 APPEARANCE AND REALITY Is there any knowledge in the world, which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy. For philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions, not carelessly and dogmatically, as we do in ordinary life and even in the sciences, but critically, after exploring all that makes such questions puzzling, and after realizing all the vagueness and confusion that underlie our ordinary ideas. In daily life we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out the window, buildings and clouds, and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth, that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth, that owing to the earth's rotation it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that if any other normal person comes into my room he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true. To make our difficulties plain let us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown, and shiny. To the touch it is smooth, and cool, and hard. When I tap it it gives out a wooden sound. Anyone else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise. But as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Although I believe that the table is really of the same color all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colors on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colors, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected. For most practical purposes these differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all important. The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they really have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy, the distinction between appearance and reality, between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be. The practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are, but the philosophers wish to know this is stronger than the practical man's, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the difficulties of answering the question. To return to the table, it is evident from what we have found that there is no color which preeminently appears to be the color of the table, or even of one particular part of the table. It appears to be of different colors from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its color than others, and we know that even from a given point of view the color will seem different by artificial light, or to a colorblind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no color at all. Though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged. Color is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When in ordinary life we speak of the color of the table, we only mean the sort of color which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colors which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real, and therefore to avoid favoritism we are compelled to deny that in itself the table has any one particular color. The same thing applies to the texture. With a naked eye one can see the grain, but otherwise the table looks smooth and even. If we looked at it through a microscope we should see roughnesses and hills and valleys and all sorts of differences that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Which of these is the real table? We are naturally tempted to say that what we see through the microscope is more real, but that in turn would be changed by a still more powerful microscope. If then we cannot trust what we see with a naked eye, why should we trust what we see through a microscope? Thus again the confidence in our senses with which we began deserts us. The shape of the table is no better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the real shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But in fact as we all have to learn if we try to draw a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is really rectangular it will look from almost all points of view as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel they will look as if they converge to a point away from the spectator If they are of equal length they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table because experience has taught us to construct the real shape from the apparent shape, and the real shape is what interests us as practical men. But the real shape is not what we see. It is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move about the room. So that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table. Similar difficulties arise when we consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table, and also upon what part of the body we press with. Thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be supposed to reveal directly any definite property of the table, but at most to be signs of some property which perhaps causes all the sensations. But is not actually apparent in any of them, and the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can be elicited by wrapping the table. Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence two very difficult questions that once arise, namely, one, is there a real table at all? Two, if so, what sort of object can it be? It will help us in considering these questions to have a few simple terms of which the meaning is definite and clear. Let us give the name of sense data to the things that are immediately known in sensation, such things as colors, sounds, smells, hardnesses, roughnesses, and so on. We shall give the name sensation to the experience of being immediately aware of these things. Thus whenever we see a color we have a sensation of the color, but the color itself is a sense datum, not a sensation. The color is that of which we are immediately aware, and the awareness itself is the sensation. It is plain that if we are to know anything about the table, it must be by means of the sense data, brown color, oblong shape, smoothness, etc., which we associate with the table. But for the reasons which have been given, we cannot say that the table is the sense data, or even that the sense data are directly properties of the table. Thus a problem arises as to the relation of the sense data to the real table, supposing there is such a thing. The real table, if it exists, we will call a physical object. Thus we have to consider the relation of sense data to physical objects. The collection of all physical objects is called matter. Thus our two questions may be restated as follows. One, is there any such thing as matter? Two, if so, what is its nature? The philosopher who first brought prominently forward the reasons for regarding the immediate objects of our senses, as not existing independently of us, was Bishop Berkeley, 1685 through 1753. His three dialogues between Hylas and Thelonus, in opposition to skeptics and atheists, undertake to prove that there is no such thing as matter at all, and that the world consists of nothing but minds and their ideas. Hylas has hitherto believed in matter, but he has no match for Thelonus, who mercilessly drives him into contradictions and paradoxes, and makes his own denial of matter seem, in the end, as if it were almost common sense. The arguments employed are of very different value. Some are important and sound. Others are confused or quibbling. But Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity, and that if there are any things that exist independently of us, they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations. There are two different questions involved when we ask whether matter exists, and it is important to keep them clear. We commonly mean by matter something which is opposed to mind, something which we think of as occupying space and as radically incapable of any sort of thought or consciousness. It is chiefly in this sense that Berkeley denies matter. That is to say, he does not deny that the sense data which we commonly take as signs of the existence of the table are really signs of the existence of something independent of us, but he does deny that this something is non-mental, that it is neither mind nor ideas entertained by some mind. He admits that there must be something which continues to exist when we go out of the room or shut our eyes, and that what we call seeing the table does really give us reason for believing in something which persists even when we are not seeing it. But he thinks that this something cannot be radically different in nature from what we see and cannot be independent of seeing altogether, though it must be independent of our seeing. He has thus led to regard the real table as an idea in the mind of God. Such an idea has the required permanence and independence of ourselves without being, as matter would otherwise be, something quite unknowable in the sense that we can only infer it and can never be directly and immediately aware of it. Other philosophers since Berkeley have also held that although the table does not depend for its existence upon being seen by me, it does depend on being seen, or otherwise apprehended in sensation, by some mind, not necessarily the mind of God, but more often the whole collective mind of the universe. This they hold, as Berkeley does, chiefly because they think there can be nothing real, or at any rate nothing known to be real except minds and their thoughts and feelings. We might state the argument by which they support their view in some such way as this. Whatever can be thought of is an idea in the mind of the person thinking of it. Therefore nothing can be thought of except ideas and minds. Therefore anything else is inconceivable, and what is inconceivable cannot exist. Such an argument, in my opinion, is fallacious, and of course those who advance it do not put it so shortly or so crudely. But whether valid or not, the argument has been very widely advanced in one form or another, and very many philosophers, perhaps a majority, have held that there is nothing real except minds and their ideas. Such philosophers are called idealists. When they come to explaining matter, they either say, like Berkeley, that matter is really nothing but a collection of ideas, or they say, like Leibniz, 1646 through 1716, that what appears as matter is really a collection of more or less rudimentary minds. But these philosophers, though they deny matter as opposed to mind, nevertheless in another sense admit matter. It will be remembered that we asked two questions, namely, one, is there a real table at all? Two, if so, what sort of object can it be? Now both Berkeley and Leibniz admit that there is a real table, but Berkeley says it is certain ideas in the mind of God, and Leibniz says it is a colony of souls. Thus both of them answer our first question in the affirmative, and only diverge from the views of ordinary mortals in their answer to our second question. In fact, almost all philosophers seem to be agreed that there is a real table. They almost all agree that however much our sense data, color, shape, smoothness, etc., may depend upon us, yet their occurrence is a sign of something existing independently of us, something differing, perhaps, completely from our sense data, and yet to be regarded as causing those sense data whenever we are in a suitable relation to the real table. Now obviously this point in which the philosophers are agreed, the view that there is a real table, whatever its nature may be, is vitally important, and it will be worthwhile to consider what reasons there are for accepting this view before we go on to the further question as to the nature of the real table. Our next chapter, therefore, will be concerned with the reasons for supposing that there is a real table at all. Before we go farther it will be well to consider for a moment what it is that we have discovered so far. It has appeared that if we take any common object of the sort that is supposed to be known by the senses, what the senses immediately tell us is not the truth about the object as it is apart from us, but only the truth about certain sense data which, so far as we can see, depend upon the relations between us and the object. Thus what we directly see and feel is merely appearance, which we believe to be a sign of some reality behind. But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all, and if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like? Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypotheses may not be true. Thus our familiar table, which has aroused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Given this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Libnese tells us it is a community of souls, Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God, sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion. Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all. Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions, which increase the interest of the world and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface, even in the commonest things of daily life. The End of Appearance and Reality by Bertrand Russell The Workers and the Church by Charles Summer from Topics of Today, Busyman's Canada, June 1912. Read by Bologna Times. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. The Workers and the Church by Charles Summer. Everyone has just witnessed a remarkable midnight procession. 500 Anglican Church Socialists, headed by Mr. George Lansbury MP, bearing a cross, and with the Reverend Conrad Knoll and the Countess of Warwick prominent in the ranks, marched from Westminster to the Archbishop's Palace at Lambeth to lay before his grace a memorial expressing surprise and regret that the bishops had failed to take the side of the workers in the recent industrial troubles. The Archbishop was away and the memorial was accepted by his chaplain. The demonstration in front of the grand old pile, which has, for seven centuries, been the official home of the head of the Anglican Church, was on this occasion a peaceable one, but Lambeth Palace, in its time, has had to be defended from very hostile attacks. It is no new thing for the working classes to entertain the idea that his grace of canterbury has but little in common with the toilers. Lambeth Palace, entertained with magnificent hospitality, Plantagent, Tudor, and Stuart Kings, Queens Mary I, Elizabeth, Mary II, and Victoria visited the Archbishop and were received with great pomp, let in the poor. The grand gates of Morton's Tower were gladly open to those who could smile royal favours, but only a very few years ago, since the days of Archbishop Benson, have the spacious and beautiful grounds of the palaces been open for the enjoyment of the poor of crowded and squalid Lambeth. The great library of Lambeth Palace, the great hall, the noble guard room, have been the scenes of many historic gatherings, councils, and trials. Hard fought battles over such questions as a priest's genuflections in front of an altar, the decoration of a vestment, or the position of a candlestick. But how comparatively seldom has Lambeth Palace, the home and office of the head of the church, been the scene of a conference for bettering the condition of the toiling poor? Garden parties, for the dwellers of the West End, have been many under the shadow of the Lawlord's Tower. But it took years of agitation to convince the head of the church that the green and broad acres of Lambeth Palace, seldom used by his grace of Canterbury, who had another beautiful palace at Addington, would be a boon and a blessing to the children of those who toiled in the pottery's, the ironworks, and soap factories of murky Lambeth. Take the long line of Archbishops, from Lenfrank in 1070 to Benson, and the courtiers who have held sway at Lambeth, who have far outnumbered those who have followed the master as a friend of the people, names spoken reverently. Lambeth has had a Stephen Langton, a Henry Chichely, a Whitgift, a Tilletson, a Howley, and a Tate, names to be spoken with love and reverence. But some of these had hard work in doing good to atone for the mischief wrought by a lawd who saw eye to eye, and worked hand in hand with those who tried to murder English liberty. The terms of the memorial to the present Archbishop are not before me, but it will not surprise any student of history to find the head of the English church reminded of his duty to those who toil. Lambeth has been the scene of a very peaceable demonstration, but there have been episodes of violence in its history. Archbishop Boniface, who had committed an outrage on the prior of St. Bartholomew's Smithfield, had to repel a regular siege by excited Londoners. The followers of Watt Tyler, who was not such an awful rebel as some historians have painted him, attacked the palace, and, to their honour, some five hundred London apprentices held a very hostile demonstration at Lambeth against the obnoxious lawd. In 1780 Lambeth Palace suffered from the followers of the fanatic Lord George Gordon, and the Archbishop and his family had to beat a hasty retreat across the river. The present head of the church has but recently read the clergy a lecture on the Signs of the Times. He has the wisdom to see that the church, to hold its position, must take cognizance of the problems of everyday life, and that fact will certainly be brought home to him by the midnight visit of a band of people who, although their methods are unconventional, must have the excuse and be given the credit of being deadly in earnest. Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an entire of which kings and kings would be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to the gospel of peace. End of THE WORKERS AND THE CHURCH Books may be written in all sorts of places. Local inspiration may enter the birth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town, and since saints are supposed to look benignantly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old Flaubert, who imagined himself to be, among other things, a descendant of Vikings, might have hovered with amused interest over the decks of the two-thousand-ton steamer called the Adawa, on board of which, gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of Almair's Folly was begun. With interest, I say, for was not the kind Norman giant with enormous mustaches and a thundering voice the last of the romantics? Was he not, in his unworldly, almost ascetic devotion to his art, a sort of literary, saint-like hermit? It has set at last, said Nina, to her mother, pointing to the hills behind which the sun had sunk. These words of Almair's romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rusted on the blanket of my bed-place. They referred to a sunset in Malayan aisles and shaped themselves in my mind in a hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas, far removed from a commercial and yet romantic town of the northern hemisphere. But at that moment the mood of visions and words was cut short by the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth, coming in with a bang of the door, and the exclamation, You've made a jolly warm here! It was warm. I had turned on the steam-heater after placing a tent under the leaky water-cock, for perhaps you do not know that water will leak or steam will not. I am not aware of what my young friend had been doing on deck all that morning, but the hands he rubbed together vigorously were very red and imparted to me a chilly feeling by their mere aspect. He has remained the only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not play the banjo, he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to this sentimental inspection, and after meditating a while over the strings under my silent scrutiny, inquired airily, What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask? It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and simply turned the pad over with movement of instinctive secrecy. I could not have told him. He had put to flight the psychology of Nina Allmayer, her opening speech of the tenth chapter, and the words of Mrs. Allmayer's wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not have told him that Nina had said, It has set at last. He would have been extremely surprised, and perhaps have dropped his precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the son of my seagoing was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire. I did not know this myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an excellent young fellow, and treated me with more deference than in our relative positions I was strictly entitled to. He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and I went on looking through the porthole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail end of a great cart. A red-nosed carter and a blouse and woollen nightcap leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house-guard, belted over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy houses found a place in the picture framed by my porthole across a wide stretch of paved quay, brown with frozen mud. The coloring was somber, and the most conspicuous feature was a little café with curtain windows and a shabby front of white woodwork corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had been shifted down there from another berth in the neighborhood of the opera-house, where that same porthole gave me a view of quite another sort of café, the best in town I believe, and the very one where the worthy bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of Old Père Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an opera which was the tragic story of Locia di Lemmermoire in a setting of light music. I could recall no more the hallucination of the eastern archipelago, which I certainly hope to see again. The story of Almer's folly got put away under the pillow for that day. I do not know that I had any occupation to keep me away from it. The truth of the matter is that on board that ship we were leading just then a contemplative life. I will not say anything of my privileged position. I was there just to oblige, as an actor of my standing may take a small part in the benefit performance of a friend. As far as my feelings were concerned I did not wish to be in that steamer at that time and in those circumstances, and perhaps I was not even wanted there in the usual sense in which a ship wants an officer. It was the first and last instance in my sea life when I served shipowners who have remained completely shadowy to my apprehension. I do not mean this for the well-known firm of London Shipbrokers which had charted the ship to the, I will not say short-lived, but ephemeral Franco-Canadian transport company. A death leaves something behind, but there was never anything tangible left from the FCTC. It flourished no longer than roses live, and unlike the roses, it blossomed in the dead of winter, admitted to sort of faint perfume of adventure and died before spring sat down. But indubitably it was a company. It had even a house flag, all white, with the letters FCTC artfully tangled up in a complicated monogram. We flew it at our main mast-head, and now I have come to the conclusion that it was the only flag of its kind in existence. All the same we on board for many days had the impression of being a unit of a large fleet with fortnightly departures for Montreal and Quebec as advertised in pamphlets and prospectuses which came aboard in a large package in Victoria Dock, London, just before we started for Rouen-France, and in the shadowy life of the FCTC lies the secret of that, my last employment in my calling, which in a remote sense interrupted the rhythmical development of Nina Almeyer's story. The then secretary of the London Shipmaster Society, with its modest rooms in Fen Church Street, was a man of indefatigable activity and the greatest devotion to his task. He is responsible for what was my last association with a ship. I call it that because it can hardly be called a sea-going experience. Dear Captain Fraud, it is impossible not to pay him the tribute of affectionate familiarity at this distance of years, had very sound views as to the advancement of knowledge and status for the whole body of the officers of the mercantile marine. He organized for us courses of professional lectures. St. John Ambulance classes corresponded industriously with public bodies and members of parliament on subjects touching the interests of the service, and as to the oncoming of some inquiry or commission relating to matters of the sea and to the work of seamen it was a perfect godsend to his need of exerting himself on our corporate behalf. Together with this high sense of his official duties he had in him a vein of personal kindness, a strong disposition to do what good he could to the individual members of that craft of which in his time he had been a very excellent master. And what greater kindness can one do to a seamen than to put him in the way of employment? St. Fraud did not see why the shipmaster society, besides its general guardianship of our interests, should not be unofficially an employment agency of the very highest class. I am trying to persuade all our great ship-owning firms to come to us for their men. There is nothing of a trade union spirit about our society, and I really don't see why they should not, he said once to me. I am always telling the captains, too, that all things being equal they ought to give preference to the members of the society. In my position I can generally find for them what they want amongst our members or our associate members. In my wanderings about London from west to east and back again I was very idle then. The two little rooms in Fenchurch Street were a sort of resting place where my spirit hankering after the sea could feel itself nearer to the ships, the men, and the life of its choice, nearer there than on any other spot of the solid earth. This resting place used to be, at about five o'clock in the afternoon, full of men and tobacco smoke, but Captain Fraud had the smaller room to himself, and there he granted private interviews. His principal motive was to render service. This one murky November afternoon he beckoned me in with a crooked finger and that peculiar glance above his spectacles, which is perhaps my strongest physical recollection of the man. I have had in here a shipmaster this morning, he said, getting back to his desk and motioning me to a chair, who was in want of an officer. It's for a steamship. You know, nothing pleases me more than to be asked, but unfortunately I do not quite see my way. As the outer room was full of men, I cast a wondering glance at the closed door, but he shook his head. Oh, yes, I should be only too glad to get that berth for one of them, but the fact of the matter is the captain of that ship wants an officer who can speak French fluently, and that's not so easy to find. I do not know anybody myself but you. It's a second officer's berth, and, of course, you would not care. Would you know? I know that it isn't what you are looking for. It was not. I had given myself up to the idleness of a haunted man who looks for nothing but words wherein to capture his visions. But I admit that outwardly I resembled sufficiently a man who could make a second officer for a steamer chartered by a French company. I showed no sign of being haunted by the fate of Nina and by the murmurs of tropical forests, and even my intimate intercourse with Almyre, a person of weak character, had not put a visible mark upon my features. For many years he and the world of his story had been the companions of my imagination without, I hope, impairing my ability to deal with the realities of sea life. I had had the man and his surroundings with me ever since my return from the eastern waters, some four years before the day of which I speak. It was in the front-setting-room of furnished apartments in a Pemlico square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings, Almyre, that old acquaintance, came nobly to the rescue. Before long, as was only proper, his wife and daughter joined him round my table, and then the rest of that pante band came full of words and gestures. Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of melees, Arabs, and half-castes. They did not clamour aloud for my attention. They came with a silent and irresistible appeal. And the appeal, I affirm here, was not to my self-love or my vanity. It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in their obscure, sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth. I did not receive my visitors with boisterous rapture as the bearers of any gifts or profit or fame. There was no vision of a printed book before me as I sat writing at that table, situated in a decayed part of Belgravia. After all these years, each leaving its evidence of slowly blackened pages, I can honestly say that it is a sentiment akin to piety which prompted me to render in words assembled with conscientious care the memory of things far distant and of men who had lived. But coming back Captain Fraud and his fixed idea of never disappointing shipowners or ship captains, it was not likely that I should fail him in his ambition. To satisfy, at a few hours' notice, the unusual demand for a French-speaking officer. He explained to me that the ship was chartered by a French company intending to establish a regular month lead line of sailings from Rouen for the transport of French immigrants to Canada. But frankly, this sort of thing did not interest me very much. I said gravely that if it were really a matter of keeping up the reputation of the shipmaster society, I would consider it. But the consideration was just for form's sake. The next day I interviewed the captain, and I believed we were impressed favorably with each other. He explained that his chief mate was an excellent man in every respect, and that he could not think of dismissing him so as to give me the higher position. But that if I consented to come as second officer, I would be given certain special advantages, and so on. I told him that if I came at all, the rank really did not matter. I am sure, he insisted. You will get on first-rate with Mr. Paramore. I promised faithfully to stay for two trips at least, and it was in those circumstances that what was to be my last connection with the ship began. And after all, there was not even one single trip. It may be that it was simply the fulfillment of fate of that written word on my forehead which apparently forbade me, through all my sea wanderings, ever to achieve the crossing of the western ocean, using the worlds in that special sense in which sailors speak of western ocean trade, of western ocean packets, of western ocean hard cases. The new life attended closely upon the old, and the nine chapters of Almyre's Folly went with me to the Victoria Dock, once in a few days we started for Rouen. I won't go so far as saying that the engaging of a man, fated never to cross the western ocean, was the absolute cause of the Franco-Canadian transport company's failure, to achieve even a single passage. It might have been that, of course, but the obvious, gross obstacle, was clearly the watt of money. Four hundred and sixty bunks for emigrants were put together in the tween decks by industrious carpenters while we lay in the Victoria Dock, but never an emigrant turned up in Rouen, of which, being a humane person, I confess I was glad. Some gentlemen from Paris, I think there were three of them, and one was said to be the chairman, turned up indeed, and went from end to end of the ship, knocking their so-cats cruelly against the deck-beams. I attended them personally, and I can vouch for it that the interest they took in things was intelligent enough, though obviously they had never seen anything of this sort before. Their faces, as they went ashore, were a cheerfully inconclusive expression. Notwithstanding that this inspecting ceremony was supposed to be a preliminary to immediate sailing, it was then, as they filed down our gangway, that I received the inward munition that no sailing within the meaning of our charter-party would ever take place. It must be said that in less than three weeks a move took place. When we first arrived, we had been taken up with much ceremony well towards the center of the town, and all the street corners being placarded with the tricolor posters announcing the birth of our company, the petite bourgeois with his wife and family made a Sunday holiday from the inspection of the ship. I was always in evidence in my best uniform to give information, as though I had been a cook's tourist interpreter, while our quartermasters reaped a harvest of small change from personally conducted parties. But when the move was made, that move which carried us some mile-and-a-half down the stream to be tied up to an altogether muddier and shabbier quay, then indeed the desolation of solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation. For as we had the ship ready for sea, to the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the day is short, we were absolutely idle. Idle to the point of blushing with shame when the thought struck us that all the time our salaries went on. Young Cole was aggrieved because, as he said, he could not enjoy any sort of fun in the evening after loafing like this all day. Even the banjo lost its charm since there was nothing to prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good Paramore, he was really a most excellent fellow, became unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature. Till one dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the crew and hauling both cables up on deck and turning them in for end. For a moment Mr. Paramore was radiant. Excellent idea, but directly his face fell. Why, yes, but we can't make that job last more than three days, he muttered. I don't know how long he expected us to be stuck on the riverside outskirts of Rouen, but I know that the cables got hauled up and turned in for end, according to my satanic suggestion. Put down again, and the very existence utterly forgotten. I believe before a French river pilot came on board to take our ship down, empty as she came, into the hover roads. We may think that the state of forced idleness favored some advance in the fortune of Almayer and his daughter, yet it was not so. As if it were some sort of evil spell, my banjoist cabin-mate's interruption, as related above, had arrested them short at the point of that faithful sunset for many weeks together. It was always thus with this book, begun in eighty-nine, and finished in ninety-four, with that shortest of all the novels, which it was to be my lot to write. Between its opening exclamation calling Almayer to his dinner and his wife's voice, and Abdullah's, his enemy, mental reference to the God of Islam, the merciful, the compassionate, which closes the book. There were to come several long sea passages, a visit, to use the elevated phraseology suitable to the occasion, to the scenes, some of them, of my childhood, and the realization of childhood's vain words, expressing a lighthearted and romantic whim. It was in eighteen sixty-eight, when, nine years older thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa, of the time, and putting my finger on the blank space, then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance, and an amazing audacity, which are no longer in my character now. When I grow up, I shall go there. And of course, I thought no more about it, till after a quarter of a century or so, an opportunity offered to go there, as if the sin of childish audacity were to be visited on my mature head. Yes, I did go there, there being the region of Stanley Falls, which in sixty-eight was the blankest of blank spaces on the earth's figured surface. And the manuscript of Almer's Folly carried about me as if it were a talisman of a treasure went there too. That it ever came out of there seems a special dispensation of providence, because a good many of my other properties, infinitely more valuable and useful to me, remain behind through unfortunate accidents of transportation. I called to mind, for instance, a specially awkward turn of the Congo between Kinshasa and Leopoldville, more particularly when one had to take it at night in a big canoe with only half the proper number of paddlers. I failed in being the second white man on record drowned at that interesting spot through the upsetting of a canoe. The first was a young Belgian officer, but the accident happened some months before my time, and he too, I believe, was going home, not perhaps quite so ill as myself, but still he was going home. I got round the turn more or less alive, though I was too sick to care whether I did or not, and always with Almayer's Folly, amongst my diminishing baggage, I arrived at that delectable capital, Boma, where before the departure of the steamer, which was to take me home, I had the time to wish myself dead over and over again with perfect sincerity. At that day there were in existence only seven chapters of Almayer's Folly, but the chapter in my history which followed was that of a long, long illness and very dismal convalescence. Geneva, or more precisely the hydropathic establishment of Champel, is rendered forever famous by the termination of the eighth chapter in the history of Almayer's decline and fall. The events of the ninth are inextricably mixed up with the details of the proper management of a waterside warehouse owned by a certain city firm whose name does not matter. But that work, undertaken to accustom myself again to the activities of a healthy existence, soon came to an end. The earth had nothing to hold me with for very long, and then that memorable story, like a cask of choice Madeira, got carried for three years to and fro upon the sea. Whether this treatment improved its flavor or not, of course I would not like to say. As far as appearance is concerned, it certainly did nothing of the kind. The whole manuscript acquired a faded look and an ancient yellowish complexion. It became at last unreasonable to suppose that anything in the world would ever happen to Almayer and Nina, and yet something most unlikely to happen on the high seas was to wake them up from their state of suspended animation. What is it that Novala says? It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it. And what is the novel, if not a conviction, of our fellow man's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history? It would be, on my part, the greatest in gratitude ever to forget the sallow, sunken face, and the deep-set dark eyes of the young Cambridge man—he was a passenger for his health—on board the Good Ship Torrens, outward bound to Australia—who was the first reader of Almayer's Folly, the very first reader I ever had. Would it bore you very much reading a manuscript and a handwriting like mine? I asked him one evening, on a sudden impulse, at the end of a longish conversation, whose subject was Given's history. Jacques, that was his name, was sitting in my cabin, one stormy dog-watch below, after bringing me a book to read from his own travelling store. Not at all, he answered, with his courteous intonation and a faint smile. As I pulled a drawer open, his suddenly aroused curiosity gave him a watchful expression. I wonder what he expected to see—a poem, maybe. All that's beyond guessing now. He was not a cold, but a calm man, still more subdued by disease, a man of few words, and of an unassuming modesty in general intercourse, but with something uncommon in the whole of his person, which set him apart from the undistinguished lot of our sixty passengers. His eyes had a thoughtful and prospective look, in his attractive, reserved manner, and in a veiled, sympathetic voice he asked, What is this? It is sort of a tale, I answered, with an effort. It is not even finished yet. Nevertheless, I would like to know what you think of it. He put the manuscript in the breast pocket of his jacket. I remember perfectly his thin, brown fingers, folding it lengthwise. I will read it to-morrow, he remarked, seizing the door handle, and then, watching the roll of the ship for a propitious moment, he opened the door and was gone. In the moment of his exit I heard the sustained booming of the wind, the swish of the water on the decks of the torrents, and the subdued, as of distant, roar of the rising sea. I noted the growing disquiet in the great restlessness of the ocean, and responded professionally to it with the thought that, at eight o'clock, in another half hour or so, at the furthest, the top gallant sails would have to come off the ship. Next day, but this time in the first dog-watch, Jacques entered my cabin. He had a thick woolen muffler round his throat, and the manuscript was in his hand. He tendered it to me with a steady look, but without a word. I took it in silence. He sat down on the couch, and still said nothing. I opened and shut a door under my desk, on which a filled-up log slate lay wide open in its wooden frame, waiting to be copied neatly into the sort of book I was accustomed to write with care, the ship's log book. I turned my back squarely on the desk, and even then Jacques never offered a word. Well, what do you say? I asked him at last. Is it worth finishing? This question expressed exactly the whole of my thoughts. Distinctly he answered in his sedate, veiled boys, and then coughed a little. Were you interested? I inquired further, almost in a whisper. Very much! In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my bed-place swung to and fro as it were a punca. The bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly and the gusts of wind. It was in latitude forty south, and nearly in the longitude of Greenwich, as far as I can remember, that these quiet rites of Almeyer's and Nina's resurrection were taking place. In the prolonged silence it occurred to me that there was a good deal of retrospective writing in the story as far as it went. Was it intelligible in its action, I asked myself, as if already the storyteller were being born into the body of a seaman. But I heard on deck the whistle of the officer of the watch, and remained on the alert to catch the order that was to follow this call to attention. It reached me as a faint, fierce shout to square the yards. Aha! I thought to myself, a westerly blow coming on. Then I turned to my very first reader, who, alas, was not to live long enough to know the end of the tale. Now let me ask you one more thing. Is the story quite clear to you as it stands? He raised his dark, gentle eyes to my face, and seemed surprised. Yes, perfectly. That was all I was to hear from his lips concerning the merits of Almeyer's folly. We never spoke together of the book again. A long period of bad weather set in, and I had no thoughts left but for my duties, whilst poor jock caught a fatal cold and had to keep close in his cabin. When we arrived in Adelaide, the first reader of my prose went at once up-country and died rather suddenly in the end, either in Australia or it may be on the passage while going home through the Suez Canal. I am not sure what it was now, and I do not think I ever heard precisely. Though I made inquiries about him from some of our returned passengers who, wandering about to see the country, during the ship's day and port, had come upon him here and there. At last we sailed, homeward bound, and still not one line was added to the careless scrawl of the many pages which poor jock had had the patience to read with the very shadows of eternity gathering already in the hollows of his kind, steadfast eyes. The purpose instilled into me by his simple and final, distinctly, remained dormant, yet alive to await its opportunity. I daresay I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea voyage after voyage. Lives must follow upon each other, as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one, one for all men and for all occupations. I do not know which of the two impulses has appeared more mysterious and more wonderful to me. But still, in writing, as in going to sea, I had to wait my opportunity. Let me confess here that I was never one of those wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a wash-tub for the sake of the fun, and if I may pride myself upon my consistency, it was ever just the same with my writing. Some men, I have heard, write in railway carriages, and could do it, perhaps, sitting cross-legged on a clothes-line, but I must confess that my sporadic disposition will not consent to write without something at least resembling a chair. Line by line, rather than page by page, was the growth of Almayer's folly. And so it happened that I very nearly lost the manuscript. Advance now to the first words of the ninth chapter in the Friedrichstrasse railway station that's in Berlin, you know, on my way to Poland, or more precisely to Ukraine. On an early, sleepy morning, changing trains, in a hurry, I left my Gladstone bag in a refreshment-room. A worthy and intelligent Koffertrager rescued it. Yet in my anxiety I was not thinking of the manuscript, but of all the other things that were packed in the bag. In Warsaw, where I spent two days, those wandering pages were never exposed to the light, except once to candlelight, while the bag lay open on a chair. I was dressing hurriedly to dine at a sporting club. A friend of my childhood, he had been in the diplomatic service, but had turned to growing wheat on paternal acres, and we had not seen each other for over twenty years, was sitting on the hotel sofa waiting to carry me off there. You might tell me something of your life while you're dressing, he suggested kindly. I do not think I told him much of my life story, either then or later. The talk of the select little party with which he made me dine was extremely animated and embraced most subjects under heaven, from big game shooting in Africa to the last poem published in a very modernist review edited by the very young and patronized by the highest society. But it never touched upon Almyer's folly, and next morning in uninterrupted obscurity this inseparable companion went on rolling with me in the southeast direction towards the government of Kiev. At that time there was an eight-hours drive, if not more, from the railway station to the country house, which was my destination. Dear boy, these words were always written in English. So ran the last letter from that house received in London. Get yourself driven to the only inn in the place, dine as well as you can, and sometime in the evening, my own confidential servant, factotum and major domo, a Mr. V.S. I warn you he is of noble extraction. We'll present himself before you, reporting the arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose, with such overcoats as you may have with you, will keep you from freezing on the road. Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an enormous barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door opened, and in a travelling costume of long boots, big sheepskin cap, and a short coat, Gert, with a leather belt, the Mr. V.S. of noble extraction, a man of about thirty-five, appeared with an air of perplexity on his open and moustachioed continents. I got up from the table and greeted him in Polish, with, I hope, the right shade of consideration demanded by his noble blood and his confidential position. His face cleared up in a wonderful way. It appeared that, notwithstanding my uncle's earnest assurances, the good fellow had remained in doubt of our understanding each other. He imagined I would talk to him in some foreign language. I was told that his last words on getting into the sledge to come meet me shaped an anxious exclamation. Well, well, here I am going, but God only knows how I am to make myself understood to our master's nephew. We understood each other very well from the first. He took charge of me, as I were not quite of age. I had a delightful boyish feeling of coming home from school when he muffled me up next morning in an enormous bearskin travelling coat, and took his seat protectively by my side. The sledge was a very small one, and it looked utterly insignificant, almost like a toy behind the four big bays, harnessed two and two. We three, counting the coachmen, filled it completely. He was a young fellow with clear blue eyes. The high colour of his livery fur coat framed his cheerful continents and stood all round level with the top of his head. Now, Joseph, my companion, addressed him, do you think we shall manage to get home before six? His answer was that we would surely, with God's help, and providing there were no heavy drifts in the long stretch between certain villages whose names came with an extremely familiar sound to my ears. He turned out to be an excellent coachman with an instinct for keeping the road amongst the snow-covered fields and a natural gift of getting the best out of his horses. He is the son of that Joseph that, I suppose, the captain remembers. He who used to drive the captain's late grandmother of holy memory remarked V.S. busy tucking fur rugs about my feet. I remembered perfectly the trusty Joseph he used to drive my grandmother. Why, he it was, who let me hold the reins for the first time in my life and allowed me to play with a great foreign-hand whip outside the doors of the coach-house. What became of him? I asked. He is no longer serving, I suppose. He served our master, was the reply, but he died of cholera ten years ago now, that great epidemic we had, and his wife died at the same time, the whole houseful of them, and this is the only boy that was left. The manuscript of Almyer's Folly was reposing in the bag under our feet. I saw again the sun setting on the plains as I saw it in the travels of my childhood. It set, clear and red, dipping into the snow in full view as if it were setting on the sea. It was twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land, and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till. Out of the waste of a white earth joining a bestowed sky surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain, a cottage or two glided by, a low and terminable wall, and then glimmering and winking through a screen of fir trees the lights of the master's house. That very evening the wandering manuscript of Almyer's Folly was unpacked and un ostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my room. The guest-room which had been, I was informed in an effectively careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years or so. It attracted no attention from the affectionate presence hovering round the sun of the favorite sister. You won't have many hours to yourself while you are staying with me, brother, he said. The form of address borrowed from the speech of our peasants, being the usual expression of the highest good humor in a moment of affectionate elation. I shall be always coming in for a chat. As a matter of fact, we had the whole house to chat in, and were everlastingly intruding upon each other. I invaded the retirement of his study where the principal feature was a colossal silver ink-stan presented to him on his fiftieth year by a subscription of all his wards then living. He had been guardian of many orphans of land-owning families from the three southern provinces, ever since the year 1860. Some of them had been my school-fellows and playmates, but not one of them, girls or boys, that I know of has ever written a novel. One or two were older than myself, considerably older too. One of them, a visitor I remember in my early years, was the man who first put me on horseback, and his four-horse bachelor turnout, his perfect horsemanship and general skill in manly exercises, was one of my earliest admirations. I seemed to remember my mother looking on from a colonnade in front of the dining-room windows as I was lifted upon the pony, held for all I know, by the very Joseph, the groom attached especially to my grandmother's service, who died of cholera. It was, certainly, a young man in a dark blue, tailless coat and huge, Cossack trousers, that being the livery of the men above the stables. It must have been in 1864, but reckoning by another mode of calculating time, it was certainly in the year in which my mother obtained permission to travel south and visit her family, from the exile into which she had followed my father. For that, too, she had had to ask permission, and I know that one of the conditions of that favor was that she should be treated exactly as a condemned exile herself. Yet, a couple of years later, in memory of her eldest brother, who had served in the guards and dying early, left hosts of friends, and a loved memory in the great world of St. Petersburg, some influential personages procured for her this permission. It was officially called the Highest Grace of a three-month leave from exile. This is also the year in which I first began to remember my mother with more distinctness than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness. And I also remember the great gathering of all the relations from near and far in the gray heads of the family friends, paying her the homage of respect and love in the house of her favorite brother, who, a few years later, was to take the place for me of both my parents. I did not understand the tragic significance of it all at the time, though indeed I remember that doctors also came. There were no signs of infelidism about her, but I think that already they had pronounced her doom unless perhaps the change to a southern climate could re-establish her declining strength. For me it seems the very happiest period of my existence. There was my cousin, a delightful, quick-tempered little girl, some months younger than myself, whose life, lovingly watched over, as if she were a royal princess, came to an end with her fifteenth year. There were other children, too, many of whom are dead now, and not a few whose very names I have forgotten. Overall this hung the oppressive shadow of the great Russian empire, the shadow lowering with the darkness of a newborn national hatred fostered by the Moscow School of Journalists against the Poles after the ill-elmen rising of 1863. This is a far cry back from the manuscript of Almyr's Folly, but the public record of these formative impressions is not the whim of an easy egotism. These, too, are things human, already distant in their appeal. It is me that something more should be left for the novelist children than the colors and figures of his own hard-won creation. That which in their grown-up years may appear to the world about them as the most enigmatic side of their natures, and perhaps must remain forever obscure even to themselves, will be their unconscious response to the still voice of that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their personalities are remotely derived. Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales and the emotions of the man reviewing his own experience. End of Chapter 1 of Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad Four classes that constitute a menace from anti-suffrage Ten Good Reasons by Grace Duffield Goodwin Reading by Bologna Times We are a nation of unsolved problems. Brains and time and patience are going into their solution. Our Negro and our alien problem are ours alone. No other nation shows a condition in which these two difficulties exist side by side and press for solution at the same time. At present no one is bold enough to say that we are finding it easy to amalgamate the sorrowful legacy of our own greed and inhumanity in the race of struggling children just up from slavery, confused and bewildered even yet by the sufferings of the past, the burden of the present, the blind ambitions of the future. Our American Negroes are not yet woven into the fabric of our common life. Their ignorance, their helplessness, has not yet ceased to be a political menace. In the southern states, where white control is held only by the frankest bribery, where the Negroes number five to one or ten to one as the case may be, it is proposed to add for further exploitation and bribery all the Negro women who are more helpless and ignorant than the men. This is said with full realization of the numbers of Negro men and women who are far beyond the average of their people. One has but to see the race close at hand to recognize its sterling virtues and its dangerous weaknesses, virtues of sympathy, patience, cheerfulness, loyalty, weaknesses of moral fiber and of mental grasp. We have the problem of the immigrant coming here by millions in the last decade, coming from different political conditions, new to republicanism, new to responsibility, new to freedom, which in the exuberance of the second generation he misreads license. He clings to his own and he makes in all our cities a ghetto or a little Italy or such a settlement as that of fifty thousand bohemians in New York settlements which are not American in any particular. He populates the streets of the New England mill towns until in Rhode Island one may walk perhaps two or three blocks without hearing a word of English. In five years he is a citizen. In five years he is expected, with the pressure of a terrible toil upon him, to learn the language, the customs, the ideals of his future home and to become a unit in its government. As a matter of fact the majority toil incessantly, learn very little, are exploited by the boss of the ward no little and care less about the government of their adopted country. What we are doing to make him worthy of citizenship is but a drop in the bucket compared to his numbers and his need. We must put time and brains upon the problem of the foreign man as a voter. How will it help to add the foreign woman? All workers among these people recognize how much more backward is the foreign woman than the foreign man. Many of the women live years in this country without even learning the language. This is not true of the younger generation which tends to irreligion and lawlessness. The reaction does not set in until the third generation as those well know who have lived and worked among them. The older and the younger foreign women for very different reasons would add greatly to the danger of the naturalized foreign vote and as we are constantly receiving them and as the quality is steadily deteriorating we shall have this to consider for many years to come. The suffragist proposes to double these two problems. We have in common with all countries the problem of the vicious woman numbered in our cities by the thousands. The suffragists tell us that they will not vote, that they will not register because they do not desire publicity. They are already registered in the lists kept by the police in many cities. They are not classed as criminal only as potentially so. They would not shrink from registration and who exploit them would see that they voted. To a woman in this class, I said, not long ago, do you want to vote? Yes, she replied. Why? I asked. What would you do with the ballot? God! she breathed, raising tragic arms above her head. I'd sell it and take a vacation. Another problem in all countries is that of the intelligent, consciousness woman, she exists, and she is the companion of the intelligent, consciousness man who plays politics for what there is in it, here in America as perhaps nowhere else in the world to the same extent. The man who makes the public shame of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh or Denver or San Francisco or Adams County, Ohio. The shame of every American city in town that owns the rule of the boss and the ring that has political access to grind and political trades to make. Over against these four classes of undesirable voters among women would be the comparatively small number of earnest, intelligent women capable of handling public affairs. They would be overwhelmed by numbers. End of four classes that constitute a menace by Grace Duffield Goodwin. A Quartet of Potters from All Manor of Folk, Interpretations and Studies by Holbrook Jackson, reading by Bologna Times. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. A Quartet of Potters by Holbrook Jackson. Before me, as I write, stands a vase. There is nothing remarkable in that, but this is a vase of distinctive yet unobtrusive grace. It is not necessarily the grace that holds you in thrall at the first glance, although it has that power also, but the grace that insinuates and wends you unawares. Its proportion is so exquisite that it affects the mind like music, like slow, stately music, or better, like the balance of the large, easy flight of certain sea-birds. It compels you to think of such things, of balanced, accomplished things, things which round off, as it were, the infinitude in which every man's thoughts flounder and fret or take their ease. Yet you are not only delighted by the proportion of my vase, for this proportion is wedded unto a subtle coloring of equal charm. There is something strident, something of the brass band in the coloring of so much pottery, even in Imari and Satsuma, in Severis and Derby and in Delft, but no hints of high sounds spring out of the greens and grays which bewitch the eye on the shell-like surface of my vase. All is modulated to a harmony of whispering quiet. To look at my vase after the hurly-burly of the modern day is like going into a retreat where the telephone bell is not and the motor never was. You feel grateful to those greens fading into grays and grays fading into green, in and out of which curve and float the quaintess and most graceful of fishes etched richly into the clay. A little to the westward of Chancery Lane, on the opposite side of Holborn, there is one of those dim lanes of tall and somewhat unkempt houses with shop fronts which are, if not particular to, at least at their best in London. About halfway down the lane, which is called Brownlow Street, there is a little shop in whose white-framed window may be seen at any time of the year an assortment of stoneware vases akin to mine, and there are, as well, jugs and other objects of the potter's craft, pieces of craftsmanship which every now and then hold up the judicious passer-by in wonderment. There is nothing about the little shop at all like the shops of modern commerce, the business, you imagine, may possibly take place there, but you feel that the main object is something different. The pots are not arranged like the crockery in an ordinary shop, and there is slight evidence of antagonism towards the dust. When you enter the shop, the effect is much the same. You find yourself in a dim-lit passage with crowded shelves of stoneware jugs and alluring, laughing, grinning, and ogling faces, jostling the most impossible, and with all most fascinating pot-birds with delightfully disturbing anthropological expressions. Faces as beautiful as the one I have described and of innumerable shapes and sizes, and queer little imps blowing horns or beating cymbals, a curious but goodly assembly of unique ceramic products huddled together in their dim and dusty domain with every appearance of self-satisfaction and content. Opposite the shelves is a desk with an ink-pot of the same wear as the other pottery and a little chaos of papers, and this last is the only suggestion of commerce. You are undecided how far to proceed, for you see more light and more strange and beautiful pots in a small square room beyond. But presently you are set at rest by the appearance of a little man, bespectacled and neglect, with a half-carved figure of clay in one hand and a wooden tool like a scalpel in the other. You notice, although the light is dim, that his face, swathed though it is in a shaggy beard and crowned with a tangled mane of brown and gray hair, is quick with the intelligence of the artist. And if you are patient, you will soon realize that you stand before a master craftsman, Wallace Martin, the eldest of the quartet of brothers who make the stoneware, which has given me so much delight. Or it may be that you will be received by Edwin Martin, a taller man of middle age, with a sensitive face of a poet. He also comes with his work in his hand, an all-probability and unfired face, into whose drab clay he is etching some quaint device, for that is his contribution to the art of creating Martinware. These potters do not approach you as shopmen, and I dare not think what would happen if you attempted immediately to open up commercial relations. I have seen many pieces of stoneware bought of Wallace and Edwin Martin, but I have never seen them sell apiece. The pots are there. They have their prices marked on them. You may examine them and admire, and if you wish, purchase them. But if you only admire you are just as, and I sometimes thank, more welcome. For the Martin brothers are reluctant to part with the treasures they have made. They are jealous of other ownership, even after they are convinced of its worthiness. There is a charming simplicity about these brothers. Their craft is everything, and they never tire of discussing it in quiet, homely phrases, which tell you far more than all the art-talk of the drawing-rooms and the coteries. All about you are pots of superb proportion and exquisite coloring, and there is also enough quaintness and whimsical fancy in clay in their shop to make the fortune of any black-and-white artist. Yet there is no talk about art as such, only about the actual making of these things by men who have a childlike joy and pride in their work, and who love their work and are happy in telling you about it. William Morris would have delighted in these men whose creations are the quintessence of joy and work combined. And he would have loved to hear Wallace Martin, clay in hand, discussing enthusiastically problems of life and religion, commingled with a deeply informed technical interpretation of his craft. This enthusiasm and practical knowledge is manifested even in the simplest piece of Martinware. You have but to look at these creations to recognize that their makers live for them. It is this reverent and joyful craftsmanship infused with rare imagination which turns the rough clay into beautiful faces and jugs, strange birds and imps, and saders that have become devils in the medieval vision of Wallace Martin. Martin brothers are all the more remarkable in our age as they are pure Londoners, and indeed there is not a little of the colour of London in the low tones of their dyes. Their father was Robert Thomas Martin, stationer of Queen Hythe, Thames Street, EG, coming originally from Norfolk, but their mother was actually a native of Thames Street in the city, and in that street Wallace also was born. They first began as potters at Fulham in 1873 and in 1877 moved to Southall where their pottery has remained till now. Rarely have four brothers so complemented one another, and for forty years their complementary qualities worked eloquently together when death took Charles Martin away from them. A remarkable circumstance of this fraternal partnership is the fact that each brother has carried out a certain and definite part of the work, and a kind of division of labour has existed throughout, which in other circumstances might have had ill effects on the completed objects of their craft, but the sympathy of the brothers in their co-operate aim has saved their work from the evils of that bane of all good craftsmanship, the division of labour. Wallace Martin, who is nearing the age of seventy, is the sculptor and modeler. Quaint face jugs, musical imps, and delightful grotesque birds are the outcome of his genius and handiwork. Walter Martin combines the art of potter and chemist. It is he who mixes the west of England clays of which the pots are made, and stands all day at the ancient potter's wheel, throwing the beautiful shapes which are later etched all over with the strangely fascinating devices of Edwin Martin, who is the etcher and painter of the combination. Walter is responsible also for the pigments used in the colouring of the clays. The late Charles Martin, who died in June 1909 in his sixty-second year, used to preside over the little shop in Brownlow Street, watching affectionately over the beloved pots and releasing them reluctantly. All the work of firing, mixing clays and chemicals, throwing, modelling, etching, and selling is done by the brothers Martin without any outside help, and every piece they make is unique, no shape or design ever being repeated. With medieval simplicity and sincerity the Martin brothers go to work, requiring few aids from modern science, and although they seem to be far apart from the scramble and shouting of the modern world, throwing back, as it were, to the remote Middle Ages, yet are they modern in a very real way? The modern note is struck in each of their creations. They are out of touch, however, with all save a few in this age and their rule of never repeating a single design. The uniformity of today has not reached the Martin pottery, which means that these craftsmen are not manufacturers and their pottery remote from the pot banks of Staffordshire. All the prodigality of genius is to be found in the infinite variety of their products. But at the same time there is no striving after vein effects. Each piece of Martin ware is unique, but all Martin ware is alike, just as you will find variation and personality expressed in the details of the harmony, which goes to the building of a Gothic minster. The two chiefed variations of Martin ware are color and decoration. The colors are generally worked into the actual clay and sometimes inlaid by the decorator. The bulk of the designs, especially those of Edwin Martin, are etched in clay. Charm of color and design is always a characteristic of Martin ware, but besides these qualities an incalculable charm is derived from the hard, shell-like surface of all the pieces. The surface is a triumph of the ceramic art. It is really a salt glaze produced by submitting each piece to the ordeal of actual contact with salt-fed flames. In the early days of the pottery, experiments were made in design, and it was some years before the potters found the real trend of their genius. At first they borrowed motifs from the Renaissance, but today these early efforts, though excellent in form, accrued in design beside their later work. Today they follow no school, but find a real basis of design in their own whims and fancies. Inlaid and indented devices, following the geometrical designs of the artificer nature, as she reveals herself in gourd and seashell, now dominate the various shapes, varied by strange and beautifully etched devices of fishes, crustaceans, weird lizards, and dragons. The Martin Brothers' love of the grotesque is best exemplified in the modeled figures and birds of Wallace Martin. In these there is a mastery beyond praise. Quietly, for years, and almost unknown, seeking no fame and content with an income that would be despised by a suburban grocer, Wallace Martin has gone on carving his balls of clay into fancies that will live. He has passed the age when praise might have spoiled him. Indeed, praise of his genius is unnecessary, for if I understand him a right, he wants neither that, nor fame, nor great wealth. If you enjoy the things he joys in making, it will be enough. But when we deplore the absence of originality among our native sculptors, we may find hope in remembering Wallace Martin. His grotesque face jugs are joys forever, worthy receptacles of generous beverages. His imps and satyrs conquer by the very abandon of their impishness. Whilst his birds defy all words, they are inexplicable and irresistible. They are a new species. An addition to nature. Half humans they are, wise and sad and knowing, and you find yourself talking to them as though they lived. Perhaps they do somewhere. Or, if not, I am sure they will some day. Wallace Martin, it may be, is teaching nature some new tricks. Elsewhere we have nothing to compare with them, save such literary cattle as the Jabberwock, the Quangle-Wangle-Quee, and the Snark. Still, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear did think along the same lines as Wallace Martin. They dreamed similar dreams. Only Wallace Martin has dreamt them in clay and baptized them with flame. End of A Quartet of Potters by Holbrooke Jackson Peace and War in the Balkans by Norman Angel from Peace Theories and the Balkan War. Reading by Bologna Times This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. Peace and War in the Balkans by Norman Angel. Peace in the Balkans under the Turkish system. The inadequacy of our terms. The repulsion of the Turkish invasion. The Christian effort to bring the reign of force of conquest to an end. The difference between action designed to settle relationship on force and counteraction designed to prevent such settlement. The force of the policeman and the force of the brigand. The failure of conquest as exemplified by the Turk. Will the Balkan peoples, prove pacifist or bellicest, adopt the Turkish or the Christian system? Had we thrashed out the question of war and peace as we must finally it would be hardly necessary to explain that the apparent paradox in answer number four that war is futile and that this war will have immense benefits is due to the inadequacy of our language which compels us to use the same word for two opposed purposes not to any real contradiction of fact. We call the condition of the Balkan peninsula peace until the other day merely because the respective ambassadors still happen to be resident in the capitals to which they were accredited. Let us see what peace under Turkish rule really meant and who is the real invader in this war. Here is a very friendly and impartial witness Sir Charles Elliott who paints for us the character of the Turk as an quote administrator quote the Turk in Europe has an overweening sense of his superiority and remains a nation apart mixing little with the conquered populations whose customs and ideas he tolerates but makes little effort to understand. The expression indeed quote turkey in Europe unquote means indeed no more than quote England and Asia unquote if used as a designation for India the Turks have done little to assimilate the people whom they have conquered and still less been assimilated by them in the larger part of the Turkish dominions the Turks themselves are in a minority the Turks certainly resent the dismemberment of their empire but not in the sense in which the French resent the conquest of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany they would never use the word turkey or even its oriental equivalent the high country in ordinary conversation they would never say that Syria and Greece are parts of Turkey which have been detached but merely that they are tributaries which have become independent provinces once occupied by Turks where there are no Turks now as soon as a province passes under another government the Turks find it as the most natural thing in the world to leave it and go somewhere else in the same spirit the Turk talks quite pleasantly of leaving Constantinople some day he will go over to Asia and found another capital one can hardly imagine Englishmen speaking like that of London but they might conceivably speak so of Calcutta the Turk is a conqueror the idea of the Turk is a catalogue of battles his contributions to art literature, science and religion are practically nil their desire has not been to instruct to improve hardly even to govern but simply to conquer the Turk makes nothing at all he takes whatever he can get as plunder or pillage he lives in the houses which he finds or which he orders to be built for him in unfavorable circumstances he is a marauder in favorable a grand senior who thinks it is his right to enjoy with grace and dignity all that the world can hold but who will not lower himself by engaging in art literature trade or manufacture why should he when there are other people to do these things for him indeed it may be said that he takes from others languages, language, customs there is hardly anything which is Turkish and not borrowed the religion is Arabic the language half Arabic and Persian the literature almost entirely imitative the art, Persian or Byzantine the costumes and the upper classes and army mostly are pen there is nothing characteristic and manufacture or commerce except an inversion to such pursuits in fact all occupations except agriculture and military service are distasteful to the true Osmanli he is not much of a merchant he may keep a stall in a bazaar but his operations are rarely undertaken on a scale which merits the name of commerce or finance it is strange to observe how when trade becomes active in any seaport or upon the railway lines the Osmanli retires while Greeks, Armenians and Levantines thrive in his place neither does he much affect law, medicine or the learned professions such callings are followed by Muslims but they are apt to be a non-Turkish race but though he does none of these things the Turk is a soldier the moment a sword or rifle is put into his hands he instinctively knows how to use it with effect and he is at home in the ranks or on a horse the Turkish army is not so much a profession or an institution necessitated by the fears and aims of the government as the quite normal state of the Turkish nation every Turk is a born soldier and adopts other pursuits chiefly because times are bad when there is a question of fighting if only in a riot the stolid peasant wakes up and shows surprising power meaning organization and expedience and alas a surprising ferocity the ordinary Turk is an honest and good-humored soul kind to children and animals and very patient but when the fighting spirit comes on him he becomes like the terrible warriors of the Huns or Genghis Khan and slays, burns and ravages without mercy or discrimination such is the verdict of an instructed traveled and observant English author and diplomatis who lived among these people for many years and who learned to like them who studied them and their history it does not differ of course appreciably from what practically every student of the Turk has discovered the Turk is the typical conqueror as a nation he has lived by the sword and he is dying by the sword because the sword the mere exercise of force by one man or a group of men upon another conquest in other words is an impossible form of human relationship and in order to maintain this evil form of relationship it's evil and futility is the whole basis of the principles I have attempted to illustrate he has not even observed the rough chivalry of the Brigande the Brigande though he might knock men on the head but he will remain from having his force take the form of butchering women and disemboweling children not so the Turk his attempt at government will take the form of the obscene torture of children of a bestial ferocity which is not a matter of dispute or exaggeration but a thing to which scores hundreds, thousands even of credible European witnesses have testified that the menace gentlemen or that ever butchered a woman or burned a village is the phrase that punch most justly puts into the mouth of the defender of our traditional Turkophile policy and this condition is peace and the act which would put a stop to it is war it is the inexactitude and inadequacy of our language which creates much of the confusion but in this matter we have the same term for action destined to achieve a given end for a counteraction destined to prevent it yet we manage in other than the international field in civil matters to make the thing clear enough once an American town was set light to by incendiaries and was threatened with destruction in order to save at least a part of it the authorities deliberately burned down a block of buildings in the pathway of the fire would those incendiaries be entitled to say that the town authorities were incendiaries also and believed in setting light to towns yet this is precisely the view of those who taxed pacifists with approving war because they approved the measure aimed at bringing it to an end put it another way you do not believe that force should determine the transfer of property to a creed and I say to you quote hand me your purse and conform to my creed or I'll kill you unquote you say quote because I do not believe that force should settle these matters I shall try and prevent it settling them and therefore if you attack I shall resist if I did not I should be allowing force to settle them unquote I attack you resist army and say quote my force having neutralized yours and the equilibrium being now established I will hear any reasons you may have to urge for me for my paying you money or any argument in favor of your creed reason understanding adjustment shall settle it unquote you would be a pacifist or if you deem that that word connotes non-resistance though to the immense bulk pacifist it does not you would be an anti-bellicist to use a dreadful word coined by Monsieur Emile Fagui in the discussion of this matter if however you said quote having disarmed you and established the equilibrium I shall now upset it in my favor by taking your weapon and using it against you unless you hand me your purse and subscribe to my creed because force alone can determine issues and because it is a law of life that the strong should eat up the weak unquote you would then be a bellicest in the same way when we prevent the brigand from carrying on his trade taking wealth by force it is not because we believe in force as the means of livelihood but precisely because we do not and if in preventing the brigand from knocking out brains we are compelled to knock out his brains it is because we believe in knocking up people's brains or would we urge that to do so is the way to carry on a trade or a nation or a government or make it the basis of human relationship in every civilized country the basis of the relationship on which the community rests is this no individual is allowed to settle his differences with another by force does this mean that if one threatens to take my purse I am not allowed to use force to prevent it that if he threatens to kill me I am not to defend myself because the individual citizens are not allowed to settle their differences by force unquote it is because of that because the act of self defense is an attempt to prevent the settlement of a difference by force but the law would not justify me if having disarmed my opponent having neutralized his force by my own and reestablished the social equilibrium I immediately proceeded to upset it by asking him for his purse on pain of murder I should then be settling the matter by force I should then have ceased to be a pacifist and have become a bellicest for that is the difference between the two conceptions this says quote force alone can settle these matters it is the final appeal therefore fight it out let the best man win when you have preponderant strength impose your view force the other man to your will not because it is right but because you are able to do so unquote it is the excellent policy which lord roberts attributes to germany and approves the bellicest take an exactly contrary view we say quote to fight it out settles nothing since it is not a question of who is stronger but of whose view is best and as that is not always easy to establish it is of the utmost importance in the interests of all parties in the long run to keep force out of it the former is a policy of the turks they have been obsessed with the idea that if only they had enough of physical force ruthlessly exercise they could solve the whole question of government of existence for that matter without troubling about social adjustment understanding equity law commerce blood and iron were all that was needed the success of that policy can now be judged and whether good or evil comes of the present war will depend upon whether the Balkan states are on the whole guided by the bellicest principle or the opposed one if having now momentarily eliminated force as between themselves then reintroduce it if the strongest presumably Bulgaria adopts lord roberts excellent policy of striking because she has the preponderant force enters upon a career of conquest of other members of the Balkan league and the populations of the conquered territories using them for exploitation by military force why then there will be no settlement and this war will have accomplished nothing save futile waste and slaughter for they will have taken under a new flag the pathway of the Turk to savagery, degeneration death but if on the other hand they are guided more by the pacifist principle if they believe that cooperation between states is better than conflict between them if they believe that the common interest of all in good government is greater than the special interest of anyone in conquest that the understanding of human relationships the capacity for organization of society are the means by which men progress and not the imposition of force by one man or group upon another why they will have taken the pathway to better civilization but then they will have disregarded lord roberts advice and this distinction between the two systems far from being a matter of abstract theory or of metaphysics or logic chopping is just the difference which distinguish the Britain from the Turk which distinguishes Britain from Turkey the Turk has just as much physical vigor as the Britain is just as Viral manly and military the Turk has the same raw materials of nature, soil, and water there is no difference in the capacity for the exercise of physical force or if there is the difference is in favor of the Turk the real difference is a difference of ideas of mind and outlook on the part of the individuals composing the respective societies the Turk has one general conception of human society and the code and principles upon which it is founded is mainly a militarist one and the Englishman has another mainly a pacifist one and whether the European society as a whole is to drift towards the Turkish ideal or towards the English ideal would depend upon whether it is animated mainly by the pacifist or mainly by the bellicis doctrine if the farmer it will stagger blindly like the Turk along the path to barbarism it will take a better road end of peace and war in the Balkans by Norman Angel