The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE TANK convention which gives them enormous breasts, wasp waists, and atrophied legs, and places them in attitudes suggestive of a violent dislocation of the hipjoint. Whether such figures were actually cultivated at the period, I do not know; but even if this could be proved, the sculptures could only be regarded as conventional exaggerations of an unhealthy fashion.” “Finally, and coming back to the Buddha-figures in particular, what are we to say of the marvellous spirituality of expression often attributed to them? It is to me, I own, far from apparent. The drooped eyelids, and the immobile pose do, indeed, express the idea of contemplation; but I am at a loss to find anything spiri- tual in the smooth, insipid faces.” Pig-mindedness can hardly go further. And yet— “In the Indian epics, the poets are always trying to outdo themselves and each other in their search for the marvellous, whether in virtue, prowess, gorgeousness, wickedness, demoniacal fury, or mere numerical extravagance. They are con- stantly creating records in exaggeration, which are as constantly broken. What wonder that a people habituated from childhood to these orgies of unbridled fancy should suffer from a certain slackening of imaginative fibre, an insensitiveness to normal and wholesome stimulation? It is that insensitiveness which seems to me to account for all that is worst in Indian art. It is that insensitiveness which will have to be corrected before India can hope to make the best of her intellectual gifts in a world in which, though all may be illusory, the God-made illusion of Nature must in the end prevail over the man-made illusions of mythology and metaphysics.” I am perfectly in accord with the political conclusion of this book. He was doubtless paid to write it in this interest. However, I had no idea that Mr. Wil- liam Archer was such an unpleasant thing. The publisher says that he was born at Perth, Scotland. Perhaps, he was one of the famous “twin brothers of Perth, who were—ready to exhibit a positive Wassermann—to the eyes from their birth. Said Bill to his brother, ‘Well, thanks to our mother, we’re the rottenest beggars on earth.’” True Guost Stories. By Herewarp Carrincron. J. S. Ogilvie Publishing Co. Mr. Herewarp CarRINGTON was a very clever young man, and that was his trouble. He is still a very clever young man, and as he is older than he was, his trouble is increased. I always thought him crazy with his ideas on fasting and his weighing souls, but he always gave the impression of the greatest sincerity. He did extraordinarily good work in the case of Eusapia Palladino. He merely destroys one’s confidence when he coils himself in the Flag, and issues a Bryce Report like the mysteries of Myra, lends his name to quacks like Michael Whitty (not Witty), who doesn’t even deny that he is the American representative of the swindler and blackmailer Mathers, so often exposed in the columns of THE Egurnox, and helps to edit the review of an obviously fraudulent sealed letter 299