entro mi rugge.'

In its sense of peace, its haunting melancholy, the sonnet almost suggests Leopardi. But in 'Dei Sepolcri' we are never far from the Ortis who sought to lose himself in the lovely world of Greek mythology, in Homer and his memories of Zacynthus as an escape from the world of reality which for him could hold out no hope.

L. COLLISON-MORLEY.

Ter

Art. 13.-THE LABOUR PARTY.

THE essential and characteristic feature of democracy is its organic quality. Democracy must be born not made; for it rests absolutely upon an organic, not a mechanical, conception of politics. A living organism has mind, will, life of its own; a machine, until made active by some impulse external to and independent of itself, is a mere inert and meaningless mass of matter. It is because democracy has the capacity of exhibiting the features of a living organism-the tissue and substance of which are the characters and personalities, the aims, the outlook, the ideals, the hopes, and the wishes of the individual men and women who compose it-that it can claim to be the highest form of human government. But if this claim is to be made good, it is indispensable that democracy should be true to the principle of its being, and that the organic element should predominate over the mechanical. When it is otherwise, when the mechanical element is uppermost, what appears to be democracy is really a changeling and -since the corruption of the best is the worst-the most worthless, if not the most dangerous form of human government. And further, that organic quality requires for its preservation the collision and contact of opposite forces. The collision and contact of party is as essential for the political organism as the collision and contact of sex is for the physical.

The machine-made party is thus the most dangerous of all the enemies of democracy. What should be living is dead; what should be spontaneous is induced; what should be real is sham. A foreign body is introduced into the political organism. Unless it be expelled or absorbed, the organism dies. To-day, the world is full of machine-made democracies crumbling before our eyes. The suspicion of the party machines,' so frequently expressed in this country by men of educated minds, is clear enough indication of their instinctive appreciation of the organic conception of politics, and it is the modern elaboration of the party machine which is perhaps more than any other single cause responsible for the complete withdrawal of many of the higher and

more fastidious types of personality in the Britain of today from any active engrossment in political life. Certain it is that the more the mechanical element in party vanquishes the organic, the lower sinks the reputation of the politician, the more sordid and degraded does the political life of a nation become. And, conversely, how invigorating and regenerating is the effect on that political life of the personality which possesses the special genius for developing the organic rather than the mechanical, which can bring life into the dry bones, whether it be Grattan in 18th-century Ireland, Lincoln in the United States, or here and to-day, the Prime Minister! If these general propositions be sound, it is worth while to examine the Labour Party in their light; since it seems at least probable that for the years immediately ahead, the Labour Party must share with the Conservative the conduct of the political life of England. Is it fit for that task? Is it founded upon an organic conception of politics? Will its effect be to lead democracy to a more vigorous and real life, more wholesome, more healthy? Will it develop the better and not the worse qualities of its own leaders? These questions reach, in importance, far beyond and below any connected with the programme or the policy of the Labour Party.

Now, if a party is to be a living organism it must in the first place possess a real unity of structure. The individual citizens must be the foundation, for they alone can supply vitality and reality. Thus in evil days or fine, the Conservative and the Liberal parties have alike been composed of actual men and women, combining together for no other reason than that they had common principles, common aspirations, common views on the government of the country and the affairs of the community. Their system of organising has become more elaborate, more complex, more laborious, under the changed conditions of modern life, but be it simple or elaborate, both the Conservative and the Liberal parties have been composed of actual citizens, combined for a single purpose. Whether in city ward or country polling district, in constituency association, in national federation, on the benches of the House of Commons or in the Cabinet, these political principles, held in common, are the link which unites them. At whatever point it

be dissected, the organism they compose-and it would not be an organism unless this were so-is of the same substance. And as a result, those who represent either of these parties in the House of Commons are nominated, approved, supported by and, in their turn, lead, guide, and encourage associations of men and women who are combined from the sole cause of being in their basic opinions on public affairs of a like mind. And for this reason, both the Conservative and the Liberal parties are part and parcel of the life of England, created by the English people, growing indeed and changing as the generations of Englishmen have grown and changed, but throughout their growth and despite these changes, homogeneous in structure, identical in substance, organic in quality. No such origins, history, or structure has the Labour Party. No spontaneous combination of individual citizens, animated by common principles, views, and aspirations brought it into existence; no evolution of these common principles caused its development; nor is it, in its structure, even now mainly composed of individual men and women.

The origin of the Labour Party was the creating of a caucus; its development the capture of fully grown organisations, existing for purposes totally apart from public affairs; its structure is a machine composed of other machines. Not in a dream, but in fact, the lean kine have devoured the fat. The last and fattest, it is true, still remains; but this coming Whitsuntide, the Co-operative movement, the oldest and richest treasure house of working-class savings, the great edifice built up on the principles of capitalism, in which millions of men and women have stored up a few hundred pounds of private capital, with its banks, its investment trust company, its thousands of wage-earning employees, its great invested capital, its dividends, is at its Annual Congress to be asked to enter into an alliance, which can only bring it at last into the maw of the Labour Party. There can be little doubt that the Congress will accept the invitation. If so, the efforts, the manœuvres, the manipulations of nearly fifty years will have reached their final objective.

It is impossible here to tell in detail the tangled and most unedifying tale of the lean kine's banquet. It has