exhibitions of strength and courage. Art is the fine raiment in which the civilised man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps, because women have need of no such artifice that their contributions to the museum of the world’s art have been so casual and so imponderable. I believe that some such apologia has been made before, and I am half-inclined to feel that it was George Moore who made it. Certainly he has said somewhere that the most precious service that art has done to life is its exalting of an instinct into a revelation, its gorgeous apparelling of love. And whether or no he stressed the fact that it was a masculine achievement, it is a point certainly not to be disregarded by the critic of prose literature. For this is what it comes to, that the themes of the world’s great stories are masculine. And it is only youth that can write honestly and convincingly of age. We are under the spell always of what is distant from us. From the bondage of marriage we survey the raptures of free love. And from the deceit, the evasions, the premeditation of an intrigue we turn our eyes towards the decent pasturage of matrimony. Riot is as real to the virtuous, as virtue to the riotous. It is experience that attracts innocence. And if a young man would write of last love, he has, in the love for him of a mature woman, the situation ready to his hand. There is no need for him to search further; it is thus that the story of youth and middle age is told to him. If he would write of a man’s old age, would go beyond maturity, he would select some Père Goriot, some aspect of wronged senility, some Fouan or King Lear. And by the time that he has come himself to middle age, by the time that he has reached that borderland, the theme of age is, because he is no longer remote from it, unattractive. The ageing novelist returns to youth, and first love, and the raptures of spring. In “The Man of Property” Galsworthy told the story of mature, devastating passion; he was then at that point of balance of which Shakespeare wrote. But mature love, and the love of middle age for youth had, when he came to complete the Saga, ceased to appeal to him. The love of Jolyon for Irene is never actual to us; but of first love, of Val and Holly, of Jon and Fleur; of the hesitations, the blindness, the enrapturement of dawning love, he writes as few save Turgenev have ever written.