greater facilities for divorce than any other nation in the world except Bolshevist Russia.

The American has no reasonable ground of complaint if a European is eager to discover the actual qualities of his nation, and is impatient of the sentimentalities of such bodies as the English Speaking Union, for America has almost the whole world in its financial thrall, and by its practical monopoly of cinema production is affecting the minds and the souls of the ingenuous in all the other continents. The quality of the average American film exhibited in the picture theatres of London, Paris, Berlin, Cairo and Calcutta is exactly the quality of the religion of the Baptist minister with a spot-light on his converts and of the luscious sermons of the Reverend Billy Sunday, a thinly veiled lasciviousness-that most awful of all forms of vice, the cold-water vice. Mr H. L. Mencken says of Hollywood, where the world's moving pictures are created, that its morals are those of Port Said.' From this colony of grotesquely overpaid actors, set in a country dominated by a decadent Puritan tradition, there is spreading all over the world an influence, made attractive by immense mechanical and even imaginative subtlety, that must radically affect the lives of those millions of men and women whose aspirations are indefinite and whose standard of conduct has to a large extent lost the rigidity that comes from the acceptance of the assertions of traditional religion. Moreover, so far as England is concerned, the American influence is by no means limited to the cinema. The London theatres are largely controlled by American Jewish syndicates and are even more largely concerned with the production of American plays, while American fiction, mainly of that crude type that eulogises the 'he-man,' is piled high on our railway bookstalls. An American negro, too, has found a tragic compensation for the ills that he has suffered at the hands of Europeans, transplanted to America, by flooding Europe itself with the discords of jazz music blared out in every restaurant and hotel by banjoes and saxophones. Europe dances crudely and in imitation of its masters as the African pipes, and the dance halls of Europe have forsaken dignity and rhythm, and any beauty of movement, for wriggles that have no significance since, happily, in Europe, they are rarely consciously sensual. Two

generations ago, America depended on the culture of Europe and particularly on the culture of England. To-day there is more than a little danger that the culture of Europe and particularly that of England may be overwhelmed by the new barbarism of success, jazz, spot-lights on steeples and Hollywood cinema plays.

However this may be, America itself is still in the process of being born. In every epoch in the world's history men have run after strange gods and have raised altars in all manner of grotesque worship; but it is inconceivable that a great people can be content permanently to say their prayers at the shrine of Mr Henry Ford, who in a way stands for the best, as the Reverend Billy Sunday stands for the worst, in modern America. But whatever the America of the future will be, it will not be Anglo-Saxon. As it is, the most significant of its literature owes nothing to English influence. At present this literature suffers from the necessary revolt against the deadening hand of Methodism. Sometimes the revolt, as with Mr Sinclair Lewis, is joyous, audacious and realistic. Sometimes, as with Mr Cabell, it is mannered and artificial-if I may use the phrase, naughty for the sake of naughtiness. Mr Cabell's Jurgen,' which might have been amusing if one had never read Rabelais, was absurdly praised both in England and America, and his most recent book, 'Straws and Prayer Books,' is just 'audacious,' as when the writer refers with vulgar familiarity to the Deity and calls Jane Austen one of the world's worst writers. But it is necessary to pull down the old idols before new and better idols can be erected in their places, and iconoclasm in America has a propriety that it could not have on this side of the Atlantic. Reform never comes before the realisation of the absolute need of reform. There is no room for the erection of a beautiful house until the old ugly house is destroyed. There is, of course, exaggeration in Mr Mencken's denunciations and in Mr Sinclair Lewis's caricatures, but there is justification for them both. It is in these mutterings of the unconsidered minority that there can be found the promise of the development of something finer than the present Rotarian civilisation with its 'yells,' its slogans, its buttons, its prosperity and its narrow-visioned self-satisfaction.

SIDNEY DARK.

Art. 3.-THE GREAT ONES OF THE SEA.

1. Pursuing the Whale. By John A. Cook. With Illusstrations. Murray, 1926.

2. From the Deep of the Sea. The Diary of the late Charles Edward Smith, M.R.C.S., Surgeon of the Whaleship Diana.' A. and C. Black, 1922.

3. Whalers and Whaling. By E. Keble Chatterton. T. Fisher Unwin, 1925.

4. A History of the Whale Fisheries. By J. T. Jenkins, B.Sc., Ph.D. Witherby, 1921.

5. Whaling North and South. By J. S. Hodgson and F. V. Morley. Methuen, 1927.

And other works.

ON a morning in August 1913, somewhere on the Atlantic, I was standing in the bows of a Norwegian whaler, the gunner beside me, within easy reach of his weapon. A little while ago distant pearly puffs of whales had been sighted, but now no sign of them was to be found. It was a flat, unruffled calm, a suspicious calm; in the stillness of the atmosphere was a threat; there was something sullen in the light, as well as in the warm air; but all those things, while foreboding storm, combined to give the water an extraordinary clarity, a visibility such as my landlubber's eyes had never known. Of a sudden the gunner touched my arm, then pointed downwards, towards the depths. With his other hand he made a signal, and the whaler's half-speed fell to dead-slow. Away down in the green I saw shadowsthree of them-moving at the same pace as ourselves. The shadows became shapes, at first black, then brownish, as the whales moved very leisurely on an easy upward slope, unaware of man, towards the light and the air desired. Soon, swimming a few yards apart, they were only a fathom or so from the surface, each plain to see, from the frog-like mouth and the shut blowhole to the flickering flukes that without effort, as it seemed, propelled the giant body. It was the sight of a lifetime, the sight I cannot hope to behold again. Quietly the heads broke water, the blasts of vapour went up, the greyish-black shoulders heaved out and forwardand the gunner took aim. I jerked myself away from

him. Had I stayed, I should have cried, For the love of God, don't shoot!'

'

It may be that the recent revival-one might call it the resurrection-of Moby Dick' gave a lead and an encouragement to those writers who since that event have been adding to our knowledge of the whale and the whaling industry. Certainly, after a survey of their books, one feels safe in saying that more has been written exclusively on the subject in the last seven years than during the seventy preceding them. Further, at least two whaling stories have been elaborately and expensively 'screened,' the first of which had merits, while the other was a sorry travesty of Herman Melville's masterpiece, its 'White Whale' obviously a 'fake' and about as impressive as a rubber toy in a child's bath; altogether one of those pictures which cause a person who, like myself, is friendly to the Kinema, to wish very heartily that it would leave great Literature alone. Still, those pictures do at least serve to strengthen the idea suggested by the books, that the Whale, as the most wondrous and mysterious of created things, is at last, in the popular sense, coming into his own; and, perhaps, one of these days some one will produce a picture sufficiently true, and therefore sufficiently thrilling, to render any 'strong love interest' superfluous.

Nearly thirty years ago, home from my first whaling trip with the Norwegians, having seen for the first time the whale at close quarters, I was naturally eager to read what had recently been written, particularly out of actual experience, about the great mammal, its hunting and its hunters. The only modern and helpful books I could find were Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot,' H. J. Bull's Cruise of the Antarctic,' Burn Murdoch's 'Edinburgh to the Antarctic,' and Prof. F. E. Beddard's 'Book of Whales,' then just published. It was years later that I discovered the wonders of 'Moby Dick,' which I had heard of, but in my ignorance had assumed to be a book for boys. 'The Cruise of the Cachalot,' as being the work of a whaleman, held the strongest interest for me, though it told me nothing of the kind

* 'A Book of Whales.' By F. E. Beddard, F.R.S. Murray, 1900.

B

of whales whose acquaintance I had lately been making. On the other hand, the work of Prof. Beddard (who died last year), while primarily a handbook for students of zoology, told me very many things I wanted to learn ; my one complaint being that the author had been too cautious as to the maximum length of the Blue Whale, largest of living things; for he would not admit the possibility of more than 80 feet, whereas, on a flensing stage in North Iceland I had, a few weeks earlier, taken a measurement-between perpendiculars, if you please— of 86 feet, and had heard tell of another of no less than 106 feet. The hearsay was, I confess, a little too much even for my young enthusiasm; yet, twenty-five years later, I was to receive the trustworthy account of a Blue Whale killed in the Antarctic, which measured 110 feet. I should like to think that the Professor's book is still in demand. If we are going to have a Literature of Whales-and a fairly long shelf might already be filled -the book, which is not a heavy one, in either sense of the word, ought assuredly to have a place, since it will save the new student, zoological or otherwise, much bewilderment over the different kinds of whales and their diverse ways.

For there are whales and whales, even among the giants concerning which all the books I have read have been written; the lesser sorts, from the Porpoise of 3 feet to the Grampus of 30 feet, including the White Whale of the Arctic, purveyor of bootlaces, and the Bottlenose, have thus far been all but ignored. It is, as a rule, the human interest that sustains, if it does not originally inspire, the writers. Wars apart, whaling has been for ages man's biggest adventure on the sea. So it is still, though in these days few harpoons are "darted," save from the guns in the bows of sturdy little steamers. The risks, or nearly all of them, belong to the past, yet no one who has clung spray-battered to the ratlines while the whaler plunges and lurches towards that almost submerged, slow-gliding, animate mass of eighty tons, and the gunner crouches, finger on trigger, behind his weapon with its dreadful bolt, will ever question that the adventure survives. And there is always the off-chance that one, or other, of man's many inventions may fail, or trick, him at the moment of