Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it--they have tried most things--but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again. There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures) there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance; and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly, so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences, but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them "great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter, symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope, in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man, nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle, with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten.