i8 
LAND & WATER 
August ji, igi6 
like Vcrhaeren, we can bring ourselves to accept this 
machinery-driven life of ours and turn it to account. 
We intist have the discipline freely to yield up that small- 
scale beauty and humanity which time seems to be taking 
from us, and frankly to face this mechanical-looking life 
which the future seems to have destined to be ours. 
Let us acknowledge it frankly to ourselves ; the machine 
is here. Modem politics are here ; so is the trades- 
union ; so are electricity and steam. And we cannot 
catch again the human which it has displaced, in the old 
charming child-like shape which once it wore. 
The trade-union workman cannot have again the old 
sweet human relations with his master. He must strike 
when the union says so ; he must submit to let it pre- 
scribe his rate of work and rate of wages, fix his hours 
and even have a say as to whether he is to do an odd 
job for his neighbour in his spare time. Precisely similarly 
the manufacturer's machine is there. It is turning out 
articles in thousands a day, every one of which, perhaps, 
ought to have provided a skilled artizan with work for a 
week. But we cannot help it. We cannot go back 
and catch the beauty of the hand-made article even if 
we would. There is no inducement, for one thing. 
The enterprise would not repay the trouble. And that 
is not all. Even if we defied the manufacturer's machine, 
as we occasionally see a workman defy the imion, we 
should meet with precisely that man's trouble. Neither 
of us can get peace. We cannot carry out our designs 
unmolested. Therein both of us fail to get back to the 
dear old-time conditions. 
The old conditions were accepted by everybody, and 
a man got p^ace to live in them ; and that was in the 
essence of their nature. The old-time hand-worker 
worked in peace and so produced a beauty of which he 
didn't need to think. It was an accidental beauty. It 
was struck out by the way while the worker was wholly 
taken up with what to him were far more important 
matters— efficiency, practicability, the making a handle 
that would hold,' or a blade that would cut. Had he 
been for ever thinking about the charm which surrounded 
his work he would have lost it. But while wc are making 
the article, we can never be unconscious of its beauty as 
the old-time worker was. We live in a different day. 
We cannot be unconscious because the machine o\-er the 
way will not let us. It is rattling away there, turning 
out our weeks work every few minutes. We cannot 
forget it. And it forces us to be for ever -calling ti mind 
those " points of interest and beauty " which we know 
arc in hand-made things, and for whose sole sake we are 
persevering in our laborious methods. We must be for 
ever thinking and talking about the verv things which 
thinking and talking kills. No more can the trade-union 
man behave as though there were no union. And at 
bottom the reason is the same. He cannot do it naturally, 
unthinkingly and undisturbed. He may work the wrong 
hours for the wrong pay, but his neighbours will whisper 
about it. He may refuse to strike, but he will suffer for it. 
In a word, the old human relationship, like the old 
beauty, is gone, and we may as well let it go. Not that 
we cannot improve things ; for we can. But for that 
very reason we must let the old go, face forward and not 
attempt to face back. 
For there /s hope in the situation. At least there is 
hope in it if we take Verhaeren's lead. It \» the machine, 
we have said, which is working the havoc. The prin- 
ciple, then, is : advance to the machine and bid it dis- 
close to you its beauty. The beauty we have lost was 
accidental ? Well, there is an accidental beauty still. 
There are still things which we do frankly and without 
self-consciousness. We build bridges, we make guns. 
And — we make social-political machines too. It is 
quite true, the machine has undone the old-time beauty. 
But let us not forget. We created the machine. And 
whilst we were doing that in imconsciousness, nuich 
beauty flashed out by the way as fire from the flint. We 
have not yet taken much account of that. To take 
account of it, and go in and enjoy it, is the lesson of 
Verhaeren. We cannot build a Gothic temple again. 
But may there not be architecture in our ships and grace 
in our steam-hammers ? There may not be much of the 
human, perhaps, in our Pariiament. But cannot wc 
make a Parliament ? 
The human cannot be killed except by the human. 
Art cannot be killed excent by art- In America, I 
understand, they have carried it so far that a machini 
now turns out fifteenth century carvcd-oak panel., 
" indistinguishable except by an expert." Truly, these 
panels arc not art. Carved-oak panels were art in 
4he fifteenth century. But art — the art of modern 
America— most surely resides in the brain, which made 
that machine. 
Shells 
Young mother, little son, 
Playing upon 
A Sussex beach. 
As in a trance 
She watches waves that reach 
His grave in France — 
Her husband's, of whom records tell 
Tliat he was shattered by a shell 
In the advance. 
And now, his child and hers 
Brings, with a glance 
That triumph tells. 
Bright ocean-wares ; 
" O mother, I love shells- 
Had father shells in France ? " 
That evening, by his bed 
She bows her own young head ; 
Says prayers in faltering snatches 
Since grief at utterance catches : 
Forgive u<, God, as wo 
Forgive our enemy ! " 
Then he, from under pillows, 
Brnigs bric-a-brac of billows. 
She turns wet eyes askance — 
His word she sure foretells : — • 
" O mother, I love shells — 
Had father shells in France ? " 
ST!e, Heaven, how one hard throne. 
And he who sits thereon, 
Hath parodied Thy thunder ; 
Thwarted Thy schema of Love 
Put man and wife asunder ; 
Peopled with phantom faces 
Each nook and cove 
Of pleasant sunshine places ; 
Made even the sea 
A misery. 
And a child's chatter 
Cruel with shells that shatter. 
There is a fine intimacy in Mr. J. Middleton Murry's 
study, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Martin Seeker, 7s. 6d. ne t), an 
intimacy which reveals the Russian genius to this student 
of his work as more than novelist, and as the creator of a new 
form. Mr. Murry shows us Dostoevsky through his work, 
takes the really great books of the Russian and through 
them visualises the man. 
He admits that Dostoevsky was " a sick soul, a mind 
diseased, a man corrupted by his own thought," and the 
whole of this book is devoted" to justification of such a sick 
soul and the productions of sucii a mind. Many who know 
Dostocvsky's work almost as intimately as docs Mr. Murry 
will part company with him early in' this study, refuse to 
admit that the novelist's work was in its purpose the assertion 
of rebellion against life, for -to take an example— in his 
chapter on The Idiot, Mr. Slurry sets Rogozhin before 
Myshkin, displaces the one whom many would deem the 
central figure in order to set up the devil of the book as its 
hero. Dostoevsky " did not fit into the forms of general 
life, and he cannot be defined by his relations to them," 
says Mr. Murry. and he sets to work to define his hero by 
means of other forms. 
His work, which will raise a host of contentions, may be 
defined as brilliantly explanatory of Dostoevsky ; the effect 
of reading it will be to send the reader back to Dostoevsky 
hirnself for refutation or confirmation of the views set forth. 
It is a brilliant study of a genius, and it is valuable in that 
it will help to awaken interest in the great Russian. 
