And I will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty conscience.

“Often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when I felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, I hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind.  With the pen poised in my hand I hesitated, whispering to myself ’What if I were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.’”

Such were the lofty scruples of M. Jules Lemaitre—­dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the Republic of Letters; a Censor of Plays exercising his august office openly in the light of day, with the authority of a European reputation.  But then M. Jules Lemaitre is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine conscience—­not an obscure hollow Chinese monstrosity ornamented with Mr. Stiggins’s plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother—­the State.

Frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf?  It has stood too long there.  Hatched in Pekin (I should say) by some Board of Respectable Rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of Moscow—­I suppose.  It is outlandish.  It is not venerable.  It does not belong here.  Is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some implement appropriate to its worth and status?  With an old broom handle for instance.

PART II—­LIFE

AUTOCRACY AND WAR—­1905

From the firing of the first shot on the banks of the Sha-ho, the fate of the great battle of the Russo-Japanese war hung in the balance for more than a fortnight.  The famous three-day battles, for which history has reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance before the struggles in Manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate persistence, and end—­as we have seen them end more than once—­not from the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness of the combatants.

We have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold, silent, colourless print of books and newspapers.  In stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, I have no intention of putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the battles in Manchuria.  I only wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the Far East has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of inadequate words.