Life in Madrid, some one (I think Gautier or Dumas) said, is passed entre una insolacion y una pulmonia, between a sunstroke and an attack of pneumonia, a sarcastic allusion to the violent extremes of climate through which the city passes yearly: extremes due to its situation. Just now, the soi-disant sunstroke period, it is perfect. The heat which a few days ago filled the gorges of Viscaya with thunderstorms, and the wind which howled across the plains of Castile, raising clouds of dust and whipping the sparse trees into imploring phantoms, these have combined to give us a fine clear heat tempered by a gentle breeze. The morning air is divinely light and brisk, the evenings are deliciously cool and fair: as for the rest of the day, it is best to imitate the Madrilenos and suspend active operations; or if one must go out, then cat-like one crawls round the squares and streets following the belt of shade, leaving the blaze in the centre for the simones (cabmen) and the policemen.

This being the height of summer, and the Chamber closed, most of the well-to-do Madrilenos are summering elsewhere, at San Sebastian or Biarritz, or in Switzerland, out of the hurly-burly: for which some of the papers do not spare them. But just as London is never so full as when some few hundreds of Society people have left, and with bland self-complacency notified that it is therefore empty, so Madrid teems with life, and the Puerta del Sol, the pulse of Madrid, throbs from morning till far through the night. Though the drive in the Buen Retiro, the Rotten Row of the Madrilenos, may show a smaller number of dashing turn-outs, and the "Paseo" or the Prado not quite so many Parisian models, as in spring and autumn,

there is no lack of occupation for eyes and ears. In the movement of the Puerta del Sol, the variegated types with which the city abounds just now, or the appalling cacophony which rises from all the busy corners of Madridthe more or less indifferent train service, the teams, a few automobiles, the ox-carts of Viscaya, which torture the ear-drums; the diligencia with its mayoral and mules and the entirely Spanish occupation of tomar el sol or tomar el fresco according to the season-in all these particulars Madrid remains much the same always.

Gautier was much amused in one of the bourgs through which he passed to notice the economy of the authorities who had left up in the chief square the names of Plaza Real: Plaza de la Constitucion: Plaza de la Republica— one above the other: the choice of the name for use was dictated, he supposed, by the passing political phase. To the witty Frenchman the splash of white paint, ready to receive any name whatever, on the massive stone wall of the building, was typical of the political movements which come and go in Spain, leaving little or no trace on the hard-grained character of the country itself. With very little change the metaphor will serve again to-day, for the complexion of the Governments which rise and fall in Spain matter little, so long as they exist by corruption, favoritism and "spoils." They may, indeed, be like a splash of white paint bearing a changeable name, underneath is the same unvarying, unsavory foundation.

Yet even Spain has moved since the thirties; the growth of the population in some of the great towns, the extension of industry, commerce and wealth in enterprising provinces like Catalonia and the Basque provinces, the inter

nations, and consequent mental growth which these things have brought about, having introduced into the country a political element conscious of its own needs and desires, anxious for improvement and profoundly dissatisfied with the jobbery, self-seeking and class interest which characterize the actual government of the country. Whatever may be the state of opinion in the agricultural districts, where the population is scattered and ignorant, it is safe to say that in the great towns like Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Bilbao, Valencia, and many others, the mass of opinion is anti-governmental, and, along with it, anti-dynastic. The war in the north of Africa, entirely unpopular in spite of official efforts to rouse patriotic ardor, has given an occasion for expressing this feeling of profound dissatisfaction, with results in Catalonia with which the world is now more or less accurately acquainted.

It is a little difficult to get at opinion in Madrid. The censorship nominally exercised only over news relating to the operations at Melilla is, in practice, extended to all political matter. It is sufficient for a paper to publish something displeasing or inconvenient to Ministers to run the risk of denunciation and consequent suppression. In these circumstances, the journals can print only official statements concerning the movements of troops and the calling out of further reserves, scraps vouchsafed by the censor on what is, or may be, going on at Melilla, mild polemics or vague historical articles, and in the official and clerical sheets reports and stories concerning Catalonia which are, even to an ordinary reader of newspapers, obviously apocryphal. It is in the things which are not said, not permitted, in the absence of political discussion and of political information, and in the licensed attacks of the official organs on

character, that the significance of Madrilena journalism lies. Open expression of opinion is, indeed, a difficult matter in the capital of a country where constitutional guarantees have been suspended; where the Parliament is closed and Government by decree is the order of the day; where all meetings or manifestations are forbidden; and where the strictest pressure is brought to bear upon the public press. It is for these reasons, perhaps, that recent "special commissioners" from London newspapers have failed to get at the truth of things, and have seen nothing, where knowledge of the country, its life and language would have enabled them to find out much whose existence they never even suspected. It is in the cafés, the markets, on the eternal paseo, or the sidewalk, or the Prado, in the railway carriage, in a thousand and one ways, that public opinion in Madrid can be gathered and sorted, and my experience is that it is strongly anti-governmental; anti-martial; anti-dynastic. The feeling about the war gathers all else into itself, for all other reasons of discontent are connected with it, directly or indirectly, and those reasons, be they good or bad, are many and strongly held. So, when the English newspapers, following official statements, print notices about the enthusiasm for the war and for the royal family, declare that the troubles in Catalonia had nothing to do with Melilla, that there is no anticlericalism in the country, and that the days of fire and blood-letting in Barcelona were the work of anarchists and international revolutionaries-in a

word, that we are to believe that life in Spain is normal and that all is for the best, those newspapers are quite beside the mark.

The Government is discredited in the opinion of thinking people. Small wonder! Nominally constitutional, it is

bureaucratic to a degree, all but autocratic, the autocrats in this instance being, not the sovereign, but the Ministers. Constitutionalism is a vain form in a country where elections, save in the quarters mentioned above, are "managed" by the party in power, resulting in an entirely subservient Chamber. Of the corruption of the administrative mechanism, the practice of treating places in the administration, down to the very meanest, as spoils of the conquerors, of the multiplication of posts, favoritism and its attendant evil, inefficiency, it is almost futile to speak at this date. But these things rankle in the minds of thinking Spaniards, and produce a state of mind which makes many ready to welcome almost any change in the hope of a change of system. In no other way can one account for the growth of Republicanism and of Republican clubs and newspapers.

Two months ago at one of the theatres in Madrid, zarzuelas, or topical skits, were being played to crowded houses under the very noses of the Ministers, which would never have passed the censor in London. They were nothing more nor less than bitter political satires in which no attempt was made to disguise the persons satirized; on the contrary, to prevent any error, the name of each Minister attacked was printed below the satirical character in the dramatis persona. And it was significant that, in Madrid, the seat of Government and the home of royalty, the spirit of revolution was applauded as "a spirit, not destructive only, but constructive; a spirit of progress and liberty." The point may be small, it is profoundly significant.

There is widespread dislike for the royal family, though in varying degree according to the different members of it.

Alfonso XIIL is regarded as a puppet of the Ministers, a young and

amiable nonentity, useful as a figurehead on public occasions, for social functions, but negligible as a political quantity. And, moreover, he is a Bourbon. His English marriage is unpopular, malgré all official announcements to the contrary: an unpopularity which is explicable when Spanish traditions, religion, and dislike of foreigners are taken into account. But the fullest intensity of dislike is reserved for the Queen-mother, Maria Christina, who is regarded by many as the âme damnée of Spain. To find the reason for that odium one must go to the feeling which has been declared again and again, officially, not to exist-anti-clericalism. In the general hatred dealt out to the regular Orders, especially the Society of Jesus, Queen Maria Christina takes a full share. Rightly or wrongly, she is credited with entire submission to their influence, and with exerting her own influence on their behalf over King and Government. As a Madrid editor put it to me yesterday, "The Jesuits give orders to the Pope: the Pope to Maria Christina, and she to the Government." This is cruelly put, but it expresses a widespread opinion, and accounts for the odium in which she is held. In an interview with the publicist of the capital in a position to gauge the current of feeling in the country, tremendous importance was attached to this question of clericalism. According to the Concordat of 1851, three religious orders only were legalized in the country; to-day they number at least forty, and the frailes themselves mount up to a large figure, some say close on 60,000.

They are credited, rightly or wrongly, with dabbling in financial matters, sharing in monopolies, working with companies and banks, and are included, with the royal family, in the shady business of mining concessions to French and Spanish companies, at whose feet the odium of the war in

Africa is laid. And in this hatred of religious orders all classes are mingled -workers, industrials, merchants, intellectuals, and even the secular clergy, whose position, entirely under the power of the frailes, becomes often intolerable. The Government says there is no clerical question: it is an invention of the diabolic French imagination. Progressives say there is hardly any other question, that in this is concentrated all the questions that relate to the future of Spain. The fact that for many years past hardly any internal troubles have occurred in which there was not the attacking or burning of religious houses in Valencia, Talavera, Logrono, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santander, Coruna, Orense, Cordoba, &c., seems to have taught the Powers that be nothing at all. Instead of studying the question they content themselves with repeated and obstinate denials, as if the mere denial disposed of the matter sufficiently. Even when convent after convent was being burned in Barcelona in a way that recalled the famous telegram of the Alcalde of a town in revolt: "The convents of this town are being burned with the greatest regularity," even then the official statement was obstinately repeated: "There is no clerical question, these acts are the work of anarchists." the truth of that last statement, as of many other lurid and sensational paragraphs telegraphed to English newspapers on the strength of rumors gathered a hundred miles from the actual occurrences, a little light has been thrown from time to time, though the day of full disclosures is not yet. On them I have been able to gather information here in Madrid, but it is better that it should be controlled and verified on the spot. I have been concerned here chiefly with gathering the general opinion on the crisis through which the country is passing.

The English Review.

On

It may soon be summed up: the lower classes are deeply stirred, for the calling out of the reserves for service in a war whose motives pass their comprehension presses most hardly on them. Numbers of the reservists had obtained permission to marry during the last few years and have young families, and they are further embittered by the fact that exemption could be secured from service on a money payment-about two thousand pesetas. The better classes, in the parts of the country which count, are furious against a system of Government, almost autocratic, out of touch with the population in general, in which corruption and inefficiency abound, and under which monopolies flourish. The economic condition of the country is, in some respects, desperate: the poverty in which numbers exist is hopeless almost beyond imagination. The great families of the country, rich and privileged, are classed together with financiers, politicians, and even royalty in the louche transactions involving the country in a war of which hardly any one seems to understand the why or the wherefore. And lowering over all is the question of the religious Orders, especially of the Jesuits, and "the question of the life of Spain" as it was de. scribed to me, in which all the previous elements are confounded in one intense detestation. It is difficult to imagine the issue. But the war seems to draw all the rest to a head. A speedy and successful issue may stave off an explosion. On the other hand, it is possible that in the mountains of Gurugu both Government and Dynasty may find a Sedan. When I suggested to the publicist before-mentioned the possibility of a disastrous ending, he looked horror-stricken and said: "In that case I think not a monk would be left alive in Spain."

William T. Goode.

Of all living writers, Mr. Arthur Symons would have seemed to me the best equipped to treat the subject immediately suggested by the title he has chosen for his new book; and though he employs the word "Romantic" in a much wider sense than is customary and takes in a vast field of poetry which is not commonly regarded as Romantic, this very fact makes his thorough competency and mastery of the material the more striking. By the Romantic movement Mr. Symons means no less than the coming back to life of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century after its long and death-like sleep. He justifies his use of the phrase with skill, energy and resource. All poetry, he says, except that of the eighteenth century, has been Romantic; the poets of the Renaissance were Romantic poets; and if Keats was a Romantic poet, then Shakespeare was a Romantic poet also. The Renaissance was a Romantic movement, and what is commonly called, and what Mr. Symons himself calls, the Romantic movement was a Renaissance. This is an extension, with a vengeance, of Stendhal's dictum that all literature was Romantic when it was new. We will consider presently Mr. Symons' defence of his position if we may apply the term "defence" to a very spirited assault upon an ordinary article of the literary creed of Englishmen - but it must be noted that in his introductory chapter he lays more stress on the word "movement" than on the word "Romantic"; and, far from dealing with all Romantic poetry which, to follow his definition, means all genuine poetry he is occupied solely by the revival of poetry. This narrows very

"The Romantic Movement in English Poetry." By Arthur Symons. London: Constable, 10s. 6d. net.

considerably a formidable field; but as he deals with all the poets, great and small, so long as they can be called poets, who were born before 1800 and lived into the nineteenth century, the field, however narrowed, still cannot be said to be a narrow one. A large number of small and important “poets” get separate notices. All are discussed from Mr. Symons' point of view, a point of view to which he holds consistently, though by no means fanatically or absurdly; the whole book is clearly and logically arranged, and it is written throughout in that musical and crystalline English, easy without looseness, of which Mr. Symons is so fine a master.

In fact, I should be inclined to call this book the most brilliant that Mr. Symons has ever written. When he praises, he gives ample reason for the praise; when he gibes as he does, very prettily, often he gives no reasons, but quotes a line or two from the person gibed at. Happily, none of these persons are living, or Mr. Symons' own life would not be secure. Hannah More, for instance, is given what the ordinary literary agent would call a "favorable notice"; but amidst all the kindness comes the remark that this lady's works are not, after all, so bad to beguile a "dull afternoon." This is disagreeable criticism carried to the highest point of perfection. I thoroughly enjoy these little excursions. Henry James Pye, poet-laureate from 1790 to 1833, "meatless and savourless;" Mrs. Piozzi, "who wrote one verse in one century and lived nearly twenty years into the next"; "Samuel Rogers was not a poet" such remarks fill the soul of a hardened critic, who has had to handle inferior persons, with a certain wellearned delight. But even better than