into something itself possessing the quality of an arresting delight! Perhaps, again, in a subwayed and radioed and Fordized civilization, courtesy and grace of manner in social relations would appear too effete and eighteenth century an importation. But the connection between manners and morals is something more than accidental; the form of doing and what is done, like the form and content in music, are indissolubly wedded to each other. No civilization can be lovely in attainments, the quality of whose daily living is ugly.

In his latest volume of "Impressions and Comments" Havelock Ellis becomes almost bitter in his denunciation of the extent to which our civilization has wandered from the path of beauty. He is forever contrasting a beautiful moment in love, in ecstasy of the dance, or in the sight of sea gulls flying, with the tawdriness and horror of our architecture, our cities, and our social relations.

There is cause for bitterness, no doubt. But cause, too, for hope. Never before since the sunny freedom of the Greeks was there more of a chance to have the attitude of the artist and the ideals of art become the criteria and centres of our lives. We are freed from many of the outworn stupidities and hypocrisies. We know perfectly well that whatever divinity we dream, it is only our own artful intelligence that can convert it into the realities of our lives. The new morale, if it is to be at all, will be a universal art of life. Through such an art we may turn the turbid stream of living into something colorful, fluent, and free.

There are many forces making in the direction of treating life as a problem in art. Not the least of these is the habituation even of Philistia to the cadence, the clarity, and the serenity of beauty. Somewhere Plato speaks of

life as a listening, a listening to a fine music whose intervals are too subtle for the casual and promiscuous ear. It is perhaps not too fantastic to suppose that the way in which music seems genuinely to have made its way in America, may augur well for the future sweetness and fluency of life on this continent. An imagination attuned to the beautiful precisions of music will not remain long patient with the major discords of life. The harmony of the musician may win us to the view of making something more of a harmony of our society and our lives. We may come to hate hate, condemn misunderstanding, and social inequalities, not because they are wrong but because they are ugly deformations on the face of our civilization.

There are signs even that painting, so long a stepchild in this country, and architecture, too, are coming into their own. There are beginning to be reared about us structures in steel and stone that will feed the eye and the imagination as well as house the worker and his work. There is, too, something wistful and hopeful in the way in which thousands stand rapt along the galleries of the Metropolitan Art Museum in New York, listening to music among the marbles. And there is hope also in the very discontent which torments the rebel against Main Street who misses the space and splendor of the Place de la Concorde and the imagination which made them possible.

It is hard to tell where the passion for beauty, once stimulated, may lead us. It may transform our ugly urban civilization into something more shapely, simple, and humane. Philistia, awakened to art, may cease to be Philistia. The critics of our civilization who are most effective are not the rebels, the cynics, and the satirists. They are those artists in writing, in

thought and in sound and in color, who are bit by bit displaying to us the ingredients of a beautiful world. There is so much of vitality, energy, and freshness in our civilization that is amenable to forms of beauty that no artist will flee the challenge. The sense for beauty can be continually fed by artists too busy creating beautiful things to curse an ugly environment. Nor does this mean that we shall turn into a nation of æsthetes fleeing from reality to arabesques. It will mean simply that habituation to the beautiful in art will be retroactive upon our lives.

Schiller long ago wrote some beautiful essays on the æsthetic education of man. We are just beginning to learn that to cultivate the ear, the eye, and the imaginations of our children, to educate them to beauty, is one of the easiest and most persuasive ways to convert them to the good. If we educate the children of Philistia to beauty, to its enjoyment and to its making, the civilization of the future will not only contain more beautiful things, but life in it will be something nearer to the creation, the rhythm, the freedom and discipline that is art.

I

HE weather report submitted by the Suffix Weather Bureau on May 11, 1837, states that shortly after three in the afternoon there was a light rain, a precipitation of some .005 inches. There is a certain sad significance in this technical statement of the Weather Bureau, for during that light rain, George and Edna Bodney were married in the south vestry of Queen's Church.

We know that it was the south vestry because of a letter written the next day by the Rev. Dr. Morbeling, the

been torn up by plumbers and plasterers for over a week now, throwing all the business into that dark, damp old south vestry which is very difficult to work in owing to the danger of tripping over the litter of kindergarten chairs."

North or south vestry, however, it is certain (and essential) that George and Edna Bodney were married on May 11, 1837, for on May 13, 1837, William Bodney was born.

II

BROOK AND RIVER

F the boyhood of William Bodney He was

OF

brought up as most of the boys in Suf

fix were brought up, except for the fact that he did not go out of doors until he was eleven, and then only to strike at the postman. He was kept in the house so much because of an old prejudice of Edna Bodney's against fireflies.

We catch a glimpse of Bodney's school life, however, in a letter written by Charles Cod, a fellow student at Wimperis School (From the Danker Collection):

"There are lots of fellows here in school", writes Cod; "among them Henry Mamsley, Ralph Dyke, Luther Fennchurch, William Bodney, Philip Massteter and Norman Walsh."

Cod is no doubt accurate in his letter, although a note of personal prejudice which creeps in now and again makes it a little hard to rely on his judgment.

No more trustworthy is Norman. Rully, writing to Ashman in 1845 (Author's Collection) when he says that Bodney paid "three shillings for a pair of skates". This is unquestionably an error on Rully's part, for skates at that time cost five shillings if they cost a nickel.

Lycurgus from his moss-bedowered tree Brings asphodel to deck the starry sky. The winter-scarred olympids homeward fly And softly spread their golden heraldry Yet Lacedemon does not wake in fantasy Nor Thetis sing her songs to such as I.

So, Laura, how shall Eros take his due
Or crafty Xerxes leave his tent at night
If, dropping down from his cerulean blue,
He brings not gold with him wherewith
to fight?

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way

And, what is more, you'll be a man, my

son.

The boy in Bodney is fading and giving place to the man. This sonnet, while not perfect, shows what was going on in the youth's mind. Of course, "moss-bedowered tree" is bad, and Lacedemon was the name of a country, not a person, but "winter-scarred olympids" makes up for a great deal, and the picture of decking "the starry sky" with asphodel comes doubtless from Bodney's vacation days in Polpero where there are a lot of rocks and seaweed. Henry Willers, in a most interesting paper on Bodney's Relation to Open Windows points out that the "open windows to the sea" probably refers to an old window of his aunt's which she kept upstairs in the house at Ragley. Mr. Willers is probably right also in believing that in line six, the word "their" comes from a remark made by Remson to Bodney concerning some plovers sent him (Remson) after a hunting trip. "I am using their feathers", Remson is reported to have said, "to make a watch fob with.”

These are fascinating speculations, but we must not linger too long with them. Even as we speculate, the boy Bodney is turning into the man Bodney, and is looking searchingly at the life about him. Poor Bodney! We know now that he looked once too often.