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tion as this is given of literary masterpieces, we can suggest only that its authors should consult the nearest doctor.

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"The author," says Mr Mordell, is more in his work than he suspects." We pity Mr Mordell if he is more deeply implicated in his own book than he pretends. And how shall we treat, save with hellebore, the critic, who cannot cast an innocent eye even upon a piece of machinery? "Why," asks Mr Mordell," does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing descriptions of machinery into his works? If dreams of machinery relate to sex, then we must follow the logical conclusion that an undue interest in machinery must evince a sexual meaning." Must we indeed ? Not unless we are tainted with the sad mania, of which Mr Mordell appears to be a victim.

But Mr Mordell's greatest pride is that he has discovered a personal note in an epic like the Iliad,' usually considered impersonal. What sort of a crib, we wonder, did he use when he made this brilliant discovery? The discovery, of course, is no discovery at all. What Mr Mordell has found out is what has always been obvious to all men that Achilles and Patroclus were friends. Homer, like the artist that he was, drew a beautiful picture of friendship, and he drew it, no doubt, because he had a fine and subtle understanding of what friendship

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was and meant. We need not go to the jargon of psychoanalysis to appreciate the noble words of Homer. And this is what Mr Mordell says about it: "No, indeed, Homer was no mere spectator reciting Achilles's troubles in an objective manner. He had a great sorrow of his own, and he did not go out of his way to counterfeit one. ... What the nature of the friendship was we cannot say; it may have been homo-sexual, a love which was common among the later Greeks. But it did have the element of passion. We know now the chief event of Homer's life." For all this nonsense there is, of course, no warrant whatever. Critics, who profit no more than the Freud view from the reading of poetry, should be sternly debarred the use of books. Mr Mordell adds nothing, and could never add anything, to our knowledge of Homer. He does but drag in the obscure suspicion, wherewith his mind is perplexed. He makes no discovery except this that the disciples of the ineffable Freud and the amateurs of psychoanalysis should refrain their fingers from the masterpieces of literature and their prying eyes from the lives of the poets. There is a kind of printed stuff which would suit their method of inquiry well enough-" a real immoral (or indecent) literature," as Mr Mordell calls it,

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those aspects of his personality the criticism of Mr Mordell. which civilisation should have We have as little desire to tamed." These specimens of see them interpreted as to see printed matter, as remote from the nature of their authors literature as the advertisement- explained. But if they will hoarding, are doubtless within restrain the disciples of Herr the compass of the understand- Freud from defacing and defaming of Freud and his school. ing the work of great poets, Mr Mordell does not think they may have their uses. And ill of them. "Such writings," when the psychoanalysts have he says, "should not be con- done their worst with these demned offhand just because crude examples of savagery, they stir our moral indignation. they might be invited to go They must be interpreted so for the collection of the scandals that we may learn the nature which are the material of their of their authors." For our false philosophy to the jail part, we would condemn all and the lunatic asylum. No such writings offhand as fit haunts for them are the severely as we would condemn slopes of Parnassus.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons.

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Entered as second-class matter, July 3. 1917. at the post office at New York, N. Y., un the act of March 3, 1879

Yurovsky; and the Murder of the Tzar

by

CAPTAIN FRANCIS MCCULLAGH

A remarkable account of one of the darkest episodes in modern history by one who has personally visited the scene of the murder and conversed with his assassins. The most tragic story of the Great War told for the first time. Capt. McCullagh had the advantage of very unusual opportunities for the collection of the information contained in this account, which forms one of the most important articles in any recent periodical. In the September number of

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

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