MR. CLIVE BELL’S POT.—Mr. Clive Bell cannot escape the charge of literary insolence by giving to his collection of essays the deprecatory name of _Pot Boilers_. That the articles he has reprinted were designed to boil Mr. Clive Bell’s pot, and did, in fact, keep it simmering, may be true enough; for the _Athenæum_, in which most of them appeared, was an eclectic journal with a surprising taste for the bad as well as for the good. Mr. Clive Bell’s modesty, however, is titular only, for not merely has he republished these ashes of his yesterday’s fire, but he imagines them to be still ablaze. “It charms me,” he says, “to notice as I read these essays, with what care and conscience they are done.... I seem consistently to have cared much for four things—Art, Truth, Liberty, and Peace.” These are things which a more modest man would have left his biographer and eulogist to say of him; and even then not even friendship would have made them true. To Art and Truth, there are, of course, a good many references in Mr. Clive Bell’s essays, but the mere mention of these names ought not to be regarded as an evidence of care for the things themselves. Cannot the names of Art and Truth be also taken in vain? In the two concluding essays of the book are to be found most clearly Mr. Clive Bell’s conception of Art. It is indistinguishable from what may be called the Bohemian conception. Art is not moral, art is not useful, art is not a relative fact; it is an absolute to which all these other things are relative. The artist, again, is not a “practical” person, and it is no use expecting of him an interest in the non-artistic affairs of the world. The war, for instance? It is only a means to art, and what should be said of artists who abandon the end to occupy themselves with the means?