and on which the handwriting is blurred and obliterated with blots and stains."

I open the "Chevaux de Diomèdes at random and come upon that passage of M. de Gourmont's thought.

"Non è mai tarde per tentar l'ignoto,

Non mai tarde per andar più oltre,"

but it was never with the over-orchestration of the romantic period, nor with the acrid and stupid crudity of societies for the propagation of this, that, and the other, that de Gourmont's mind went placidly out into new fields.

He never abandoned beauty. The mountain stream may be as antiseptic as the sterilised dressing. There was the quality and the completeness of life in M. de Gourmont's mode of procedure. Just as there is more wisdom, perhaps more "revolution," in Whistler's portrait of young Miss Alexander than in all the Judaic drawings of the "prophetic " Blake, so there is more life in Remy than in all the reformers.

Voltaire called in a certain glitter to assist him. De Gourmont's ultimate significance may not be less than Voltaire's. He walked gently through the field of his mind. His reach, his ultimate efficiency are just this; he thought things which other men cannot, for an indefinitely prolonged period of time, be prevented from thinking. His thoughts were not merely the fixed mental habits of the animal homo.

And I call the reader to witness that he, de Gourmont, differed from Fabians, Webbists, Shavians (all of whom, along with all dealers in abstractions, are ultimately futile). He differed from them in that his thoughts had the property of life. They, the thoughts, were all related to life, they were immersed in the manifest universe while he thought them, they were not cut out, put on shelves and in bottles.

Anyone who has read him will know what I mean. Perhaps it is quite impossible to explain it to one who has not.

In poetry as in prose M. de Gourmont has built up his own particular form. I am not sure that he was successful, in fact, I am rather convinced that he was not successful in the "Simone," where he stays nearer the poetic forms invented by others. His own mode began, I think, with the translation of the very beautiful "sequaire" of Goddeschalk in "Le Latin Mystique." This he made, very possibly, the basis of his "Livre de Litanies," at least this curious evocational form, the curious repetitions, the personal sweeping rhythm, are made wholly his own, and he

used them later in "Les Saints de Paradis," and last of all in the prose sonnets.

These "sonnets are among the few successful endeavours to write poetry of our own time. I know there is much superficial modernity, but in these prose sonnets Remy de Gourmont has solved the two thorniest questions. The first difficulty in a modern poem is to give a feeling of the reality of the speaker, the second, given the reality of the speaker, to gain any degree of poignancy in one's utterance.

That is to say, you must begin in a normal, natural tone of voice, and you must, somewhere, express or cause a deep feeling. I am, let us say, in an omnibus with Miscio Itow. He has just seen some Japanese armour and says it is like his grandfather's, and then simply running on in his own memory he says: "When I first put on my grandfather's helmet, my grandmother cried because I was so like what my grandfather was at eighteen.” You may say that Itow is himself an exotic, but still, there is material for an hokku, and poetry does touch modern life, or at least pass over it swiftly, though it does not much appear in modern verses.

M. de Gourmont has not been driven even to an exotic speaker. His sonnets begin in the metropolis. The speaker is past middle age. It is a discussion of what he calls in the course of the sequence of poems "la géométrie subordonnée du corps humain."

I shall give a dozen or more phrases from the sequence (which consists, if I remember rightly, of about two dozen poems). By this means I shall try to give, not a continuous meaning, but simply the tone, the conversational, ironic, natural tone of the writing. The scientific dryness, even, as follows :—

"J'ai plus aimé les yeux que toutes les autres manifestations corporelles de la beauté.

"Les yeux sont le manomètre de la machine animale.

"Et leurs paroles signifient le désir de l'être, ou la placidité de sa volonté. . .

'Mais on pense aussi avec les mains, avec les genoux, avec les yeux, avec la bouche et avec le cœur. On pense avec tous les organes,

Et à vrai dire, nous ne sommes peut-être que pensée.

"Je parlerais des yeux, je chanterais les yeux toute ma vie. Je sais toutes leurs couleurs et toutes leurs volontés, leur destinée. . .

"Dont je n'ignore pas les correspondances.

"C'est une belle chose qu'une tête de femme, librement inscrite dans le cercle esthétique. . . .'

"Je sculpte une hypothèse dans le marbre de la logique éternelle. "Les épaules sont des sources d'où descend la fluidité des bras.

And then, when one is intent and wholly off guard, comes, out of this "unpoetic," unemotional constatation, the passage :

"Les yeux se font des discours entre eux.

Près de se ternir . . les miens te parleront encore, mais ils n'emporteront pas bien loin ta réponse,

Car on n'emporte rien, on meurt. Laisse-moi donc regarder les yeux que j'ai decouverts,

Les yeux qui me survivront."

He has worn off the trivialities of the day, he has conquered the fret of contemporaneousness by exhausting it in his pages of dry discussion, and we come on the feeling, the poignancy, as directly as we do in the old poet's

Λέγουσιν αἱ γυναῖκες

Ανακρέων γέρων εἶ.
"Dicunt mihi puellae
Anacreon senex es."

It is the triumph of skill and reality, though it is barbarous of me to try to represent the force of the original poems by such a handful of phrases taken at random, and I am not trying to convince anyone who will not read the "Sonnets in Prose" for himself. EZRA POUND.

HISTORY OF THE WAR.

DURING the past month the centre of military gravity has shifted from West and East to the South. Failing to bring about decisive results in France and Russia, the Germans have launched a new attack in South-Eastern Europe with the object of breaking a way through Serbia, linking up the Austro-German armies with those of Bulgaria and Turkey, and interposing a wedge between the Russians and their Western Allies. It comes to this: that, besieged on two fronts, the two Central Powers, led by Germany, are extending the zone of military operations by throwing out a defensive line to the South, and by this means relieving the economic pressure which the maritime blockade of their harbours has brought to bear on their resources. The extension of the belligerent area was an imperative necessity for both Germany and Austria-Hungary, who are feeling the economic "pinch of war" with increased intensity every month; but it is not all to the good, for the 1,200-mile battle front has been lengthened out by something like another 600 miles, for the defence of which the Germans are now responsible. They have gained, it is true, a new ally in Bulgaria, but this does not alter the fact that they have added to their vulnerability, and increased the opportunities for attack by their enemies.

For the time being the campaign in the West is in a state of suspension. This does not mean that it has been abandoned, but only that progress is in abeyance pending developments in the new theatre of war, which has become for the moment the principal scene of military operations. It was some time before our Government recognised the change which has come over the course of the war, as their military advisers had formed great expectations of the Anglo-French offensive in France, the plans of which had been elaborated in August, but postponed for execution till the last week in September. On November 9th Sir Edward Grey stated in the House of Commons that the Serbian Minister in London had asked the British Government as long ago as July 7th to consider whether British troops could be sent to reinforce the Serbian Army, but at that time the military authorities thought it would be impossible to spare troops from other theatres of war. Even so late as October 9th the General Staff at Whitehall threw cold water on the proposal in a Memorandum which was submitted to the Cabinet, and must have influenced the minds of some Ministers in a sense adverse to offensive action in the Balkan Peninsula. The Memorandum has not been published, but from what Sir Edward Carson said in his letter to the Prime Minister on October 12th,1 the gist of it was that (1) Parliamentary Debates. Tuesday, November 2nd, 1915. Vol. 75. No. 109, page 532.

sufficient troops could not be sent to Serbia without depleting Sir John French's reserves, and as France was the "main theatre of war" all available strength should be concentrated there, instead. of being diverted to another and subsidiary sphere of operations. elsewhere.

All this is true in the abstract, and the only question for strategists to decide is where the centre of gravity of the enemy's power happens to be for the time being. As pointed out in the preceding page of this article, the question in this case has been decided for us, not by politicians, but by the German General Staff, who are seeking to divide the forces of the Allied Powers. That this is the view of the French Generalissimo is an open secret, for when he heard of the objections of our General Staff, as put forward in their Memorandum of October 12th, he hurried over to London, and in a few hours brought them to adopt his view of the situation as it was presented to his mind by the new German departure. What conversations took place between General Joffre and Lord Kitchener we do not know, but so strongly did he feel the urgency of sending prompt aid to the Serbian Army, that he is reported to have said that if we transferred half a million of men from France to Serbia he was prepared to defend the present Anglo-French front with French troops alone.

However this may be, what we now all recognise is that the new campaign, far from being one of subsidiary interest, has become, by force of circumstances, strategical rather than political, a naval and military operation of the very first significance. If we allow the Germans to subjugate Serbia, seize Contantinople, and obtain the hegemony of the Balkan Peninsula, they will succeed in doing in the South of Europe what they have failed to do in the West and East. The occupation of Constantinople by a German force would deal a tremendous, perhaps irreparable, blow to our prestige in India, and be a standing menace to our position in Egypt. The importance of forestalling the Germans in possession of this great strategical point d'appui has been consistently argued in these articles in the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW ever since the attack on the Dardanelles was first launched, and in spite of Sir Ian Hamilton's want of success the reasons for undertaking the campaign have not been weakened by initial failure. Recent events have changed the venue of the attack, but the objective remains the same.

The Austro-German-Bulgarian invasion of Serbia, which was only in its inceptive stage when last month's Record of the War was broken off, has made continuous if not very rapid progress during the past month, and at the hour when this article is closed (midday, November 18th) two-thirds of Serbia are in the enemy's possession. It is clear from the movements which have taken place that the invasion was undertaken on a carefully-considered plan arranged between the German and Bulgarian General Staffs. Austro-German army, composed, as is believed, of 300,000 men,

An