The Hand of the Potter, for Kaiser had laughed at his puppets. On n'apprend qu'en s'amusant, according to Sylvestre Bonnard, and she remembered Nietzsche's defence of the music of Carmen: It approaches lightly, nimbly, and with courtesy. It is amiable. It does not produce sweat. What is good is easy; everything divine runs with light feet: the first proposition of my Æsthetics. . . . How delightful the scene in Kaiser's play in which the German grandmother dies because her son leaves the house before eating his dinner! It had never happened before. What a comment on German character! And ten times as powerful as if the scene had been presented as something to cry over. One could shed tears to be sure, but not in behalf of the grandmother. One wept for her nation. She mentally decided that Hilaire Belloc's The Mercy of Allah gave a much better picture of a modern millionaire, because the book was good-humoured, satirical, and allegorical, than the more solemn performances of W. L. George in Caliban and Theodore Dreiser in The Financier. It was this same lack of humour, this sentimental adherence to a rigid point of view which in her eyes spoiled Three Soldiers. There was something to be said for such a book, undoubtedly, but you could not say that it was written for a sophisticated audience. No, in a different sense, it was written for the stupid, unsophisticated crowd, just as Rupert Hughes's books were written for that crowd. Only Hughes wrote
