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LONDON AND THE CORONATION

SYDNEY BROOKS

EVER has the overwhelmingness of London and London life seemed so palpable or so oppressive as at this moment. The "season" is in full swing; we have a political and constitutional revolution in progress, complete in everything save barricades and bloodshed; the Imperial Conference is sitting; of pageants, fêtes, banquets, concerts, tournaments, horse shows, operas, picture exhibitions, dinners, balls, receptions, race meetings, naval and military reviews, there is no end; the streets and the parks and the shops are fuller and more brilliant than I have ever known them; and if a London-lover somewhat resents the poles and scaffolding, the "grand stands " and decorations, the arches and garlands that are lending a fantastic and incongruous touch to the dim griminess of his cherished city, he finds also much to compensate and console him, many moving spectacles and unexpected splashes of color-here, on Regent Street, a rainbow-hued Indian soldier, majestically isolated, majestically unnoticed; there, on Piccadilly, a British "Tommy" acting as guide, philosopher and friend to a couple of dusky Cingalese; somewhere else, the gold and white, the scarlet or purple, of an Indian Prince's bodyguard; now, a mixed and glittering troop of Sikhs, Goorkhas and Punjabis “doing" London under the guidance of an English officer; everywhere, royal carriages with coachmen and grooms in scarlet livery driving Rajahs in light-blue silk, or Moorish envoys in snowy white, or the resplendent heirs to four-fifths of the thrones of Europe and Asia. The social strain is terrific; one misses half a dozen functions for every one that is attended; no one, and least of all the responsible statesmen of the Empire, has any time to think. Yet it is on such occasions that London, after all, is most herself and that one is positively grateful for the long chapter of accidents and events that have made her not only the biggest but the most comprehensive capital in the world. Her absorbent magnetism is not, to be sure, at all times and under all circum

stances, a good thing either for herself or for the nation. London not only dominates England, but overpowers it and in a measure devitalizes it. In the United States there is no capital of anything like the ascendency of London or Paris or even Berlin. But there are also no provinces. England undoubtedly pays a heavy toll for the irresistible attractiveness of London in the comparative dulness of English life outside the four-mile radius. The city more than presides, it tyrannizes, over its hinterland. It is not merely an incubus, it is almost a monopoly. An American capital of even half its size and wealth and power is a legal impossibility; it would be dissolved by the Supreme Court under the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. But at a time like this one is content not to look too narrowly into the social, political, intellectual or other effects of London's immensity. One accepts and welcomes and enjoys it, without any obstinate questionings, just as it is the gorgeous, mellow supplanter of Paris in the social primacy of Europe, the world's centre for every form of art, amusement and intellectual diversion, the capital not only of the Kingdom but of the Empire, the seat of the Legislature, the home of Royalty, and the scene of the thousand and one festivities and ceremonies that, in a Coronation year especially, go with and branch out from the presence of a Court. One does not stop to inquire whether it is proper and wholesome that practically all the creative and all the critical power of the country should be heaped together in this one city. One simply plunges into the incomparable-literally incomparable since the fall of the Second Empire-richness and variety of its social life; one steeps oneself in its tolerant, unquestioning, easy spirit. London's code is as spacious as any society's must be which has agreed that "live and let live" is the king of social oils. It is the most forgiving, the most informal, the most equable and unconcerned of cities, and, next to New York, the most callous. Old, complex and experienced, it has a halfcynical, half-charitable, wholly good-humored pardon for almost every breach of etiquette, decorum or morals. And that, whatever else one might say of it, is at least a free and comfortable atmosphere to have round one. The art of life London has always had; she is showing just now, on a splendid and memorable

scale, that she has also the art of public pageantry and rejoicing; and the result, for the time being, is to place her beyond criticism.

In the few and brief intervals that can be spared from the engrossment of domestic politics, private entertainments and public functions, all London-and London for the moment is synonymous with England-is religiously talking Empire. The Imperial Conference, the fourth of its kind, is now in session and all the Premiers of the self-governing British Dominions beyond the seas are taking part in it. There is not quite the same popular interest felt in its proceedings as there was in 1897, in 1902, and in 1907. The Boer war and King Edward's Coronation lent to the Conference of 1902 an extraordinary enthusiasm; 1897 was the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, when also the tides of patriotic emotion ran flood-high; and in 1907 the advent of the Liberals to power and the complication of the fiscal issue stimulated an additional curiosity. This year British affairs are in a state of such amazing chaos that the nation has little inclination to busy itself with any but domestic problems. The Coronation, moreover, operates rather as a competitor than as an adjuvant to the Conference; there is no outstanding figure among the Colonial Premiers; we have seen nearly all of them before and know pretty well what are their views and personalities. This is not at all a bad thing. These Conferences ought to stand on their own merits and be independent of adventitious excitements. To a large extent this one does so stand, and there is not the least reason to think that it will therefore be less productive than its predecessors. If the general interest in its discussions is less exuberant than four or nine years ago, it must not be assumed that it is non-existent. On the contrary, it is very much alive and operative. The average Englishman's conception of the Empire does not go very far beyond a vague pride of ownership, but that pride of ownership is sufficient to make him genuinely Imperial. There is a quite distinct consciousness in all classes of society that these gatherings of the leaders of the self-governing sister-nations for consultation under the family roof-tree are a spectacle unparalleled in history. If the knowledge of the precise problems they meet to deal with is capricious and slight, all Englishmen are at any rate at one

in recognizing their transcendent importance; all feel that there is no such question in the whole sphere of British politics as this of drawing tighter the bonds of Empire; all agree that Imperial consolidation is the master-issue before the British peoples; all hope and work for a time when the several States of the Empire, however independent in their local affairs, however dissimilar in some of their institutions, shall yet form, for certain purposes, one body politic and in their relations with the rest of the world shall take rank as a single, solid unit in the society of States.

That unquestionably is the ideal toward which the British Empire is slowly, cumbrously moving. But the path is sown with obstacles, and there are even aspects in which one would hesitate to say that the impulse toward federation is stronger than the impulse toward separation. At present the British Empire is little more than a glittering abstraction. Parts of it correspond to the old Roman idea of a great central State, ruling with absolute, if benignant, despotism a vast number of varied and scattered dependencies. Other parts of it, and these the most vital to the future of the race, correspond to nothing that has ever existed. If you look solely at the relations that obtain between Great Britain and India, for example, or the Malay States, or almost any of the Crown Colonies, you feel yourself in the presence of an organized system. But if you look at the relations that obtain between Great Britain and Canada or Australia or South Africa or New Zealand, you feel yourself in the presence of no system at all. The Empire in this latter aspect presents itself as a haphazard congeries of States, three-quarters independent, and linked neither to one another nor to the motherland by any but the most casual and decorative bonds. There is, indeed, the silken thread of the Crown running through them all. But there is no unity of defence, no policy of commercial preference, no machinery for coöperative action, no visible organic unity. It is an Empire in feeling perhaps, but not in fact. The self-governing Dominions, almost without exception, tax British goods as they tax the goods of foreigners. Great Britain shoulders almost the whole burden of Imperial defence. The relations between the autonomous and the despotically governed portions of the Empire are guided by no settled principle of def

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THE FEMININE ACCENT

SHAEMAS O SHEEL

HIS is the day of the voice of woman: more so than

woman herself knows, or many of her brothers under

stand. The clamor of the more-or-less militant claimant of the suffrage is indeed loud in the land, but how little is it realized as evidence of a tremendous sociological fact, the awakening of a feminine sex-consciousness. Still less realization is there that the world is preparing for a Messianic advent of the Woman-Spirit which is the gentler part of the human spirit, the part of love opposed to force; though some have foreseen and foretold this, among them Lafcadio Hearn and Fiona Macleod. But the voice of woman is more and more heard; in the chorus of poets, for instance, it is now familiar. Fifty years ago Mrs. Browning made Laura Savio of Turin say:

"Yet I was a poetess only last year,

And good at my art, for a woman, men said.”

But modern Italy hardly qualifies its praise of Ada Negri by any such reservation as "for a woman.' "9 And where Mrs. Browning as a poet of first note was unique, Alice Meynell and Katharine Tynan and others are a numerous company. In Ameriica the poetess is a commonplace; alas! too often just that! But the first gathering has lately been presented of a young woman whose poems are not commonplace. They are not concerned at all with the awakening sex-consciousness, nor consciously with the Woman-Spirit as Savior, and they ask judgment in the scales of absolute poetry; yet the fine ultimate feeling one brings from reading them is a sense of the subtlety and beauty of the feminine accent.

More keen and more constant than man in her spiritual realizations, woman is also possessed of much greater spiritual courage. Modern man, swaying between the unrelenting inner consciousness of the spirit and the world's irreverence and infidelity, becomes apologetic and equivocal, or agitated, or stentorian, in his spiritual acknowledgments. Woman speaks of the same things with quiet certainty. The natural rôle of man as bread