fully provided loops of rope for them to rest their feet in. Mr. Cochran had forgotten nothing. It was his hour. He deserved it. It pains me as a professional observer that I cannot recall whether the Prince and Mr. Cochran wore smoking jackets or swallow-tails. Opinion was divided as to the sartorial proprieties. Some star actors and some millionaires wore smoking jackets; some star actors and some millionaires wore swallow-tails.

The millionaires were richly represented. There they were, dotted about, the genial wizards who have removed Arlington Street from the map, who are said to have the government in their pockets, and who assert with calm conviction that 'Lloyd George can't put it over them.' Women were certainly too few; some had sought to atone for the paucity by emulating the attire of the gladiators in the ring. They made futile spots of sex on ten guineas' worth of plush in an environment where Aphrodite had no status whatever.

The raised ring was already well illuminated, but soon many lamps that had been unlit fizzed into activity, and dazzling torrents of bluish light rained down a treble-X radiance on the battle ground. The cinema men prepared themselves. The last of the preliminary bouts finished. An M.C. climbed into the ring and besought the audience to stop smoking, so that the champions about to dispute the mastery of a continent might breathe more easily. The celebrated Mr. B. J. Angle, whose word was to be law to the champions, climbed into the ring and delivered a short homily. Mr. B. J. Angle was evidently a man who knew his own mind, and who also knew his world. Some persons were pained because he wore a gray suit and brown boots at 10 P.M. in the presence of the Prince, and they did not hesitate

to express their narrow-mindedness. A little box, covered with advertisement, was deposited in the centre of the ring. It contained the gloves. The sublime moment approached. You had a unique sensation; you admitted to yourself that it was well worth ten guineas, and also that the subject of the reconstruction of Europe lacked actuality.

Beckett and train appeared first, and the train was so numerous as to be bewildering. For a moment you thought that both boxers and both trains must be in the ring. You understood better the immense costliness of a really great fight, and the complexity of the machinery which is necessary to perfect it. You perceived that though eight thousand pounds Iwas to be divided between the combatants, neither would be overpaid when he had reckoned his time and discharged his expenses. When Carpentier and train appeared, the ring was like a market place. One figure, Carpentier, stood out astonishingly from all the rest. All the rest had the faces and the carriage of bruisers. Nobody could have taken Carpentier for a boxer. He might have been a barrister, a poet, a musician, a Foreign Office attaché, a Fellow of All Souls; but not a boxer. He had an air of intellectual or artistic distinction. And long contact with the very physical world of pugilism had not apparently affected his features in the slightest degree. In the previous six years he had matured, but not coarsened. He seemed excessively out of place in the ring. You could not comprehend what on earth he was doing there. Surely he must have lost his way! Beckett, a magnificent form, but with a countenance from which you would not infer much power of ratiocination, gazed long at Carpentier from under his forehead, whereas, Carpentier

scarcely glanced at Beckett. At one moment Beckett appeared to you like a dumb victim trying to penetrate the secrets of a higher and inscrutable power; at another moment you were persuaded that grim Beckett was merely contemplating his poor destined intellectual victim with the most admirable British detachment. At one moment you felt that Carpentier must inevitably be crushed; at another moment you were convinced that if Carpentier was not too many for Beckett, then the course of civilization had been very misleading.

I know nothing about boxing; my opinion on boxing would be worth about as much as Beckett's on Scriabine. But I had seen Carpentier, in 1913, when he was a boy, knock out Bombardier Wells at the National Sporting Club in less than two minutes, and the performance was so brilliant, so easy, so natural, that I could not believe that anybody else would ever knock out Carpentier. Now, however, I was overborne by the weight of expert prophecy. All the experts were certain that Beckett must win. Some of them murmured something perfunctory about the million-to-one chance of an early knockout by Carpentier, but none of them had in reality any fear of such a chance. I surrendered, and privily told myself what a simpleton I had been to imagine for a single instant that Carpentier would not be smashed. (I forgot the peculiar accents in which Lord Fisher said to me in 1915, that his life then was 'nothing but one damned expert after another.') Further, the experts killed Carpentier immediately they saw him. They said he was not in condition; they liked not the color of his skin; they said he had gone right off; they said he was a dead man. And I submissively persuaded myself that this was so.

The ritualistic prologue to the encounter seemed to take a very long time. But it served excellently its purpose of heightening the excitement of expectation. When the bell at length rang, and Beckett and Carpentier approached each other lonely in the ring, beneath a million candle power of radiance, and the whole barbaric stadium was stilled, and hearts knocked remindingly under waistcoats in that moment, even those who had paid twenty-five guineas for a ten-guinea seat must have felt that they had got a bargain.

There had been some grand fighting before the big event, particularly between Eddie Feathers and Gus Platts, and experts had said: "This will be the best fighting of the evening. You'll see. A championship match is never any good.' The devoted experts were wrong again. In five seconds the championship fighting stood plainly in a class apart, thanks solely to Carpentier. Carpentier caught Beckett on the nose at once. Beckett positively had to rub his nose, an act which made the strong men around me shudder. Beckett was utterly outclassed. He never had a chance. The stadium beheld him lying stunned on his face. And the sight of Beckett prone, and Carpentier standing by him listening to the counting of allotted seconds, was the incredible miraculous consummation of all the months of training, all the organization, all the advertising, all the expenditure, all the frenzy. Aphrodite, breaking loose in the shape of a pretty girl bien maquillée, rushed to the ring. Men raised her in their arms, she raised her face; and Carpentier bent over the ropes and kissed her passionately amid the ecstasies of joy and disillusion that raged around them. That kiss seemed to be the bright flower of the affair. It summed up everything. Two minutes

earlier Beckett in his majestic strength had been the idol of a kingdom. Now Beckett was a sack of potatoes, and Carpentier in might and glory was publicly kissing the chosen girl within a yard of the Prince of Wales.

We left the stadium immediately, though the programme of boxing was by no means concluded, and in Red Lion Square found our taxi-driver, whose claim to distinction was that his grandfather had been a friend of Mr. George R. Sims. All the streets of the vicinity were full of people abroad for the event. They were all aware of the result, for at the very doors of the stadium, on our emerging, a newspaper boy had offered us the news in print. They all stood or moved in attitudes of amaze, watching with rapt faces the long lines of departing motors. You perceived that the English race was profoundly interested and moved, and that nothing less than winning the greatest war could have interested and moved it more profoundly. This emotion was no product of a press campaign, but the press campaign was a correct symptom of it. It was as genuine as British fundamental decency.

Not Beckett alone had been stunned. The experts were stunned.

Their

prime quality of being ever cheery had gone from them. They could scarcely speak; there was naught to say; there was no ground for any argument. They were bowed with grief. Fate had heavily smitten them. One of them murmured: 'I consider it's a disgrace to Great Britain.' Another: 'It's the champion of Great Britain that's been beaten. This after Mdlle. Lenglen!' Where to go in these circumstances of woe? Obviously to the Eccentric Club. We went, and were solaced and steadied with an aged Courvoisier brandy. Sipping the incomparable liquid, and listening to the exact reconstitution of the battle by the experts, I reflected, all solitary in my own head, upon what, with such magnificent and quiet hospitality, I had been taken to see. Was the show worthy of the talents and the time lavished on its preparation and accomplishment, worthy of the tradition, of the prowess, of the fostering newspapers, of Mr. Cochran? It was. Was it a moral show? It was—as moral as an Inter-University Rugger match. Was it an æsthetic show? It was. Did it uplift? It did. Did it degrade? It did not. Was it offensive? No. Ought the noble art to continue? It ought. I had been deeply interested.

TWENTY-FIVE years have passed since Stevenson's death and though on the whole his popularity persists, the number of those who attack the accepted view of his genius with dark sayings and subdued negations is on the increase; while the generation which has grown up with such tragic suddenness under war conditions finds itself regarding him with that attitude of kindly and agreeable patronage which is significant of more than youth's unconscious attitude toward the amiable indiscretions of its elders.

Much of this may be imputed to the mental prejudice of an age which prefers absolute attainment in one direction to comprehensive charm in a thousand, which applauds an idea as recklessly as its predecessor did homage to a moral. Possibly those of us who are too scientific to endure an effusive humanity in literature are in danger of overlooking the artistic elements in a most human writer. But the present-day conviction that to mingle and not to mix emotions and ideas is the first rule of an artist's conduct is bound to find in Stevenson an abrupt denial.

In a more singular sense, too, was Stevenson symptomatic of his age; his constitutional handicap is analogous to the physical placidity of the years in which he lived, when men occupied by the abstract processes of thought were bound to create for their own self-respect a world of action, which seems now theatrical, just because it was divorced from experience. It was a time which demanded so loudly that its knights should be knights that it made them into carpet

knights; and its heroes in their large vague attitudes are rejected by those who have learned at first hand what narrow elbow-room the heroic allows.

Fact has not so much killed fancy as enlarged it, and is in the course of developing it, as a force of realism, into imagination. It has in Stevenson's case tamed the audacity of his romance and converted the war he waged so fiercely against respectability in The Yellow Paint, The House of Faith, and elsewhere into a mimic battle, in which the adversaries are a host of shades. Contrary to all precedent, the only romanticism generally acceptable to-day is that of experience. Sassoon's poetry, for instance, is preferred to Binyon's by the men who have closed with war; we note it as a fact rather than a reliable estimation, for Stevenson's case is not dissimilar. Not unnaturally his constant exhortation to manliness has lost is felicity in the strident company of recruiting sergeants; and he is forced by circumstances into the position of the talkative soldier who had to stay at home.

An age composed largely of men who have been compelled to suffer in silence is apt to attribute such a voluble pluck to the nerves of a weakling. 'I wish to die in my boots, he says, 'no more land of counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse-aye, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution.' To-day it sounds a trifle neurotic. Violence is not the fashion. Nor for that matter is optimism. Men's faith is less pretentious, and their wisdom less tolerant of the dishonorable consolations of

sentiment. Stevenson lived and wrote on the principle that 'no art was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived.' We feel it to be the utterance of a man who has scarcely understood evil or the mistakes of providence; and although 'to miss the joy is to miss all,' we are inclined to turn his sword on himself and set him seeking the pulse of joy that must beat its tense vitality behind all the perfect art of sorrow. He detested the 'literature of woe,' but without discrimination, and though his romanticism was a faculty of optimism, we cannot find in it any such cosmic impulse as moved Whitman or Rabelais or Shakespeare to ecstasies of grief or ribaldry. Too often it strikes us as a forced laugh to hide a Calvinistic frown.

Stevenson's entirely natural genius was the story teller's. It was, indeed, the only aptitude in which he was instinctively an artist, and one which expressed itself not only in the masterly plot, but in the minute particulars of incident out of which he shaped those unforgettable descriptions, too numerous to instance, or made geography alive and mystical, as in his picture of the Bay of Monterey and the oceanhaunted, mist-invaded land about it. It was in Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Wrecker, that he took middle-aged gentlemen as often as schoolboys on princely adventures which asked nothing of the mind; and it is only his temporary misfortune that we to-day have had enough of obvious adventure, and that 'brute incident' has cost too much in shattered limbs for men to take an immediate pleasure in it. But on such adventures he could well have gone on conducting them with indefinite success. He preferred, however, to submit himself to the training without which such a limited gift could never be turned into the working

matter of a great novelist. It was in the narrative school of Dumas, the romantic of Scott, and the sentimental and anecdotal of Sterne that he studied most industriously.

To a great extent he was bound to compromise his natural gift in the process of training it for higher things. Much of his work, therefore, can only in fairness be regarded as the product of a diligent apprenticeship, and one which necessitated too much struggle to express the repose of art which is the other side of the conflict. And he, who was ever his own best critic, never ceased to see beyond 'better stuff.' Endowed with too many gifts, he had to spend twenty years in sorting them and creating a working agreement between them. His very facility in the stringing together of episode proved his worst enemy when he had to deal with character. Often it led him to introduce incidents at wrong moments, sometimes prayers, sometimes journal narratives of piratical braggadocio as wild interludes to tragedy, sometimes a false grimness in an hour of farce, or to develop a plot or a character along too many lines of advance. Where his native genius had the freest play, in the short story as, The Merry Men, or the dramatic or picturesque incident, or where his devices are judged in themselves as pieces of perfect workmanship, he attained not rarely the supreme form and language of art; but not until Weir of Hermiston (if we except the ecstatic farce of The Wrong Box) was the discipline complete, and his genius and his experience united on a large canvas. It is, indeed, tragic that such an education should have been, so far as we are concerned, for naught.

In the process, however, Stevenson created a hundred things which, beyond the ways of art, are a contribution to and a solace for humanity;