must unite Catholic to Modernist in emphatic denial, and which vitiates the whole teaching of the Incarnation because it implies (what traditional Christianity denies) an intervention of supernatural power to save the human nature of Christ from an injury to which, in the ordinary course of nature, it would be liable (and which, owing to a suspension of that power, He could not possibly foresee). I pass over the frequently seen but unsupported assertion that the "wine" of the Last Supper was not true wine but unfermented grape-juice. The Last Supper took place in Spring, and it belongs to the "limitations" of that period that unfermented grape-juice could not be kept until Spring. Even were this not the case, the Greek word employed is one which is always used to describe true wine.

Furthermore, unless there has been a similar unheard-of intervention in their behalf, these alleged deplorable effects have been operative for nineteen centuries upon a vast number of Christians, including all Catholic priests and, until quite recently, most Protestant ministers who have used wine in sacramental or memorial rites. If the universal harmfulness of wine were really a "scientific fact," it is a wonder that the prohibitionist Moslems did not overrun Christian Europe centuries ago.

Of course it is not a scientific fact. It is a superstitious belief. But it forms the only philosophical basis upon which a conscientious man can vote for the proposed Constitutional amendment. For unless one is convinced that any use of beverages containing alcohol is always and everywhere wrong, it is cowardly and un-Christian to vote that it shall be always and everywhere illegal.

It is cowardly. For it is the counsel of despair to act upon the assumption that there will always exist conditions such as would forbid all exercise of what one believes to be a natural right.

And it is un-Christian to join hands with those who are doing their very best, on the basis of anti-Christian assumptions, to make it forever impossible for American men to do what is, on Christian hypotheses, entirely permissible. JOHN COLE MCKIM.

THE BOOK OF THE MONTH

THE PRETTY LADY1

BY LAWRENCE GILMAN

AMONG those possible alterations in the soul of man and the ways of his life which some of us are trustful enough to look for as an outcome of the War, there are two which, though they are not likely to involve a revolution, yet hold for certain restless spirits a potential richness of gratification.

First, we hope that the stress of post-bellum reconstruction may sober our American newspapers into the habit of direct and honest speech: the habit of writing lucid and candid English. It is, of course, a fond delusion of city editors, reformed reporters, and schools of journalism, that newspaper training teaches a man to compose direct, terse and simple English-that the newspaper is a good school for young writers. If you would learn to write English with vigor, force, compactness (they tell us), get a job as reporter on a daily newspaper. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Stevenson spoke of "the copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter" he was thinking of the reporter's style, not of his morals. Copious"-" Corinthian "-"base": that characterizes the typical quality of most newspaper writing. Copious rather than compact, Corinthian rather than simple, base rather than honestthose are harsh epithets: but are they not justly applied to a tradition of English usage which requires a writer to say, not that a woman is pregnant, or with child, but that she is “in a delicate condition "; not that a man is drunk, but that he is "under the influence of liquor "; not that some reprobate has committed rape or seduction, but that he has been "guilty of a statutory offense"? English that is good enough for the Old Testament, the Gospels, the classics, and the

'The Pretty Lady, by Arnold Bennett. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1918.

masters of modern prose, is not good enough for the reporter and the copy-reader..

We do not need to be reminded that admirable writing intrudes at times into the American newspaper. That is perfectly true: we are extremely familiar with the fact, duly grateful for it, and we do not require to have it brought to our attention. We are not unmindful of a long tradition of brilliant and accomplished English in the case of certain editorial columns, certain specialists, certain inspired narrators. These we salute. Our point is that the common run of newspaper writing the sort of writing that fills column after column of our chief newspapers day after day, and the sort of tradition it derives from and indicates--ignores and contravenes those elementary virtues of English style which a newspaper training is supposed to conserve and foster. We mean that our newspaper writing, as it may be observed from day to day-chiefly in the news columns-reeks with almost every conceivable viciousness of which English prose is capable. The ideal English of the newspaper office is an English persistently indirect, flabby, ornate. It has precisely the opposites of those virtues which it is conventionally supposed to inculcate. Instead of stating facts and impressions with clarity and precision and economy, it states them ambiguously, vaguely, redundantly. Traditionally, it is figured to us as an athlete stripped for a contest, lithe, competent, free of encumbrances and impediments. Actually, it reveals itself as a shambling defective, mincing, circumlocutory, swathed in concealments and evasions. The emblem by which it swears is a fig leaf of colossal size; its standard-bearer is the ghost of Thomas Bowdler; the public to which it logically addresses itself is a public of elderly New England supervirgins, Baptist ministers, and the kind of young man who explained that the class yell of his correspondence school was a stamp stuck on an envelope upside down.

Its verbosity, its cheap "refinement," its indecencies of respectability, its prodigies of euphemism, its timid avoidance of simplicity and candor and expressional honestythese traits are flagrant and unescapable.

Walter Bagehot said of Gibbon's style that it is "not a style in which you can tell the truth. A historian who has to tell the truth must be able to tell what is vulgar is little... Gibbon cannot mention Asia minor!" Gib

what

bon's inhibition has been inherited by the average American newspaper writer. He cannot mention so shocking a thing as ordinary, legitimate pregnancy: it becomes, in his miserable jargon, a delicate condition." The New Testament description of the Nativity as it stands in Matthew, 1:18, would never get by the copy-desk of any respectable American newspaper. Writing of this kind illustrates a truth once pointed out to us by a shrewd observer of contemporary American life: that the word 'baby "has become slightly improper to our ears. In the world of the newspaper, this difficulty is easily overcome, and babies are now made decent by calling them "tots." Mr. James L. Ford once remarked that the sentence, "This is a dog," chalked by a schoolboy on a blackboard, was an ideal example of stylistic clarity, directness, and force. That budding stylist would have to be elaborately corrupted before he would be granted desk-room in a newspaper office. He would have to be taught to say: "This is a quadruped of the canine family," or: "This is man's most faithful friend." In other words, he would have to forget how to be brief, terse, concrete, simple, and learn to become oblique, diffuse, sentimental.

The second and cognate alteration for which we hope after the War-that other boon we mentioned at the start-lies potentially in the same direction: in the direction of a freer movement toward reality on the part of those of us whose business it is to report existence for the benefit of the unobservant or the disqualified-a habit of looking experience and the soul of man straight in the eye, and reporting what we see as if we were men of courage and honesty sure of the courage and honesty of others, rather than a company of timorous evaders, fearfully skulking behind a convention of suppressive respectability which great spirits and great art have always contemptuously thrust aside. In that day we shall know that it is not authentic delicacy of feeling and taste, but a bottomless vulgarity of soul, which makes a writer use gross euphemisms like "under the influence of liquor " and " questionable characters," instead of the honest English words that precisely and tersely describe those phenomena. "The publicans and the harlots," said Jesus to the chief priests and the elders, "go into the Kingdom of God before you." Into the Kingdom of God-yes; but not into the more exclusive kingdom of the conventional commentator upon life and art.

It is constantly amazing and amusing to receive fresh evidence that the type of mind which looks at life and reports upon it in this way is surviving to-day in situations where it is capable of doing grievous harm to latent appreciation. Only the other day we read in an important newspaper a critical comment upon Mr. Arnold Bennett's new novel in which the reviewer betrayed his annoyance with Mr. Bennett because the chief male character in The Pretty Lady leads the kind of metropolitan existence which would seem ill-chosen to the Committee of Fourteen. Whether or not Mr. Bennett had created a three-dimensional person; whether or not his projection of characters and events was artistically successfulthese matters were irrelevant, and our critic, with entire consistency, disdained to discuss them, passing on instead to denunciation of Mr. Bennett as sacriligeous for having portrayed with singular tenderness and delicacy the naïve piety of the Pretty Lady in the presence of a mediæval image of the Virgin: for the Pretty Lady was one of those whom Christ quite bluntly called harlots; and what right had Mr. Bennett to mention on the same page the mother of Jesus and one of the objects of his compassionate understanding?

Of such is the kingdom of the gross in heart.

We have arrived at Mr. Bennett's novel by a circuitous road, and have lingered overlong, perhaps, on the way. We feel ourselves justified, however, by the fact that his new book seems to us significant and precious chiefly because of the attitude from which it has issued and the spirit in which its elements have been assembled and observed. Mr. Bennett is not only a literary artist of positive and extraordinary excellence, but a genuinely free spirit. We are convinced of this, despite the existence of those Treatises on Conduct which fortified Professor Stuart Sherman's approval of Mr. Bennett as an artist. We have no present intention of reading "that book of popular philosophy, The Plain Man and His Wife," which Professor Sherman commends to the American public. We are content with the fact, patent in his imaginative re-creation of character and experience, that Mr. Bennett is a good deal more than the complacent moral standpatter which Professor Sherman sees and reverences in him. For Professor Sherman is as bent upon denying what he calls "radicalism" to Mr. Bennett as if he were defending him against a suspected indulgence in wifebeating; Professor Sherman cannot speak of ideas of free