Volume 1 — BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

POEMS, 1916–1918. By Francis Brett Young. Collins. 5s. net.

Mr. Brett Young's Marching on Tanga was the best written of all the books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew his early novels, of which The Dark Tower was the most notable. It has been succeeded by two other prose works, The Crescent Moon, an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful descriptive writing, and The Young Physician, a more naturalistic essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of verses, Five Degrees South; and in this new volume are gathered the contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more recently.

The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking, Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling, of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are points of departure. He writes of England—friends, landscapes, and a woman—before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. The Gift gives the keynote of the book:

That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an alien. Then he returns:

All his deepest feelings—patriotism, love, friendship—are interwoven with natural beauty. In Testament he leaves to his friend the common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon, evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close, putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke in The Happy Lover and Mr. Masefield in Biography, he catalogues the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in Thamar—the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater success than it achieves—he is never obscure for a moment. And his simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The longer pieces—such as The Leaning Elm—are elaborately musical, and an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied, though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond those we have mentioned—the best are the exquisite Prothalamion and Invocation—are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and Bête Humaine:

This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future; but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.

COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8s. 6d. net.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885–1918. Three vols. Hodder & Stoughton. 63s. net.

It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume—or in two or three uniform volumes—the verses of a poet which we have previously had to search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last few years his reputation as a poet—quite apart from the fact that he has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and beautiful work—has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including The Dynasts) rather than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even the most faulty are worth having. Faults—though we might rather call them idiosyncrasies—Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist) and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great poet.

The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of "Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the Ballad of East and West, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his name.

WHEELS 1919: A FOURTH CYCLE. Blackwell. 6s. net.

The end-papers of this volume bear a charming design of athletes throwing darts at targets, and it is to be observed that no one of them as yet has hit the bull's-eye. We do not know if the symbolism was deliberate, but it is apt, for the volume is full of potshots so wayward that we are usually uncertain as to which target these erratic slingers wish to hit. Music at least is not desired: most of the verses consist of strings of statements—if they are not disconnected the connections between them are not apparent to us—interesting neither severally nor jointly, and entirely without beauty of sound. Miss Edith Sitwell's verses, though incomprehensible, contain a good deal of vivid detail, pleasant because it reminds us of bright pictures. There is one poem by the late Wilfred Owen (Strange Meeting) which has a powerful, sombre beginning:

There are several other poems by him which have all the earnestness, and much of the force, of Mr. Sassoon's illustrations of the beastly cruelty of war. But the one poet included who is always arousing interest and curiosity is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley, when these poems were written (though, in Leda, he seems already to be partly recovering), seems to have been in the same sort of revulsion against sentimentality as Rupert Brooke was in when his first book was being composed. He is anxious that we should not overlook the facts that there are noisome smells in the world, that many people are disgusting to see, and that even the most touching episode may be interrupted by an eructation: though, unlike Brooke, he does not usually even try to sing. There is something very familiar about the restaurant poem:

There is always strength about Mr. Huxley's epithets: he observes accurately and his language is hard, clear, and original. He conveys his unpleasing ruminations with such force that in several places we were incommoded by a rising in our gorge. But it is not in order to obtain sensations of that kind that we read poetry, and we shall not in idle hours beguile our leisure by repeating over and over the much-loved syllables of The Betrothal of Priapus. Mr. Huxley can see things with his own eyes, and has a powerful intelligence, and when he has discovered something to write about he may become a very good poet.

GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN, AND OTHER POEMS. By Nicholas Vachel Lindsay. With an Introduction by Robert Nichols. Chatto & Windus. 5s. net.

Mr. Vachel Lindsay is best known as the author of poems, notably poems inspired by negro camp-meetings, which are meant for recitation; they have intoxicating rhythms and the language full of gusto. The Congo, The Daniel Jazz, and others should certainly be introduced to the British public, and perhaps Messrs. Chatto propose to follow up this volume with another containing Mr. Lindsay's later work. It is a pity, however, that the present collection should have come first, for it contains little that is characteristic of Mr. Lindsay at his best, and little, therefore, that will show readers here how good he can be. The title-poem, though not as good as some of its successors, is the only one now published which shows what Mr. Lindsay can do. It describes the entrance of the late General Booth into Paradise at the head of the motley army whom he has saved:

The other poems are far more ordinary in form and banal in language. Mr. Lindsay, at this stage, was writing like other people, and his verse was redeemed from commonplaceness only by its sincerity and high spirits. He is an "uplifter" who is as jovial as Falstaff; he is probably the only poet on record, except Shelley, to be a teetotaller, and certainly the only one to take an active part in an anti-Saloon campaign. The second best poem in this book is an elegy, in couplets, on O. Henry; an elegy both romantic and truthful. Of the others an address to the U.S. Senate is decidedly racy. A senator whom Mr. Lindsay regarded as undesirable was elected. His verses on the occasion begin:

That is what met the eyes of the newly-elected when he opened his local paper on the morning after the poll.

A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY, BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR: 1914–1919. Edited by George Herbert Clarke. Hodder & Stoughton. 10s. 6d. net.

If this be a treasury it contains not merely gold and silver, but copper, nickel, Britannia metal, brass, and lead. Even if all the good poems inspired by the war were brought together they would not make a book of over four hundred closely-printed pages. Mr. Clarke is Professor of English in the University of Tennessee. His collection, amongst those who are sufficiently undiscriminating to like it, may promote Anglo-American friendship; if it does it will have justified its existence. Otherwise its only value consists in its reproduction of certain poems which are not, we think, to be found elsewhere. We believe that the Poet Laureate's Wounded (which appeared in the Times) is one of these. It is a very lusty poem inspired by Trafalgar Square in sunshine: wounded lads lolling by the lions and Nelson standing above. It ends:

This poem—it is not the only one—was overlooked by those who were recently yelping at Mr. Bridges for having written nothing about the war.

NOVELS

CHILDREN OF NO MAN'S LAND. By G. B. Stern. Duckworth. 7s. net,

SIR LIMPIDUS. By Marmaduke Pickthall. Collins. 7s. net.

NIGHT AND DAY. By Virginia Woolf. Duckworth. 7s. net.

THE POWER OF A LIE. By Jonas Bojer. Hodder & Stoughton. 7s. net.

GOLD AND IRON. By Joseph Hergesheimer. Heinemann. 7s. net.

The question how far the novel can be, or should be, a criticism of society, not of life in Arnold's sense, but of the forms in which life manifests itself at given times and places, is one that has been discussed but is never likely to find a general settlement. There will always be purists, of the "art for art's sake" order, who will maintain that the discussion or even the exposition, as such, of practical social problems is out of place in fiction. There will always be those who maintain, as did Mr. H. G. Wells some years ago, that "if the novel is to be recognised as something more than a relaxation, it has ... to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it"—writers and critics, in fact, who, like Mr. Wells himself, are prepared to use the novel as a means to any practical end, whether transient or eternal, of which at the moment it seems capable. Nor is it particularly desirable that any such settlement should be arrived at; but the dispute suggests a distinction which has some usefulness. Mr. Wells has picked up, with the forceps of fiction, and examined by turns politics, religion, education, and the relations between the sexes. Mr. Bennett, portraying modern society of all kinds no less closely, has no special suggestion to make to this age or this civilisation: his lesson, if his books contain one, is of universal applicability. Mr. Conrad, so unlike him in all else, is with him in this. Mr. Conrad, the novelist, has no views on the treatment of subject races or the reform of the merchant marine. These two are of the older tradition: for the novel dealing with social questions is a thing of comparatively recent growth. Formerly only one artist was allowed, and even expected, to be didactic—that artist in whom to-day preaching is most bitterly resented, namely, the poet. He was the bard, the seer, the prophet, who thundered out of a cloud and instructed the nation. The dramatist and the novelist were by comparison mere providers of entertainment and were required at most to give their work a flavour of good morals as a proof of decent intentions. The drama led the way; and, in the hands of Ibsen and his disciples, it became an instrument for the examination of topical problems. The novel soon followed suit, so that we are now confronted with a category of works of fiction in which the divided aim by no means destroys all artistic interest.

Such a book, in a high degree, is Miss Stern's Children of No Man's Land, which examines alternately the position of naturalised Germans and their families in England during the war and the position of those members of the younger generation who have been left by parental indulgence to drift between the enforced morality, which is spared them, and the easy immorality, from which their instincts withhold them. In both cases the meaning of No Man's Land is perfectly clear. It is the barren and abhorred territory in which wander those who are rejected by both the contending nations; and it is the land of the demi-vierges or, as Miss Stern somewhat awkwardly calls them, "the demi-maids." Both problems are clearly presented and examined; but it is not obvious what purpose is served by thus combining them and giving to them a common symbolism, or by making a brother suffer in one tract, while his sister strays in the other. They are not problems in the same category or on the same plane; and their alternate treatment here hardly conduces to continuity or clarity of thought.

But it must be admitted that Miss Stern, having thus handicapped herself, carries the unnecessary burden with great dexterity. The whole book is written with a hard, brilliant cleverness that never flags and is conducted through a remarkable variety of incidents and with the help of a remarkable variety of characters. The study of the behaviour of the "half-English" during the war has an inherent air of reality and moderation. But it is not on this that Miss Stern lavishes her fullest powers of description and reasoning. She is actually more concerned with the development of Deb Marcus, the beautiful Jewish girl, who is discovered at the opening of the book being kissed by a middle-aged and unattractive German whom she does not like but whom her fear of seeming foolish forbids her to repulse. We leave her in comfortable wedlock declaring that her daughter will be brought up "As strictly as I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts wherever she may stop and wander. I'm going to superintend her morals; I'm going to say 'don't,' and I'm going to ask questions, and forbid her things. And be shocked whenever it's necessary I should be shocked——" "You little reactionary!" her friend replies; and this, in fact, is the plain moral of Miss Stern's book, that modern laxity has rendered reaction necessary. But the moral lesson, however just it may be, would not be acceptable unless it were supported by sound observation or palatable without good writing. Miss Stern provides both these necessities, and her pictures of both the half-worlds are extremely convincing and entertaining. She makes real and keeps distinct a great variety of characters, who, as one thinks over the book, reappear unmistakably in the mind—Manon, the marketable ingénue, daughter of an operatic singer; Antonia Verity, a Diana whose virginity is almost imperceptibly changing into spinsterhood; Winnie, stupid, sluggish and greedy, in whom inconsistent but rigid conventions have quite taken the place of morals, "a jumble of puritanism and prejudice and incurious sensuality," and a host of others. Her men are equally well done, but perhaps with a care less intense and less from the inside. But it is a sign of Miss Stern's thoroughness that both men and women should be there in such numbers, so delicately differentiated, so intricately taking their places in her prolonged and exhaustive argument. If, of course, she had done no more than provide a gallery of typical portraits to prove a thesis, her work would hardly be worth discussing at so much length. But she has managed to avoid the pitfall of the social critic in fiction, and, without ever losing sight of her main purpose, to compose a book in which no passage is mere argument. The story proceeds levelly through all its multifarious scenes, continuing to present incident and character as a novel must do. The skill is perhaps even too great. The reader's attention is sometimes diverted by it; and it must be said that juggling with cups invites praise rather of the juggling than of the china. But, in one way and another, Miss Stern keeps interest vividly alive through a long book, the theme of which is by no means wholly pleasant. Her wit and vivacity are really remarkable; and the conversations of her persons are unusually animated. She is without great depth of feeling or perception. The types with which she deals are shallow; and it is noticeable that the less shallow they are the more she tends to deal with them from the outside. But Children of No Man's Land is nevertheless an admirable performance in a difficult kind.

Sir Limpidus, by Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall, is another essay in social criticism, for which the author has somewhat disappointingly deserted the Levant. His hero is a member of the ruling classes, the son of a wealthy baronet, who is trained from early youth to follow the code of his peers, in evil-doing and well-doing alike. This leads him, by way of public-school and university, one entanglement and another, including a breach of promise case and a suitable marriage, to a seat in the Cabinet and the reverence of his fellow-countrymen. On the last page:

Suddenly he was recalled to London. There was war in Europe and England might at any moment be involved in it. How would the people take it? was the question of the hour. Sir Limpidus was of the opinion that war just then would be a godsend. It would rouse the ancient spirit of the people and dispel their madness. They would once more rally to their natural leaders, who, for their part, would throw off the mantle of frivolity. Even defeat as a united nation would be better than ignoble peace with the anarchic mob supreme.

But Mr. Pickthall's final verdict on Sir Limpidus occurs earlier than this, and is put into the statesman's own mouth or rather mind. Sir Limpidus has delivered an address at his old school, and is told by his disappointed son that "the fellows ... wanted you to talk about yourself, the things you've done, in Parliament and foreign countries, and all that."

"I've not done anything to make a speech about," said Sir Limpidus, after a moment's hesitation.

His triumph as a statesman was not one of doing. It was the natural consequence of being what he was. If it came to doing, he had fought a duel in his youth, and in Albania had assisted to burn down a village. Those incidents in his career were not fit subjects for a speech to schoolboys; and besides them in the way of doing there was nothing but pursuit of women and field sports. So it was with a smile over the double meaning of the words that he repeated: "I've done nothing to make a speech about."

The headmaster, following his distinguished guest, happened to overhear this mild disclaimer, and he laughed aloud, calling his colleagues round him to enjoy the classic joke.

These two extracts will serve better than any analysis to explain both the direction and the method of Mr. Pickthall's satire. It has the doubtful merit (in a satire) of being consistently moderate; and Sir Limpidus, who is never quite a figure of truth, also misses ever being quite a figure of fun. Social criticism on these lines may put forward quite adequately the author's point of view; but unless it has some imaginative vigour it cannot be said to justify the form in which it is cast. Mr. Pickthall's book is a presentation, by means of characters instead of by abstract arguments, of certain lines of thought regarding politics, education, and other questions; and in so far it is an essay in the same genre as Miss Stern's novel. Where it differs is in the fact that the lines of thought have remained to the author incomparably more interesting than the means of their presentation. These figures are painted in the flat: they have little imaginative life: and, as a work of creative fiction, the book must be regarded as a failure.

With the remainder of the books on our list, we return to the older tradition of the novel, the tradition which seeks to produce a work of art, the lessons deducible from which (if any) are, roughly, applicable to human nature in general. In this sort, Mrs. Virginia Woolf has written a very extraordinary story. Katharine Hilbery, after much hesitation, engages herself to William Rodney, a precise Civil Servant, who writes plays in verse. He develops doubts of their love simultaneously with hers, and is not sure whether he is not in love with her cousin, Cassandra, as, after some curious experiments in emotionalism, he discovers himself to be. He therefore disengages himself from Katharine and engages himself to Cassandra. Meanwhile Ralph Denham, a brilliant and more vital, if less polished, young man, in love with Katharine, seeing her given to William, proposes to Mary Datchet, who loves him but refuses him. When Katharine is free he proposes to her and is accepted. This story Mrs. Woolf tells in nearly five hundred-and-fifty pages of fairly close print.

The taste for her writing is decidedly an acquired one; and, as we have proved by experiment, it is possible to read some two hundred pages without acquiring it. But when a certain saturation point is reached, a remarkable change takes place in the reader's sensibility; and what before he thought amazingly tedious and thin-spun he then finds delightful—delightful enough for it to be worth while turning back to the beginning and reading again the two hundred pages which wearied him at the first attempt. Mrs. Woolf has indeed proved a truth which undoubtedly exists but which few writers are capable of establishing, namely, that no character, properly ascertained and portrayed, can ever be uninteresting. It is not by vivacity or humour that she maintains the readableness of her innumerable scenes and conversations. Perhaps the most vivacious passage in the book is the description of Cassandra, as she appears in William's memory:

Cassandra Otway had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very happily her melodious and whimsical temperament.

Mrs. Woolf is not a satirist, not even so much as was Jane Austen; and she avoids humour for its own sake, not so much because she is not capable of it as because that is not here her concern. The outstanding quality of her book is its consistent wealth of minute and accurate observation, both of behaviour and of states of mind, by means of which the persons are at length fully revealed. Extracts from work of this sort are unfortunately, as a rule, not very convincing: it is like a liquid which has no colour when it is seen in a tea-spoon and a great deal when it is seen in a bucket. But a specimen may be given. Here Katharine and Rodney, sitting together in silence, are considering for the first time the possibility of breaking their engagement:

She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship; no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract ideas—figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.

When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.

She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

This is woven of gossamer threads, and so indeed is the whole novel; but these threads make together a consistent, flexible, and beautiful fabric. There is one further observation that is perhaps worth making. Writers who go so deeply into the minutenesses of psychology and behaviour as Mrs. Woolf commonly tend to obscurity not only in their material but also in their presentation of it. In the pages of this book there is not one thought or one sentence that is not impeccably lucid.

The Power of a Lie, by Mr. Jonas Bojer, a Norwegian author, whose book, The Great Hunger, has already attracted attention, is preceded by an introduction by Sir Hall Caine; and indeed the farmers and peasants with which it deals do a little recall the Manxmen of that writer's early work. But there the suitability of this sponsorship ends; and we must enter a protest against the practice of handicapping a book with a preface by a critic who is evidently incapable of understanding it or of expressing himself intelligently upon it. The story is sufficiently simple. Knut Norby, a wealthy, simple, good-hearted, irascible old farmer, has allowed himself in a weak moment to be cajoled into backing a bill for Wangen, who is an unbalanced, incompetent, and rather unamiable person. Wangen fails; and Norby is reduced to panic terror by the thought of what his wife will say when she hears of his folly. He therefore puts off the moment of confession by speaking so evasively as to give the impression that he denies having signed the bond, and Fru Norby, indignant against the man who has sought to defraud her husband, takes the matter into her own hands and lays a charge of forgery against Wangen. The innocent man, who is guilty enough in other particulars, having brought many persons who trusted him to destitution, is elevated into a condition of excessive self-righteousness by this unjust accusation. Norby struggles for some time to put matters right, but his courage always fails him at the point of confession; and gradually he comes to regard Wangen as a wicked man and as the tool of unscrupulous persons. Wangen, always weak and shifty, at length forges a letter to prove his case, which he cannot do otherwise, as the only witness to the signature is dead. His forgery is detected, and he is sentenced to a year's hard labour. Meanwhile Norby has argued himself out of the truth and back into the condition of benevolent justice, which is his natural state. The book ends with a banquet given to him by his neighbours to show their sympathy with him in his trials.

On this very remarkable composition Sir Hall Caine has the following observations to make:

This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away by the suspicion and abuse of the world.

I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity. If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.

This passage is worth quoting because it suggests what Mr. Bojer has avoided. Sir Hall Caine demands, to all intents and purposes, a book like one of his own, in which there are definite and distinguishable categories of good men and bad men, in which virtue is ranged uncompromisingly against vice. But Sir Hall Caine's books, as this preface would suggest, even if we had never seen one of them, are, since the very earliest of them, negligible both artistically and morally. Mr. Bojer has attempted something different and has succeeded in writing a most unusual and interesting novel. He makes the perennial discovery that good and bad are mixed in all men and he adds the discovery that the sufferings of bad men are not always the results of, or proportionate to, their sins. He has done these things in a story which astonishes the reader by its straightforwardness and simplicity. The characters are presented by means of the barest lines; and no incident or theme is elaborated beyond a few pages. Nevertheless the central idea is adequately worked out, and the whole novel leaves a distinct and vivid impression on the mind.

In Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer discriminating English readers found over a year ago an American novelist whom, alone of his generation, they were able to admire and to consider seriously. This may have been partly because he has learnt something, but not so much as to seem ridiculous, from English models, and because he writes with a restraint, moderation, and detachment which are rare in his literary compatriots. But there was certainly also a definite and individual virtue in him to which critical opinion in this country responded. He had a lively and exact visual gift and a power of rendering great passion without risk of bombast; and these qualities were rightly held to redeem many faults and weaknesses in The Three Black Pennys. In Java Head, published in the middle of last year, the first of these qualities was still perceptible, but, as regarded the second, Mr. Hergesheimer's avoidance of rant appeared to have become a paralysing inhibition. We do not know quite what to make of his third book, Gold and Iron. In the absence of any information to the contrary it would be natural to suppose that it is a later work than the other two; but this seems to us almost impossible and, if indeed it be so, decidedly regrettable. It consists of three nouvelles or "long-short stories," of which the first, Wild Oranges, describing the rescue of a girl from a household living in isolation and terrorised by a homicidal man-servant, is, except for a few passages of description, a negligible piece of the magazine order. In the second and third we do discover traces of the Mr. Hergesheimer whose talents excited us in 1918. One deals with the resuscitation, by a cold, contained, and determined man, of a deserted blast-furnace and his attempt to establish himself as a magnate. The other describes the return of a gold-miner, rich but with hands reddened in one of the incidents of Forty-Nine, from California to his prim and sleepy native village on the coast of Massachusetts. In both of these Mr. Hergesheimer's object is to discover to the reader the interior passions of intense but reserved and hardly articulate personalities. This is an ambition worthy of a novelist of the first rank; and indeed, both in setting himself such a task and in his methods of approaching it, Mr. Hergesheimer reveals himself as a writer of more than common powers. But it can hardly be said to be successfully accomplished here. In glimpses both Alexander Hulings and Jason Burrage are grasped and shown as living men. Hulings comes vigorously and convincingly to life in his duel with Partridge Sinnox, the dangerous gentleman from New Orleans; it is possible to see Burrage, smoking a cheroot, feet up on the brass rail of the hearth, with the refined and yet original Honora Canderay beside him, at his first visit to her. But between such glimpses as these both figures disappear, as though in a moving mist, behind Mr. Hergesheimer's attempt to describe them. He will describe them only in the precise and rigid way which he has chosen, a way which involves omissions, reticences, and silences, subtle appeals to the reader's understanding; and, in these stories at least, he has by no means mastered it. It was used with much more success in The Three Black Pennys and in Java Head, and is probably capable of much further development. If we are right in our surmise that these stories are early work, there is a possibility that Mr. Hergesheimer may yet show himself to be a very remarkable novelist indeed.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12s. 6d. net.

The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience, and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young England which bore the brunt of the war.

How delightful is this passage on the German supper—Sorley lodged in an academic household at Schwerin:

The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30 to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From 11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to scatter. By 2 I am in bed.

That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:

A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said, "Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."

Charles Sorley remarks on this that an exact parallel may be found in the Odyssey where the gentleman expostulates οὐ γαρ ἐγώ γε τερπομ' ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος {ou gar egô ge terpom' oduromenos metadorpios}—I hate being forced to grieve in the middle of supper.

The letters are full of casual literary criticism, and provide a curious contrast to the letters of Lionel Johnson recently published. Charles Sorley strikes one as having a far clearer idea of the position of literature in life than had Johnson, but he shows little sign of that fine critical intelligence which mark Johnson's best judgments. Sorley passes passionately from Masefield to Housman, from Housman to Hardy, from Hardy to Ibsen and Goethe. It seems odd that a boy of his temperament should think Faust greater than anything of Shakespeare's, and by implication greater than Peer Gynt; elsewhere he passes a really witty judgment on Goethe: "If Goethe really died saying 'More light,' it was very silly of him: what he wanted was more warmth."

His life in the Army was not long. After a hard training in England he left for France in May, 1915, and was killed by a sniper on October 13th. The books he had over there were Faust and Richard Jefferies. To some of us Jefferies is chiefly lovable and remarkable because of the men who have loved him; and that he could charm Sorley and bring to him, amid the disgust of the battlefield, something of the English countryside, gives him an additional claim on our gratitude:

I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the light green and dark green of the Aldbourne Downs in summer.

The book is edited by Professor and Mrs. Sorley, and Mrs. Sorley contributes a brief biographical chapter. There are one or two references to living persons which would, perhaps, be better away, though we cannot imagine any person of humour objecting to the fun of this high-spirited, generous boy. Incidentally, in its picture of Marlborough and Sorley's literary activities, the letters provide a useful counterpoise to the rather reckless attacks made on the uncultured public schools of England.

ESSAYS ON ART. By A. Clutton-Brock. Methuen. 5s. net.

Shall we ever have a satisfactory æsthetic? Sometimes, in moments of hopefulness, one believes that there may be a few points of agreement in ethics, in politics, in metaphysics, even in economics: but to read a new book on æsthetic is to wonder again whether we shall ever get beyond the old tag, that it's a mere waste of time arguing about taste. Certainly Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, interesting, acute, and charmingly written as it is, does not show us how to reconcile, let us say, Tolstoy's What is Art? with Whistler's Ten o'Clock: or either with the great and unjustly-despised body of criticism to be found in Ruskin's works. His essays are provocative: at times he appears to clear up certain matters, and then the reader finds himself wondering.

In the very first essay Mr. Clutton-Brock discourses on nature and art. "There is one beauty of nature and another of art." "Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference between them and between their beauties." Now is there any truth in those statements? Take, for instance, the simplest kind of beauty, the beauty which appeals to touch: is there any essential difference between the sensations of beauty given by stroking a sable and stroking a piece of exquisite silk velvet? Again, is the beauty conveyed by the sight of Cader Idris really different in kind from the beauty conveyed by the sight of Amiens Cathedral? Is a singer's appeal fundamentally different from the appeal of the nightingale?

Mr. Clutton-Brock goes on to say that "all great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship which is the essence of their beauty, and distinguishes it from the beauty of nature." That sentence betrays what seems to us his saddest error. He is confusing, we think, art and craft. It simply is not true that a work of art must show "inadequacy of craftsmanship." What is essential is that the artist should not seem to be satisfied with his mere technical skill of craft. He should, somehow, convey to us that he knows there is a beauty which no craft can render perfectly. He must, in short, be humble. For lack of that humility Blake refused to call Rubens a great artist. Yet Rubens, superb craftsman as he was, was not the superior of Velasquez, who yet preserves in all his work that sense of something desired yet unachieved—unachieved not because Velasquez's craft was inadequate, but because his vision was interpretative rather than imitative. It is important that the distinction between craft and art should be recognised, otherwise Mr. Clutton-Brock's perfectly sound contention that the beauty of art "is produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible" will be made a mere excuse for slovenly workmanship. This sort of discussion, however, is unsuitable for a review; even where space is, for practical purposes, infinite (e.g. in a conversation), it seldom leads to agreement. We can only say (what everybody knows) that Mr. Clutton-Brock is the sanest of all professional art-critics and that to differ from him is to doubt one's own opinions.

UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS. By Lord Dunsany. Elkin Matthews. 5s. net.

Lord Dunsany's fancy can generally be trusted to discover many odd prettinesses for our pleasure, but as in old Battersea enamel the prettiness is liable to chip off and show the dull metal beneath; and in these twelve sketches there is little of fancy. They were written "to show," so the Preface tells us, "something of the extent of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered," and the cultivated lack of vigour in style does serve, somehow, to illustrate the desolation of towns laid waste, and—which more peculiarly touches Lord Dunsany's sympathy—gardens. The monotony of the scene is, too, well typified by the same quality in description. Frequently, as in The Real Thing, when he sets out to be fantastic he is merely trivial; and throughout he draws from a wealth of ingenious but ungainly metaphor. However, the author well understands that the utmost terror of desolation can be inspired by the sound (rather than the sight) of man-made things gone to rust. Out in the dead land, where villages are to be conjectured from scattered heaps of stones, he was much impressed—for he refers to it again and again—by the "mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things," and—"this was the sound that would haunt the waste for ever." On the other hand, in Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg, he observed that a German soldier had chalked up the name of his regiment on a wall—the 156th Wurtemburgers. Subsequently a British soldier had prefaced this with "Lost by," and added after "retaken by the Bermondsey Butterflies." This might have served to point the less serious moments of a special correspondent to one of the lighter newspapers, but it scarcely warrants preservation in an admirably printed book with a strong binding in excellent taste.

THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON. By Isabel Savory. T. Fisher Unwin. 25s. net.

"The thought of 'the picturesque' repels me," writes Miss Savory in extenuation of her offence in the kind of sightseeing which less sophisticated tourists, for whom she accuses Nature of "touting," joyfully regard as inevitable. But though from time to time she is careful lest the reader should associate her with the organisations of Cook and Lunn, this superiority to the obvious is not always implicit. Whether the ideal book of travels should satisfy us by our own firesides or should merely stimulate us to go and see things for ourselves is a question that Miss Savory has not helped to decide. Her vision is uneven, but on the whole she provokes and does not satisfy curiosity. The book is a record of an exhaustive (and one would say exhausting) exploration of the Eastern Pyrenees, with Perpignan, Ille-sur-Tet, Estagel, and other places as centres for radiating expeditions, and "we did many wanders at Salses," she says. She climbed high mountains, and admired the views; she visited forgotten villages, and raked up their history; she lingered—none too long—under groined roofs and in panelled salles. But in her frank delight in good wine and food there is real vitality and emphatic, if unconscious, art. "We picked bunch after bunch (of grapes) hot in the sun, buried our faces in the warmness of them ... bit not one but mouthfuls, sweet and juicy...." And then she goes on to tell us that at the same moment there would be a "little sad, sour, tight bunch not a quarter grown" on a house in Gower Street, and that nobody was ever quite so dead as Queen Anne.

However, Miss Savory need not fear lest we should fail to recognise her appreciation of the beautiful things she saw, more especially as many of them—carvings, chateaux, plaster-work—are admirably reproduced as illustrations in collotype from the drawings of Miss M. L. MacKenzie: but our recognition would have been quicker if she had been at less pains to impress us with her originality.

JACOPONE DA TODI. By Evelyn Underhill. Dent. 16s. net.

In the preface to her life and letters of this remarkable man, Miss Underhill says: "Three types of mind should find pleasure in Jacopone's work and personality. First, those interested in Christian mysticism.... Next, lovers of poetry.... Last, those who care for the Italy of St. Francis and his descendants." The last two aspects of an arresting personality will doubtless make the wider appeal, admirably as his biographer has traced and explained the spiritual development of the man she calls the first great Italian religious poet.

So sympathetically has Miss Underhill treated the religious experiences of Jacopone that in the light of her exposition, extravagance, futility, seeming madness even, seem to take their rightful place in the spiritual history of a man who expresses that history in strangely beautiful poems. Born probably about 1230, soon after the death of St. Francis, Jacopone da Todi followed very closely in the steps of his more famous master. Like St. Francis, he belonged to a noble Umbrian family; like St. Francis, he turned from a gay worldly existence to the worship of Lady Poverty. His conversion, however, compared with that of the founder of the Franciscan rule, was a late one. St. Francis was only twenty-four, Jacopone was nearly forty when he left the world and its ways to begin the quest for perfection.

A legend (not perhaps entirely legendary, since it is in some respects supported by the self-revelations of his laude) grew up about his name, and was embodied, years later, in the so-called Vita, a manuscript of the fifteenth century.

Here it is related that Ser Jacomo—to give him his worldly title—was passionately devoted to his young wife, who was ascetic at heart, yet to please her husband wore the rich clothes he gave her, and took part in all the gaieties of the town. A tragic ending to Ser Jacomo's happiness was brought about when, on the occasion of a marriage festival, his beautiful Vanna was killed by the fall of a balcony.

"And when" (says the Vita) "they took off those garments of vanity which she had upon her in order to make her ready for the grave they found at last, next to her bare flesh, a harsh shirt of hair."

The legend goes on to relate that the shock of his wife's death, together with the discovery of her pious fraud, led first to madness and then to the conversion of Jacopone. Nowhere in his subsequent poems is there to be found a reference to his marriage. But this in itself is no proof of the falsity of the story, for, as with most mediæval penitents, the casting off of his old life meant to him the abjuration of earthly ties and memories. Jacopone the saint remains nevertheless Ser Jacomo the passionate lover. No songs in praise of an adored wife or mistress could be more fervid, more palpitating with emotion than those addressed to his Saviour.

It is by means of these religious poems—laude, as they were called—that the successive stages in the progress of the mystic may be traced. But leaving the mystic aside, we may feel grateful to Miss Underhill for having placed the poet before us. Many of his laude, in the English translation of Mrs. Theodore Beck, are given at length in this book, and very beautiful they are. To forget their theme and to consider only their form and imagery is to be reminded of secular Italy of the thirteenth century—its troubadours, its Court poets, its Courts of Love. For nearly forty years after all Jacopone had lived in the world, enjoying its laughter, its gaiety, its sunshine, and the poems of the saint, indicate that he had not forgotten all he learnt as a sinner—that is as an ordinary man of the class to which he originally belonged. "O Queen of all Courtesy," he begins in an address to the Blessed Virgin—and we are immediately transported in thought to a fair garden and a lover with his lute.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

THE RIDDLE OF THE RUTHVENS AND OTHER STUDIES. By William Roughead. With thirteen Illustrations. William Green & Son Ltd., Edinburgh. 25s. net.

Whether we may consider the reading of criminal annals a profitable occupation or otherwise, it is an unquestionable fact that they often possess a human interest, for the imaginative person at all events, far in excess of the records of the intrigues and policies of kings, statesmen, generals, and priests. And there is a well-nigh unique and special interest attaching to Scottish causes célèbres which places them in importance far above the general run of the great trials of all the other nations of Europe. This is accounted for by the strangely complex psychology of the average and typical Scotsman. He is a being in whom the emotions are strictly subordinated to the government of his reason. He is deeply metaphysical, and there is a powerful forensic strain in his composition. It is seldom indeed that a Scotsman pleads guilty to any charge, even when he has been caught red-handed. To do so would simply spoil for him all the pleasure of the trial, and there is probably no one in court who follows the evidence and pleadings more carefully or with greater zest than the prisoner himself. Were it possible for him to be closeted with the jury, it is quite conceivable that he should be found arguing the pros and cons of the case as forcibly and with as great detachment as any "good man and true" among them. But there is a fatal flaw in the character of the Scot which detracts to a large extent from the interest that one feels in his other traits, namely, the theological tendency which in persons of evil life at last degenerates into pure cant. The condemned prisoner on the scaffold exhorting the multitude "to avoid the heinous crime of disobedience to parents, inattention to Holy Scriptures, of being idle and disorderly, and especially of Sabbath-breaking," is by no means an edifying spectacle. The existence and prevalence of this trait is all the more curious when one considers that the Scot generally is not lacking in a keen sense of humour.

The special value of this collection of historic criminal trials and other juridical studies by Mr. Roughead, however, lies in the fresh light he has been able to throw upon the respective characters of King James the Sixth of Scotland (First of England), the most despicable poltroon that ever disgraced a British throne; and of Lord Braxfield, the prototype of Robert Louis Stevenson's Weir of Hermiston. An old Edinburgh University Professor of Constitutional Law and History used to say that Charles II. was the most iniquitous ruler that England ever had, but James II. was still worse. It was badly expressed, but there was something in it. Its special application was Constitutional, however, although it might easily be extended to apply universally if we allow the addition of the proviso that James I. was the worst of all. He was a liar, a coward, and a hypocrite, full of pedantry and cant. This is conclusively demonstrated in The Riddle Of the Ruthvens, and in other sketches that deal with the witchcraft prosecutions that were conducted with such a degree of vindictiveness and fury throughout the whole of his reign. But perhaps the greatest service of all that Mr. Roughead has done in the cause of truth and justice is his vindication of the respective characters of the much-maligned Lord Braxfield and Robert Fergusson the poet from so many of the absurd eccentricities which have been attributed to them by incompetent biographers and unscrupulous scandalmongers, and have in course of time, by constant repetition, become traditional. It is a far cry from the Gowrie Conspiracy to "Antique" Smith, the forger of the autograph letters of great literary and historical personages, who is still well remembered in Edinburgh, but these are Mr. Roughead's limits, and between them there is such a mass of history and criminal psychology as the student of either will delight in, while the curious, or merely general, reader will find it very good entertainment.

GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON: PATRON AND PLACE-HUNTER. By Lloyd Sanders. John Lane. 1919. 16s. net.

Here is a case of book-making of a somewhat explicit kind, since there is little to say, and nothing to print, of Dodington which he has not said of himself. There is, of course, no more harm in making books than there is in making bricks; but if the one wants straw, as Moses says it did, the other wants humanity. God made Bubb Dodington, and therefore let him pass for a man. In his own day he passed for a coxcomb; in ours, which is more censorious, he would certainly have passed for a rascal. In either aspect, if he is to be treated at all, he requires a more philosophical study than Mr. Sanders has been able to supply.

Of mean origin, some ability and unbounded impudence, Dodington inherited both money and land. With the land there accrued to him Parliamentary interest—to wit, in some four seats in Dorset and Somerset, which he spent the rest of his life in hawking from faction to faction with a flagrancy and success which even his own age found shocking. From first to last—and he lived a long time—there were no illusions about him. Pope scoffed at him until he found metal more attractive, and changed "Bubo" for "Bufo"; Walpole remarked to Lord Hervey upon "the second time that worthy has proposed to rise by treading on my neck"; Hervey himself, who seldom had a good word for anybody, never had a worse than for him. Hanbury Williams, who was never malevolent, wrote of him that he was

Horace Walpole called him a political journalist, meaning by that that he was daily in the market-place, and for the highest-bidder. Lord Chesterfield thought that "God made Dodington the coxcomb he is; mere human means could not have brought it about. He is a coxcomb superior to his parts, though his parts are superior to almost anybody's." These are Bubb Dodington's best credentials except those which he supplied for himself. With those, with colossal impudence and four boroughs, he set up in trade, and did pretty well. He miscalculated the odds more than once: first on the accession of George II., when he dropped Sir Robert for Spencer Compton; next when Frederick Prince of Wales enticed him over to Carlton House for the second time, and promptly died. Slips like those kept him out in the cold until near the end of the reign. Just in the nick of time he made friends with Lord Bute, and on the accession of George III., a year before his own death, was made a peer. There is evidence that he died a contented and complacent man.

Mr. Sanders proposes to "explain" Dodington, but fails for lack of matter. There is really nothing to explain. There would have been a good deal to expose had not the creature done it for himself in his egregious Diary. That to be sure is an unexampled document. Men, before it and since, have written themselves down rogues and peasant slaves of various kinds, some for amusement, some for edification. But few—I think no others—have written themselves down in the act and intention of writing themselves up. Casanova occurs to the mind; but Casanova neither wrote himself up nor down, whereas Dodington's complacency in the act to be a scoundrel is his most remarkable feature.

"I desired Lady Aylesbury to carry you Lord Melcombe's Diary. It is curious indeed; not so much from the secrets that it blabs, which are rather characteristic than novel, but from the wonderful folly of the author, who was so fond of talking of himself that he tells all he knew of himself, though scarce an event that does not betray his profligacy; and (which is still more surprising that he should disclose) almost every one exposes the contempt in which he was held, and his consequential disappointments and disgraces!"

That is Horace Walpole, writing to Conway in 1784, when the Diary was out. Lord Hervey, long before it was written, gave him a pungent paragraph. "Mr. Dodington," he says, "whilst some people have the je ne sais quoi in pleasing, possessed the je ne sais quoi in displeasing in the strongest and most universal degree that ever any man was blessed with that gift.... His vanity in company was so overbearing, so insolent, and so insupportable that he seemed to exact that applause as his due which other people solicit, and to think that he had a right to make every auditor his admirer." And so indeed it is, in this Diary of his dealings between the Prince of Wales and the Administration, that he solemnly records all his disgustful traffickings of himself and his boroughs, as if they were negotiations between high contracting powers, and in every page declares himself both knave and fool in a way which would afford pleasant reading if it were not so long and so dull. It is enlivened by one delicious, but entirely unconscious, gleam. In April, 1754, he went down to Bridgewater to an election, having done his best to sell the seat to the Duke of Newcastle. He spent £2500 on it, and he lost it. The fourteenth and two following days, he records, "were spent in infamous and disagreeable compliance with the low habits of venal wretches." Those wretches naturally were burgesses whom it was necessary that he should buy in order that he might afterwards sell himself. It is the only good thing in the book, but it is good enough. The next best thing is the naïve excuse of its editor of 1784 for publishing it, that by its means politicians might be advised how not to conduct their and the country's affairs!

Mr. Sanders has done his part of the business with industry and candour. He says the best he can for his subject, and has left nothing of importance out, either for or against him, except the account of the trouncing which he received in the House of Commons for his speech against Sir Robert in 1742. It is told by Horace Walpole, with gusto, as is only natural, but with obvious accuracy. Mr. Sanders should not have let him off the chastisement of an insolence and hypocrisy paralleled only by Disraeli's attack upon another Sir Robert. On the credit side of the account he rightly selects the defence of Admiral Byng as the most disinterested action of Dodington's long career. Add to that that Lady Hervey really liked him, and that he used a steel machine with which to pick up his handkerchief.

AN OXFORD SCHOLAR: INGRAM BYWATER, 1840–1914. By W. W. Jackson, D.D. Clarendon Press. 1917. 7s. 6d. net.

There are probably a good many people who know something about Jowett and have read several works of Gilbert Murray's, and yet could not even guess who was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford who bridged the gap. It was Bywater. Between two great popular influences the pendulum took a swing towards scholarship in the strictest sense, and from 1893 to 1908 the chair was filled by one of the most learned Hellenists of his day in any land, a man less great indeed than Scaliger and Bentley and the present Professor of Latin at Cambridge, but assuredly of their type. Those three rank even higher, not so much because they are more "brilliant" as because their interest in the classics is primarily the literary one. They apply their criticism and interpretation to the more purely literary authors, and their style has a quality not relevant to scientific scholarship, however welcome there—it has the creative writer's zest. Bywater's learning ranged, certainly, over the whole field of Greek prose and poetry; he had, moreover, a keen interest in literature as such, read the chief contemporary poets and novelists, and had views about them; he was master of an admirable Latin style; but his ruling passion was not literature so much as knowledge, and it was in the philosophic writers that he found his special field. For that reason his most characteristic work may be said to be his edition of Aristotle's Ethics, published in 1890. At the same time, that by which he is deservedly best known is an edition of a work on the borderland between philosophy and literature, Aristotle's Poetics, to which he supplied, in 1909, an English paraphrase and a fully explanatory commentary, both the best things of their kind for any student of that work; and as these will always be many, the book's future seems assured.

"Bywater," writes a relative, "was always studying"; and again, in words of insight, "but if he were not actually a genius he was far from being merely a learned man." His enlightenment and humanity are brought out in Dr. Jackson's admirable little biography, which, as the story of a scholar who died soon after the European War began, seems worth commending now. Though he disliked what we know as Liberalism, the word is the right one for his educational views; he supported the abolition of University religious tests, and was against compulsory Greek. Further than that it is not applicable; he was a Tariff Reformer. As an undergraduate he belonged to the famous "Old Mortality Club." He was a friend and disciple of Mark Pattison, and, like him, married a lady who was an excellent scholar and at the same time humane and charming. Of Walter Pater he was a friend and no disciple; "his style I do not like: it seems to me affected and pretentious and often sadly wanting in lucidity." In congenial company one of the most sociable of men, he showed much kindness to promising young scholars. Some of the mots ascribed to him are rather donnish, but not all: "I often think that modern education is a conspiracy on the part of schoolmasters and dons to keep men babies until they are four-and-twenty" is profounder than it looks; and he realised that "those who care for manuscripts per se are usually dull dogs."

All through his life he was a great bibliophile, and even in this respect happily mated. Few wives would pack their husbands off to Paris immediately after breakfast to inspect a copy of the editio princeps of Homer, and when they returned with it the following evening give it to them for a birthday-present. But he possessed something even more remarkable than that (for of Homer there are, after all, other editions); in his copy of Melanchthon's De Anima was an autograph of Rabelais.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE IN THE COUNTRY PARISH. By Eleanor Trotter, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 10s. net.

This book has one serious fault: there is not enough of it. Miss Trotter gives a feast of good things, suggests so many interesting happenings of the period, that she might have expanded almost every page into three, and still we might ask for more. It is, however, confined strictly to showing how the ordinary business of government was carried on during this troubled century. Readers will find good exercise for the imagination in filling in the outlines. Take this for example: "The beadle's chief work was of a punitive nature; he was expected to help the constable in apprehending and punishing rogues; he wore a special dress, and carried a whip or wand in his hand with which he drove the dogs out of church." A footnote says: "In 1887 at Wensley Church the wands were still to be seen. They were six in number, and were attached to the front of the churchwardens' high pews." The vestry book at Pittington, page 104, shows this entry: "Maie 3, 1646, John Lazing was appointed to be bedel for driving doggs out of the church in time of public worship, and other necessary dutys." The office of church-warden was then of great importance, and carried with it the dignity of a special "high pew," a matter of moment when the seating arrangements in church almost created a table of precedence. But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition? The beadle's office to-day would be a sinecure, for during many years of regular attendance the writer has only twice seen a dog in church.

The next page refers to "Rogue Money," the colloquial term for a contribution not exceeding 6d. or 8d. a week levied on Sunday on the parish for the maintenance of poor prisoners in the county gaol. A further levy of not less than 20s. per annum from the whole North Riding was made for the relief of poor prisoners of the King's Bench and Marshalsea. Even taking into account the greater value of money then, this would not go far among destitute prisoners, but it is somewhat surprising to find that any provision at all was made in those hard days.

The temptation to go on extracting these vignettes is great, but must be resisted. Surprises of this sort, however, are numerous, and when we remember the lack of hard roads, the absence of any postal facilities, and the difficulties and cost of any sort of communication, it is astounding to find how well acquainted the local justices were with the statutes, and to what an extent they succeeded in administering them. Miss Trotter's investigations have evidently much impressed this upon her, and her preface gives an excellent summary of the conclusions at which she has arrived.

The great majority of the men who took their share in the government of England in the seventeenth century had neither learning nor culture; some probably were not able to write their own names; nevertheless, through being made responsible for the well-being and good order of the little community to which they belonged, they gained a considerable amount of political education. The work of local government, carried on voluntarily from father to son through untold generations, has produced certain characteristics—a moderation of outlook, a reasonableness and sanity of mind, an intensely critical faculty and a political insight—which are typical of our race.... There is a fear lest the masses through ignorance of the work of their forefathers may demand a centralisation of governmental functions, which is alien to the character of the English Constitution.

The author has earned public thanks for bringing to light these interesting records of an interesting period. It should be compulsory for every education authority to use this and similar works as part of the historical instruction given in all our schools. Such books would clothe the dry bones of history, as ordinarily taught, in a so much more attractive garb that lessons might become a pleasure instead of a penance. The Royal Commission on Public Records received a letter from M. Paul Meyer, of the Ecole des Chartes, in which he says: "En Angleterre tout est en désordre," referring to our widely scattered and unorganised records. This Royal Commission is doing a great service in trying to bring order out of chaos, but it is not its function to do for the general reader what a book like this may do—bring to life in a handy and digested form some of the buried records of our past.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS

BALKAN PROBLEMS AND EUROPEAN PEACE. By N. Buxton and C. L. Leese. Allen & Unwin. 4s. 6d. net.

Among all the ignorances of the British public there is none more calamitous than its ignorance of the Balkan peoples and of their importance in European politics. We persist even now in lumping them together as a set of semi-savage tribes, who may be manipulated by the civilised Powers in this way or that, but who ultimately will have to fight it out among themselves like the Kilkenny cats. Any book that is not mere partisan propaganda, that will throw light on that dark corner of Europe, is to be welcomed. And this little volume, slight though it is, is all to the point. Its authors are experts, and practical experts, in their subject. Mr. Noel Buxton especially has known the Balkans, as few Englishmen have known them, for twenty years, and in the early days of the war he went there as the accredited agent of the British Government to try to attach Bulgaria to our cause. The story of our diplomatic failure is sketched for us in rapid outline. "Allied diplomacy," Messrs. Buxton and Leese say, "exerted no comprehensive activity, but at intervals made isolated efforts to please one State or another by promises, some of which proved only contradictory and embarrassing to action in another direction demanded by circumstances a little later." We were handicapped, they say, by the policy of Russia. We were handicapped also by ill-grounded fears of alienating Serbia and Greece. The final chapters of the book deal with the future prospects in the Balkans. They were written before the conclusion of the Bulgarian Treaty, and most of the things which they deprecate have found a place in that Treaty. Many Englishmen will not regret this; but no reader of Mr. Buxton will believe that his plea for Bulgaria is based on hostility to Serbia or Greece or Rumania, or, indeed, on anything but a single-minded desire for lasting peace in the Balkans.

THE SKILLED LABOURER, 1760–1832. By J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond. Longmans. 12s. 6d. net.

This book is the third of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's important studies of that period of English history which fell between 1760 and 1832. Together with The Village Labourer and The Town Labourer it makes a remarkable trilogy. It is marked by the same scholarly research, the same vividness of presentation, the same polished style as its predecessors. Some readers may perhaps find it of slightly less general interest: if it is so, it is simply because its scope is rather more limited. In The Village Labourer the authors gave an account of the enclosures of common lands and of the agricultural labourers' rising of 1830; in The Town Labourer they drew a very striking picture of the civilisation of the time, of the governing classes as well as of the poor, of the new social and economic conditions. The present volume gives us the history of certain selected bodies of workers during the same period. It is, in fact, a detailed account of the Northumberland and Durham miners, the cotton and woollen and worsted operatives, the Spitalfields silk-weavers, and the framework knitters, together with a very full description of the Luddite risings in the Midlands and in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have made very large use of the Home Office Papers, and they have been able to throw a great deal of new light on their subject. Their tale is, of course, a gloomy one—a tale of desperate struggles against grinding poverty and serfdom, of wages, often family wages, of 10s. a week or less in times of dear living, of a working day of anything from twelve to eighteen hours, of tiny children in the mines and the mills, of passionate strikes and brutal repressions. The chapters on the Luddite riots are of especial importance: they are the best, if not the only, connected account of that little-known episode in the annals of industry. They will remove the wrong impression, which, as Mr. and Mrs. Hammond say, is widely prevalent, that these troubles originated in Nottingham over the introduction of new and improved stocking-frames. In fact, the cause was not new machines at all, but the adaptation of old machines to the manufacture of a new and inferior kind of article. And the workmen had the sympathy and support of many of the employers in their campaign against the degradation of the industry. Not the least remarkable feature of the story of Luddism is the part played by spies and agents provocateurs. The military, the local magistrates, and the Government all had their spies, and the wide extent of the mischief done by those vile creatures is very thoroughly exposed by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. One of them, by name Oliver, alias Richards, alias Hollis, has a chapter all to himself. He was "a person of genteel appearance and good address, nearly six feet high, of erect figure, light hair, red and rather large whiskers, and a full face, a little pitted with the small-pox. His usual dress was a light fashionable-coloured brown coat, black waistcoat, dark-blue mixture pantaloons, and Wellington boots." He was a special pet of Lord Sidmouth, and in 1817 he performed the inestimable services of fomenting sedition in the Midlands and the North and of getting quite a number of poor and ignorant men hanged, transported, or imprisoned.

Altogether, The Skilled Labourer is a book which puts every student of history very deeply in the debt of Mr. and Mrs. Hammond.

IN THE SIDE SHOWS: OBSERVATIONS BY A FLIER ON FIVE FRONTS. By Captain Wedgwood Benn, M.P., D.S.O., D.F.C. Hodder & Stoughton. 12s. net.

Captain Wedgwood Benn's experiences in the side shows may well fill with envy those whose lot was cast in the main theatre of the war. We confess that we took up his book rather doubtfully—for who was not long ago surfeited with stories from the front? But we found it, after all, full of diverting adventures in many lands, as well as in the water and the air. It is written straightforwardly, without that straining after effect which marred so many of its kind. Captain Benn began his military career in 1914 in the Middlesex Yeomanry. He was bored, like every one else, at Ismailia: he fought and was bored again at Gallipoli. Then he was fortunate enough to get into the Naval Air Service. He flew in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. He bombed the Turks near Aden, passed the time of day over the telephone to the King of the Hedjâz at Mecca, made a brief "Cook's Tour" to the Sudan and was presently "observing" in Palestine, blowing up portions of the Bagdad Railway, and commanding an astounding mixed force of British soldiers and French sailors in Castelorizo, near Adalin. After this he comes home on leave, gets his "wings," and is off to Taranto to join the Adriatic Barrage, the aerial force whose task was to keep the Austrian submarines out of the Mediterranean. Finally, after Caporetto, he is on the Piave fronts attached to General Plumer's force. He apparently managed from there to do a good deal of sight-seeing up and down Italy, and he has some amusing tales of the people and places he visited. He also took part in the melodramatic adventure of Alessandro Tandura, the Italian spy who was dropped from an aeroplane in the Austrian lines. This is the best adventure in the book, and must be read to be properly appreciated.

Now and then Captain Benn interrupts his narrative to discuss an idea or a problem. The most notable of these interludes is his criticism of our military system. He can find little to say in praise of it. The much-vaunted discipline seems to him to mean only mechanical obedience. The "system" puts a premium on waste of time, on the "spit and polish" spirit; it discourages ideas, imagination, initiative. And most of the higher officers are monuments of stupidity and ignorance. In all this there is no doubt much truth. But a good many of his readers will suspect that Captain Benn was exceptionally unfortunate in the senior officers he met.

IRELAND A NATION. By Robert Lynd. Grant Richards. 7s. 6d. net.

Many Englishmen are now sick of the "Irish Question"; many are ashamed of it. Some have argued an inconsistency between our attitude to Poland or Czecho-Slovakia or Jugo-Slavia and our attitude to Ireland. Others have come to feel that damage is done to our reputation abroad, both among friends and enemies, by our Irish policy. Mr. Lynd knows how to gauge public opinion here as well as in Ireland, and he seizes the opportunity to press home the point that the Irish problem is an international problem. His argument, which is as closely reasoned as it is eloquent, is that England can save herself and save the world only by saving Ireland. What does saving Ireland mean? "It means," says Mr. Lynd, "the immediate surrender of Ireland into the hands of the Irish people, to rule it either as a republic or a dominion, according as the people themselves decide."

Many, of course, made up their minds on the matter long ago; but Mr. Lynd is by no means satisfied with all who profess themselves friends of Ireland. He has some pungent remarks on what he calls "the hesitating sort of Liberal" who wants to give Ireland a carefully-conditioned measure of self-government which will prevent her from abusing her liberty or inconveniencing England. But there are others who are still baffled by Ulster. It is not that they think of the Irish as "a mob of Celts" instead of as a nation. The trouble is that we are apparently confronted by two nations—two irreconcilable nations. What has Mr. Lynd to say to that? He says firstly, bluntly, that Ulstermen are Irishmen, and that "the Ulster question" is an invention of British Statesmen. "Cabinet Ministers have no moral objection whatever to coercing Ireland. If they have any objection to coercing Ulster, it is not on moral grounds, but because Ulster provides them with a plausible palliation for their guilt in denying freedom to a race of white men." He cannot, of course, disregard the Ulstermen's fear of Home Rule. He can only argue that it is an utterly unreasonable fear; for "Ulster is much more likely to dominate an Irish Parliament than to be dominated by it."

Mr. Lynd does not confine himself to the mere politician. He has much that is of profound interest to say on the Irish soldier, on Ireland's record in the war, on Irish literature, and Irish poetry. His book is one which ought to be read by everyone who cares for Ireland—and still more by those who do not.

AGRICULTURE AND RURAL LIFE

COTTAGE BUILDING IN COB, PISÉ, CHALK, AND CLAY: A Renaissance. By Clough Williams-Ellis, with an Introduction by Mr. St. Loe Strachey. Published by Country Life, London. 6s. net.

This little volume of unassuming proportions marks a period in the evolution of housing the people of this country. Perhaps the word revolution is more apt in this connection, for it indicates either a reversal of the wheel of time, taking us back to ancient methods, or a completion of the circle, bringing us round again to the use of building materials which Nature has provided to the hand of the builder. The author addresses himself particularly "to those who have in the past built only with stone, brick, concrete, timber, and plaster, etc.," but there are many people to-day thinking of building who never thought of it before; for the scarcity of houses (not merely of the five-roomed cottage but of the ten or twelve-roomed middle-class house), with the consequent inevitable increase in rent, to say nothing of the contumely of house-agents and their kind, are giving rise to a wonder if there is no alternative to tenancy. To all such this book will be of value, for not only will it widen the field of possibility, but it is packed with definite facts, which have involved much labour in their compilation. To build with either of the materials named in its title will appear to the uninitiated, i.e., to all those who only think of brick and stone houses, as being worthy of the man who "built his house upon the sand"; but plenty of instances are given to show that if proper though simple methods of construction are followed, such houses will last for many generations. We well remember our surprise when, some twenty years ago, we first saw in Leicestershire and Warwickshire a number of what were locally termed "mud" cottages, and found on enquiry that many of them were from two to three hundred years old.

Building by-laws effectually put a stop to the use of any such materials as those under consideration, wherever by-laws were in operation. They were looked upon by the officials of many local authorities and by other well-meaning but short-sighted people as a gleam of sunshine on a dark world: they were to check jerry-building and prevent bad housing. Though this ray of light first shed its beams upon a startled world so long ago as 1858, through the Local Government Act of that year, we are now discovering that jerry-building is as rampant as ever, housing conditions are, in very many places, execrable, and that by-laws sometimes only act as a deterrent to men who want to build. Parliament in its wisdom has passed quite a number of Acts since the year named dealing with the subject, which might have been admirable if they could have been administered by supermen. As, however, this duty fell to the lot of ordinary mortals, by-laws have actually prevented the use of improved methods and materials, which happened to be unknown at the time the old ones were drawn up. These have been somewhat relaxed in recent years, but even to-day it is to be feared that a serious proposal to build with Pisé, or Cob, might cause the sudden death of many respected representatives of Bumbledom. The Ministry of Health have expressed the view that further relaxation in the direction of allowing such materials might be permitted, but many local authorities would, we suppose, require more than that to induce them to adopt the suggestion.

For the moment cost is of even more importance than longevity, and if the usual materials are to be insisted upon the building of cottages and small houses on economic lines is impossible. Transport is one of the large items in the cost of construction; but if the heaviest and bulkiest materials are on the spot, this item can be almost entirely eliminated. It is, therefore, not unreasonable to hope that local authorities will give every facility, nay, encouragement, to use any suitable material, rather than insist upon the letter of their by-laws. The author's view is as follows, but it must be borne in mind that the builder is not always a free agent:

Formerly he who carried bricks into Merioneth or the Cotswolds, or slates into Kent, or ragstone-rubble into Middlesex, was guilty of no more than foolishness and an æsthetic solecism. Under present conditions such action should render him liable to prosecution and conviction on some such count as "wasting the shrunken resources of his country in a time of great scarcity."

Mr. St. Loe Strachey contributes an instructive and amusing preface, the humour of it giving point to his own experiences. No one has done more than he in trying to find the cheapest suitable material for cottages; in Pisé he has rediscovered the very thing he wanted. As one who served under his chairmanship on the Committee of the First Cheap Cottage Exhibition at Letchworth Garden City in 1905, the present reviewer is glad to offer a tribute to his persistence and success. The illustrations in this book are both interesting and instructive.

ANTHROPOLOGY

THE MYSTERY OF EASTER ISLAND: THE STORY OF AN EXPEDITION. By Mrs. Scoresby Routledge. Sifton, Praed, & Co. 31s. 6d. net.

Any map of the Pacific will show a minute dot standing by itself far to the eastward of any other island south of the line, yet some 2000 miles away from the American coast. This is Easter Island, long famous as a land of archæological wonders. Apart from these it is an unattractive place, consisting of a triangular patch of volcanic rock, grass-covered, bare of trees, waterless but for the rain that collects in the craters of its extinct volcanoes, and, of course, wind-swept and harbourless. At present it serves as a cattle-ranch managed in the interests of a Chilian company, the natives, no more than 250 in all, being huddled into a single village on the west coast in order to keep them out of mischief. Formerly, however, there were enough of them to form ten clans, who kept things merry with their local feuds. The navigators of the eighteenth century, Roggeveen, who discovered the island, Gonzalez, Cook, and La Pérouse, estimate their number at anything from 700 up to 2000 souls.

How, then, in such a solitary spot, inhabited by a handful of savages, does it happen that hundreds of giant statues of stone are to be found, not to speak of smaller statues of wood, curious rock-carvings, and finally a script? A few passers-by had pleasantly trifled with the problem, but a serious attempt to solve it had not been made until Mr. and Mrs. Scoresby Routledge gallantly resolved to take the matter in hand. The task before them was no light one; for in order to study Easter Island one must first get there. So a yacht, the Mana, was built for the purpose. The Polynesian word means "luck," and luck certainly attended the little vessel on its long run of 100,000 miles. Quite apart from the account given of Easter Island itself, the log of the voyage provides the matter for a fascinating book, proving as it does that there are many odd corners of the much-betravelled earth which still await exploration. This becomes apparent as soon as Magellan Strait is traversed, and the ship hazardously works her way north through the intricate uncharted channels that run up the western coast of Patagonia. It was hereabouts, by the way, that the Dresden, after the Falkland fight, played hide-and-seek with our gunboats for several months. Helped by many striking illustrations, we are enabled to picture to ourselves the deep gorges overlooked by snowy peaks, and the gaunt half-naked Indians that these waters precariously support. Afterwards Selkirk's Island, Juan Fernandez, was visited, and when the Easter Island investigations were complete, the expedition went on to Pitcairn, the home of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, an incidental consequence being that King George in due course received at Buckingham Palace two loyal representatives of this, the smallest of British Colonies. But space would fail if we dwelt further on the nautical side of the adventure, complicated as it was by the fact that during the greater part of the three years and four months during which it lasted there were German foes above and below water to be circumvented. Even Easter Island, it must be added, proved no haven of refuge, for first von Spee's squadron and subsequently the armed cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich paid a call there, though luckily Mana was away on both occasions.