lower plane are _menschlich allzu menschlich_. As a matter of fact the radical writers of to-day who are accomplishing anything of magnitude are still predominantly of that school of realism. But a few restless souls, those in particular whom Señor Ortega has in mind, driven on by the despotic Demon of the Absolute, have not been content to abide in this halfway house. They see clearly enough that art has not been purified by such realism, but mixed and muddied by deliberate opposition to the ethical interpretation of life; they will detach art from even that poor remnant of deliberation which made a selection among the elements of composite human nature with a certain regard, though an inverted regard, for moral values. They hold deliberation to be the foe of liberation. Hence the later theory, exemplified in English by James Joyce, that art shall not reproduce a picture of life as the humanist sees it, or even from the inverted point of view of the realist, but for its subject matter shall descend to what they call the pure “stream of consciousness.” The hero of fiction shall have no will, no purpose, no inhibition, no power of choice whether for good or evil, but shall be merely a medium through which passes an endless, unchecked, meaningless flux of sensations and memories and emotions and impulses. And so the limit of elimination has been reached--at least the practical limit, since below the stream of consciousness there would seem to remain nothing to represent save bottomless inanity. But this fact is to be noted: though the process of evolution may seem to have been carried on in the name of absolute art, the actual goal attained is an absolute of quite another order; there has been no true liberation, but a progressive descent in slavery. As, successively, one after another of the higher elements of our composite nature has been suppressed, a lower instinct has taken its place. The submergence of the humanistic conception of man as a responsible creature of free will has been accompanied by an emergence of the romantic glorification of uncontrollable temperament; this has been supplanted by a realistic theory of subjection to the bestial passions, and this, at the last, by an attempt to represent life as an unmitigated flux, which in practice, however it be in literature, means confinement in a mad-house. The practitioners of the newest art call themselves _surréalistes_, super-realists; they flatter themselves, they are sub-realists. Art may be dehumanised, but only in the sense that, having passed beyond the representation of men as undifferentiated from animals, it undertakes to portray them as complete imbeciles. To speak of the works produced by the boastful modern school as pure art is, from any point of view, mere bluff. By their fruits you shall know them. Turn the pages of the little magazine published in Paris under the title of _transition_, wherein Mr. Joyce and a group of denationalised