arts follow dark courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science.  Some day, without a doubt,—­and it may be a consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it—­fully informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies’s poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats’s “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths” came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.

There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining—­and this is one of them.  “Many a man prides himself” says Mr. Bourne, “on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living selection of his hereditary taste.”  This extract is a fair sample of the book’s thought and of its style.  But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that “persuasion” is a vain thing.  The appreciation of great art comes from within.

It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of Mr. Bourne’s purpose is undeniable.  But the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes, this one seems of little dynamic value—­besides being impracticable.

Yes, indeed.  Art has served Religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows.

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS—­AN APPRECIATION—­1907

A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play—­and I lived long enough to accomplish the task.  We live and learn.  When the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance.  Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays.  I may say without vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information:  for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, and I was aware of being in England—­in the twentieth-century England.  The fact did not fit the date and the place.  That was my first thought.  It was, in short, an improper fact.  I beg you to believe that I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.