The consideration of these facts leads us to wish that poetry were in the same case; and we are beginning to feel both that poetry may become a more active factor in normal life than hitherto and that a careful criticism may remove it from the desert space of assertion and undefended preference which it now inhabits. Possibly the war may help to cure us of our ancient English muddle-headedness. We have awakened with surprise to find our army an admirable and workmanlike machine. The South African war rid us, in military affairs, of the incompetent amateur and the obstructive official. Vague rumors of what the army had learnt there even reached other departments of activity: possibly this war will infect us all with a new energy and a new sense of reality. We may learn how to reach our ends by taking thought and by cherishing ideas instead of plunging on in a sublimely obstinate and indisciplined muddle. As for our war-poetry—I must end where I began—it is merely a sloughing of the old skin, a last discharge of the old disease. New York Letter GEORGE SOULE Nature flowers in the spring, man in the fall. With the first of November comes a bewilderment of elections, concerts, books, plays, new magazines, bombs, exhibitions, and all the other things that seem to have blossomed so futilely year after year. To set about the task of discovering the significant in it all is more confusing than to attempt to trace the origin of new species in a single May countryside. Take the theatres, for instance. There is the usual increase in plays which are so bad that even visiting travelling salesmen begin to suspect their artistic integrity. There is Shaw’s _Pygmalion_, which some think is second-rate Shavism well acted by Mrs. Campbell, and others believe is a good play badly acted. There is Molnar’s _The Phantom Rival_, an amusing and slender satire which is understood by one-quarter of the audience, and applauded for its faults by the other three-quarters. MacDonald Hastings, who aroused hopes with _The New Sin_, has descended to a very bad second-rate in a vehicle for Nazimova called _That Sort_. Elsie Ferguson has made a hit in _Outcasts_, written by Hubert Henry Davies,—the author of the fascinating _Cousin Kate_,—as a vehicle for Ethel Levey, the former star of unspeakable musical comedy in America who has become a great actress in London. It is a play of sordid “realism,” whose principal function seems to be to raise an almost academic question of morals and then disclaim any moral intent by a solution which in the opinion of most of the audience is either grossly immoral or disgustingly moral. Everything is topsy-turvy.