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seedless raisins can be used, although I think the
large raisins give rather better results. Rub the
Nutter into the flour, add the raisins, which should
be *well dried* after washing, and mix with enough
water to form a dough which almost, *but not quite*,
drops from the spoon. Put into the greased tin,
which should be very hot, and bake in a hot oven
at first. At the end of twenty minutes to half-an-
hour the loaf should be slightly browned. Then
move to a cooler shelf and bake until done. This
will be in about another hour's time. Test with a
knife as for ordinary cakes.

Florence Daniel (Vashti).

IN YE CRANKS' LIBRARY.

A French Utopia.¹

I HAVE a friend who never reads fiction, and who has in reserve for the perplexed or merely curious inquirer after a reason for this intransigent abstemiousness an almost snarling interrogative : " Why *should* I read fiction ? Why add to the vicious wastage of time that has already gone to the making of it ?" Quite recently, I induced this friend to spend a rainy afternoon, which he had set aside for statistical reading, upon Mr. Cloudesley Brereton's translation of Gabriel Tarde's " Underground Man, " which I assured him would be a far less fictitious form of literature. He is a hard working man, and I had as I saw him attach himself to his enterprise a remorseful desire to let him off.

¹ "Underground Man," by Gabriel Tarde, London, Duckworth & Co. Again this month I am dealing with a two-year-old book. It justifies itself amply, but has had so far only a small circulation.

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However, the arrival of tea and illumination
revealed him to me sitting with his book held
intimately in the wintry twilight in the window
seat. He caught my look.

“Yes, but—” he said, with a half apologetic
smile, “it’s quite a special kind of book.”

“Well, yes.”

“Well, of course its absurd, but its delightful,
and it sets you thinking.”

“Exactly; it’s first class fiction.”

“Ah, but the man has really something to
say, and I don’t see why he could not have said it
all without writing fiction at all. It is just the
drawback of the book, that and his irritating
French flippancy. Why did he need to make the
sun go out, and to transplant humanity into the
bowels of the earth to bring about his society
founded on love? All the essentials of his ideal state
are within our reach here and now realisable. Why
all these Utopias—these writers making imaginary
worlds under impossible conditions out of our
everyday humanity? Why don’t they come out
into the open and say what they mean, and make
their criticisms directly instead of indirectly, and
construct their Utopia at home?”

I tried, and failed dismally in my foolish effort,
to convey a sense of the inevitableness of images
and indirections for the expression of the under-
lying, the real things of life, the hopelessness of
the attempt to imprison them in words—to show
that Tarde had sketched the thing he desired to
articulate in its tangible results, the outward and
visible signs.

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“Well,” he said at last, taking up his book,
“I will finish it.”

I sat about near him in the lamplight watching
him a little, and, I must confess, not a little gratified
to see how much he was really liking my book,
how he went on reading, clearly charmed and in
touch in spite of his protests and objections, and it
suddenly came home to me that the differences
between my friend, who is a solidly unimaginative
broad-minded Englishman, and the brilliant French
psychologist, though apparently enormous, were
after all very slight—that both held, starting from
different standpoints, the same fundamental
position, that when my friend, struggling to be
articulate says rather shamefacedly, “Man does
not live by bread alone,” he means exactly what
Tarde means when he insists with a compelling
vividness the necessity of the superfluous.

“The room left vacant in the heart by the
reduction of our wants is taken up by the talents—
those artistic, poetic and scientific talents which,
as they day by day multiply and take deeper root,
become really and truly acquired wants. They
really spring, however, from a necessity to produce,
and not from a necessity to consume. I underline
this difference. The manufacturer is ever toiling,
not for his own pleasure nor for that of the world
about him, of his fellow men or his natural rivals,
but for a society different from his own—on mutual
terms, but that is immaterial. His work, therefore,
constitutes a non-social, an almost anti-social
relationship with those who are not of his kind, to
the great hurt and hindrance of his relations with
those who are. The increasing intensity of his

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work tends to accentuate and not to attenuate the dissimilarities between the different grades of society, which act as an obstacle to the general reunion. We have clearly seen the truth of this in the course of the 20th century of the ancient era, when the whole population was divided into trades unions of the different professions, which waged desperate warfare on one another, and whose members in the bosom of each union hated one another as only brothers can."

That surely could not fail to delight him. And there would be, I knew, a momentary protest against the contention that "society consists in the exchange of reflections....not in the exchange of services, but in that of admiration or criticism, of favourable or unfavourable judgments, and then perhaps he would acknowledge to himself that his happiest, his most expansive times were just those of intimate voluntary social intercourse, and he would reach out hands of deep desire towards this land of promise bathed in love as in a fine æther—the whole of his difficult taciturn nature would respond to the suggestion of a world where every day, every hour would bring the stimulus of pleasant meetings and greetings robbed of the terrors of our social life to-day, where to enjoy unstinted variety of "social tonics" one must be a vagrant or a wealthy man, where class isolation and economic isolation and the bother of dress and food and the grimness of organised gaiety combine to exclude any kind of spontaneity from our social life. Better still, and more welcome to my Englishman than anything Tarde shows us of the exhilaration, the flow of the daily human intercourse of his

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"Well," he said at last, taking up his book, "I will finish it."

I sat about near him in the lamplight watching him a little, and, I must confess, not a little gratified to see how much he was really liking my book, how he went on reading, clearly charmed and in touch in spite of his protests and objections, and it suddenly came home to me that the differences between my friend, who is a solidly unimaginative broad-minded Englishman, and the brilliant French psychologist, though apparently enormous, were after all very slight—that both held, starting from different standpoints, the same fundamental position, that when my friend, struggling to be articulate says rather shamefacedly, "Man does not live by bread alone," he means exactly what Tarde means when he insists with a compelling vividness the necessity of the superfluous.

"The room left vacant in the heart by the reduction of our wants is taken up by the talents—those artistic, poetic and scientific talents which, as they day by day multiply and take deeper root, become really and truly acquired wants. They really spring, however, from a necessity to produce, and not from a necessity to consume. I underline this difference. The manufacturer is ever toiling, not for his own pleasure nor for that of the world about him, of his fellow men or his natural rivals, but for a society different from his own—on mutual terms, but that is immaterial. His work, therefore, constitutes a non-social, an almost anti-social relationship with those who are not of his kind, to the great hurt and hindrance of his relations with those who are. The increasing intensity of his

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neo-troglodytes, is the underlying implication of possible solitudes with this fine social activity always at hand.

And Tarde's lovers—what would he make of them? Passionate chaste lovers dominating physical desire in intimate association, inspired and inspiring—and his married folk, earning their right "to have children which is the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius," by producing works of art, or of those other lovers unable to rise to either of these heights and meeting death voluntarily together.

Pityingly he would dwell, I was sure, on these dying lovers, would glance a little askance at the sublime altitudes of the survivors, and scornfully repudiate the idea of the ability to paint pictures as a qualification for parentage.

"Well," he said at last, "I've certainly enjoyed my afternoon in your Frenchman's paradise."

"Not," he said finally, "that I should care to live in his beautiful caves, but they do set one thinking of what we might—by the way, what does he mean by this?" and rather hurriedly and indignantly he read me a passage.

"The error at present recognised of these ancient visionaries called Socialists was their failure to see that this life in common, this intense social life they dreamt of so ardently, had for its indispensable condition the æsthetic life and the universal propagation of the religion of truth and beauty. The latter assumes the drastic lopping off of numerous personal wants. Consequently in rushing, as they did, into an exaggerated development

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of commercial life, they were marching in the opposite direction to their own goal." "Surely even in France—"

"Ah, well, it is, you see, after all," I said rather lamely, "only fiction, and besides, Tarde wrote before Socialists had developed art groups."

"Fiction? No," said my friend, turning away. "It's all fact from beginning to end, in spite of his apologies and grimacings—it's truth—it's his very soul's truth," he added quietly.

D. M. Richardson.

## THE WOOD-WORKER AND THE TENT-MAKER.

(Continued.)

ON his next visit to his old alma mater, Mr. Harrod heard that Professor Glasse was talking of an artisan whom he had met in London, who had told him more about his own business than he had ever heard or dreamed of before.

"That infernal Mac David again!" said Mr. Harrod to himself. What was the world coming to, if Oxford Dons were going to foregather with men like that—reprobate, upstart, revolutionary, infidel, materialist, blasphemer? His hatred to Joshua, bitter enough before, became exasperated to frenzy.

There is little more to tell about the life of Joshua Mac David. " Crucifying and burning were merciful inventions, compared to what is being done now in the name of religion and morals" —so said, in 1865, a medical man who had had large

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D. M. Richardson.

(Continued.)

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And Tarde's lovers—what would he make of
them? Passionate chaste lovers dominating
physical desire in intimate association, inspired
and inspiring—and his married folk, earning their
right “to have children which is the monopoly and
supreme recompense of genius,” by producing works
of art, or of those other lovers unable to rise to
either of these heights and meeting death voluntarily
together.

"The error at present recognised of these
ancient visionaries called Socialists was their failure
to see that this life in common, this intense social
life they dreamt of so ardently, had for its indis-
pensable condition the æsthetic life and the universal
propagation of the religion of truth and beauty.
The latter assumes the drastic lopping off of
numerous personal wants. Consequently in rush-
ing, as they did, into an exaggerated development

213

YE CRANK.

Florence Daniel (Vashti).

IN YE CRANKS' LIBRARY.

A French Utopia.¹

I HAVE a friend who never reads fiction, and
who has in reserve for the perplexed or merely
curious inquirer after a reason for this intran-
sigent abstemiousness an almost snarling
interrogative: "Why *should* I read fiction? Why
add to the vicious wastage of time that has already
gone to the making of it?" Quite recently, I
induced this friend to spend a rainy afternoon,
which he had set aside for statistical reading, upon
Mr. Cloudesley Brereton's translation of Gabriel
Tarde's " Underground Man," which I assured him
would be a far less fictitious form of literature.
He is a hard working man, and I had as I saw him
attach himself to his enterprise a remorseful desire
to let him off.

E

209

YE CRANK.

“Well, yes.”

I tried, and failed dismally in my foolish effort,
to convey a sense of the inevitableness of images
and indirections for the expression of the under-
lying, the real things of life, the hopelessness of
the attempt to imprisonment them in words—to show
that Tarde had sketched the thing he desired to
articulate in its tangible results, the outward and
visible signs.

210